Town and Country in Modern Arabic Literature

TOWN AND COUNTRY IN MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE by Robin Ostle Dr. Robin Ostle, rapporteur for civilization. Not the least of these the recent UFSI conference on achievements was that of literature, "Town and Country in Modern for in the Islamic period Arabic liter- Arabic Literature," has written a ature has always been bourgeois in the strictly literal sense of the word. UFSI Report summarizing the It depended very much on city discussion. A videotape of a par- cultures for its patronage and appre- ticipants' discussion of the main ciation, finding there those milieux conference themes is also avail- in which it could perform certain able. time-honored functions. Naturally the tensions which sur- round the relations between cities and their hinterlands are in no sense confined to the Near and Middle Ibn Khaldun is the most notable East, either now or at any other time authority to have indicated in a com- in history. But in this area they have plete and convincing manner that always appeared particularly acute. much of the history of the Near and If one drives out of Cairo in the Middle East revolves around the re- direction of the Pyramids one can lationships between urban centers experience a sense of shock at the and their hinterlands.1 lslam itself suddenness of the transition from was born in an urban setting and town to hinterland, and this is only sought subsequently to assert its one example of many. Throughout control over the surrounding desert the region, desert or semidesert fre- environment. The early centuries of quently reach into the very perim- Islamic civilization saw, on the one eters of the middle eastern town. As hand, the rejuvenation of old cities brusque and as rapid as the topo- such as Jerusalem, Damascus, or graphical changes are the stark Alexandria; but much more dra- contrasts in the life styles of the matically they also witnessed the people as one moves out of the rise of flourishing new centers of urban center into the hinterland. It urban civilization: Kufa, Basra, all looks like a very precarious re- Oayrawan, and those two most lationship consisting more of oppo- brilliant examples of medieval Arab sitions and polarities than dovetailed city culture, Baghdad and Cairo. interdependence. One can draw a These were the oases which sought, map of the Islamic world in 1000 often unsuccessfully, to impose A.D. in the form of an organi- administration and taxation upon gramme, that means of expression their hinterlands. These were the so beloved of French bureaucracies. centers of scholarship and religious The dominant features of this chart learning where "official" lslam often would be concatenations of towns took forms very different from the and cities linked by lengthy, tenuous practice and organization of its non- trade routes extending as far west urban varieties. They were the focal as Fez and Marrakesh and as far points of commercial activity, and east as Bukhara, Samargand, and the stages on which the wealthy beyond. It looks like a structure sections of society could display the which is fragile and brittle, and this remarkable achievements of their was often the case. The system could work only if the urban centers European roads will have cut Mubarak notes how the narrow were strong enough to control the through at right angles the dusty streets of old Cairo represent a stage hinterlands in order to protect the and mute old town which now in urban development associated trade routes. Only then could the peacefully collapses on the poor with insecurity and crime: the flow of commercial commodities fella hs." narrow streets, which could be and taxes be maintained, without These external transformations of guarded by gates closed at night, which the power of the urban were the best protection against the centers would collapse. the urban scene are accompanied by equally extraordinary trends in thieves who prowled the dark unlit The traditional dichotomy of Town internal decor and furnishing. De areas. and Country has a long history of Nerval gives scathing descriptions With progress, the old city is gradu- representation in the literary tra- of the interiors of Muhammad Ali's ally transformed into wide avenues, ditions of ~uro~e,~but in the Near palaces: squares, gardens and public parks, and Middle East in the premodern furnished in the style of provincial all bathed in the new security of period this type of dichotomy modern street lighting. Thus the appears as Town and Desert. Thus it social circles, with mahogany couches and armchairs, billiard very shape of the city is the symbol is the desert which is the setting for of a society progressing from dark- those values of chivalry by which tables.. and portraits in oils of his sons dressed in artillery officers' ness and insecurity, into a new era notables and potentates dignify of modernity represented by open their persons and their positions, it is uniform. The whole ideal of the spaces and light. 6 the desert which provides the wide country bourgeois. 4 open spaces for the nostalgic imagi- These are signs of a process which Just as the topography and struc- nations of the cloistered city was to gather impetus as the nine- ture of certain areas of Egyptian dwellers, and this is the background teenth century progressed. Cities society were being changed so against which the poet's amorous such as Algiers, Tunis, Alexandria, radically, so literature experienced fantasies are played out in their and Cairo became more and more its own versions of external trans- most widely appreciated forms. It is islands unto themselves in relation formation: the old maqama form true that poets such as Bashshar, to their hinterlands. To a certain gave way to the modern burgher Abu Nuwas, or Ibn al-Rumi sang to extent this had always been the epic, the novel, and the late nine- powerful effect of the pleasures of case, but now the degree of rupture teenth century saw the rise of those urban living, and they described the and dislocation became exagger- other literary categories new to the delights of civilized, manmade forms ated, verging on the ludicrous. area, the drama and the short story. of nature, but they and those who These external and internal trans- These external transformations go wrote like them did not displace the formations of urban space went alongside vitally significant thematic predominant position of the arche- very much together with the transitions. The old dichotomy in typal desert motifs in Arabic poetry modernization of the army, the Arabic literature between Town and which persisted well into the twen- wholesale translation of technical Desert gradually changes until it tieth century.3 manuals, the reorganization of the resembles more the Town-Country bureaucracies, and perhaps most antithesis with which we are familiar These remarks are designed to rein- in Western literature. The desert force the point that the relationships crucial of all, the radical reorienta- tion of educational systems. motifs do not disappear, but they between city and hinterland in the cede pride of place to something Near and Middle East have long In the case of Egypt, while these which has much more in common been fraught with tensions and am- processes were certainly reinforced with the countryside in the Euro- biguities: the tensions are an inevi- by the colonial experience, they pean sense. table result of each milieu seeking to were initiated by the ruling circles of In Egyptian literature the publication dominate the other, and the Muhammad Ali and his successors, of Haykal's novel Zaynab in 1913 ambiguities result from one milieu long before the British Occupation. (usually the city) investing the other In the Ottoman context as exempli- was a crucial landmark. With this (the desert) with ideological values, fied by the city of Istanbul, the types book, the fellah, after almost con- despite the fact that the two are of transformation which began to sistent neglect throughout the mutually incompatible, culturally affect the external shape of Cairo Arabic literary tradition,' assumes and economically. In the nineteenth and to mold its interiors in the nine- positively heroic dimensions and and twentieth centuries, both before teenth century, in the case of becomes the embodiment of virtues. and during the colonial period Istanbul extend well back into the It is no longer the desert but the rif proper, additional dimensions are eighteenth century. 5 which is to become one of the domi- added to the ambiguities and con- nant motifs in Arabic literature. tradictions. M. Gilsenan quotes the It is reasonable to suggest that the There is a ready explanation for this sense of deception felt by Gerard de ruling classes in Egypt in the nine- radical shift of emphasis: political Nerval faced by the transformations teenth century saw in the very power had passed away from the being imposed on the old city of shapes and symbols adopted by the court circles and the Turko-Egyptian Cairo. Writing to Theophile Gautier modern European city yet another aristocracy, into the hands of the in 1843, de Nerval comments: aspect of that civilization which had to be transplanted into European The spirit and needs of the modern soil, if their country was to emulate "Translations of technical terms and world have triumphed over the city the achievements of Europe. So the titles in the order they appear can be like death. In ten years time the town planner and engineer Ali found on p. 8. RO- 1 -'82/3 liberal bourgeoisie, the new profes- for the subsequent development of sight of the peasants bent over their sional groups of doctors, lawyers, literature in Egypt and other Arab labors with hoe and sickle, sweating engineers, and administrators, many countries in and around the Fertile in the heat of the day, the women of whom were involved in the en- Crescent: these were the pastoral or working alongside them.

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