“Blame These Days, Don’t Blame Me!”: Rewriting Medieval Arabic in Maghrebi National Literature and Drama
In: Journal of Arabic LiteratureSearch for other papers by Samuel England in
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This article examines two crucial moments of literary adaptation in twentieth-century North Africa, when Classical Arabic prose takes on a central but rarely acknowledged position in emerging national arts. Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī and al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī destabilize the accepted critical account of Arabic literature’s modernization. Whereas literary historians have argued that writers eschewed restrictive Classical forms and Arabized Western genres, al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī directly apply Prophetic ḥadīth and humorous maqāmāt to the novel and drama. Their gesture toward medieval prose gives them an ethical master key, allowing them to engage pious Islamic discourse and shift abruptly to the disingenuous, pragmatic world of the maqāmāt. However, in the charged field of national literature, their maneuvers provide them substantially less comfort than they seek. Presenting their ambitious modern prose as Classical, they force a broad variety of genres into a single continuum of Arab-Islamic identity. Such a historiography requires that we parse the categories that al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī conjoin, a challenge largely unmet amidst the accolades they have received over the past five decades. Al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī deepen the anxiety of form that they assiduously attempt to relieve. The Arabic novel and drama, although portrayed in criticism as the iconoclast tools of modernity, drive these authors deep into torturous examinations of the literary past. Maghrebi literature exposes the enduring rifts between centuries-old narrative traditions and the urgent task of forming national canons during an era of political independence.
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3
Allen, “Rewriting Literary History: The Case of the Arabic Novel,” Journal of Arabic Literature 38:3 (2007), 250. For his most explicit remarks on the underappreciated role of the maqāmāt in the post-independence-era novel, see ibid., 259-60.
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5
Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London: Saqi, 1993), 108-109.
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8
Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama: A History of a Genre (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 358. Mohamed-Salah Omri, an expert on al-Masʿadī’s works, has offered a fascinating hypothesis for twentieth-century trends that minimize the maqāmāt, hinting that he may provide more support for it in subsequent studies: “the nation-state narrowed the possibilities for Arabic narrative such as maqamah by making the novel its privileged form. I cannot push the point further here. . . .” See Omri, “Local Narrative Form and Constructions of the Arabic Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 41 (2008), 252. I am grateful to an anonymous reader of this article for pointing out Allen’s revisitation of The Arabic Novel in the course of writing his historiographic and critical assessment of the larger field of study. For a study of this Tunisian narrative, see Muḥsin al-Mūsawī, Infiraṭ al-ʿaqd al-muqaddas: al-Riwāyah baʿda Maḥfūẓ (Cairo: gebo, 1999), 277-302.
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9
William Granara, “Picaresque Narratives and Cultural Dissimulation in Colonial North African Literature,” Arab Studies Journal 11:2/12:1 (2003-04), 41-42.
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10
Omri, Nationalism, Islam and World Literature: Sites of Confluence in the Writings of Maḥmūd Al-Masʿadī (London: Routledge, 2006), 37-40; idem, “Interview with Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī,” Comparative Critical Studies 4:3 (2007), 436-37.
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12
Omri, “Interview with Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī,” 438; idem, Nationalism, Islam and World Literature, 53-54.
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13
Al-Masʿadī, Ḥaddatha Abū Hurayrah qāl . . . (Tunis: al-Dār al-Tūnisiyyah, 1973), 12 (hereafter cited as Ḥaddatha).
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14
Ibid., 13.
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17
Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 72.
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20
Omri, “Interview with Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī,” 436. Ellipsis original.
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33
Muhammad Siddiq, Arab Culture and the Novel: Genre, Identity and Agency in Egyptian Fiction (London: Routledge, 2007), 214; Khālid al-Khamīsī, “Khālid al-Khamīsī: ladayya shakk kabīr fī al-muthaqqafīn al-miṣriyyīn,” Buṣṣ wa-ṭul, April 8, 2010, http://boswtol.com/politics/reports/10/April/08/9448/. Genetic arguments, critically reviewed by Siddiq and enthusiastically endorsed by al-Khamīsī, linking the novel to maqāmāt may in many respects be traced back to literary movements of the early- to mid-twentieth century, on which see Muḥammad Ḥasan, Athar al-maqāmah fī nashʾat al-qiṣṣah al-Miṣriyyah al-ḥadīthah (Cairo: al-Hayʾah al-Miṣriyyah al-ʿĀmmah li-l-Ḳitāb, 1974). Ḥasan’s focus on the short story allows him to suggest a vital maqāmāt-novel link without lengthily treating the novel itself.
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34
Beeston, 132; George Makdisi, “Scholasticism and Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 109:2 (1989), 179.
“Blame These Days, Don’t Blame Me!”: Rewriting Medieval Arabic in Maghrebi National Literature and Drama
In: Journal of Arabic LiteratureSearch for other papers by Samuel England in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article examines two crucial moments of literary adaptation in twentieth-century North Africa, when Classical Arabic prose takes on a central but rarely acknowledged position in emerging national arts. Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī and al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī destabilize the accepted critical account of Arabic literature’s modernization. Whereas literary historians have argued that writers eschewed restrictive Classical forms and Arabized Western genres, al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī directly apply Prophetic ḥadīth and humorous maqāmāt to the novel and drama. Their gesture toward medieval prose gives them an ethical master key, allowing them to engage pious Islamic discourse and shift abruptly to the disingenuous, pragmatic world of the maqāmāt. However, in the charged field of national literature, their maneuvers provide them substantially less comfort than they seek. Presenting their ambitious modern prose as Classical, they force a broad variety of genres into a single continuum of Arab-Islamic identity. Such a historiography requires that we parse the categories that al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī conjoin, a challenge largely unmet amidst the accolades they have received over the past five decades. Al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī deepen the anxiety of form that they assiduously attempt to relieve. The Arabic novel and drama, although portrayed in criticism as the iconoclast tools of modernity, drive these authors deep into torturous examinations of the literary past. Maghrebi literature exposes the enduring rifts between centuries-old narrative traditions and the urgent task of forming national canons during an era of political independence.
