LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

yasir suleimanconferences, the participants summed up their findings in a final communiqué(al-bayan al-khitami, ibid.: 23–5). Not only did these findings telescope literaryhistory and cast it in unambiguously nationalist mode, but they constituted anexercise in national ‘myth making’ in a seamless progression from the past to thepresent. Thus, the findings of the conference were written in a thoroughlymodern nationalist idiom which, to say the least, is at odds with the facts as theliterary critic might recognise them. These so-called ‘findings’ included thefollowing points: 4 (1) pre-Islamic poetry discharged its nationalist duties andaffirmed the existence of an Arab self (al-dhat al-Æarabiyya, ibid.) by using poetryas a weapon to fight the enemies of the Arabs; 5 (2) Arab literature in the earlyIslamic period succeeded in discharging its nationalist tasks (muhimmatihi alqawmiyya,ibid.: 24) and in keeping pace with the Islamic revolution (al-thawraal-islamiyya, ibid.), which through the Arab liberation wars (hurub al-tahrir al-Æarabiyya, ibid.) – that is, the Islamic conquests – carried the national anduniversal values of the Arabs to the newly liberated lands; 6 (3) in the Abbasidperiod, Arabic literature delivered its expanded national functions by affirmingArab unity (wihdat al-wujud al-Æarabi, ibid.) and rebutting the claims of thenewly emerging anti-Arab movements (al-harakaat al-shuÆubiyya al-munahida liruhal-umma al-Æarabiyya wa-jawhar risalataha al-insaniyya, ibid.); 7 and (4) Arabicliterature in the modern period continues the above trends of national consciousnessformation, advocacy of Arab unity, and mobilisation against externalpowers and the forces of decline and fragmentation.The participants at the conference concluded by calling Arabic literature inits re-christened nationalist mode throughout history as a ‘literature of struggle’(adab siraÆ, ibid.: 25). According to this reading, there is hardly any difference,in nationalist literary terms, between what the students of nationalism call theformative age, the golden age, the dark age and the age of struggle in nationbuilding. Moreover, the Arabs of today are fused in the Arabs of pre-Islamic andearly Islamic Arabia at the stroke of a pen, and the lands which the earlyMuslims acquired by conquest are declared as ‘liberated lands’ rather thanconquered territories.This mode of ‘packaging the past’, as Coakley calls it (2004: 540), serves avariety of functions in the nationalist enterprise. For our purposes here, reinforcement,legitimisation and inspiration are the most important of these functions(ibid.: 541). The first, reinforcement, is intended to instil a sense of pride in pastachievements as ‘part of a psychological search for symbols of confidence in thepresent’ (Rustow 1967: 42). This search tends to intensify when there is a crisisor when the nation feels under attack from external forces. The nationalisthistoriography of Arabic poetry outlined in the preceding paragraph provides aperfect example of this practice. The conference alluded to above was held inBaghdad at a time when Iraq was engaged in a bitter war with its non-Arab— 210 —www.taq.ir