Fall 1993

Short History of Modern Arabic Literature a M. M. Badawi

New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. 314 pages. LC 92-23257. ISBN 0-19-826542-5 $49.95.

Review by Marilyn Booth, D.Phi1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

I n the past three years there have appeared four volumes in English that trace the contours of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arabic literature with a view to providing an introduction to, and survey of, the subject for students and a general audience, as well as offering a resource for specialists. The volume edited by Robin Ostle sets Arabic literature in the context of other literatures of the region, and thus necessarily offers a brief treatment.* The latest volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, by contrast, is encyclopedic in its range and contents.* Comprehensive yet succinct, each in its own way, are the volumes by two eminent scholars and recent emer- iti-a collection of essays by Pierre Cachia3 and the history under re- view, the work of M. M. Badawi, who has recently retired after many years of teaching at Oxford.

Cachia’s Overview is more wide-ranging in the genres and modes of writing it treats, while Badawi’s Short History focuses more intensively on three generic spheres, offering a narrative history of

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each: poetry in “standard” or ”literary” Arabic, fictional narrative (mostly the novel, with a brief discussion of the short story), and drama. In each case, the author provides extensive discussion of the turn-of-the-century ferment of experimentation and transformation which accompanied and preceded the emergence of those writers who now constitute the canon of modem Arabic literature, and whose oeuvres the author goes on to encapsulate. Throughout, it is made clear that literature cannot be discussed apart from its politi- cosocial context; indeed, the conventional periodization of modem Arabic literature, which Badawi accepts, and outlines in his introduc- tion, is dependent on major political events which had transforma- tive effects on the Arab intelligentsia.

The first third of the book, on poetry, is a graceful distillation of the author’s A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry (1975), with a bit more attention to the political context and less to the bio- graphical. Precise explications of individual poems nicely shape the general historical points the author wants to make. Badawi made the wise decision-in a project demanding a great deal of selection and omission-to quote individual poems in translation at some length, thereby giving the reader a more concrete sense of the material than was possible in the sections on fiction and the drama. Unfortunately, discussion of the quite interesting developments which have marked Arabic poetry over the past twenty years is limited to a three-page summary and listing of some distinguished contemporary poets. The second part, on fiction, is noteworthy for its detailed discussion of early Arabic novel writing, including-by way of example-a most useful evaluation of the novels of Jurji Zaydan. This prefaces an or- derly reading of individual works by noteworthy novelists, first in Egypt and then elsewhere, including works whose import lies in the impact they had on other writers, such as those of the Syrian writer Muta‘ Safadi. The third section, on drama, follows the same pattern, nicely balancing evaluations of drama as text with comments on as- pects of theatrical performance.

cessitates difficult choices of whom and what to include. But in a work which surely seeks to give readers new to the subject an indica- tion of the breadth and liveliness of creative writing in Arabic, it would seem sensible to at least indicate that the high tradition t lus book encapsulates-a canon of elite and mostly male literary produc- tion-however experimental and fluid, has never been the sole site of literary activity in Arabic. Indeed, the boundaries of what constitutes ”the literary” in Arabic are being probed with growing intensity by

As Badawi notes in his preface, such an ambitious survey ne-

Fall 1993

poets, prose writers, critics, and literary historians in the region. For example, it is no longer possible to dismiss the output of today’s Egyptian colloquial poets as irrelevant to Arabic poetic discourse. Autobiography and biography constitute another sphere of growing, and experimental, literary activity. It would not have required a ma- jor shift in focus to have addressed the politics of literary inclusion. On another but related plane, the author’s brief discussions of some contemporary Lebanese and Palestinian women novelists and his mention of a handful of other women writers does not dispel the overall impression given in this book (and fortified by a tendency to use exclusionary language) that women have made no particular contribution to Arabic literary production. This is somewhat surpris- ing, since in his preface the author defines the need he sought to ful- fill here specifically as ”a comprehensive critical account of creative writing by Arab men and women since the mid-nineteenth century” (p. vii, italics added).

The author is sensitive to the needs of the audience he has de- fined for this project; he does not assume a great deal of prior back- ground on the region or its literature. In this context, his clear and concise characterizations of cultural movements (notably, several no- tations on Arab Romanticism), and his careful points of comparison between Arabic and English literary works or trends are to be appre- ciated. Boldly, he has eschewed footnotes completely; while this may add to the work‘s readability, it might disappoint those who seek further information or indications of the state of research in the field, and the lack of reference occasionally lends a note of vagueness to points the author makes. Also, this reader found the very occasional parenthetical bibliographic reference in the text more intrusive than a footnote would have been. A fairly comprehensive bibliography of critical works and translations in English provides some guidance for further reading.

Marilyn Booth is the editor and translator of Stories by Egyptian Women: My Grandmother’s Cactus.

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Notes

1. Robin Ostle, ed., Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East 2850-2970 (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). (Re- viewed in DOMES 2, no. 2: 1-3.)

2. M. M. Badawi, ed., Modem Arabic Literature, vol. 4 of The Cam- bridge History of Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1992).

3. Pierre Cachia, An Overview of Modem Arabic Literature (Edin- burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).

Gihan Nasr Akel Arara Village Givat Haviva Institute

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