LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanFallah (an ‘Egyptian peasant’), though written a couple of years earlier whileHaykal was studying in France, Zainab is considered by many critics to be thefirst modern Egyptian novel and one of the first modern novels in Arabic. Andsince Hamilton Gibb initially dubbed it as such, Zainab has been the subject ofconsiderable discussion, centred largely on the question of whether its artisticvalue merits this distinguished epithet. 14 What is seldom mentioned, though, isthe significance of the subsequent and gradual revelation of this Misri Fallah’sreal identity. Although those associated with al-Jarida, the newspaper in whichZainab was first published in serialised form, knew from the start that Haykalwas the author, it was not until 1922 that his name first appeared on somecopies of the text, and only in 1929 did he finally republish it under his ownname (Sakkut 1971: 12). But Zainab’s popularity, which led to a film version in1930, is perhaps less the cause than the result of this gradual identification ofthe author with the text, the explanation for which must instead be sought ingeneric developments themselves (Gibb 1962: 294).Without a clear antecedent in the traditional forms of Arabic prose narrative(maqama, hadith, sira, qissa, khurafa, ustura) it was for the most part a group ofSyrian Christians who first introduced the novel to the Arab world throughnineteenth-century translations of European works, often adapted to therhymed prose form of the maqama (Allen 1982: 17). But as consequence of theSyrian migration that followed the Lebanese massacre of 1860, and the strictcode of censorship imposed by the Ottoman administration in Syria, the centreof literary activity had shifted by the latter part of the nineteenth century toCairo where the climate was more conducive to literary freedom, especially after1882, when the British protected it by law (Allen 1982: 21, 24; Moosa 1983:172). With a still small but growing readership, the popularity and thus demandfor these translations and adaptations increased, and this in turn gave somewriters the incentive to begin writing ‘novels’ of their own (Badawi 1985: 130–1). But by and large, these early experiments in the genre were unable to breakfree from the formal and thematic constraints of the traditional prose forms(Allen 1982: 29–31). And in spite of the popularity of such works, genericdevelopments on the whole were further restricted by the stigma attached tonarrative fiction in general. As with the development of the novel in Europe,such work had long been held in contempt by the educated classes, who viewedit as not only inferior to the tradition of classical Arabic poetry but morallysuspect as well (Connelly 1986: 12; Brugmar 1984: 205). And in the eyes of aconservative Islamic elite who felt increasingly threatened by the encroachmentof Western values, the belief that fiction was a corrupting force could notbut be confirmed once it began to take shape in the specifically Western form ofthe novel (Badawi 1985: 130).In this context it is understandable, as Haykal later claimed, that as a young— 132 —www.taq.ir