LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationhimself as a staunch critic of the conventions that have foiled his search thus farand as the novel’s central voice of reform:Turning my back on the establishment, I rejected the values which those who adhereto our traditions are so proud of, and the whole concept of marriage in my eyesbecame a subject of bitter criticism. (To this day I consider the institution of marriagedefective, on account of the conditions that are attached to it. Indeed I believe amarriage which is not based on love and does not progress with love to becontemptible). (Haykal 1989: 174)Thus, it seems, Hamid has learned the narrator’s lesson. And as the fallahintellectual,his refusal to settle for marriage under present conditions suggeststhe significance of his departure from the scene of the story: marriage based onlove will become possible only if the nation follows his lead and breaks withthose destructive effects of tradition that culminate in the symbolic portent ofZainab’s death: ‘Tomorrow or the day after I shall die and I warn you mother,when the time comes for my sisters to marry, don’t force them against their willfor as you can see, it is a mortal mistake’ (Haykal 1989: 211).Although Haykal’s treatment of the status of women and relations betweenthe sexes is more complex and compelling than his treatment of the peasantry,Zainab’s dying warning, like Aziza’s confession, seems ultimately ineffectual.The women who bear the primary burden of tradition can voice their sufferingsand misgivings in private, but only the male intellectual is at liberty to departfrom the conditions of tradition, and thus only he is in position to initiatereforms in the socio-sexual order. Without question, Egyptian men of a certainclass were indeed at much greater liberty to do so. But in adhering to Amin’sargument, Haykal overlooks the contributions Egyptian women of the time madein putting the question of their own status on the agenda of social reform. 25 As aresult, like the peasantry, the women in the novel are deprived of the chance toplay an active role in the course of social change, and the question of their ownstatus is consequently made subservient to Haykal’s vision of the nation and hisprivileged place within it as represented through Hamid’s search for love.One is left to conclude that without the leadership of a male intellectualelite, women are doomed to tradition. And it is then only by adhering to aspecifically male vision of the nation, based on a modern bourgeois conjunctionof love and marriage, that women can hope for their own liberation. That aburgeoning women’s movement did in fact employ the rhetoric of that nationalistagenda in order to legitimate its own emergence into the traditionallymale-gendered public space of Egyptian society should not, however, lead to theconclusion, as Haykal would have it, that women were entirely in accord withthe terms of that agenda. 26 Rather, as I have tried to suggest here, a criticalreading of Zainab might encourage one to look instead at the ways in which acertain vision of the nation centred around the needs and desires of the male— 143 —www.taq.ir