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title: The Arabic Novel
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This post forms part of my '[aspects of the novel](/2022/01/04/aspects-of-the-novel/)' collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. They implicitly or explicitly describe a canon not of my own making or choosing and replicate this from various sources. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive, nuanced and worth consulting. I am especially conscious, in this article, of the danger of causing offense by grossly simplifying national literary histories.

In the Mashreq regions of Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, poetry has traditionally been the oldest/preeminent genre of aesthetic writing. Other forms of writing, such as the qissa (story), hikaya (tale), usturah (myth), khurafah (fable), and sirah (saga) were popular, but far less prestigious than poetry.

One of the earliest Arabic narratives was _Kalila wa Dimna_, which is a Persian translation of the Sanskrit _Panchatantra_, a set of "beast fables", by Ibn al-Muqaffa’. That said, the best known work of Arabic fiction is _Kitab alf layla wa layla_ (or the _Book of the Thousand and One Nights_), sometimes mistranslated as _The Arabian Nights_. 

The context for the emergence of the Arabic novel, according to Waïl S. Hassan (p. 59), is postcolonial. For instance, the entertainment, social commentary, and moral instruction genre of _maqama_ -- using rhymed prose -- was used in the nineteenth century to recuperate national heritages in the face of anti-Ottoman discourse. Nasif al-Yaziji and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq are two examples of such practices. Meanwhile, works such as Muhammad al-Muwailihi’s _Hadith ‘Isa Ibn Hisham_ (1898–1902, _The Tale of ‘Isa Ibn Hisham_) is a satire about Western corruption and moral turpitude.

The novel emerges in Arabic cultures with rough/loose [translations of European novels](/2022/01/04/adaptation-and-appropriation/). For example, Rifa’ah Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, translated François Fénelon’s _Les Aventures de Télémaque_ (1699, _The Adventures of Telemachus_) in 1867. Bishara Shadid’s translated Alexandre Dumas’s _Le Comte de Monte Cristo_ (1844–45, _The Count of Monte Cristo_) in 1871. And Muhammad ‘Uthman Jalal created an Arabic version of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s _Paul et Virginie_ (1788) in 1872. In the 1870s, Yusuf Sarkis and Salim al-Bustani popularized historical romance through translations.

The first Arab woman to write a novel was ‘A’ishah Taymur, who wrote _Nata’ij al-ahwal fi al-aqwal wa al-af ‘al_ (1887–88, _The Results of Speech and Action_). Alice al-Bustani and Zaynab Fawwaz were also active novelists in the 1890s.

A commonly held, but apparently historically contested view, is that the Arabic novel really properly starts in 1913 with the Egyptian writer Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s _Zaynab_. This text focuses on contemporary conditions in a prose style that broke away from the rhyming style of maqama and with a unified plot. Novels of this "early" period tend to focus on the relationships between the Arab world and Europe. For instance, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s _‘Usfur min al-sharq_ (1938, _A Bird from the East_) and Yahya Haqqi’s _Qindil Umm Hashim_ (1944, _A Saint’s Lamp_) both depict Egyptian students travelling to Europe (Paris and London) to study. While they are overseas, they fall in love, which is used as an opportunity to explore cultural interrelations. Similar patterns emerge in Suhayl Idris’s _Al-hayy al-latini_ (1953, _The Latin Quarter_) and the Sudanese Tayeb Salih’s _Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shamal_ (1966, _Season of Migration to the North_).

Perhaps the most famous Arabic author is Naguib Mahfouz (or Najib Mahfuz) who wrote more than forty novels over a seven-decade period and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. His work ranges from the realist _Zuqaq al-midaqq_ (1947, _Midaq Alley_) and _The Cairo Trilogy_ to a later more experimental phase. The Nobel Prize citation controversially mentioned his novel _Awlad Haritna_ (1959, translated as _Children of Gebelawi_ and _Children of the Alley_), which allegorized various Qur’anic stories, leading to a _fatwa_ being levelled against the writer. As a result, he was attacked by a young militant in 1992 and struggled to write thereafter.

The diversity of novels from this region is extreme and Hassan gives an excellent reading list/starting point on pages 62-63 of his chapter. However, common themes include the Arab-Israeli conflict(s), the Lebanese civil war, and gender relations in Arabic nations.

The only thing left to note is that various hybrid identities, such as Arabic-American fiction, are often excluded from such discussions of Arabic literature. Yet the Lebanese author Ameen Rihani’s _The Book of Khalid_ (1911) could be described as the first Arab-American novel, demonstrating a long tradition of hyphenated identity that goes back over a century. Anglophone Arab novelists include the Palestinians Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Yasmin Zahran; Mikhai’l Nu’aymah, Nabil Saleh, and Rabih Alameddine from Lebanon; the Jordanian Fadia Faqir; from Egypt: Waugih Ghali, Ahdaf Soueif, and Samia Serageldine; from Sudan: Jamal Mahjoub and Leila Aboulela; the Libyan Hisham Matar; the Tunisian Sabiha al-Khemir, and the Moroccans Anouar Majid and Laila Lalami. Arab-American and Arab-Canadian novelists include Diana Abu-Jaber, Kathryn Abdul-Baki, Saad Elkhadem, Rawi Hage, D. H. Melhem, Frances Noble, Laila Halaby, and Mohja Kahf.

Further reading: 

* Allen, Roger, _Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction_ (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1982)
* Caiani, Fabio, _Contemporary Arab Fiction: Innovation from Rama to Yalu_ (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007)
* Hassan, Waïl S., ‘Arabic Novels’, in _The Encyclopedia of the Novel_, ed. by Peter Melville Logan, Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 57–65
* Meyer, Stefan G., _The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant_ (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000)
* Omri, Mohamed-Salah, ‘Local Narrative Form and Constructions of the Arabic Novel’, _NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction_, 41.2/3 (2008), 244–63
* Zeidan, Joseph T., _Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond_ (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995)