Childhood and Modern Arabic Literature: The Initiation Story

Reviewed by: Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework by Reuven Snir Anna Ziajka Stanton Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework. Reuven Snir. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. 416. $113.20 (cloth); $37.72 (paper); $37.72 (eBook). In 2011, the International Journal of Middle East Studies convened a roundtable of scholars to survey the field of Arabic literary studies in the United States. The five brief essays that they produced reflect a sense of having arrived at an inflection point in the field’s history. Post-9/11 enrollment in Arabic-language courses at US institutions of higher education was at a record high (according to data collected by the Modern Language Association, it peaked at around 35,000 students nationwide between 2009 and 2013).1 The nascent Arab Spring movements had lent a youthful revolutionary cachet to the popular image of the Arab world abroad, inspiring a burgeoning interest in Arabic cultural production among American undergraduates and in the public sphere. Academic research on Arabic literature was tracking away from the sociological and philological approaches that had dominated in an earlier era to become increasingly theoretical in its orientations, as befitted its new disciplinary affiliations with departments of comparative literature rather than solely with area studies departments dedicated to the regional study of culture, history, and politics. Yet amid their general optimism about the state of Arabic literary studies in the American academy in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the essays in the IJMES roundtable also register a subtle anxiety: a concern that Arabic literature’s newfound cool would mean the wholesale abandonment of the more staid empirical methods that—with their attention to issues of canon-formation and literary form, their privileging of archival work aimed at situating texts within the material-historical conditions of their production—formerly gave shape and purpose to the field. As one contributor put it: “What exactly is the discipline of Arabic literature? Or what, in concrete terms, is the Arabic literary material we can work on?”2 Reuven Snir’s new book, Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework, offers an answer to these questions that is unabashedly—even unfashionably—empirical in its approach. Arguing that Arabic literature can be profitably understood as comprising “one dynamic, autonomous literary system,” Snir’s ambitious goal is to map this system in its entirety, thus making possible “the comprehensive study of the diverse and multifarious texts that make up modern Arabic literature” (2). Such a systematic theory of literature is advantageous insofar as it allows Snir to present a picture that is simultaneously capacious and granular, invested in identifying the macrotrends that have defined the Arabic literary field since the nineteenth century and, in equal measure, in exposing the dialectical play of factors—internal and external, aesthetic and circumstantial—that constantly operate to “defamiliarize” these trends within a process-driven cultural space (3). In one chapter, Snir inventories an extensive corpus of literary texts, written in Modern Standard Arabic as well as various Arabic dialects, in order to propose six interlocking subsystems within which individual works circulate according to their canonical or non-canonical status, their intended audience of either children or adults, and their identity as either original Arabic creations or translations. Another chapter explores “the diachronic intersystemic changes” to Arabic literature that have resulted from the interference of foreign (predominantly European) literary traditions, and from the extraliterary pressures of religion and politics (100). The book’s final substantive chapter examines Arabic poetry, fiction, and drama as discrete genres linked to specific epochs in the field’s history, but also as composite categories whose “interrelationships and interactions” make them inherently resistant to efforts at temporal and typological classification (175). [End Page 681] In its avowedly egalitarian view of what constitutes Arabic literature, Snir’s book joins the company of Muhsin al-Musawi’s The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters (2015) and The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature’s volume on postclassical literature (2008) as the latest recent work of scholarship in English to challenge the foundational structures of Arabic literary studies in both the Western academy and the Arab world. A standard history of Arabic literature’s evolution after the rise...

Modern Arabic literature is often considered to have begun with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, while the 19th century is recognized in sources as the Nahda (renaissance) century. During the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha in Egypt, who assumed power in 1805 after Napoleon, significant steps toward modernization were taken. Key developments included the establishment of the Bulaq Press, the sending of students to Europe for education, translation activities, and the founding of the School of Languages. While literary products began to emerge after the 1850s, the appearance of the first modern literary works extended into the early 20th century. Today, Paul Starkey is one of the most prominent scholars of modern Arabic literature in the West. Paul Starkey, a British Orientalist and scholar known for his work on modern Arabic literature and Arabic-English translation, who studied at Oxford University and until his retirement was Professor of Arabic at Durham University, has published numerous scholarly articles on various aspects of the Arabic novel, especially on Arab writers such as Edwar al-Kharrat and Sonallāh Ibrahim. He has won many awards in the international arena. In his work Modern Arabic Literature, English Orientalist and academic Paul Starkey argues that modern Arabic literature did not begin with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Starkey suggests that the use of the term modern in this context reflects the influence of the rise of the novel in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and its peak in the 19th century, which marked the West’s modernity being mirrored in the East. He also emphasizes that the term Arabic in Arabic literature is not limited to works written in the Arabic language but includes works by Arabs or authors of Arab origin, especially in Western languages such as English, French and Spanish can also be considered as Arabic literature. Moreover, the evaluation of this literature, which brings Mahjar literature to mind, brings with it a new perspective that considers the publications written in Spanish by Arabs in South America as a continuation of Mahjar, contrary to the ideas that Mahjar literature ended in the 1960s but continued its influence. Finally, Starkey points out that the word “Adab” has a much wider layer of meaning than the meaning of literature. In the related article, descriptive method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used throughout the research and the data obtained were evaluated by analysis method. In this context, in the light of the aforementioned information, this article aims to explore the concept of Modern Arabic Literature through Paul Starkey’s perspective and to provide a broader interpretation of this concept. It also examines the Nahda movement and the emergence of the novel as a genre resulting from modernization efforts.

No doubt that Classical Arabic Literature was influenced by Greek Literature, as the modern Arabic literature was influenced by European Literature. The narrative poetry was designed for the emergence of theatrical poetry, a poetry modeled on the model of the story with its performance in the front of audience. This style was not known as Arabic poetry, but borrowed from the European literatures by the elite of poets who were influenced by European literatures looking forward to renew the Arabic poetry. It means that we use in this article the historical methodology based on the historical relation between European and Arabic literature in the ancient and modern age.
 The first who introduced the theatrical art in Arab countries was Mārūn al-Niqqāsh, who was of a Lebanese origin. He traveled to Italy in 1846 and quoted it from there. The first play he presented to the Arab audience in Lebanon was (Miser) composed by the French writer Molière, in late 1847.
 It is true that the art of play in Arabic literature at first was influenced by European literatures, but soon after reached the stage of rooting, then the artistic creativity began to emerge, which was far away from the simulation and tradition.
 It is true also that European musical theatres had been influenced later by Arabic literature and oriental literatures. European musical theatres (ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn and the magical lamp), the play (Māʿrūf Iska in Cairo) and the musical plays of (Shahrzād) are derived from (One thousand and one Nights).
 This study aims to discover the originality of theatrical art in modern Arabic literature. Therefore it is focused on its both side: Its European originality and its journey to Arab World, hence its artistic characteristics in modern Arabic literature. We also highlight its journey from the poetic language to the prose.

This thesis is a research into the growth in Nigeria of Modern Arabic Literature, from the impact of modern secular thought on the medieval Arabic-Islamic literary tradition. In chapter one the spread to Nigeria of Islam and the growth within its cultural context of Arabic literature are discussed in the light of the classical Arabic literary theory. Cultivated as an integral part of Islamic traditional sciences, Arabic literature throughout its development in Nigeria had remained the function of Islamic religion. All the literary men were essentially Muslim jurists (al-fuqaha') writing in a sacred medium. The various aspects of this religious literary tradition, al-taqlid, are described with illustrations in chapter two. In chapter three the process of how modern European literature had given birth in Egypt and Greater Syria to Modern Arabic Literature, and its major currents are described. Thus inspired, Modern Arabic Literature is not Islamic but Arab nationalist oriented with very little to offer the non-Arab Muslims in the name of the Islamic Commonwealth. The non-Arab Muslims have accordingly embarked on developing their own national literature in English, French or a vernacular. This phenomenon, seen in Turkey, Iran and Senegal is also demonstrated in Nigeria by the birth of modern Hausa literature instead of Arabic. This development is discussed in chapter four within the context of the Western cultural impact on Islamic Nigeria. But the study of Arabic and Islamic religion in secular institutions imposed by modern political order has begun to challenge the existing religious literary tradition. Nigeria has now produced some Arabists, including Christians, in whose literary innovations Arabic language and literature is no longer an exclusive function of Islamic culture. Influenced by neo-classical Arab writers, the most outstanding contribution to this new trend is the diwan (anthology) of 'Umar Ibrahim, the literary exposition of which is made in chapter five. In conclusion, the scope of the literary innovations introduced into Nigerian Arabic literature is highlighted with an attempt to determine its prospect.

Chinese scholars just began to study Arabic literature since Reform and Opening-up of China in 1979, though Arabic language began to be taught in Peking University since 1951. Chinese scholars’ studies on Arabic literature studies at that time were at the edge of studies of world literature. Articles on Arabic literature just issued on Arab World. It was still difficult for professors of Arabic literature to issue their articles at the journals such as Foreign Literature Review, Literature Abroad, Foreign Literature Studies, Foreign Literature and Contemporary Foreign Literature in 1980s. These journals preferred to issue papers on western literature and Russian literature during that period. In recent years, studies on Arabic literature developed rapidly in China. The Chinese intellectuals do not study on ancient Arabic literature only, but study on modern and contemporary Arabic literature also. They published books on Arabic literature such as On Arabian Nights: Mythology and Reality,Singing for Love: A Study on Kuwait Poetess Souad al-Sabah,Sufism in Modern Arabic Literature, Modern Arabic Literature During the Cultural Changes,Arabic Poetry in the Context of Globalization: A Study on Egyptian Poet Farouk Guweidah, and Comparative Study of Chinese and Arabic Literature. They also wrote histories of Arabic literature, for example, History of Arabic Literature, History of Modern Arabic Literature and General History of Arabic Literature are available in Chinese book market in these years. Professor Zhong Jikun won Appreciation Award of Egypt Ministry of Higher Education in 2005, won Sheikh Zayed Book Award’s Cultural Personality of the Year in 2011 and in the same year won King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Translation. These prizes and awards show us that studies on Arabic literature have moved from the edge of China to the center of Arab world.

The article is devoted to the modern Arabic literature based on the literary works of young novelists. Modern Arabic literature still remains understudied area, both in Russia and in Europe. Young writers around the world are faced with a common problem: it is difficult to find a means to reach the reader. Arabic literature may be called conservative. Today, however, young Arab authors are interested in the genres which their European colleagues were interested in several decades ago. Nowadays modern Arab novelists choose different themes for their literary works — there are everyday life topics as well as political and philosophical themes. The theme of struggle is one of the most important in the works of Arab writers. The authors are rarely confined to a single storyline in his narrative. The general trends of modern Arabic literature largely coincide with the trends of world literature with a number of specific features.

Courses that teach modern Arabic literature, particularly those that address students of comparative literature or other non-specialists, often focus on relatively recent exemplars of the canon. Most engage texts that hail from the mid- to late twentieth century—a period in which the fate of “new” narrative genres (for example, the novel) is well established—rather than those that evoke a time when the boundaries between “tradition” and “modernity” were in flux. Yet a critical pedagogy of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Arab “renaissance” (nahḍah) could bring modern Arabic literature more squarely into the fold of empire and postcolonial studies, critical translation theory, and the resurgent fields of world and comparative literature. This essay reflects on both the theoretical importance and the practical experience of teaching the dynamics of early Arab literary modernity to non-specialist audiences—both undergraduate and graduate—in comparative literature. Two problems emerge in this context: first, the self-Orientalism of nahḍah texts, which often uphold a thesis of post-Ottoman “decline” and post-European “awakening” and thus reinforce Orientalist views of Arab-Islamic culture in a post-9/11 era of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment; second, a relative dearth (to date) of high-quality, in-print, and affordable English translations. Conjoining comparatist methods of “close” and “distant” reading, I propose a twofold praxis of proxidistant reading to address these problems of world, time, and access: a praxis that connects modern Arabic literature to modern Western and world literatures in ways that assume neither easy equivalence nor absolute non-relation between adab and literature, one modern and another, and the modifiers Arabic, Western, and world. First, while nahḍah intellectuals reengineered the Arab-Islamic idea of adab—once coterminous with knowledge itself—to translate the modern Western idea of literature, premodern adab and its modern Arabic “nemesis” share more than nahḍah ideology concedes: both can be narrowly “literary” or radically transdisciplinary, belletristic or “lowbrow,” formal ( fuṣḥā) or dialectal (ʿāmmiyyah). Thus I suggest that we read nahḍah texts as testimonies to the discontinuous continuity—or continuity in death—of premodernity and modernity, “Wests” and “Easts,” interrogating conceptions of world and time that exaggerate either the proximity or the distance of literary-cultural epistemes, genres, and modes of expression across these postulated divides. Second, I propose that we read translations of nahḍah “literature” both up close to and afar from original texts and from the imagined purview of the “literary.” To impart a prismatic vision of the nahḍah to students who must rely on limited English translations, I suggest peri-literary approaches—“time-travel” to the nahḍah through secondary sources on the period, as well as through primary sources (e.g., novels) set in the era yet composed in later periods—and para-literary readings that place the many forms that nahḍah “literature” actually took (historical, sociopolitical, scientific, popular) alongside those that fit its belletristic theoretical mold. By teaching an earlier “modern” than the “modern Arabic literature” comparatists typically teach and by comparing the nahḍah with similar “renaissances” elsewhere in the non-Western world, I argue, we can help students understand Arabic-speaking cultures not as objects of global modernity but as complex subjects thereof—and develop a complementary (or contestatory) vision of the rise of world and comparative literatures usually imputed to nineteenth-century Europe. Such a pedagogy, I suggest, might de-Orientalize U.S. studies of Arabic literature.

PurposeThis study aims to explain the flow of romanticism along with the continuity and changes to con-temporary Arabic literature, and to be able to reveal dialogues about the flow of romanticism in modern Arabic literature, which is growing rapidly in the Arab world. Knowing the characteris-tics of Arabic literary Romanticism. Knowing the figures of Arabic Literary Romanticism. MethodThis study used a library research design and note-taking techniques. This research method uses aspects of library research with data sourcesof books and literacy related to romanticism in mod-ern Arabic literature: continuity and change. Results/FindingsThis study reveals the continuity and change as well as its influence on contemporary Arabic lit-erature, namely: 1) History of Arabic Literature in the modern era, 2) History of the Emergence of Western Romanticism in Arabic and its characteristics, 3) Development of Romanticism and its influence on Arabic Literature, 4) Figures of the Romanticism of Arabic Literature and their works. ConclusionRomanticism has had a major influence on Arabic literature, with the establishment of groups of Arabic literary, such as the Mahjar group, the Diwan school, the Apollo school and Usbah al-Asyrah. In addition, there is also a renewal of magazines and newspapers in the Arab world which call for renewal, and criticism of the previous flow (classicism).

No doubt that modern Arab literature has been influenced by Western literature more than it was influenced by ancient Arabic literature, whether by the missionaries, occupiers, merchants, and investors who arrived at Arab countries or by the scientific missions sent by Arab countries to European capitals or by Arab immigrants to the West. This influence was either through the translation, or through reading in the original languages ​​of Western literature, and this second method was more influential in modern Arabic literature, because translation loses many of the characteristics of artistic literatures that have a close connection with the language.. We mentioned in this research the link between East and West, and between Arab literature and European literature, and the features of impact between them through the process of transferring the literary heritage from East to West through several crossings, and its study to extract the literary and cultural treasures through the efforts of missionaries from Orientalists that were the first nucleus of modern Western civilization. We also dealt with the features of renewal in Arabic literature, Arabic poetry and its schools in the modern era. We focused on the Divan school, the Apollo school and Diaspora School, especially the nature of poetry and truth of free modern realist poetry. We also mentioned the high demand for translated eastern literature in European countries, and its inclusion by the writers, poets and writers in their literary writings. We used the descriptive approach that is always suitable for such literary and critical topics.

Extract Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a unique series that aims to fill a glaring gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period (that is, from the nineteenth century onwards) is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/ Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or French literature. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/ Middle Eastern Literature’ make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-Arabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century.

Water in Arabic literature has literal and symbolic meanings. Water is one of the four elements in Greek mythology; life would be impossible without water and it is a synonym for life; life originated in water. Springs, wells, rain, seas, snow, and swamps are all associated with water. Each form of water may take on a different manifestation of the original from which it comes about. Arabic literature employs the element of water in poetry, the short story, and the novel. We find it in titles of poems: Unshudat al-matar (Hymn of the Rain) and Waj’ al-ma’ (The Pain of Water); and novels: Dhakirat al-ma’ (The Memory of Water); Taht al-matar (Under the Rain); Matar huzayran (June Rain); Al-Bahr khalf al-sata’ir (The Seas Behind the Curtains); Rahil al-bahr (Departure of the Sea); and many others. This study aims to answer the following questions: How does the element of water manifest in Arabic literature? What are the semantics and symbolism of the different forms of water in the literary imaginary? The study refers to six different significations for water in classical and modern Arabic literature: water as synonymous with life, purity and the revelation of truth, separation and death, fertility and sex, land and homeland, and talent and creativity.

With the rise of Islam, Arab civilization was given a defined ideological and cultural framework within which it could develop. Islam, as a system of symbols, represents the most significant factor in the explanation of Arab cultural, intellectual, and literary history since the seventh century. Arabic literature was never wholly a religious one, but since the revelation of the Qur'ān, the various activities in the literary system generally occurred within the borders defined by Islam and were guided by a cultural heritage that seemed nearly as sacred as the religious law. Islam and, more specifically, the Qur'ān, was also predominant in consolidating principles that ensured, according to most Arab intellectuals in the twentieth century, that modern Arabic literature could only be a direct extension of the classical literature. The dominance of Islamist discourse in the literary system during the last century was reflected through censorship and banning of books for religious considerations and for the harm they might do to public morality. Nevertheless, Arabic literature witnessed during the second half of the previous century a strong trend towards separation from its strict Islamic moorings in order to follow its course as a completely secularized literature. This trend has found its manifestation in both the interrelations of the literary system with other extra-literary systems as well as on the level of the texts themselves. (The term “Islamist” is used here to refer to the cultural activities and the discourse of the religious circles; conversely, the terms “Muslim” or “Islamic” are applied to general religious and traditional cultural phenomena).

This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.

(2001). Childhood and modern Arabic literature: the initiation story. Arabic & Middle Eastern Literature: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 167-178.

The interest for Modern Arabic literature has been bound in Spain to translation since its inception more than half a century ago, when Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's Al-Ayyām was translated in 1954. Since then, many Arab poets and novelists have been translated into Spanish, first mainly with the support of institutions and more recently under the troublesome forces of the markets.Translation was born out of a sociological, rather than a literary, interest. Arabic literature was perceived as a means to better understand customs and manners of Arabs and Muslims. The sociological and political capitalization on literature often marked the election of original texts as well as characterized the translated texts from Arabic. Footnotes, transliterations, Spanish vocabulary of Arabic origin and other textual devices ended up establishing an authentic typology of translated Arabic texts into Spanish that might have hampered the reception of modern Arabic literature.