Review Article the Modern Arabic Short Story

REVIEW ARTICLE

THE MODERN ARABIC SHORT STORY: PROBLEMATICS OF SCHOLARSHIP

MUHAMMADSHAHEEN, The Modern Arabic Short Story: Shahrazad Returns, London: Macmillan Press, 1989. vii, 158 pp.

Over the last thirty years the study of modern Arabic literature in general, and in the English language in particular, has advanced considerably. As a result the reviewer now demands from the author a disciplined treatment of his subject. The ambitious title of Muhammad Shaheen's book and the date of its publication, long after scholarship in the field had come of age, leads one to expect a great deal, raising hopes that at last the richest and most interesting genre in modern Arabic literature, the short story, has been studied. One expects the book to deal with the modern Arabic short story, probably in more than one country, exploring the lengthy process of its genesis, tracing the various stages of its development, and probing its rich harvest. Yet a first glance at the book thwarts such expectations. The book's title is the first cause for frustration, as it shouls have been entitled 'Certain Folkloric Themes in Modern Arabic Literature'. For students of Arabic literature the ambitious title reflects neither the scope of the investigation nor its domain. The development of the genre in Arabic spans, temporally, almost a century of continuous quest by successive generations of talented writers for exellence in form, and, spatially, the whole of the Arab world from Bahrain in the east to Morocco in the west, and from Syria in the north to the Sudan in the south. Yet the title is not a conscious attempt on the part of the author to mislead the reader, but the result of an innocent and genuine misconception of the nature of the Arabic short story. Apparently the author genuinely believes that "the short story proper is not more than three decades old" (p. 89), whereas in fact the modern Arabic short story is at least sixty years old. In modern Arabic literature, the emergence of the short story as a distinct literary genre started around the turn of this century and was linked to the change of literary sensibility resulting from the cumulative impact of over a century of constant interaction with the West and the developing sense of national identity in the struggle for independence. Its genesis owed a great deal to the expansion of modern education, the advent of the press, the spread of jour- nalism, the acceleration of urbanization, the process of modernisation, women's s emancipation, the growth of translation, the revival of the traditional narrative form of the maqamah, and the emergence of a new reading public with distinct needs and aspirations. By the 1920s the modern Arabic short story had attained a great deal of maturity, popularity and vigour with two main trends: the romantic which often bordered on the sentimental, and the realistic which was marked by great depth and vitality. The romantic contribution to the emergence of the genre developed some interesting work at the beginning of this century. Jibran Khalil Jibran (1883-1931) published 'Ard'i's al-Muruj ( 1 906) and al-Arwdh 156 al-Mutamarridah (1908), Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfalüti (1872-1924) started to publish his highly influential pieces in al-Mu'ayyad in 1907 which he collected a few years later in his famous book al-cabardt (1915). These works were both well received and influential, and led to the publication of similar works in many Arab countries. Yet the realistic trend was the one that brought the genre to maturity and con- tributed most to its popularity throughout the Arab world. The realistic school produced significant work by many writers in the first two decades of this century such as: Khalil Baydas (1875-1949), Palestine, Labibah Hashim (1880- 1947), Lebanon, cabd al-Masih Haddad (1881-1950) and Mikha'il Nucaymah (1889-1978) who represent the mahjar dimension of Levantine literature; clsa (189?-1922) and Shihatah clbaid (189?-1961), who demonstrate the bond between the Levantine cultural movement and its Egyptian counterpart; Muhammad Taymur (1892-1921) from Egypt, Mahmud Ahmad al-Sayyid (1901-37) from Iraq; and finally the key contributors to the maturation of the Arabic short story: Mahmud Taymir (1894-1973), Mahmud Tahir Lashin (1894-1954) and the members of jama-lat al-Madrasah al-lJadïthah, (the New School of Writers) in Egypt. The publication of Lashin's short story Hadath al- Qaryah (The Talk of the Village) in 1929 is widely accepted by scholars and critics as the date for the emergence of the mature and coherently artistic short story in Arabic literature. Lashin's story can meet the toughest criteria of the modern short story and its merits are no less than those of works by Maupas- sant, Chekhov or Katherine Mansfield. Since then, and throughout the last sixty years, the work of many Arab writers has widened the scope of the genre, sharpened its textual strategies, developed its ability to deal with various facets of reality, and extended its con- cept of its own identity. To confine the short story to the last three decades would be to overlook the bulk of the contribution of many major short story writers throughout the Arab world from Yahya Haqqi, Mahmud al-Badawi, Shukri cayydd, Yusud Idris, Abü-l-MaCati Abu-1-Naja and'Abd al-Rahman al- Sharqawi in Egypt; Najati Sidqi, Ishaq Musa al-Husaini and Samirah 'Azzdm, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Imil Habibi and Ghassan Nakafani in Palestine; Dhu-1- Nun Ayyub, Ghd'ib Ticmah Firman, 'Abd al-Malik Nuri and Idmun Sabri in Iraq; 'Abd al-Salam al-cujayll, Sa'id Huraniyyah, Sidqi Ismacil and Mutd' Safadi in Syria; Tawfiq Yusuf 'Awwdd, Sa'id Taqiyy al-Din, Suhayl Idris, Layla Ba'albaki, Yusuf Habashi al-cashqar and Halim Barakat in Lebanon; and al-Tayyib Salih in the Sudan to mention but a few, all of whom produced interesting short stories that at least equal if not outshine the ones included in the present book. If one overlooks this limitation and deals with the book as a study of the modern Arabic short story as if it had only emerged in the last three decades as the author suggests, one encounters another set of problems. The last three decades have been particularly important in the development of the modern Arabic short story, for they were witness to the development of modern sensibility and the rising tide of experimentation with new techniques and new textual strategies in the genre as practised since the 1920s in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. The modernist phase in the development of the Arabic short story has produced some of the most interesting works of this genre. Writers like Yusuf al-Shdrfinf, Idwar al-Kharrat, in Egypt; Fu'dd al- Takarli, in Iraq; and Zakariyya Tamir in Syria have made their literary reputa-