LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

marginal literatures of the middle eastEnglish (Nash 1998). There is a library of academic writing by Arabs in English.Eighty years ago Khalil Gibran Khalil and Amin al-Rihani adopted an AmericanEnglish to express their Arab consciousness. In the 1940s another Lebanese,Edward Atiyah, wrote novels about Lebanon and Sudan in English. ThePalestinian Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote novels equally in Arabic and English. TheEgyptian Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Room, published in the 1950s, hasrecently been reprinted. These writers have all come from the older Ottomanand Mediterranean cultural worlds, but use of a European language was notrestricted to these. The Bahraini poet, the late Ibrahim al-ÆUrayyid, was born inBombay in 1908. His father was a Bahraini pearl-merchant, his mother fromIraq. His first education was in Urdu and English and he went to Bahrain for thefirst time in his teens. But he became a distinguished poet in Arabic, arguablyhis third language. He represents too an Indian Ocean culture, having writtenpoetry also in English and Urdu, and having translated ÆUmar Khayyam fromFarsi into Arabic (Sarhan 1998).The number of Arab writers of quality who are writing in English today hasbecome a critical mass. This is a distinctive phenomenon requiring an explanation.The phenomenon reflects aspects of the contemporary culture of the Arabworld. Individuals have not complied with the orthodoxies prescribed by differentArab regimes. The monopoly of truth assumed by Ministries of Information andEducation, and backed by Ministries of the Interior and security systems, ischallenged by the availability of alternative sources of information, from satellitetelevision to the internet. Millions of Arabs have in the last thirty yearsmigrated as never before, either within the Arab world to oil-richer states or toBritain, mainland Europe or the Americas. Tens of thousands have gone outsidethe Arab world – to east and west Europe and North America – for highereducation. Students return. Families reunite. Experiences are exchanged. Theauthority of the propaganda from the home country crumbles, if it does notcollapse. This weakening of the authority of the domestic education andinformation apparatus has coincided with the emergence of English as a globallanguage. English has become the commercial language of Arabia and the Gulf.Commercial contracts between Japanese and Arabs are drafted in English. It isthe language of numerous international professions. It is the language of themajor international news agencies. Most Arab countries have English televisionchannels and English-language daily newspapers. Al-Ahram has an Englishedition. It is not surprising, therefore, that English has become a language ofcreative expression for many Arabs. Some Arabs find a formality in modernstandard Arabic that inhibits freedom and also style of expression. A Syrianjournalist and academic who writes with equal fluency and distinction in Arabicand English has said that she has a sense of humour when she writes in English,but not when she writes in Arabic. This emerging critical mass of Arab writers— 183 —www.taq.ir