LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanmore radical alternative is in fact broached, the narrator ultimately resorts tothe common refrain of fatalism:There was nothing that Ibrahim could do to prevent the rich and powerful tyrantsdisposing of his life until sufficient cooperation existed among his fellow workers forthem to defend themselves and rise up against the unjust oppressors. Then theywould be forced to listen to what he had to say … But Ibrahim was poor, destined tobe sent away … Yet if he had possessed but twenty pounds he could have savedhimself from this. What injustice could be greater, or rather what hostility couldequal it? There is no escaping fate. (Haykal 1989: 155–6)Is the great injustice here that Ibrahim is conscripted against his will toparticipate in the military campaign in the Sudan, or is it that he simply lacksthe money to buy his way out? Either way, the corruption that promotes thisinjustice is consigned to fate. From a certain perspective, the rhetorical appealto fate has its point, since the Hamids who see in this campaign the chance forfuture national glory are certainly not the ones who will fight and die in it. Butif that appeal does not quite exonerate the social causes of corruption here, itcertainly enervates the critique. And more importantly, perhaps, it compromisesthe agency of the very peasants whose interests the text purports to represent.And this, in fact, seems to be the real injustice of the manner in which thenarrative repeatedly renders the peasants and workers impotent through itscontinuous evocation of fate. In contrast to later works like Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi’s Al-Ard (The Earth [1954]), where the peasants actively combatcorrupt officials at both the local and national level, or Yusuf Idris’s Al-Haram(The Taboo [1959]), which offers a more nuanced and individualised portrait ofthe peasantry internally differentiated between those who own or rent land andthose who subsist as migrant labourers, Haykal’s peasants are deprived of anypolitical agency in the process of modernisation and social change. The result isthat, as a class, the peasantry is effectively neutralised through its objectificationas symbol.From a literary perspective, it might be tempting to explain this depiction ofthe peasantry in terms of the novelty of Zainab’s form and subject matter. For asReinhard Schulze notes, it was only around the turn of the century that the‘literary world began to discover and study the Egyptian peasant’ (Schulze 1991:182). But the utter absence in the text of any allusion to the incipient workers’movements or to the peasant protests and uprisings which dotted the nineteenthcenturylandscape, culminating but not concluding in the 1882 ÆUrabi revolt,suggests the inadequacy of this explanation. 22 Haykal’s particular representationof the peasantry seems rooted, rather, in his own class position and anintellectual elitism inherited from Lutfi al-Sayyid in which a sincere desire forsocial reform was mitigated by a distinct fear of mass movements (Smith 1979:250). In a fatalistic portrait that preserves the romantic image as it argues for— 138 —www.taq.ir