A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (5 page)

Such considerations have meant that while it is usually not difficult for Arab authors to be published – quite a few publish their books themselves – it is much more difficult to gain a public profile or readership, and it is almost impossible to make a living from writing books. As a result, Arab authors almost always have full-time jobs, often in the large bureaucracies that are a feature of Arab countries, reserving their writing for their spare time. It is well known, for example, that Mahfouz kept a steady job almost up to the end of his life, first as a bureaucrat and then as a newspaper commentator, and many memoirs by Arab writers complain about both the need to earn a living and the absence of public interest in their literary work. The temptation is always strong to take some bureaucratic job, which can have disastrous effects on an author’s writing.

Today, however, these things may be changing, the traditionally penniless Arab literary world having received cheering injections of money from the oil-rich Gulf countries. Sometimes lucrative pan-Arab literary awards have replaced fading state patronage in countries such as Egypt, and regional outlets in the shape of the dozens of magazines and newspapers now put out in the Gulf countries can also provide Arab authors with ready cash and even careers, and their appearance has given rise to publishing strategies that would have seemed quite foreign to an ‘old-fashioned’ author like Mahfouz. While in the past Arab authors published where they could, for example in Beirut to escape harsher conditions at home, today a more usual strategy might be to approach the problem of making a living from books almost in the manner of a European author, serializing a novel in a newspaper in one country, publishing a short story in a magazine in another, and then bringing out the novel or the short stories in book form, which in most cases will make the author far less money. Such strategies have the advantage that an author can reach multiple audiences through them, and it is always possible that the readers of newspapers or magazines may be tempted to purchase the later book, if they can get hold of it.

3. The Cairo International Book Fair, held every January, attracts thousands of visitors who buy books published across the Arab world

Nevertheless, while Arab authors now have a greater range of outlets for their work and at least in theory better distribution of it, it still remains the case that Arab writers are poorly professionalized. Publishing contracts are non-standard or non-existent, copyright protection is poor, and books sell in very small numbers given the size of the potential readership. There are few literary agents in the Arab world, and censorship remains a problem in many Arab countries. Furthermore, the present climate of religious conservatism in the Arab world has meant that some ‘secular’ authors have either fallen silent or have gone into exile following threats against them, or they have seen their work banned following press and religious campaigns against it. Under such circumstances, some writers have sought to develop a reputation abroad and in translation instead, though this strategy too is not without its costs.
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Arabic literature does not exist in isolation, and it can also be looked at comparatively as a variety of ‘postcolonial’ literature, though still a
relatively unfamiliar one, as well as a case study in the arena of ‘world literature’.

Postcolonial studies are perhaps more indebted to Arabic literature than their later inflections might suggest, since one of the foundational texts of this academic discipline, Said’s
Orientalism
, dealt precisely with representations of the Arab world in Europe and the West. Questions of representation and reception have since become the stock-in-trade of postcolonial studies in universities worldwide, though theorists have tended to restrict themselves to works originally written in English, among them those by Anglo-Indian novelists such as Salman Rushdie, as well as works written for European audiences, such as those by Frantz Fanon.
²⁴
In addition to questions of representation should be added the study of translation as such; in other words, of the movement of texts across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Postcolonial studies have done this through an emphasis on hybridity, the creative mixing of forms and languages, but there is another academic field devoted to questions of translation alone, and Arabic literature makes an intriguing subject for anyone working in ‘translation studies’, as it is hoped that this chapter has suggested.
²⁵

A second approach relevant to reading modern Arabic literature is the study of ‘world literature’, recently associated with continental European critics such as Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova. The former’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ in particular put the study of literary geography back on the map, as it were, substituting what he called ‘units that are much smaller or much larger than the text’ such as ‘devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems’ for individual novels, plays or poems.

‘If the text disappears,’ Moretti wrote, ‘it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something.’ The ‘system’
Moretti had in mind was the ‘literary world system’, modelled in terms of centre and peripheries using language taken from economics. The same author’s later pieces have sought to show how his proposed ‘graphs, maps and trees’ can be used to understand the spread of literary forms such as the novel from their origins in Europe to the rest of the world, drawing out lines of extension from a mass of detail.
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Casanova has examined similar issues in her book
La République mondiale des lettres
.
²⁷
She again proposed the existence of a ‘literary world system’, this time modelled in terms of nations competing for dominance within it. Why had Goethe originally shown interest in the notion of ‘world literature’, for example? Because he lived ‘precisely at the moment when Germany was entering international literary space’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was contesting the ‘intellectual and literary hegemony’ of France. A country finding itself at the margins of Casanova’s system has the option of trying to build up its literary ‘capital’ and seek out areas of comparative advantage. The system thus has its own form of dynamism, born of competition. Furthermore, writers coming from peripheral areas can draw up strategies for entry and even dominance. According to Casanova, Joyce and Beckett, for example, damned by provinciality, entered the international literary system by adopting the latest aesthetic innovations, thereby gaining recognition. While this came at the price of cutting themselves off from their local Irish roots and audiences, it nevertheless meant that they were able to build up enough prestige to bring about a change of taste among those local audiences.

Casanova’s book is marvellously inventive. Some of the ‘strategies’ used by the Irish, Latin American, Bulgarian, Czech and other writers she considers in their attempts to conquer international literary space can be seen as reminiscent of those used by Arab authors, either in
their decisions to become ‘international’ writers or to remain purely ‘local’ ones.

The advent of modernity in the Arab world has traditionally been given a precise date. Although the picture of the historical development of Arab societies of which this date is a part has since been modified, if not rejected, there is still some justice in supposing that the French invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1798, lasting until French forces were driven out by the English three years later, was a crucial event both in the development of Egyptian society and in that of Middle Eastern and Arab societies more generally. This is so because France’s brief adventure in the Middle East decisively changed the region’s relationship with Europe.

What changed above all in that relationship was the Arab world’s insulation from European politics and from the strategic calculations of the European powers. Noting that Egypt was likely to become increasingly important to British interests in India, the French sent their most promising young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to Egypt at the head of invading forces. While the main aim of this was to ‘chase the English from their possessions in the Orient,’ as Talleyrand, French foreign minister, put it at the time, the invasion also had other,
subsidiary aims. These included liberating the country from ‘Mamluk tyranny’, re-establishing Ottoman control in the country with the help of France, and taking the ideas of the French Revolution eastwards. As Napoleon put it in a declaration, ‘the Genius of Freedom, which has made the French Republic the arbiter of Europe, now desires that it should be so for the most distant seas and countries,’ including Egypt and other parts of the Middle East.
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Whether the emphasis is put on French revolutionary altruism, or on a desire to frustrate English power, from this date onwards Egypt, the Eastern Mediterranean, and, with it, the Ottoman Empire of which most Arab countries were then a part, were increasingly subject to European intervention. In short, the famous ‘Eastern Question’ that was to bedevil nineteenth-century diplomacy had begun, and the European powers began to jockey for position amongst themselves, hoping to make gains in the Middle East at each other’s expense, as well as at that of the Ottomans and other local rulers. Ideas originating in Europe, notably modern nationalism, began to gain a foothold, and in the wake of European influence came direct colonial control. Algiers was occupied by French forces in 1830, and by 1847 the hinterland had been brought under French rule. Tunisia was declared a French protectorate in 1881. Egypt was occupied by the British in 1882. Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912. Libya was annexed by Italy also in 1912. Following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq, all of which had been Ottoman provinces until 1918, were ‘mandated’ to France and Britain, respectively, by the new League of Nations. All this indicates the background of colonialism and dependency against which modern Arabic literature at least at first was written. (Syria and Lebanon went to France, Palestine, trans-Jordan, and Iraq to Britain.)
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Yet, while European influence in the Arab world sooner or later led to direct European control, it also led to the modernization of Arab
societies along lines suggested by the encounter with Europe. In Egypt, for example, a new, explicitly modernizing regime came to power in 1805 following the French invasion. Led by a former Ottoman soldier of Albanian origin, Mohamed Ali, this regime focused on modernizing state and society in an effort to ‘catch up’ with the Europeans in ways being tried at the same time by the Ottoman government in Istanbul. The first Egyptian educational missions were sent to Europe in the 1820s in order to learn from European science and technology; the army was reorganized, as were the state institutions; new schools and educational establishments were founded. Modernization also took place elsewhere in the region. In the countries of the Fertile Crescent (roughly speaking the Levant and Iraq), for example, under tighter Ottoman control, it began in earnest with the
tanzimat
(reforms) as the authorities in Istanbul attempted to shake up what was then a notoriously ramshackle way of doing things in the Arab provinces of the empire. In the Maghreb, Algeria was brought under French control, destroying pre-colonial society. Local dynasties in Morocco, and, especially, Tunisia, also set out on the path of modernization and reform.
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In short, the nineteenth century was the period of the ‘Arab rediscovery of Europe’, as a well-known work on the period has it,
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and while it was a period that revealed Ottoman and Arab inferiority with regard to European economic and military power and technology, it also suggested ways in which this could be made up for through the adoption of European ways. However, this adoption, though laudably meant, was also fraught with dangers. Not only could it lead to the development of an increasingly polarized society, part of which was ‘modern’ and looked towards Europe, and part of which remained ‘traditional’ and distrusted the new, foreign ways, but it could also call the foundations of that society as a whole into question. Should Arab societies remain ‘traditional’, for example, and reject the modern ways in an attempt to safeguard their identity, or
should they become ‘modern’ and transform themselves on a European pattern at the risk of losing some of the things that made them most themselves? Was there perhaps a third possibility: that the ‘rebirth’ of Arab societies would come about through their modernization along lines suggested by Europe after a long period of Ottoman domination? It was this third possibility that was explored by the pioneering writers of the modern period. While questions of this sort probably confronted all societies at the time that either fell under the influence of Europe or were colonized by one or other of the European states, in the Arab world they gave rise to particularly acute debates.