LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

yasir suleimanrhythmic nature of this poetry enhanced its effectiveness as a tool of nationalmobilisation. However, the rise of journalism and the increasing popularity ofprose writing conspired to sideline poetry later, or at least to reduce its importancein the emerging Sudanese national culture. This was to some extentoccasioned by a move in this culture from oral, dialect-inspired poetry to poetryin the fusha (Standard Arabic), which was seen as the preserve of a smallconstituency of educated Sudanese.Pan-Arab nationalism benefited greatly from the power of poetry. In particular,poetry was used to connect the past with the present for reinforcement,legitimation and inspiration in the nationalist project. This is reflected in theuse George Antonius makes of the first hemistich of Ibrahim al-Yaziji’s (1847–1906) famous ode tanabbahu wa-stafiqu ayyuha al-Æarabu (‘Arise, ye Arabs, andAwake!’) as an epigraph, in beautiful Arabic calligraphy, on the title page of hisclassic study The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement(1938). Using poetry as an instrument of political mobilisation, poets with pannationalistleanings developed a poetics of literary expression in which intertextuality,repetition and the dynamism of the ‘verb’ as a category ofsignification were exploited. Yasir Suleiman investigates these stylistic practicesin relation to the poetry of the Iraqi Nazik al-Mala’ika, who chronicled some ofthe most important themes in the life of the Arabs in the second part of thetwentieth century. This study also considers how the religious and the nationalimpulses in this poetry fuse together to create a tapestry of national spiritualitythat exploits the position of Jerusalem as a potent symbol in the nationalendeavour. This ‘national spirituality’ replaces the earlier secularism of the poetin a way that presages the ascendance of Islam as a primary source of politicalorganisation in the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century.In The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, GeorgeAntonius stresses the role culture played in stirring an Arab nationalistconsciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part ofthe twentieth century, the age of the nahda (modern Arab renaissance). Highlightingthe role of literature during this critical period of modern Arab history,Antonius argues that the ‘Arab awakening’, as he calls it, was ‘borne slowlytowards its destiny on the wings of a nascent literature’ (Antonius 1938: 60).Schools and the press were instrumental in disseminating the Arab nationalistidea during this period. But so was the novel as a new genre of literaryexpression. Albert Hourani highlights the role of the novel in creating an Arabnational consciousness when he comments on the contribution Jurji Zaydan(1861–1914) made in this regard: ‘Jurji Zaydan … did more than any other[writer of the nahda] to create a consciousness of the Arab past, by his historiesand still more by his series of historical novels, modelled on those of Scott andcreating a romantic image of the past as Scott’s had done’ (1983: 277). In spite— 12 —www.taq.ir