Literature & Literary Criticism

Bab el-Oued, by Merzak Allouache, translated by Angela M. Brewer. 133 pages. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998. $ 13.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-89410-860-3

This novel is not simply the story of the Bab el-Oued district, but also the story of contemporary postcolonial Algeria. It provides a penetrating glimpse into its socio-political situation, showing Algeria’s descent into mayhem and violence. The plot starts with one of the central characters, Boualem, who, after a long night at work, fumes at the deafening Friday sermon broadcast on loudspeakers throughout the Bab al-Oued district that prevents him from falling asleep. Furious, he takes down the loudspeaker, thereby challenging the Muslim brothers. Said, the head of the militant group, is to find the culprit. When eventually the investigation results point to Boualem, who has been dating Said’s sister Amina, his anger boils over. He confronts his childhood friend in a fury, and even considers killing him.

Said, with his harsh and brutal character, represents the dark force in the novel. He bullies even his own mother and sister. He has no sincere respect for the Imam, the spiritual leader of the district, although he himself pretends to be religious. In fact, his deep frustration with the regime which offered him no significant education, no employment, and no dignity leads him to violence. Said joins demonstrators in destroying cars, invading banks and shops, and affronting policemen, an act which leads him to prison and transforms him into a hero. Once he leaves prison, he attracts a number of people whose lives are characterized by disappointment and failure. These include characters like Messaoud, whose French passport has been confiscated and who has been kicked out of France after he was caught in a drug deal. Another similar case is Rashid, whose failure in Algeria pushes him to go to Afghanistan to participate in the holy war against the Russians, but who returns home only with fabricated stories about his unparalleled bravery.

Said, however, is not more blameworthy then the truly pious Imam who continues to preach tolerance, cleanliness, and peace, yet through his lack of understanding of the situation never gives practical solutions to any of the neighborhood's problems, and even increases the tension with his enflamed speeches. Nor is he more culpable than Hassan the baker, who, despite his deep disappointment with the political situation in the country, never acts or makes the leaders of the country politically responsible. Even the kind and affectionate Boualem deserts the beloved and innocent Amina, his loving sister, and his young brother and goes to Europe.

The profound gap between people’s ideals and their reality drives them to inhabit a world of fantasy. Women who suffer poverty and oppression and are overburdened with housework find satisfaction in cheap love stories and soap operas available through the growing satellite technology. Rashid sublimates his love to Amina whom he fantasizes about, but cannot bring himself to approach. Those who are not satisfied with fantasies pursue illicit pleasure. The best example of this is Aicha, who is bold enough to flirt with her younger male neighbor, enjoys sex with her friend Lynda, and smokes cigarettes while at the same time adopting increasingly conservative religious clothing by wearing a darker hijab.

Bab el-Oued tells the story of the impact of poverty, unemployment, overpopulation, corruption, value crisis, and disillusionment on the individual. Algeria's national and cultural problems are translated in this novel into the daily feelings and concerns of its complex characters. By displaying and evoking intense emotional response, Bab el-Oued depicts these socio-political tensions, a balance that the translator successfully maintains in her English interpretation from the original French version.

Sarra Tlili
University of Pennsylvania

How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Step-by-Step Guide to Teach Yourself, by Mark Collier and Bill Manley, illustrated by Richard Parkinson. 179 pages, 200 b/w illustrations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. $18.95 (Paper on board) ISBN 0-520-21597-4

The pictorial nature of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs often intrigues visitors to a museum. Their great age fascinates, while the very concreteness and clarity of the little pictures suggest that they should be easy to interpret, if one knows the system. Unfortunately, these pictures are not entirely symbolic, but reproduce the sounds of a language, complete with tedious sequences of verbal inflections, several different types of pronouns, and peculiarities such as adjectives formed from prepositions. The trick for a ‘teach yourself’ book is thus to present enough of the grammar to read simple inscriptions without an overwhelming quantity of detail.

In most books of this sort, a simple outline of the grammar is presented first, along with varying amounts of history and context, and then various real or made-up texts that the student should be able to read, with some assistance with vocabulary and grammar. How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs takes a slightly different approach. There is no discussion of the history of decipherment, the historical development of the Egyptian language, or the relation­ship of Egyptian to other Afro-Asiatic languages; it instead dives right into real Egyptian texts. And it introduces far more of the grammar than other such books, including participles and relative forms.

The main aim of the book is to teach the student to read mortuary stelas of the Middle Kingdom—slabs of stone with memorial inscriptions dating to about 2000 to 1700 BCE—and the captions to scenes shown in Middle Kingdom tombs. The stelas include mortuary formulas, numerical dates (relative to the accession of a king), and brief biographical narratives, and hence introduce a range of different types of writing, including those most often encountered in a museum. Most of the texts used are from the British Museum or from the Middle Kingdom tombs at Meir, in Middle Egypt. There is no treatment of the inscriptions on Egyptian temples (with the exception of the Abydos king list), which makes the book considerably more valuable for museum visitors than for tourists.

The grammar is presented as the texts require it. The presentation is simple and clear, using English rather than Latin or Arabic terminology. The nominal sdm.f and sdm.n.f. of the ‘standard theory’ are avoided; but given the material, this omission does not greatly affect the understanding of the texts. There are reference tables at the end of the book including an extensive sign list (similarly organized but very differently numbered than the standard list), tables of forms, and an Egyptian-English vocabulary, as well as answers to the exercises, suggested readings, and an index.

The texts are presented either in clear black-and-white photographs or in elegant and facsimile line drawings. (However, the inexperienced reader may find the detailed outlining of the breaks a bit confusing—it might have been better just to leave out the missing parts.) A gray shading is used to indicate the parts of a stela that are too difficult to be read, which allows the authors to use relatively advanced texts, and at the same time to give beginners a sense of their limitations. Examples are often repeated to illustrate points in later sections. (I was troubled, however, by one case in which a scene has been edited by the authors in its first occurrence to make it simpler. Despite the fact that an accurate copy is given later, editing a facsimile seems to me problematic.)

Overall, How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs gives more information than most grammars for amateurs, but considerably less than a scholarly grammar. In addition to self-instruction, it might be useful in university course, to give students a quick competence in reading the most common monumental inscriptions before they face the complexities of stories and narratives. It is certainly well priced for either audience.

Ann Macy Roth
Howard University

Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing, by Fred M. Donner. (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 14) 360 pages, appendices, bibliography, index. Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1998. $29.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-87850-127-4

Those who have followed the debate about the authenticity of primal Islamic texts and the appearance of an Islamic historical consciousness are inured to blunt assertion, tortured argument, selective citation of evidence, and tendentious exposition. For them, Donner’s contribution to the debate will come as a breath of fresh air. Whether or not readers agree with his positions, they will welcome the clarity with which they are presented.

Donner describes the evolution of thinking about early Islamic sources, showing how the original descriptive approach accepting early narratives at face value gave way to a ‘source-critical approach’ gleaning kernels of historical fact from a mass of contradictory and misleading material. This position, in turn, evolved the ‘skeptical approach,’ flourishing since the mid-1970s in the writings of Wansbrough, Crone, Cook, and others. Like the tradition‑critics, the skeptics accept that the traditions about Islamic origins are products of long and partly oral evolution, but unlike the tradition‑critics they deny that there is any recoverable kernel of historical fact that might tell us what actually happened. Rather, whatever historical fact the traditions may once have contained has either been redacted out of existence, or is so buried in later accretions as to be impossible to isolate. In the words of the most articulate of the skeptical writers, Patricia Crone, “[w]hether one approaches Islamic historiography from the angle of the religious or the tribal tradition, its overall character thus remains the same: the bulk of it is debris of an obliterated past” (p. 20).[74] Donner’s objective is to critique this skeptical approach and offer an alternative reading of early sources explaining their peculiarities and indicating how historians can work with them to construct a narrative of early Islamic history. His argument has two parts. Part I investigates problems raised by the Qur’an and hadith. Part II identifies and explains themes in early narratives, discusses their formal and structural characteristics, and proposes a four-stage chronology of historiographical evolution beginning with a ‘Pre-Historicist Phase’ and ending with ‘The Late Literate Phase’ (“Classical Islamic Historiography”).

Though not immune to the skeptic critique, I want to know something about Islam’s first century beyond simply rejecting the sources and guessing what might have transpired. Many of Donner’s arguments appeal to me not only as lucid and reasonable, but also as probable, maybe even right. My primary reservations derive from his tendency to reify the early Islamic community and attribute to it one particular point of view while common sense suggests that there must have been considerable differences in knowledge and outlook. Though this book will not be the last word in the debate, it deserves to become the first that teachers introduce to students. Compared with most earlier works in the field, its clarity and good sense are so apparent, and the leaps of faith or imagination it demands of the reader so modest, that even readers of skeptic persuasion should find it useful in presenting the issues.

Richard W. Bulliet
Columbia University

The Myth of Creation: A Puppet Show in Three Acts, by Sadiq Hidayat. Translated from Persian by M. R. Ghanoonparvar. 56 pages, notes. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda publishers, 1998. $19.99 (Cloth) ISBN 1-56859-066-0

Without any doubt, The Blind Owl (Buf-i Kur) is the apogee of Sadiq Hidayat’s work. To reach this summit, however, he had to climb many smaller peaks and try many different paths. The Myth of Creation: A Puppet Show in Three Acts (Afsanah-i afarinish: khaymah shab bazi dar sih pardah) is one of these paths. As the translator, M. R. Ghanoonparvar, suggests (for different reasons, including their sarcastic and anti-religion/anti-Islamic tone and content), this and other works of Hidayat such as The Islamic Mission to the Western Lands (Karvan-i Islam: Al-Bi'sa al-Islamiyah ila al-bilad al-Ifranjiyah) have not received enough attention. This in part explains why The Myth of Creation, written in 1930 and published in 1946, had to wait more than fifty years to be translated into English. Such treatment has not only led to the ignoring of some aspects of Hidayat’s literary legacy but has also undermined studies, which focused on the examination of Hidayat’s preparatory process in writing The Blind Owl.

 In The Myth of Creation, Hidayat, like many other writers, gives in to the temptation of placing himself beyond the Ultimate Limit in order to express his ideological/existentialist preoccupations from that vantage point. In a setting reminiscent of a stereotypical description of a sultan's court, he places his characters—God, Archangels (including Gabriel and Satan), and a few secondary figures and animals—and then mocks and satirizes the whole process of Creation, especially that of Adam and Eve. Many of these issues which are brought to the surface through a sarcastic, biting, at times angry tone, attain their finalized form in The Blind Owl.

 More important than the content value of these issues is the literariness of their expressions, which is represented mainly through different linguistic layers and modes of speech. From a stylistic point of view, The Myth of Creation represents a stage in Hidayat’s literary production when he probed various linguistic textures and experimented with narrative devices. This short play is full of tensions between these different modes and textures—from ironic and sarcastic, to analytical and philosophical—so much so that at times one wonders whether the desire to juxtapose these textures is responsible for the seemingly incompatible elements in the play, or whether it is the nature of the author’s strategies which has compelled him to create such an ensemble. Whatever the case, it is clear that it takes a very experienced translator to convey these layers and textures with their multiple nuances from Persian into English. Drawing on his knowledge of the two languages and his background in both Persian and English literatures as well as on his experience in translating other works of Persian literature into English—including Simin Danishvar’s Savushun—Ghanoonparvar has succeeded. One of the examples which demonstrates the translator’s effort to remain as close as possible to the original is the rendition of the names of the play’s Dramatis Personae. Describing the heavenly court, Hidayat names his characters in a rather peculiar manner: God is called Khaleqov, the angel of death is Mulla Ezra'il, Gabriel is Jebra'il pasha,¼and Satan is Monsieur Shaytan. As Ghanoonparvar has noted, each one of these affixes or titles denotes certain qualities. ‘Ov’ is of course a Russian suffix, Mulla is an Islamic title, Pasha is a Turkish honorific, and so forth. Reading the text, one constantly pauses to inquire the manifold significances of these affixes and titles. Realizing the shortcomings of a reductionist translation, the translator stays as close to the original as possible. In the case of the characters’ names he uses and at times creates words such as Creatov for Khaleqov, Mulla Azrael for Mulla Ezra'il, Gabriel-pasha for Jebra'il-pasha, Seraph-beyg for Esrafil-beyg, Papa Adam for Baba Adam, Mama Eve for Mama Havva, and so forth. This approach has been maintained quite consistently throughout the translation, and, indeed, the voice of Sadiq Hidayat shines through the English text.

Mehdi Khorrami
New York University

The Seventh Door and Other Stories, by Intizar Husain. Edited and with an introduction by Muhammad Umar Memon. 235 pages, introduction, glossary, notes on the translators. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998. $45.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-89410-821-2

The fifteen stories in this fine collection have appeared before.[75] Yet these new, substantially revised versions fulfill an expectation I expressed in 1996, namely that I awaited “with eagerness and anticipation further collections by Memon (and company)”[76]

The poetics of Intizar Husain’s (b. 1925) writing and the background in which his writing developed are analyzed in engaging and informed detail by Memon in a fifty-four‑page introduction, in particular the rise of the Progressive Writers' Circle. Husain’s disaffection with the Progressives led to a break with them, especially with regard to their attitude vis à vis Partition. Memon shows how Husain, finding their literary treatment lacking in depth and art, adopted instead “an unrestrained belief in the radical autonomy of literature, in a poetics of fiction disengaged from extrinsic criteria and pointed, inexorably, to what is inherent in the work itself” (p. 5).

One of Memon’s aims in the introduction is to counter the unfair criticism of Husain’s introspection by G. Narang, V. Akhtar, S. Mir, and others. He does so by frequently quoting Husain himself in long, revealing passages. He also provides a lengthy rejoinder (eighteen pages) to M. Salimur Rahman’s and A. Sajjad’s critiques of Husain’s 1979 novel, Basti [Town].

Although he approves of Javaid Qazi’s tripartite division of Husain’s work (the 1950s' emphasis on social, cultural and religious symbols; the 1960s on animal imagery and metaphor; the 1970s on concepts and identity), Memon also provides his own taxonomy: 1) initially successful but then failed reclamation of memory, leading to 2) moral perversion and fall, resulting in 3) extinction of all creative principles in life (p. 18). Given this periodized analysis, it would have been beneficial indeed had the stories, ranging from 1952 to 1981 (not 1947 to 1971 [p. 235]), been anthologized in chronological order. On the other hand, Memon does provide bibliographic information on the Urdu originals.

It is of course impossible to do justice to Husain, author of over 125 short stories, in a collection that presents (only) 15 of them. But as with all of Memon’s undertakings, the selection is excellent and the translations of a uniformly high standard. Memon himself translates five stories and co-translates two others. Given my own space constraints, I might single out “A Stranded Railroad Car” (1973). This story consists of two alternating narratives: one character’s recollection of a train journey, especially the “disquietingly lovely face” and “warm fleshy body” (p. 82) of a fellow traveler, and another character’s story of a mysteriously stranded railroad car. These are adroitly juxtaposed and together barely conceal the real story, that of a Pakistan distracted and disoriented.

Memon’s imprint on Urdu and Pakistani letters–he is a gifted writer in his own right, is editor of the Annual of Urdu Studies, and had a hand in introducing Muneeza Shamsie to Pakistani writing in North America[77]–is easily rivalled by the quality and quantity of his English language translations and anthologies. Lynne Rienner Publishers is to be congratulated for associating itself with Memon’s project of bringing Urdu literature to a wide, and grateful, public.

Shawkat M. Toorawa
Cornell University

Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Roger Allen. 416 pages. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. $20.50 (Paper) ISBN 0-253-20973-0.

The first of its kind, Modern Arabic Drama comprises twelve contemporary Arab plays translated into English. The selection aspires to be as representative of the Arab World as possible. As expected, Arab countries fairly initiated into the genre of drama receive a corresponding share: Egypt has four plays, Syria three, and the five remaining plays come from five different Arab countries: Iraq, Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Palestine. Arab playwrights are similarly represented: Salah ‘Abd Al-Sabur, Alfred Farag, ‘Ali Salim, and Mahmud Diyab from Egypt; Walid Ikhlasi, Mamduh ‘Udwan, and the late Sa’dallah Wannus from Syria; ‘Isam Mahfuz from Lebanon; Yusuf Al-‘Ani from Iraq; ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz Al-Surayyi’ from Kuwait; and ‘Izz Al-Din Al-Madani from Tunisia. Among these selections the Palestinian play has no author, being attributed to the now disbanded company “The Balalin Company of Jerusalem.”

The selection is further complemented by a panoramic introduction in which Mohammed M. Badawi brings together a balanced historical survey of the genre in the Arab world, and a fair and informative synopsis of each particular play. In his introduction, Badawi addresses thematic issues as well as the dramatic techniques employed in each play. Each play is introduced by a brief overview and a historical statement describing its performance and production. The important notes on authors, translators, and editors–at the end of the anthology–provide valuable biographical data and relevant information. Translators in particular seem to have been carefully chosen; well-versed in both Arabic and English, they include famous literary scholars, poets, and playwrights. Each text, moreover, has undergone the process of translation twice: the first by a translator who knows the two languages, and then a native speaker of English whose function is to make it idiomatic.

This commendable effort to bring the translation into an impossible state of perfection suffers a few real shortcomings: the absence of the original Arabic text; the absence of other, certainly more important, Arab plays and playwrights (the choice follows no visible criteria of selection), and the sparseness of annotations. The translations, though perfect in their English idiom, add another limitation: often the original tone and aura (both important to marking the locale of each play) seem to be lost owing to the very effort of serving better the English tongue. If one trusts the wisdom of the editors’ choices, the quality of most of the plays in this anthology only confirm the common knowledge that drama is a ‘new genre’ in Arabic Literature.

Though some of these limitations are serious, they by no means diminish the value of the volume to English-speaking readers interested in modern Arabic drama and literature. The volume is indeed a timely addition to the world library in this age of globalization.

Miajan H. Al-Ruwaili
King Saud University, Riyadh

Welcoming Fighania Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal, by Paul E. Losensky (Biblioteca Iranica Literature Series No. 5) 393 pages, bibliography, appendix, index. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1998. (Cloth) ISBN 1-56859-070-9

It would seem a thankless task—the full-length analysis of a Persian poet from outside the small pantheon of famous names. We can all think of single‑author studies unread in dusty archives, waiting for the next specialist to happen by. Welcoming Fighani manages to make the study of the relatively obscure Baba Fighani (d. 925/1519) a book which all students of the ghazal in Persian or Turkish will want to read, not to mention our colleagues in European literature. Fighani becomes an occasion to assess a period when aesthetic tastes undergo change, and to demonstrate how literary change occurs.

          If it were only for his observant commentaries on individual poems, this would be an extraordinary, ground‑breaking book. But, like a poet pursuing luzum ma la yalzam, Losensky focuses on two and three poems at a time, sometimes more, tracing the negative shapes between them and answering one of the questions that New Criticism found so vexing—how to cross beyond the walls of the individual text and keep sensitivity to form intact. The ‘welcoming’ of the title is a translation of istaqbal, not only ‘welcoming’ in the ceremonial or social sense, but also the term for writing a poem in the same rhyme and meter as a predecessor’s poem, the practice also called javab-gu'i or nazira-gu'i. Fighani’s responses to Amir Khosrow or Jami, or responses to Fighani by `Urfî, Sa'ib or Naziri, make audible relationships between poetic idiolect of individual poets, dialogues on taste and their values. The complexity of those dialogues, their glimpse into the mechanisms of the ghazal, takes us way beyond the state-of-the-art theory for English literature, which Losensky knows from the vista of endless competition popularized in Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence.

A painstaking and exacting study of the biographies of Fighani with their conflicting accounts (was there a journey to Herat where he was rejected by poets of the old school? was there a debate with a learned man about the merits of wine?) sidesteps the usual complaints about their inaccuracy, stepping back a pace to show what those inventive accounts tell us, accurately, about the shifting tastes of each historian: “with its conflicting versions of Fighani, this discourse enabled an on-going negotiation of the meaning of his literary legacy” (p. 43). Losensky’s readings of the poems, similarly, channel our attention from one to another to show us a community of poets stretched across generations. Attention to detail is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a sensitive study of literature, but when the details mesh with the overall schema so powerfully it is gratifying to read. There are footnotes which come across as perfect miniature essays. Many are funny. His defense of the importance of playfulness in literature, in a centrally located discussion of Ahli of Shiraz, has the force of a manifesto.

This engaging and generous book is a real antidote to the Western notion of anxiety of influence. We can hope that Harold Bloom will read it.

Michael Beard
University of North Dakota

Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, edited by J. W. Wright & Everett K. Rowson. 239 pages, index. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. $18.50 (Paper) ISBN 0-231-10507‑X

This is the first philological study of the poetics of homoeroticism in Arabic literature to appear in English. Taking as their texts poems, prose narratives, dreambooks and plays, the authors argue for a revision in the ways homoerotic literature has been read either as emblematic, namely as a symptom of an over‑sexualized society, or as metaphorical.

Situating these literary productions with others whose unacceptable themes and motifs, such as wine drinking, are usually, and perhaps erroneously, translated into acceptable expressions of something else (for example mystical experience) some of the authors question the automatic coding of male-male love imagery as heterosexual or divine love. What they reveal is that when male writers and poets addressed themselves to men, they might indeed be articulating a homosexual passion, in addition to whatever else they were saying. For example, James Monroe demonstrates how homoeroticism in Andalusian poetry created satire against individuals and represented acts of “rebellion against established authority” (p. 125), even as it articulated an acceptable desire and an unacceptable act. When viewed through such a polysemic optic, J. W. Wright suggests that “homoerotic satirical works written by medieval Arabic scriptors represent a metonymical complex of beliefs and reactions ‘to create satirical chaos’ (and) to confine the polity within its own claims of religious devotion” (pp. 3, 16, 17).

 Suzanne Stetkeyvich shows one way that canonical writers could get away with expressing desire for forbidden sex objects and associated behaviors in her analysis of The Epistle of Forgiveness by the eleventh-century Syrian poet and litterateur Abu al-`Ala' al-Ma`arri. She shows how blurring the boundaries between this world and the hereafter served to legitimize the illegitimate. But was homosexuality forbidden in the medieval Arab‑Islamic world? No, these essays reveal that what was forbidden was not the sexual identity but the act—sodomy. It was not until the late nineteenth century that homosexuality became constructed as an outlaw identity. Steven Oberhelman’s essay on gender, ideology and power in Greek and Arabic dream manuals demonstrates that those who had adhered “to social constructs of gender and hierarchies of status” (p. 57) and had been able to do what they liked now had to beware of the identitarian meanings attached to sexual acts. Sexual orientation became liable to disciplining and punishment.

This volume does not deal with women’s eroticism. Except for a few passing references to lesbianism, the essays focus on male homoerotic desire and behavior and the paramount importance of phallic penetration and who does it to whom. Oberhelman rightly points out that “the concentration on the phallus and on the experiences of the active male sexual partner is nothing more than patriarchy in new clothing” (p. 55). Most of the essays avoid the problem by focusing less on the behavior itself and whether or not it is allowed than on how power is gained or lost through specific sexual acts.

Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature is a book for the specialist in classical Arabic literature and also for the general reader. The specialist will appreciate the erudition of these scholars and their deep engagement with the classical Arabic critical and literary traditions. The general reader will be engaged by the possibility of reading these works at their face value without need of interpretive guideposts into the mysteries of Sufi discourse. These essays confirm what queer theorists have long been arguing: critical theory is incomplete without due attention to sexuality.

miriam cooke
Duke University