LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanunder present conditions (Smith 1979: 251). 42 In his discussion of Zainab, Smithsees love itself as a metaphor of Haykal’s own desire for ‘personal happiness anda position of intellectual and political leadership’ (Smith 1979: 250). FollowingSmith’s point here, it is thus possible to see how Haykal invests his vision of thenation in Hamid’s search for love, a search which leads from city to country andback again, and which thus allows Haykal to link the distinct classes andcultures of these two worlds through a common indictment of that which foilsthe quest and thus necessitates reform – the traditional constraints placed uponwomen:[Aziza’s] education ended when she started to wear the veil and this also preventedher from further meetings with many of her acquaintances … Zainab would raise herhead to the sky as if to lament the injustice of life or to seek refuge in God from heroppressive family who expected her to agree [to a marriage] for which she had nodesire. (Haykal 1989: 13, 36)It is Aziza’s veiling and seclusion, in fact, that first leads Hamid to Zainab insearch of his ‘object of desire’. As a peasant girl, Zainab is necessarily lessrestricted in her movements than her urban, upper-class counterpart Aziza, andshe thus represents for Hamid a seemingly more realistic opportunity to satisfyhis desires: ‘However much the peasant mind may tremble at the mention of theword honour, the natural instinct of the human heart to love is a compulsionmuch stronger than social convention, as long as the deed remains out of sight,safe from the judgement of men’ (Haykal 1989: 17). But Zainab is not just anordinary peasant girl, for it is this distinctly romantic sentiment, coupled withher extraordinary beauty, that distinguishes her from the backdrop of hercompanions. And while Hamid is drawn to her above all by her beauty, it is theromantic depiction of her character underscored by repeated references to the‘unveiled moon’, suggesting a symbolic link with Isis, the Egyptian goddess offertility, that allows the presumably middle-class reader to entertain what wouldotherwise appear as a scandalous affair. Here again, then, is another instance ofwhat I have referred to as that semantic transference which momentarily bridgesclass differences by shifting the reader’s attention to a point of common identification,in this case a romantic image of and desire for love as the unifying forceof the nation.But even before Hamid’s and Zainab’s brief affair comes to a close, thenarrator alludes to the essential problem in such a relationship: ‘[M]an can onlyattain what his social position allows him to. Thus to a greater or lesser extent,he lives in a permanent state of conflict according to the amount of freedom hissituation grants him in the way of achieving his aims and desires’ (Haykal 1989:17). Although the narrator does not present it explicitly at this point, theproblem here is precisely one of Hamid’s and Zainab’s respective social positions.While the amount of freedom accorded to each does indeed allow them to carry— 140 —www.taq.ir