LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationand, indeed, necessary supplement to any study concerned with the largerquestion of Arab nationalism. Such a study might help one to better locatenationalism’s persuasive appeal for the individuals who comprise its intendedaudience, as well as its contradictions, elisions and limits as a guiding agent ofsocio-political change. With this aim in mind, I will limit my approach to whatmight well serve as that larger study’s logical point of departure: an analysis ofthe ways in which specific literary texts ‘announce’ their own modernness byencoding in their narratives an emergent nationalist discourse or, in otherwords, how such texts, in effect, write the nation. My analysis will centre on twoworks in particular, whose seminal influence in the rise of modern Arabicliterature, together with their subject matter and widespread popularity, wouldnecessarily grant them an essential place in such a study: Muhammad HusaynHaykal’s Zainab and Tawq al-Hakim’s ÆAwdat al-ruh (Return of the Spirit). 11 Butbefore I turn to the first of these, my choice bears one further comment.It is no coincidence, with respect to the subject of this chapter, that I havechosen the works of two Egyptian writers as the focus of my study. For whetherthe nahda can be traced to a specific group of nineteenth-century LebaneseChristians, as Antonius claims, or whether, as A. L. Tibawi (with whom I agree)contends, it was a far more diffuse phenomenon with multiple and overlappingpoints of departure, 12 a self-consciously modern and distinctly nationalist literatureemerged first in Egypt in the 1920s (Gershoni and Jankowski 1986: 95).That its emergence, as mentioned, coincided with the rise of a specificallyEgyptian brand of cultural and political nationalism should not, however, leadto the conclusion that literary developments in Egypt at this time were withoutinfluence elsewhere in the region. The Iraqi writer Jamil SaÆid makes thatplainly apparent when he writes: ‘Iraqi writers did not produce much fictionbecause their colleagues in Egypt and Syria were ahead of them. Iraqi readerspreferred to read books on whatever subject written by Egyptians rather thanIraqis; they even preferred books printed in Egypt rather than in Iraq’ (quoted inAllen 1982: 26). Thus, while not discounting the specificity of this moment inEgypt’s literary and national history, neither is it my intention to cast Egypt inan entirely isolated light. Rather, I have chosen to focus on the literature of thisperiod precisely because the specificity of this period in Egyptian history is whatallows the question of nationalism’s ideological content to be raised for the firsttime in the Arab world. 13 And insofar as narrative prose was identified as aprivileged means of response to that question, my analysis of the manner inwhich two representative literary texts help to articulate that content isintended to encourage further consideration of the ways in which developmentsin Egypt may or may not have prefigured related developments elsewhere in theArab world.Originally published anonymously in 1913 under the pseudonym of Misri— 131 —www.taq.ir