LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationWatani Party (Baron 1991: 274–5). The subsequent hegemony that the territorialnationalists established through the liberal reformist agenda of the new WafdParty was predicated on precisely this turn of events, as they cleared the groundfor a specifically Egyptian brand of nationalism, and one which could thenconfidently invoke Egypt’s long-standing agrarian past, as Zainab does, to legitimatethe claim to a national entity and identity distinct from Islam and fromthe Arab lands and peoples to the East.Qasim Amin’s influence on Haykal is no less apparent in the pages of Zainab.As the author of two controversial works on the emancipation of women inEgyptian society, Tahrir al-mar’a (The Liberation of Women [1899]) and Al-Mar’aal-jadida (The New Woman [1900]), Amin inaugurated with the turn of thecentury a widespread debate on the subject. But even in his own time, Amin’sposition was not an especially innovative one. As Leila Ahmed notes, Muslimintellectuals like Rif’at Rafi’ al-Tahtawi and Muhammad ÆAbduh had argued forwomen’s primary education and advocated similar reforms in the divorce andpolygamy laws a generation earlier (Ahmed 1992: 144). And given theemergence of a women’s press in the 1890s, Amin can hardly be credited withgiving rise to what was in fact an already burgeoning feminist movement. 18 Thesignificance of his argument lay rather in the link it forged between the status ofwomen and the state of the nation, whereby the progress of the former becamea necessary barometer for the moral and material advancement of the latter. 19Through the figures of Zainab and Aziza, Haykal, in turn, gives Amin’sargument and how it comes to bear on questions of love, marriage and conventionalsexual relationships central thematic importance in his novel. What Iwould thus like to examine in more detail now is the novel’s treatment of theseissues of class and gender, and the ways in which the narrator’s and Hamid’spositions with respect to them cast a distinct light on a certain emergent strainof nationalist thought.Despite its appropriateness, Haykal’s choice of Misri Fallah as his pen namefor the original text evinces from the start an ambivalent relationship betweenauthor and subject. For, as we know, Haykal was not a peasant and neither, forthat matter, is the narrator of his story, judging by his employment of literaryArabic as the dominant medium of expression, a literary Arabic that wouldhave been inaccessible to a largely illiterate peasantry. Thus, as Pierre Cachianotes, a more accurate rendering of Misri Fallah needs to take account of theusage of the period in which it ‘conveyed the sense of “an Egyptian of nativestock,” and has nationalist connotations, for it stands in contradistinction to“an Ottoman subject residing in Egypt” who, if of Turkish extraction, woulduntil then have claimed some social superiority’ (Cachia 1990: 113). Consequently,if an identification is to be forged between the author and his subjectmatter, it is not via the peasantry, who with the exception of Zainab serve— 135 —www.taq.ir