Frankenstein in Baghdad

Zainab Abdulkadhim Salman Al-Shammari

doi:10.31973/aj.v1i136.1008

Abstract

The present essay is personal reading of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, which is viewed in light of the development of the genre of utopian/dystopian writing not only in Western literature but also in the Arab/Islamic literature, highlighting the way the Iraqi writer understood the realities in his own country following the American invasion. The novel is a metaphor of the intertribal violence that is still shaking the illusory peace of the country, affecting the lives and destinies of a people which has not completely recovered from the horrors of the wars of the last decades.  “Frankenstein in Baghdad… is something of an exorcism of the evil spirits of an era not quite past. Saadawi’s goal isn’t to resolve the horror of war, but rather to thrust the reader into its midst so that they may question its senselessness”. ~ Zahra Hankir

Highlights

“Frankenstein in Baghdad... is something of an exorcism of the evil spirits of an era not quite past
The second, dystopia, or anti-utopia, denominates a literarygenre, mainly of the twentieth century, comprising such visions that might be regarded as critiques of the enthusiastic and progressive models proposed by nineteenth-century utopians, models that have degenerated, as the history of the previous century has proven time and again, into brutal totalitarian societies
One must agree that any understanding of the utopian phenomenon should start from an analysis of its diachronic perspective and attempt to circumscribe it synchronically

Summary

Early Islamic Utopian Literature

Apart from The One Thousand and One Nights, first translated into English in the early 1970s, very little is known in the Western world about earlier Arab/Muslim speculative literature. Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive, Son of Awake”, known by its Latin title, Philosophus Autodidacticus – “The Philosopher as Autodidact”), written in the early twelfth century by the Granada-born Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl, is considered the first Arabic novel It opens a dialogue both scholarly and lively with all of his predecessors in thought (like Avicenna and Averroes), which summarizes the major issues of Arab knowledge of the period. Whatever version the reader chooses, it is his education by a gazelle that collects it, which will concern the reader on, its death by which Hayy becomes aware of the phenomenon of life and goes in search of its meaning Another notable example worth mentioning is Ibn al-Nafis with his novel Risālat Fādil ibn Nātiq (“The Book of Fādil ibn Nātiq”, 1268-1277), or Theologus Autodidacticus, written in response to Ibn Tufayl‟s Philosophus Autodidacticus, Society, the Islamic community, offers the only space for the realization of authentic aspirations and human needs. In the Risālat Kāmiliyya this man, Kāmil, is like Ḥayy, born of spontaneous generation on a desert island but, unlike his predecessor, he leaves the island, and the story gradually evolves into a coming-of-age account of the protagonist, with science fiction elements

Twenty-first-century Response

Conclusions