A century's judgement

As Albert Hourani notes, they were "all masters of Arabic style, with a European education (English or French as the case might be) solidly grounded in a traditional culture... Their ideas were expounded for the most part in magazine articles, or by implication in novels and plays. They and others of their generation were the first group of novelists in modern Arabic, and some at least of them, were interested in the possibility of the Arabic drama." And Tawfiq Al-Hakim (1898-1987) will always enjoy a very special place whenever Arabic drama or the novel is mentioned.

Al-Hakim travelled to Paris in 1925 to obtain a doctorate in law and returned three years later without the degree but with new ideas that would take the Arab literary scene by storm, ideas that make his first two plays -- "People of the Cave" and Sheherazade, published in 1933 and 1934 -- the date most critics choose as the beginning of Arabic theatre. Meanwhile his novel, "The Return of the Spirit", finished in Paris though first published in 1933, is often considered the first Arabic novel, even though it postdates Heikal's Zaynab, a work many consider too naive to be included in the genre.

First or not, "The return of the Spirit" is a seminal work in the history of modern Arabic fiction, shaping the sensibility of many generations, both artistically and politically. Set during the 1919 Revolution, its theme is Egypt's reawakening at the hands of a great leader. As Naguib Mahfouz notes in the extract published below, after 1952 "the leader that Al-Hakim had envisioned and dreamt of was perceived to be Nasser, and Nasser himself understood it so. Thus he held Al-Hakim in esteem and always treated him graciously."

Finally, Al-Hakim, though the youngest of this group of liberal writers, enjoyed a long and extraordinarily prolific career. Between the early 1930s and the mid-1980s he published almost 70 volumes of drama, fiction, memoirs, as well as literary and political articles. His most controversial piece of political writing is "The Return of Consciousness" (1974), a scathing criticism of the Nasser era that provoked a storm of controversy when it first appeared.

Al-Hakim, though, lived long enough to see the rise and fall of many great hopes and expectations and it is his creative writing, rather than his political essays, that secure his place in the history of modern Arabic literature. It is, however, perhaps not without significance that by 1967 his literary output was grinding to a halt and that two of his last plays, written in 1967 and 1974 respectively, were titled "Anxiety Bank" and "Life is a great Farce".