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New distance. (9mm from spine) page size 234 x 156mm but follows EUP PPC jacket Hires CMYK pdf from Indesign CS6 17mm 3mm Dina Heshmat Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE. NEW top Series editor: Rasheed El-Enany Dina Heshmat This series, dedicated to the study of modern Arabic literature, is unique and unprecedented. It includes contemporary genre studies, single-author studies, studies of particular movements, trends, groupings, themes and periods in Modern Arabic Literature, as well as country/region-based studies. Egypt Identifies an emerging genre within the contemporary Egyptian °˚˙˘ˇˆ˛¢¢¢L˚˚ novel that reflects a new consciousness During colonial times the Egyptian novel invoked the concept of a sovereign nation-state 1919 and basked in its perceived unity. After independence the novel began to profess disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, but did not The Revolution in Literature and Film disrupt the nation’s imagined homogeneity. The twenty-first-century Egyptian novel, by contrast, shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally diverse. This new consciousness responds to discourses of difference and practices of differentiation within the contexts of race, religion, class, gender, sexuality and language. It also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square. Through a Egypt 1919 robust analysis of several ‘new-consciousness’ novels by award-winning authors, Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel highlights their unconventional, yet coherent, undertakings to foreground the marginal experiences of the Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, female and sexual-minority populations in Egypt. 234mm Key Features c c c c • Includes case studies of the novels of eight authors: Idris Ali, Baha Tahir, Ala al-Aswani, Yusuf Zaydan, Muctazz Futayha, Ashraf al-Khumaysi and Miral al-Tahawi • Shows how these novels have taken on a mediatory role in formalising and articulating their historical moment • Critically examines the recent developments within the Egyptian literary and socio- cultural arenas Mary Youssef is Assistant Professor of Arabic in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton. ISBN 978-1-4744-5835-1 edinburghuniversitypress.com Cover design: www.richardbudddesign.co.uk Cover images: a Muslim man holds the hand of a Coptic Christian © iStockphoto.com, woman crouching in Siwan house © Deddeda / Design Pics, two Egyptian Nubian men © Shutterstock.com and Muslim and Christian women holding hands. Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature Literature Arabic Modern in Studies Edinburgh Series editor: Rasheed El-Enany 3mm 17mm 2mm 2mm 17mm 3mm 156 mm spine 15 mm 156mm 3mm 17mm FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE. Egypt 1919 FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE. Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature Series Editor: Rasheed El-Enany Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel Samira Aghacy Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Literature Valerie Anishchenkova The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel Ziad Elmarsafy Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892–2008 Hoda Elsadda The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation Zeina G. Halabi Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film Dina Heshmat Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora Syrine Hout Prophetic Translation: the Making of Modern Egyptian Literature Maya I. Kesrouany Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary Omar Khalifah Conspiracy in Modern Egyptian Literature Benjamin Koerber War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction Ikram Masmoudi Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles Tahia Abdel Nasser The Libyan Novel: Humans, Animals and the Poetics of Vulnerability Charis Olszok The ArabNahdah : The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement Abdulrazzak Patel Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005–2016 Teresa Pepe Religion in the Egyptian Novel Christina Phillips Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction Yasmine Ramadan Occidentalism: Literary Representations of the Maghrebi Experience of the East-West Encounter Zahia Smail Salhi Sonallah Ibrahim: Rebel with a Pen Paul Starkey Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel Mary Youssef www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/smal FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE. Egypt 1919 The Revolution in Literature and Film Dina Heshmat FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE. Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Dina Heshmat, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5835 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5838 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5837 5 (epub) The right of Dina Heshmat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE. Contents Series Editor’s Foreword vi Acknowledgements viii Note on Transliteration and Translation xi Introduction 1 1 The Poetics of Disillusion 38 2 The Fear of the Rabble 59 3 1919 and the Trope of the Modern Nation 79 4 The Revolution on the Screen 106 5 The Politics of Rehabilitation 133 6 Rewriting History in the 1990s 155 7 Rewriting History in the Wake of 2011 182 Conclusion 204 Bibliography 210 Index 226 FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE. 4 The Revolution on the Screen Film, by its very nature, speaks to crowds; it speaks to them about crowds and about their destiny. (Sartre 1988: 216) n 26 February 1964, one week before the release of Hassan al-Imam’s O Bayn al-Qasrayn, the weekly Akhir Sa‘a launched its marketing cam- paign by casting the film as ‘portraying an important moment in the nation- alist struggle for freedom and unity’. Introduced by a short paragraph about ‘the joy that lives in the hearts of more than 80 million Arabs after the success of the kings’ and presidents’ summit [the First Arab League Summit held in Cairo between 13 and 16 January 1964]’, the article puts the film in the frame of contemporary anti-imperialist politics: ‘Art reminds us that unity of purpose and ranks is the most powerful weapon in the struggle’.1 It casts the film as the General Company for Arab Cinema’s first project; the company, so goes the narrative, ‘selected Bayn al-Qasrayn to start its journey in develop- ing Arab Cinema, to be its messenger to the world in order to present ‘our principles’ and ‘our victories’. The importance that the state was giving to the film was such that when it was released, on 2 March 1964, ‘Abd al-Qadir Hatim, minister of culture and national guidance, attended the first screening in cinema Rivoli, which was fully renovated for the occasion.2 In the first week, Bayn al-Qasrayn played in Alexandria, Mansoura, Port-Said and Tanta,3 then in Ismailiyah, Damietta and Minya. It became an immediate box-office success; tickets were routinely sold out, and it played at Cinema Rivoli for five weeks.4 No wonder: the filmmaker, Hassan al-Imam (1919–88), was ‘as commercial a director as there has ever been in the Egyptian cinema’ (Armbrust 1995: 85).5 Although contemporary critics were predominantly negative, turning it down as ‘a 106 FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE. the revolution on the screen | 107 weak police story’ and lamenting the director’s sensationalist style,6 Bayn al-Qasrayn soon became a cult movie, repeatedly screened on television. The transition to the little screen secured a broader audience and guaranteed the transmission of the visual narrative, a landmark in ‘public memory’ (Bodnar qtd in Gordon 2002: 46) perpetuated from one generation to another. It was so successful that it gave a second life to the iconic characters of the novel in the popular imaginary,7 with a particularly successful casting of Amal Zayid as Amina, the ‘iconic traditional woman’ (Elsadda 2012: 79) and Yahya Shahin as Ahmad ‘Abd al-Gawwad, ‘the icon of traditional manhood’ (Elsadda 2012: 84). Among the elements for which critics reproached al-Imam was the issue of fidelity8 – or rather infidelity – underlining the fact that the director had been unfaithful to the spirit of the novel, transforming it into a ‘belly dancers’ film’, a reference to the frequent dancing interludes, insistent close-ups on the dancers’ bodies and erotic dialogues between ‘Abd al-Gawwad, Yasin and their mistresses.9 Rather than fidelity, I am concerned in this chapter with the way the film recontextualises the literary narrative in a very different political context. Mahfouz finished writing Bayn al-Qasrayn before the eruption of the Free Officers onto the political scene in 1952, when Egypt was a monarchy and still partially occupied by British troops. Al-Imam began working on the film in 1963, in a context in which, more than ten years after the coup that put an end to the monarchy, the Nasserist regime was fully engaged in building an independent, modern state. The regime had successfully ended the British rule after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the subsequent war in 1956. It had launched a broad policy of nationalisation and agricultural reform and tightened its control on all state institutions.