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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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The Arabic Literary Heritage: the Development of its Genres and Criticism, Roger Allen, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp437
Monthly supplement
The barber of Baghdad
Ard Al-Sawad (Land of Darkness), a novel in three volumes, Abdel-Rahman Mounif, Beirut and Casablanca: Al-Mou'assassa Al-Arabiya Lildirasta wal-Nashr (Beirut), Al-Markaz Al-Thaqafi Al-Arabi Lil-Nashr wal-Tawzi (Casablanca) 1999.Fiction and reality
Abdel-Rahman Mounif
Chinese monuments and miracles
Al-Seen: Mo'jizat Nihayat Al-Qarn Al-Ishreen (China: Miracle of the End of the 20th Century ), Ibrahim Nafie, Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Translation and Publishing 1999. pp200Deep roots, shallow soil
Landmarks in the History of the Communist Party of the Sudan in the half century 1946 - 1996, Mohamed Said al-Qaddal, Beirut: Dar Al-Farabi, 1999. pp310Cinematic maladies
Al-Cinema Al-Arabiya Al-Mo'assira (Contemporary Arab Cinema),Samir Farid, Cairo: The Supreme Council for Culture publications,1998. pp260Horses in the desert night
Night & Horses & the Desert, An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, Robert Irwin, London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press. pp462Heritage in the balance
The Arabic Literary Heritage: the Development of its Genres and Criticism, Roger Allen, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp437Summer torments
Azhar al-Shams (Flowers of the Sun),Youssef Rakha, Cairo: Sharqiat Publishing House, 1999. pp143Hill of evil counsel Tal Al-Hawa ,Youssef Abu Raya, Cairo: Al-Hilal Novels, 1999. pp146
Century, conceived and edited by Bruce Bernard, London: Phaidon Press, 1999. pp1120 --see caption--
To the editor
At a glance
A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-Wardani* Al-Faylaq (The Corps), Amin Ezzeddin, Cairo: Fustat Publishing House, 1999. pp174
* Ana Baqqa wa Adel Hammouda (Adel Hammouda and Me), Ahmed Fouad Negm, Cairo: Zeinab Publishing House, 2000. pp108
* Jamal Eddin Al-Afghani, El-Sayed Youssef,Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 1999. pp255
* Masirat Hayati Hatta 1964 (The Course of My Life to 1964), Mohamed Youssef El-Guindi, Cairo: Organisation for Cultural Palaces, 1999. pp208
* Al-Mohammashoun wa Al-Siyasa fi Misr (The Marginalised and Politics in Egypt), Amani Massoud El-Heddini, Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, 1999. pp302
* Al-Kotob: Wughat Nazar (Books: Viewpoints), monthly magazine, issue no. 12, January 2000, Cairo: The Egyptian Company for Arab and International Publication
* Al-Hilal, monthly magazine, January 1999, Cairo: Al-Hilal Publishing House
* Al-Arabi, monthly magazine, issue no. 494, January 2000, Kuwait: Ministry of Information
* Sotour (Lines), monthly magazine, issue no. 39, December 1999, Cairo: Sotour Publications
* Al-Osour Al-Jadida (New Eras), monthly magazine, issue no. 3, 2000, Cairo: Sinai Publishing House
* Adab wa Naqd (Literature and Criticism), monthly literary magazine, issue no. 172, December 1999, Cairo: Progressive Nationalist Unionist Party publications
To see other book supplements go to the ARCHIVES index.
Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
Heritage in the balance
This book is a pleasure to read and to review. As a student of Arabic literature, I have learned a good deal from it. As a teacher, I feel enormous gratitude to its author for providing an updated survey of the field suitable for recommendation to students. As a reader, I admire Prof. Allen's breathtaking range of expertise and his ear for the apt quotation. I also find some of his interpretations too modest. But The Arabic Literary Heritage is the sort of book one cannot criticise without feeling indebted to it. It is a generous and well-wrought contribution to the field, and any criticism it inspires can only add to its luster.
In the introductory "essay on precedents and principles," Prof. Allen surveys the problems that beset any attempt to survey the Arabic literary tradition. In response to these challenges, he rejects the customary dynastic paradigm and adopts genre as a principle of organisation. The body of the book thus treats the Qur'an, poetry, prose, drama, and the critical tradition in separate chapters. With the natural exception of the first, which is almost entirely thematic, each of these chapters combines topical and chronological coverage. (Perhaps because of its relatively limited scope, the chapter on drama works particularly well). This genre-based approach permits the author to achieve his stated purpose of emphasising the continuity of the genres from classical to modern times. At the same time, it requires him to devote an introductory chapter to the contexts -- physical, linguistic, historical, and intellectual -- in which all these genres developed together. The book also contains a useful chronology of historical events and literary figures, and an abbreviated guide to further reading.
Prof. Allen intends his work for a general readership, not for fellow scholars. Even so, the likeliest readers are graduate students in Middle Eastern studies and (one hopes) scholars of other literary traditions. For such readers, The Arabic Literary Heritage fulfills its goals admirably. The chapter on contexts provides a concise orientation to the major themes, and each of the subsequent chapters touches on prominent figures and trends in each genre. Given its intention of surveying the field, the book inevitably mentions many authors upon whom it cannot elaborate. But it also pauses frequently to recount the biographies of representative figures, to summarise particularly influential works, and to offer illustrative citations. These features, along with its copious citation of names, dates, and titles, will make the book a handy work of reference. Helpfully, too, each of the genre-based chapters may be read on its own. The reader interested only in criticism, for example, will find it discussed all in one place (Chapter 7) rather than at intervals.
Although the work is not intended primarily for specialists, we will find much to appreciate here too. Many of us, for example, agree that the so-called Age of Decline needs to be studied and re-assessed, but few of us do anything about it. Prof. Allen, while stressing the need for further research, has evidently read a good many late-classical works, and mentions them wherever he can (see, e.g., his comments on al-Tifashi, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya and al-Nafzawi on pp. 250-52.) He is also aware of recent contributions by anthropologists, folklorists, and scholars of popular culture to the study of Arabic literature. Although he might have integrated their findings more extensively (the work of Lila Abu-Lughod, for example, might have helped contextualise pre-Islamic poetry), he does convey the sense that valuable new insights are emerging from fields other than traditional philology. Finally, Prof. Allen is also familiar with the responses of Arab critics, both classical and modern, to their own literary tradition, and his citations from their works offer a salutary corrective to the often self-contained character of Western Orientalism.
For all these reasons, the usefulness of this book is beyond dispute. Part of its usefulness consists in the potential to provoke constructive criticism, and in that spirit I offer the following remarks. The first has to do with style. Prof. Allen is evidently aware of the importance of providing literary translations of literary originals, and makes good use of older translations by such masters as Nicholson, Lyall, and Sells. It is all the more disappointing, then, when he offers flatly unpoetic renderings of many texts.
A line from a khamriya of Abu Nuwas, for example, appears thus:
Ho, give me wine to drink, and tell me it's wine! Don't do it secretly when it can be done in the open! (p.189)
Far preferable, to my ear at least, is Nicholson's rendering:
Ho! a cup and fill it up, and tell me it is wine,
For never will I drink in shade when I can drink in shine.
Translation is of course an endlessly debatable subject. But in a book expressly designed to make Arabic literature attractive to non-specialists, it is critical that the citations given in translation be of a uniformly high quality.
My second observation has to do with the matter of literary history. The age of the purely belletristic survey is past; to write literary history today, one must begin by heeding Fredric Jameson's exhortation always to historicise. Prof. Allen is clearly aware of the challenge. Yet, despite repeated references to the importance of historical perspective, he rarely presses his account of the relationship between text and context as far as he might. Two examples must suffice. The discussion of the intellectual milieu of al-Jahiz mentions the Caliph al-Ma'mun's "adoption of Mu'tazillism" and his subsequent inquisition of the 'ulama' but does not pursue the connection any further. Thanks to the work of Nagel, Al-Qadi, Lapidus, Steppat, Madelung, Jad'an, and van Ess, it is possible to describe this connection in a good deal more detail. Al-Ma'mun was an Alid sympathiser who saw himself as a rightly-guided imam, and his adoption of Jahmi (not Mu'tazili) dogma appears to have been a pretext for the repression of anti-regime elements in Baghdad, notably the anthropomorphist ahl al-sunna, whom he suspected of using their charismatic religious authority to fan the flames of popular discontent among the 'amma. All these elements are reflected in the work of the apologist al-Jahiz, who argues for the legitimacy of the Abbasids, refutes the claims of the proto-Sunni anthropomorphists, and ridicules the ignorance of the tradesmen who support them. His account of the inquisition is indeed "fascinating," as Prof. Allen notes without explaining why (p.234). The reason, briefly put, is that al-Jahiz is the only reliable source to claim that Ibn Hanbal, the hero of the proto-Sunni 'ulama', capitulated to the inquisition. Doubtless constrained by lack of space, Prof. Allen omits all this; but in doing so passes up the opportunity to illustrate a particularly well-documented instance of the interplay of theology, politics, popular religion, and literature during the formative age of Islam.
A similarly cursory treatment is meted out to the historical context of modern works, of which we may cite the example of the modern maqama. Prof. Allen, an acknowledged expert in this field, notes that the genre "exults in the sheer delight of exhibiting its own virtuosity" even as it "address[es] itself to a wide variety of issues.' These issues include the arcana of the Egyptian legal system under British rule and the ersatz attractions of a superficially Westernised Cairo (pp. 276-78). This account of the historical context is true as far as it goes, but it falls short in two respects. On the broadest level, it fails to stress the extent to which the maqamat (among other works) embody complex responses to the paradoxes of identity triggered by the imperial domination of 19th and 20h century Egypt. More narrowly, it lacks the sort of evocative detail that might bring the writers' indignation to life. Bayram al-Tunisi, for example, was deported by the British authorities to France for his editorial ridicule of the puppet government of Egypt. His maqamat do not simply deal with the "trickery" of the poorer classes, but rather (as Marilyn Booth has shown) with the inevitable failure of the common Egyptian, represented by a series of destitute and comically long-winded Azharite seminarians, to achieve an unmediated relationship with the artifacts of modernity. Here as elsewhere in The Arabic Literary Heritage what one misses is, first, an awareness of current work in colonial and post-colonial studies (Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt, for example, is one among many surprising omissions); and second, a sustained recognition of the extent to which works of literature reflect, and respond to, the sheer human misery of the modern Arab experience.
Naturally one cannot expect a scholar, even one as widely read as Prof. Allen, to master all the primary and secondary literature on so broad a topic as the entire Arabic literary tradition; nor can one do anything but praise him for keeping his survey within a reasonable compass. Furthermore, it is presumptuous for a reviewer to declare that an author would have done well to adopt a particular paradigm for understanding the relationship between literature and history. However, it is perhaps not out of place to suggest that, unless an author does adopt some paradigm or other, he will be merely making a list of events and texts. Admittedly, our field needs such a list; and even if we think of The Arabic Literary Heritage as an updated catalogue of authors and books, we would still have to admit its indispensability. Of course, the work is more than a catalogue. Its signal innovation is the adoption of a generic rather than a strictly chronological approach. This approach shatters the manifestly unhelpful dynastic paradigm and clears the ground for new readings of the tradition. By the same token, perhaps, it also makes any arguments about historical context harder to sustain. As a critical account of the tradition in context, it is remarkably (and perhaps laudably) tentative. But if its omissions inspire criticism and further study, the work will have achieved one of its purposes. For this, and for providing an updated survey of the field for ourselves, our students, and our colleagues in other fields, Prof. Allen deserves our heartfelt gratitude.
This review was first published in vol. 32, 1999 of Al-Arrabiyya, and is printed by permission from the journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic (Brigham University, Provo, Utah, USA).
Reviewed by Michael Cooperson
