LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationWere they chanting a hymn for the morning, to celebrate the birth of the sun theway their ancestors did in the temples? Or, were they chanting in delight at theharvest. It was what they worshipped nowadays. They had sacrificed for it: with work,toil, hunger, and cold all year long. Yes, they had given all they had for the sake ofthis deity … He began to look at them and at their faces in wonder. Their featuresand expressions all conveyed the same sense. Despite their differences they seemed asingle person with regard to this sense of work and hope … They were looking at thecollected harvest with loving interest, as though they were saying, ‘Toil and sufferingare of no concern so long as they are for you whom we worship.’ (172)In each instance, one sees how Muhsin’s previous revelation leads him toread these events in a particular light, and thereby ascribe to them a significanceof near mythic proportion. And it is only the assurance he derives from hisconclusions here that then allows him to raise the telltale question: ‘Would he,too, be able to sacrifice for the sake of Saniya … to plunge himself in pain andsuffering because of her? Or was he not of the same blood as these Egyptianfarmers?’ (172). For Muhsin, herein lies the secret of solidarity and renewal. Therealisation of his desire to speak the pure and eternal heart of the nation, andthereby awaken it in others, hinges on precisely his ability to make this sacrifice,without which he can only remain among the dead and corrupted souls of thecity. Thus emboldened by his discovery of Egypt’s embalmed source preserved inthe body of the peasantry, Muhsin returns to Cairo in the spirit of sacrifice.But as he prepares for his departure, we catch a glimpse of another and rathermore troubling source only briefly alluded to above: the source of Muhsin’sknowledge of the history of ancient Egypt that enabled the translation of hisvisionary experience into the language of the intellect. I am referring here tothe body of knowledge produced by European Orientalists and Egyptologists,whose origins can be located in the complex and contradictory ideology ofRomanticism and its need to see in Egypt, and specifically in the Egyptianpeasant, the image of an eternally unchanging world. It is this same knowledgethat later served as the basis for the textbooks that Egyptian students, likeMuhsin and al-Hakim, studied in school. 36 The French archaeologist who,along with a British agricultural inspector, pays a visit to Muhsin’s family at thispoint in the novel personifies the general tenor of the Orientalist discourse onEgypt. A few excerpts from his private debate with the inspector should, in turn,be sufficient to problematise the nature of Muhsin’s epiphany:‘Ignorant … These ignorant people, Mr Black, know more than we do.’ The Englishmanlaughed and said with more sarcasm: ‘They sleep in the same room with theiranimals!’ The Frenchman answered seriously: ‘Yes, especially because they sleep inone room with the animals … Yes, this people you consider ignorant certainly knowsmany things, but it knows by the heart, not the intellect. Supreme wisdom is in theirblood without their knowing it … This is an ancient people. If you take one of thesepeasants and remove his heart, you’ll find in it the residue of ten thousand years of— 153 —www.taq.ir