LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanwriting while abroad, and his realist critique (23–5). Ultimately, she arrives at aconclusion similar to my own, which sees in this tension the contradictory expressionof nationalist ideology in the hands of a liberal intellectual, be it Haykal or Hamid.22. On the relationship of labour movements to the nationalist struggle, see Joel Beinin,‘Formation of the Egyptian Working Class’, MERIP Reports 94 (February 1981): 14–23; and Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism,Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (London: I. B.Tauris, 1988). For a good overview of the peasant protests and uprisings, see EdmundBurke, III, ‘Changing Patterns of Peasant Protest, 1750–1950’, in Peasants andPolitics in the Modern Middle East, eds Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury (Miami:Florida International University Press, 1991), 24–37.23. To what extent the peasants envisioned their own uprisings of 1919 in nationalistterms is debatable (Brugman, 306; Schulze, 188–9). But what is not debatable, Ithink, is that the Wafd’s establishment of hegemony was predicated on the Britishsuppression of these uprisings, which allowed the indigenous elite to consolidatetheir power (Schulze, 196).24. In her otherwise insightful analysis of Zainab, Kilpatrick neglects the importance ofthe narrative voice at this point. Contrary to the Rousseauian influence she seeshere, in a conflict that situates Hamid between the opposing forces of socialconvention and ‘natural’ law (22), the narrator implicitly argues for the verynaturalisation of that convention.25. For those contributions, see Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture,Society and the Press, 169–88; and Afaf Lutal-Sayyid Marsot, ‘The RevolutionaryGentlewomen in Egypt’, in Women in the Muslim World, eds Lois Beck and NikkiKeddie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 261–76.26. For the limitations this form of legitimation imposed on the women’s movement, seeThomas Philipp, ‘Feminism and Nationalist Politics in Egypt’, in Women in theMuslim World, 277–94.27. For a detailed study of al-Hakim’s plays, see Richard Long, Tawfiq al-Hakim:Playwright of Egypt (London: Ithaca, 1979). Paul Starkey’s From the Ivory Tower: ACritical Study of Tawfiq al-Hakim (London: Ithaca, 1987) also offers an excellentoverview of al-Hakim’s life and work.28. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature, 120. Nasser even inscribed acopy of his The Philosophy of the Revolution (1954) for al-Hakim with the followingvery telling words: ‘To the reviver of literature, Ustaz Tawq al-Hakim, inanticipation of a second, post-revolutionary return of the soul’ (quoted in Long, 65).29. For the influence of Pharaonicism on the nationalist orientation of Egyptian artistsand intellectuals in the 1920s, see Gershoni and Jankowski, 184–90.30. This explains, no doubt, why some critics see the novel’s closing episode as a ‘mereappendage’ (Starkey, 220), ‘out of tune with the rest of the book’ (Long, 28).31. Tawq al-Hakim, Return of the Spirit, trans. William M. Hutchins (Washington, DC:Three Continents Press, 1990), 27. Subsequent references are from this translationand will be cited parenthetically by page number.32. To see individual needs here solely in terms of romantic love, as Starkey does (89–91),is to lose sight of the larger significance of this conflict and how the themes of socialand political frustration, contrary to his assertion (220), are thus in fact connected.— 160 —www.taq.ir