LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanwith careful attention to detail and a good deal of narrative poise. The structuralcoherence of the plot itself represents a marked advance in the development ofthe Arabic novel, breaking as it does with the predominantly episodic style thatits predecessors had inherited from the traditional forms of Arabic prose. Thisbreak, in turn, is in no small part enabled by the characters themselves. Haykalleaves behind the familiar stock types associated with the maqama, folktales andlegends, and, at least in the figures of Zainab and Hamid, offers two individualswhose characters are drawn with unprecedented depth and complexity. Theirnearly flesh and blood existence owes something in its turn to the environmentin which they find themselves. Parting with a narrative tradition that wascentred on a distant and highly imaginative past, Zainab is set in the moderndayEgyptian countryside. By choosing this site as the setting for his novel,Haykal thus presents not only one of the very first fictionalised accounts ofcontemporary rural life, but in so doing allows his characters to experience andembody the conflicts that emerge as modernity begins to encroach upon thevalues, practices and customs of traditional village life. 16 And even if Zainab’sromantic yearnings and independence of thought seem at times unrealistic for agirl in her position, the novel itself offers a realistic portrait of the conditions ofthe peasantry around the turn of the century.Taken together, the particularities of plot, characterisation and setting allowthe narrator of Zainab to engage in a good deal of social commentary on theproblems of contemporary Egyptian society. Prose fiction as a vehicle for socialcritique is not itself a necessarily new development here, nor is the didactic toneof an often intrusive narrative voice. But the two primary subjects of Zainab’scritique – the hardships and injustice of peasant life and the social conventionsof sexual relations as they pertain to issues of love, marriage and the status ofwomen – enhance the modern orientation of the novel and help to situate itfirmly within an emerging trend of liberal nationalist thought embodied by theUmma Party and two of its leading figures, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and QasimAmin (Smith 1979: 250–1). Lutfi, in particular, had a tremendous influence onHaykal’s own intellectual development, and the former’s secularist notion of aterritorial nationalism rooted in the peasantry finds perhaps its first literaryexpression in Zainab. 17 It is not surprising, then, that Zainab first appeared on thepages of the same journal that Lutfi founded and that, as the leading theorist ofthe Umma Party, he used to promulgate his party’s reformist programme. Andin this context, Haykal’s choice of a pen name seems quite appropriate as well.It is nonetheless important to note that Zainab was published at a time when al-Jarida expressed what was still a minority viewpoint, one that would only attainwidespread popular support in the decade following the 1919 revolution againstthe British occupation, and only after the collapse of the Ottoman empire hadrendered obsolete the more popular pro-Ottoman appeal of Mustafa Kamil’s— 134 —www.taq.ir