The Present Mood in Literature: Trends in a Period of Transition

by JAMAL MOHAMMED AHMED

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NOT since the ninth century, when the Caliph elMamun, son of Harun el-Rashid, made his court a haven for men of letters, have Arab writers been so productive as they are today. In 1954, over four hundred books were published in Iraq alone, and over two hundred in Lebanon — five times as many as had appeared ten years before in 1944. In Egypt, some books havereached unprecedented sales figures: a recent biography of Christ by a Muslim writer has sold half a million copies, while From Here We Start, a book by a young Azhar-educated sheikh, which analyzes the problems of Egypt from a religious point of view, has gone into seven printings. In all the Arab lands, new literary groups and movements have been increasing in number and activity.

Arabic literature had its golden age — the flowering of its great classics — in the time of the European Dark and Middle Ages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its vitality declined, perhaps for want of genius but more probably because the strict conventions of form and style tended to ossify the language. Commentaries on the classics became more common than original works. Then, about a hundred years ago, the French came on the scene, opening wide the door to European culture. Attracted by their novelty and vigor, and particularly by their concern with the actualities of life, Arab intellectuals eagerly read and translated thousands of Western books. Newspapers were founded in the larger cities in the early 1900’s, a new and challenging medium for writers. To transmit to an avid public the vast new body of knowledge from the West, it was necessary to modernize the language, inventing new vocabulary and simplifying style. Emphasis shifted from refined beauty of language to the communication of information.

Thus traditional literary forms such as the Maqamah — a type of strictly rhymed prose which lent itself to rhetorical virtuosity—began to give way to Western importations like the novel and the short story. At about the same time, the Egyptian poet Mahmud Sami Pasha el-Barudi (1840-1904) took the lead in liberating poetry from the old sheikhly conventions. Political developments also influenced Arabic writing, especially after the Sultan of Turkey was forced to concede a constitution in Syria and Iraq in 1908. A bombastic and ornate style was useless to a political leader who wished to reach the masses. It could not express the new spirit of nationalism which was rapidly taking root in all the Arab countries. Literary prose moved closer to the spoken vernacular.

In the wake of World War I came an iconoclastic movement which largely completed the liberation of Arabic literature from the dead hand of the past. One of the landmarks of this revolution was a book of criticism in which Dr. Taha Hussein shocked his former teachers at the Azhar by a fundamental revaluation of pre-Islamic poetry. Armed with the equipment of Western scholarship and a youthful exuberance, Hussein denuded classical poetry of its accumulated sanctity and introduced new ways of appreciating it. His epoch-making criticism met with storms of abuse on social and political grounds but its literary lessons were accepted by the new generation.

Since that time, despite the handicap of total blindness, Taha Hussein has become one of the principal figures in contemporary Arabic literature. His autobiography, The Stream of Days, has been translated into English and a portion of it is included in this collection. A true liberal, who served with distinction in earlier Egyptian governments, he has been both a scholar and a sympathetic interpreter of the lives of the down-trodden peasant and the petty bourgeoisie in such collections ol stories as El-MuazzaBun Fil-Ard (Those Who Sweat on the Land).

Perhaps the most interesting storyteller of Hussein’s generation was Ibrahim Abd el-Qadir elMazini, whose influence is still strong. El-Mazini’s ingenious craftsmanship attests his wide reading in several European literatures; yet his work is deeply Egyptian in spirit. With a deft touch he can capture a passing mood or draw significance from the smallest incident; he sketches character in a way which tells much about the Egyptian philosophy of life.

Mahmoud Teymour, another prolific author of short stories (as well as novels and plays), has also recorded the Egyptian scene with affection and humor. His “Comedy of Death” in this collection is a fair example of the level of sophistication which Arab writers were able to achieve in their first attempts at fiction. To Western readers the story may seem slight — hardly more than a sketch — but one must remember that Teymour and his contemporaries were pioneers in a form which had never developed in Arabic literature as it did in the West and in the Orient. A number of Teymour’s books have been translated into French and one, Tales from Egyptian Life, published in English in Cairo.

It is regrettable that British and American publishers have been so much less enterprising than their French confreres in translating books from the Arabic. Apart from our classics and the series of scholarly books sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, very little is available in English. To be sure, the Arab lands have produced no Hemingways or Thomas Manns, but there are several novels which would at least leave the reader with a memorable impression of a civilization different from his own.

One such book, which has been translated, is Tawfiq el-Hakim’s The Maze of Justice, a stinging and at times very amusing satire on the red tape and essential inhumanity of the bureaucratic legal system in Egypt early in this century. Its hero is a minor official who cannot solve a rather simple murder case because the witnesses are afraid to give evidence and the prosecutors are more interested in the quantity of properly filled-out reports of investigations which can be sent up to the ministry in Cairo than in bringing the criminals to justice. The account of a typical day in a rural court, where baffled peasants are sentenced one a minute for infractions of rules they cannot understand by a circuit judge who is only concerned about catching an early train back to the city, is almost as good as a scene from Gogol.

An even more remarkable book — perhaps the finest of the period — is el-Hakim’s Awdat el-Ruh (The Come-Back). Borrowing the symbolism of the resurrection in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, el-Hakim constructed a powerful novel whose theme is the reawakening in Egypt after the revolt of 1919.

Tawfiq el-Hakim has also achieved distinction as a dramatist. His Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, based on a story from the Koran, raises provocative philosophical questions about the meaning of time. The “sleepers” are Christian martyrs who return to life after three hundred years and discover what has happened to their faith and the world in the interval. In the end, disillusioned, they prefer to return to death. Time is real and the past cannot be recaptured. “Just living is valueless,” one of them says. “Life, abstract and shorn of the past, is less significant than death. In fact, there is no death. Death is the present without a past.”

Almost all of el-Hakim’s plays are modern reinterpretations of ancient themes. He has ranged freely through early Christian, Japanese, Greek, and Arab scriptures and legends for his subject matter, always, as in the scene from “The Death of Mohammed” in this collection, using the old stories to mount his own highly original speculations. It is only natural to ask how such cerebral fare goes down with the theater public. The answer is that such plays are more read than performed.

One of the curious features of Arabic literature is the checkered life of the stage. Drama, except for such folk manifestations as the puppet shadow plays and the passion plays of the Lebanese mountain people, was unknown to the Arabs of old. But as soon as contact with the West was established in modern times, Marun el-Nakkash (1817—1855) produced a number of translated and some original plays in Beirut, and the initial public response was encouraging. When the Khedive Ismail built a splendid opera house in Cairo in 1869, many prominent actors and producers migrated to Egypt. It looked as if Cairo would become the center for theater in the Arab World. Several eminent actors came to the fore, but, with their passing, interest in the stage petered out. Recently new companies have been formed in Cairo and Beirut; they have great difficulty, however, in competing for audiences with the radio and the cinema.

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To ILLUSTRATE the transformation that has come over Arabic poetry, I should like, before giving examples of contemporary work, to quote a typical classical poem. Here is one by el-Mutanabbi, who wrote in the tenth century, paraphrased by Omar Pound in a meter which retains some of the intricate patterning of the original:

Now let us make a leap of a thousand years, always remembering that Arabic poetry went on with very little alteration in style through that long span of time, to a very influential poem written in Egypt after the First World War: Abbas Mahmud el-Aqqad’s “Biography of Satan” has been called the Waste Land of modern Arabic letters. It heralded the revolt against poetic orthodoxy and was composed of six cantos, each made of several stanzas varying between seventeen and twenty-four lines in length, these interspersed with traditional verses in the old Qasida, ode, form. Here is a typical passage from it:

For el-Aqqad, Satan’s loss of faith symbolized the upheaval of values which the war and Western influence produced in the Muslim world. “I was swept,”he has written, “with an injurious scepticism and a violent irritation which shook all my basic beliefs. Every human condition was distorted in my view, and I could no longer see any wisdom or meaning in life. It became distasteful in all its forms and purposeless.”

If the intellectual crisis drove el-Aqqad to look inward and express his despair in myth, other poets of the period took another road and tried to come to grips directly with social problems. Notable among these was tin Iraqi, Maruf el-Rasafi, who changed the whole tenor of poetry in his day by portraying most movingly the scenes of poverty in the big cities and the impact of new wealth on the country.

From sympathy for the poor to revolutionary protest is but a short step, particularly in a society where economic inequalities are so extreme. If the rich have received their share of vitriol from our younger poets, so too have the Western “exploiters” who are always linked with them in the minds of the masses. Here speaks a typical modern anti-European:

The accent of these lines is familiar but what the typical Arab radical dreams about is not so much world revolution and fellowship with other workers us independence from Western economic dominaiton, which, he believes, will lead eventually to u status of world power and influence for the bloc of Arab stales. No Arab can forget the former glories of Islam, or that Muslim rule once stretched from the Ganges to Gibraltar.

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SUCH aspirations are most effective as subjects for poetry when they are coupled with an intense personal lyricism. The Tunisian poet Abu elQasim el-Shabi, who died at the age of twentyfive, fought passionately for the liberation of North Africa from France, but at the same time he steeped himself in the writings of the Muslim mystics and identified the nationalist struggle with his own battle against the illness which took his life in his prime. “Ruin and shatter my body as you will,” he wrote. “Silent as rock, I shall not heed.” And again, in one of his most moving poems, “The Will to Live,”we find him challenging his own and his countrymen’s affliction:

Fate must respond
If a people will to live.
Night must go
And chains must break.
Grasp life with tenderness, embrace it,
, Or die where you stand.
So nature tells us,
So the hidden spirit speaks.

Among the poets who are reaching maturity today, I find the work of Abd el-Wahhab el-Bayati of Iraq especially moving. His blending of the old and the new, of social consciousness with personal emotion, gives his verse meaning to a wide public. In “The Cottage” he ends a conventional ode in a way which suggests familiarity with the innovations of E. E. Cummings or William Carlos Williams:

A softer, more delicate note is struck in the verse written by women, among whom Nazik el-Malaïkah of Iraq, Fadwa Touqan of Jordan, and Jalilah Ridah of Egypt are outstanding. In the more progressive countries Arab women are achieving emancipation, but there is still, in the work of these poets, a touching appeal for greater spiritual freedom, as in these lines of Fadwa Touqan:

Some of the best modern Arabic poetry comes from Arabs who emigrated to the New World, such as Ilia Abu Madi in the United States and other important Arabic poets in South America. The “Emigrant Poets” added a new emotional depth to Arabic literature in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Such writers as the Lebanese author Kahlil Gibran, whose books have sold in the hundreds of thousands in the United States, drew in part on the mystical heritage of the religious East. In part they tried to interpret Arabic culture and society to the West. But always, an intense love of homeland is the key element in their writings.

It is difficult, and perhaps unfair at this stage in their careers, to single out one or two of the younger generation of prose writers — so many deserve mention — but, if I may share my own personal enthusiasm, I would call attention to the Egyptian Yusif Idris and Suhail Idris in Lebanon.

Yusif Idris, who is represented in this collection, is simple, direct, and always striking. A doctor by profession, he has a sharp eye for detail and makes his points with effective similes that are often drawn from the speech of the fellahin. Humor, and sometimes an unsentimental pathos, give his stories a depth that carries them beyond mere realism.

Suhail Idris, whose first novel appeared two years ago, is perhaps more ambitious, both in subject and method. His El-Hai Latin, a story of Arab students in the Latin Quarter of Paris, betrays the influence of the existentialists and makes use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, but is a sincere attempt to come to grips with important problems. His students must make the hard choice between Western ways of life and thought and their Muslim heritage, a decision which is complicated by their contacts with French girls whose concept of love is so totally different from that at home.

I hope that I have managed to convey a little of the vitality and variety that exist in Arabic literature today. Our Arab civilization is moving rapidly into a new era. It must accomplish in a few generations what the West had several centuries in which to do. The rigid traditions of Islam must find a common ground with science. An antiquated social system must find viable solutions to its problems. Politically, we are torn between two powerful ideologies. Our writers are responding to these stimuli, and the ever-growing market for their work is making it, increasingly possible for them to live by it. Their greatest problem, I think, is to achieve detachment and perspective. The first enchantment with Western ways has passed — our intellectuals are becoming more selective; they are re-evaluating the Muslim heritage and they are fearful of what seems to them the excessive depersonalization of the West — yet, because they are newcomers in so many literary forms, they must still look Westward for technical background. If our writers can find their balance and keep it, the richness of the Arab scene and the drama of a great social transformation will surely provide them with material for a literature as vigorous as that of their classical age.