LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanexperiential knowledge, one layer on top of the other, but he’s not aware of it … Thisexplains for us Europeans those moments of history during which we see Egypt takean astonishing leap in only a short time and work wonders in the wink of an eye …The power of Egypt is in the heart which is bottomless … Yes, this is the onedifference between us and them: they don’t know the treasures they possess.’ At that,the Britisher rose and said sarcastically, ‘The French nation to which you belongthinks nothing of sacrificing facts to eloquence … I am convinced that those creativethousands who built the pyramids were not herded in against their will the way theGreek Herodotus stupidly and ignorantly asserts. They rather came to work in droves,singing a hymn to the beloved in the same way their descendants go to bring in theharvest. Yes, their bodies suffered, but even that gave them a secret pleasure, thepleasure in sharing pain for a common objective … This pleasure in communal pain… had a single cause which all shared: the emotion of belief in the beloved and ofsacrifice … this was their power … Do you hear these voices in unison which arecoming from numerous hearts? Wouldn’t you think they all flow from a single heart?… When the Egyptian peasants suffer pain together they feel a secret pleasure andhappiness about being united in pain. What an amazing industrial people they will betomorrow.’ (179–82)The fact that the Frenchman’s words echo almost verbatim Muhsin’s ownthoughts on the subject contests the initial depiction of Muhsin’s personalawakening as the result of a near-mystical vision. Rather, it seems in retrospectnow to have been the product of a powerful imagination acting on and shapedby a pre-existent and internalised body of knowledge. The veracity of what aseries of existential encounters had hitherto revealed the ancient and eternalsource of the Egyptian nation is thus implicitly called into question here. And,at least for a moment, the purported source of the nation is displaced by thederivative source of the nationalist discourse itself – the self’s (Egypt’s) readingof the other’s (Europe’s) reading of the self. 37 Consequently, we are left herewith a quite different and compromised image of a unison of hearts – not thatwhich exists between the peasants, but the one established between Europe’sand Egypt’s cultural elite. 38 And just as the former had ‘awakened’ the latter toits own ‘identity’, the latter can now, in turn, perform that task for its ownpeople.But if this particular revelation undermines the credibility of Muhsin’sepiphany, it fails to negate its effect. In fact, it is precisely the force of the youngartist’s imagination that gives him the strength to make the necessary sacrificeonce back in Cairo. 39 The necessity of that sacrifice is, of course, enhanced bythe fact that Saniya and Mustafa have since fallen in love with one another. Butthat fact cannot negate the ennobling significance of Muhsin’s sacrifice, asrevealed through the reactions of the other members of the household to thisnew romance and its effect on him. Zanuba responds first by calling Saniya a‘whore’. Having formally squandered the family’s savings on magical potionsdesigned to win Mustafa’s love, she now resorts to mischievous pranks in order— 154 —www.taq.ir