LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationadvocate from a wealthy landowning family he would not want to jeopardise hisown social standing and professional rank by claiming authorship of Zainab,especially because one of the novel’s two central characters, Hamid, is clearly anautobiographical portrait of a young and sentimental Haykal (Badawi 1993:105). By 1929 Haykal, having long since abandoned a career in law, hadbecome one of Egypt’s pre-eminent intellectual and political figures and wouldthus have had even greater reason to dissociate himself from Zainab had thenovel as a genre not since acquired a certain degree of legitimacy among theeducated classes. But as a study of the history of the European novel suggests,such legitimacy is never conferred in response to aesthetic developmentsalone. 15 Indeed, as Haykal’s own words, which I quoted above, make perfectlyclear, the perceptible change in the novel’s status around this time, from populargenre to the beginnings of a canonical art form, was politically motivated aswell. In this respect, Haykal’s authoritative signature on the 1929 edition ofZainab can itself be seen as part of a process of legitimation, and one which infact continued up until quite recently (Moosa 1983: 24). How the modernnovel and a nationalist ideology emerge together in Zainab might best besuggested, then, by returning to the question of Zainab’s place in modern Arabicliterature and why it is considered to be among the first real novels as such.There are essentially four interrelated features which, taken together,distinguish Zainab from virtually all its predecessors and help to establish thetext as the prototype for a national literature: plot, characterisation, setting andsocial commentary. Briefly, the novel centres around the figures of Zainab, abeautiful peasant girl who works in Sayyid Mahmoud’s cotton fields, and thelandowner’s son, Hamid, a student in Cairo who returns home for vacations –primarily, it seems, for amorous pursuits. Hamid’s affections are torn betweenZainab, who initially responds to his flirtatious advances, and his cousin Aziza,with whom he eventually carries on a sort of love affair through letters becauseshe has since reached the age of veiling and seclusion. Zainab, for her part, fallsin love with Ibrahim, the foreman of the fields, but her parents have arrangedfor her to marry Hassan, the son of a neighbouring landowner who has fallen onhard times. When Aziza’s parents also arrange a marriage for her, a dejectedHamid returns to Zainab in the futile hope of consolation. But she has sincespurned him out of love for Ibrahim, and so Hamid departs and finallydisappears from the story, leaving his parents only a letter in his wake and noindication of his whereabouts. When Ibrahim is then conscripted into theBritish colonial army and sent to the Sudan, a now hopeless and unhappilymarried Zainab sinks into despair. She soon contracts tuberculosis and dies inthe end with Ibrahim’s name on her lips.Although at times digressive, the plot is clearly delineated, and its sustaineddevelopment allows Haykal to weave together the stories of Zainab and Hamid— 133 —www.taq.ir