LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nation1968), 83–109; and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political Historyof the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).10. Baron’s work suggests a possible methodology but is not concerned with literatureper se. For a brief comment on Egyptian literary tastes in the early twentieth century,see Hamdi Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and Its Main Trends from 1913 to 1952 (Cairo:The American University in Cairo Press, 1971), 19. On the specificity of literature’sfunction as providing an ‘escape’ from the political realities of late nineteenthcenturyEgypt, see Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Washington,DC: Three Continents P, 1983), 24.11. On the influence of these two novels, see M. M. Badawi, A Short History of ModernArabic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 109–10; and Sakkut, 89.12. A. L. Tibawi, ‘Some Misconceptions About the Nahda’, Middle East Forum 47.3–4(Fall/Winter, 1971), 15–22. Although Tibawi seems to have a particular axe togrind with Antonius and Hourani, his argument nonetheless offers a necessarycorrective to their overly narrow contentions.13. As Philip S. Khoury notes, it is not until the eve of World War II that this questionreally becomes a concern for Syria. See his Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: ThePolitics of Damascus, 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 98.14. Gibb, Hamilton A. R., Studies on the Civilization of Islam, eds Stanford J. Shaw andWilliam R. Polk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 294. On the discussion generated byGibb’s evaluation, see, for example: Sakkut, 17; Moosa, 173; Badawi, Modern ArabicLiterature and the West (London: Ithaca Press, 1985), 133; J. Brugman, An Introductionto the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), 211.15. See, for example, Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1957). Terry Lovell’s Consuming Fiction (New York: Verso, 1987) offers, in turn,an important feminist corrective to Watt’s otherwise still cogent argument.16. I am inclined to agree with Bakhtin when he argues in ‘Epic and Novel’ that one ofthe defining traits of the novel which, at least initially, distinguished it from otherliterary genres is its temporal orientation towards the present and future. It is for thisreason that Zainab might well be considered the first Egyptian novel.17. Evidence of Lutfi al-Sayyid’s influence on Haykal’s thought can be found in CharlesWendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image from Its Origins to Ahmad Lutfial-Sayyid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 275–90. Haykal, in turn,went on to become one of the leading theorists of territorial nationalism,encouraging Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East to adopt the same ideology(Gershoni and Jankowski: 89, 142). For the European origins and influences onHaykal’s thought, especially the environmental determinism of the French literaryhistorian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, see Gershoni and Jankowski, 34–9.18. Baron’s The Women’s Awakening in Egypt offers ample evidence for this point.19. See Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo:The American University in Cairo Press, 1992), ch. 3: ‘Women and the Nation’.20. Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Zainab, trans. John Mohammed Grinsted (London:Darf, 1989). Subsequent references are from this translation and will be citedparenthetically by page number.21. Kilpatrick speculates on other possible reasons for the tension between Haykal’sromanticism, fashionable at the time and perhaps accentuated by the nostalgia of— 159 —www.taq.ir