LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationHowever much they suffered they had become accustomed, like their fathers beforethem, to this environment and heritage which was their lot. They were used to thatstate of eternal bondage in which they lived their lives and submitted to it withoutcomplaint or misgiving. Toiling endlessly, they would regard the results of their workwith shining eyes while the proprietor alone gathered the fruits of their labour. Hisonly concern was to sell the cotton at the highest price and rent out his land for thebest return while at the same time exploiting the farm workers in accordance withtheir lowly status. The thought never occurred to him to raise them from themiserable conditions in which they lived as though he did not realize that his workersmight be more efficient if their standard of living was improved or if they had anincentive to work in order to live at a more humane level … He was also accustomedto accepting things as they were and never considered for a moment to exchange thecustoms of his forefathers. (Haykal 1989: 8–9)The peasantry is still cast in a timeless light here, but the romantic veneerhas suddenly been stripped away and in its place we find a more realistic portraitof endless toil and exploitation. As such, the reader is discouraged fromidentifying too closely with this life and is instead encouraged to adopt thenarrator’s critical point of view, which distinguishes him from both peasant andlandowner in their uncritical acceptance of custom.Haykal’s ambivalent treatment of the peasantry, as evident in these openingpassages, is one that pervades the novel. A persistent desire to romanticisepeasant culture is repeatedly short-circuited by a lucid critique levied againstthe totality of the social order from corrupt landowners and greedy moneylendersto an inept government that further alienates the peasants throughexcessive taxation and forced military conscription, and from the arbitrarinessof British rule to a hypocritical practice of Islam that can thus no longer serve asthe moral centre of society. 21 In this sense the social critique marks the limits ofthe desire for a national community constructed around the image of thepeasant and the land. The realization of that desire, Haykal seems to suggest, iscontingent on wide-scale social change and, most especially, an improvementin the living conditions of the peasantry.But the persistence of the romantic desire can be seen, in turn, to mark thelimits of the social critique and the bourgeois nature of Haykal’s essentiallyreformist argument. For despite what appears at times as a quite trenchantcritique, Haykal is by no means advocating a fundamental change in therelationship between the peasant and landowning classes, but only a morehumane maintenance of it through higher wages and better working conditions.Indeed, a more radical argument for change, such as substantial land reform,peasant collectives or a redistribution of income, could represent a potentiallyserious disruption of that relationship and thus strike at the very core of theterritorialist’s image of the Egyptian nation as embodied in the eternally unchangingways of the peasant. And even in the rare instance where the possibility of a— 137 —www.taq.ir