Lesson 3: The Development of Modern Arabic Prose — Novel, Short Story and Drama

01The scientific terms

• The school of Revival and Resurrection and the generation of development (Neoclassical school): a pioneering literary movement led by Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi to revive and resurrect Arabic poetry from its grave after centuries of stagnation in the Mamluk and Ottoman ages, by emulating the great poets of the brilliant ages (Jahili and Abbasid) in the strength of words, the force of wording and the classical canon (ʿamuud al-shiʿr); his pupils — Ahmed Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim and Ahmed Moharram — developed it by joining the sound Arab heritage to the treatment of the issues of their age, the problems of their society and of the Islamic world.
• The emotional (Romantic) trend in Arabic poetry: a current whose foundations were laid by Khalil Mutran in 1908, imitating French Romanticism; it starts from the individual's discovery of the self, pride in one's culture, care for the sincere feeling-experience, and the fusion of the poem's parts into an organic unity — artistic and psychological — that rejects the ready old models and artificial occasion-poetry.
• The school of al-Diwan: a critical and poetic school founded in 1921 by Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad, Ibrahim Abdel-Qader al-Mazini and Abdel-Rahman Shukri; influenced by English Romanticism, they called for expressing the self and its emotion with a philosophical, rational, contemplative bent in which the mental idea outweighed emotion, and they invented the practice of giving a title to the whole poem and to the whole diwan.
• Apollo and Mahjar: Apollo was founded by Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi in 1932 and included Ibrahim Nagi, Ali Mahmoud Taha and Abu al-Qasim al-Shabibi, marked by using language in a new way in its symbolic senses, personification, and longing for the lands of memory. Mahjar are the Arab poets who emigrated to the Americas — the Pencil League in New York (Gibrán, Mikhail Nuayma, Elia Abu Madi) and the Andalusian League in Brazil — marked by the human and spiritual bent, introspection, and latitude in language and metrics.
• The Realist school and free verse / the poetry of the tafʿīlah: a school that appeared after the Second World War as a reaction against excess Romanticism; it gave up the single metre and single rhyme and the equal halves of the line, and relied on the tafʿīlah (active foot) as a free musical unit whose number changes in each line according to the emotional flow; it expressed the worries of the masses, the questions of liberation and justice, death, symbol and myth.
• The arts of modern Arabic prose: four major genres — (1) the essay, a prose form that treats a given idea in an engaging style (subjective and objective); (2) the novel, a long narrative prose work imitating reality with characters, events and a detailed time-and-place setting and living language; (3) the short story, marked by concentration and heavy compression, creating one intense impression in a flash of insight; (4) the play, a dramatic story presenting an event and a conflict through the dialogue of characters to build an ascending dramatic structure.

02Critical rules and relations

• The critical equation of organic unity: organic unity = unity of subject (one main idea) + unity of psychological mood (one homogeneous emotion) + the interlinking and completion of the ideas. Full organic unity was achieved from the emotional trend, al-Diwan and Apollo onwards, while these schools blamed the Revival school for the disintegration of its poems and for the old "unity of the single line".
• The structural build of a dramatic work: dramatic build = presentation (opening and introduction of the characters) + complication (the rising and interweaving of the conflict) + resolution (the moment of insight and the release of the crisis). Real theatre rests on a heated conflict — mental, social or moral — carried by developing dialogue that pushes the event to the peak of tension and then to resolution.

03First: the Revival school, the generation of development, and the factors of the renaissance of modern poetry

• The school of Revival and Resurrection is the life-buoy that saved the Arabs' poetic corpus from extinction.
• Al-Barudi's leadership: he emulated (ʿāraḍa) the great masters of the ancient poets of the Jahili, Umayyad and Abbasid ages — such as al-Nābigha, al-Mutanabbī, Abu Tammām and al-Buḥturī — in their metres and rhymes, to restore to poetry its awe, its strength and its eloquence after decades of triviality and dry rhetorical ornament in the Ottoman age.
• The generation of development (his pupils): al-Barudi taught an elite of outstanding poets face to face (Ahmed Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim, Abdel-Mohsen al-Kazemi), by correspondence (Shakib Arslan), and through reading the book "The Literary Means (al-Wasīlah al-Adabiyyah)" of Sheikh Hussein al-Marsafi.
• Renewal factors came together for them that had not been available to their teacher: openness to Western culture (mastery of foreign languages, translation, reading European literatures); the national struggle, awareness of the people's freedom and the constitution of 1923; engagement with the problems of the Islamic world; the calls for the liberation of women by Qasim Amin; and the founding of the Egyptian University.
• Manifestations of development in Shawqi: (a) turning from classical panegyric to historical poetry, as in his great poem "The Major Events of the Nile Valley"; (b) depicting modern achievements and inventions instead of describing the she-camel and the horse — his description of the aeroplane "Is it an eagle that appeared in the rein of the sky… or a cloud fleeing from the violent winds?" and his descriptions of the ship and the submarine; (c) leading Arab verse drama — he wrote the historical and lyrical plays "The Death of Cleopatra", "The Madman of Layla", "Cambyses", "Ali Bey the Great", "Antarah" and the comedy "Sat al-Huda", and so was acclaimed Amir of Poets in 1927; (d) Ahmed Moharram's bending of poetry towards the epic: he adapted Arabic verse to the historical epic narrative in his huge diwan "The Glory of Islam (Majd al-Islam)" — the "Islamic Iliad" (1933) — which depicted the campaigns of the Messenger and the careers of the Companions.

04Second: the great Romantic schools — the emotional trend, al-Diwan and Apollo

• The emotional trend and Mutran: he moved from imitating French Romanticism to expressing the poet's own sincere individual conscience (wijdān). In the preface to his diwan in 1908 he announced the traits of his poetry: "This is modern poetry, and its pride is that it is modern; its maker is not its slave; the demands of metre and rhyme do not carry it against its intention; the correct meaning is said in the eloquent word; and regard is paid not to the poet of the single line alone but to the beauty of the poem in its composition, its organic unity, and its matching of psychological truth." He blamed the Revivalists for turning away from the self towards occasion-poetry, and for the disintegration of the poem.
• The school of al-Diwan: founded by the trio (al-Aqqad, al-Mazini, Shukri), influenced by English Romanticism; they proclaimed that poetry expresses the human self and what moves within it — but they were marked by a dry rational-philosophical-contemplative bent, so that mind and thought outweighed conscience and emotion in clarity of their verse. They attacked the Revival school sweepingly in their book "al-Diwan in Literature and Criticism" (1921), and called for organic unity and for one comprehensive title for the poem and for the whole diwan — such as al-Aqqad's diwan "A Passing Traveller (ʿĀbir Sabīl)" and Shukri's "Flowers of Autumn (Āzhār al-Kharīf)" — to indicate a unifying intellectual frame.
• The school of Apollo: born in 1932 after the issue of its famous magazine and the founding of its society, led by Dr Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi and Dr Ibrahim Nagi; it profited from the literary battles between Revivalists and Diwanists and was influenced by the Romantic literature of Mahjar, especially Gibrán Khalil Gibrán. Its traits: using language anew in word-senses and imaginary metaphors (the lunar perfume, the soft fragrance, the lost sailor, the burnt breaths); personification (giving dead things the attributes of persons) and embodiment (turning abstractions into material bodies); flooded longing for the lands of memory and youth; love of nature, its beauty and intimate converse with it; and the use of free verse with a leaning to light metres and quiet music.

05Third: the school of Mahjar and the new Realist school (the poetry of the tafʿīlah)

• Mahjar: Syrian and Lebanese Arab poets who emigrated to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of political oppression, sectarian conflict, poverty and the search for freedom. They split into two groups — (a) the Pencil League (Northern Mahjar, New York, 1920), led by Gibrán Khalil Gibrán, Mikhail Nuayma and Elia Abu Madi, marked by a sweeping revolt against the old rules of poetry, latitude in metrics, and the call for total renewal; and (b) the Andalusian League (Southern Mahjar, Brazil, 1932), headed by Michel Mualif and Rachid Khoury, more careful to keep the sound Arabic heritage. The traits of Mahjar writing: the human and spiritual bent and the spreading of the values of good and beauty; introspection and contemplation of the universe, life and death; violent, surging longing for their homelands in the East; and reliance on symbol, the poetic tale, and a living smooth language close to everyday speech.
• The Realist school (the new poetry / the poetry of the tafʿīlah): it arose in Egypt, Iraq and Syria after the end of the Second World War (1945), as the features of political and social life changed and liberation revolutions took place. The Iraqi poetess Nazik al-Malaika led it with Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Salah Abdel-Sabour, Abdel-Rahman al-Sharqawi and Amal Dunqul — a poetic revolt against the system of the two symmetrical halves and the single rhyme. They invented the poetry of the tafʿīlah: the poetic line becomes the unit of build, the number of feet in each line changes with the poet's emotional bursts with no fixed limit, and the rhyme is freed into varied rhymes; the poem keeps to depicting reality with its contradictions, the worries of the masses, and the questions of justice and freedom, using symbol, myth and folk heritage in a living language close to the pulse of the street.

06Fourth: the arts of modern Arabic prose — essay, novel, short story, play

• The essay (al-maqāl): a short enquiry in science, literature, politics or society, published in a newspaper or a magazine. It divides into the subjective essay — expressing the writer's feelings and thoughts in an exquisite literary style — and the objective essay — presenting facts and arguments in a scientific, or scientific-literary, manner, such as philosophical and economic essays.
• The novel (al-riwāyah): a narrative prose art of wide scope that imitates lived reality; its events and characters are of the kind that occur in people's lives even when invented, its time and place are known and detailed, its details stretch over months and years, and its language is of the kind people use with one another. Its size is relatively large — no less than 30,000 words, and it may extend into volumes, as in Naguib Mahfouz's Trilogy: Between Palaces, Sugar Alley and the Military Barracks (Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr al-Shawq, al-Sukkariyya). The novel "Zaynab" by Dr Mohamed Hussein Haykal, published in 1913, is counted as the first artistic Arabic novel in the modern sense.
• The short story (al-qissa al-qasīra): not an abbreviation of the novel, but an independent literary art standing on its own. It is marked by flexibility, compression and severe concentration; it turns around one character or one defined event in a brief time and produces one intense impression, aiming to deliver a message to the receiver and embody an idea in a fleeting moment of insight. Its size is very short — from 100 words up to 1,000 words, and it does not exceed 12,000 — and its reading time runs from a few minutes to two hours at the most. The story "The New Saddle (Saddatuhā al-Jadīdah)" by Mikhail Nuayma (1914), and the collections of Yusuf Idris and Nuʿman Ashour, are among the peaks of this art.
• The play (al-masraḥiyyah): a dialogic, performed story written above all to be acted on the stage, embodying a living conflict between characters. Its dramatic build has three interlinked parts: the presentation (in the first act, introducing the characters and the environment), the complication (the rising and mounting tension of the conflict), and the resolution (the release of the crisis and the crowning of the conflict). The theatrical conflict is not mere quarrelling but a moral, social or intellectual conflict — such as the conflict of thought against emotion in Tawfiq al-Hakim's intellectual plays "The People of the Cave (Ahl al-Kahf)" and "Shahrazad", Shawqi's verse plays, and the social realist theatre of Nuʿman Ashour and Saad al-Din Wahba.

07Worked examples

Model 1 — a critical literary analysis of the traits of the Revival school in a poem

• Task: analyse these verses of Amir al-Shuʿara Ahmed Shawqi, showing his manifestations of renewal and of holding to the old: "Is it an eagle that appeared in the rein of the sky, or a cloud fleeing the violent winds? … Or the carpet of the wind in its brocade, woven by the hand of a bold genie? … It ruled the sky, and among its signs: every beating flutter like a wing."
• Renewal in Shawqi: (a) turning from the old description of the she-camel and the horse to describing modern inventions and achievements — here the aeroplane cleaving the sky; (b) directing poetry to the horizons of the modern age, technical development, and the expression of human progress; (c) relative liberation from the bonds of the occasion and the raising of imaginative depiction.
• Conservation of the old heritage in Shawqi and his schoolmates: (a) keeping one metre and one unified rhyme — here the Wāfir metre with the silent, extended rhyme on the hāʾ; (b) the strength, weight and eloquence of the words inherited from the brilliant ages (anān, hawāj, dībāj, waqqāh, khafūq); (c) opening with a rhetorical interrogation and employing folk heritage and classical Arab imagination (the eagle, the wind's carpet, the genie).

Model 2 — a precise critical comparison of the novel and the short story

• Structural concept: the novel is a wide narrative taking in a whole life or several generations; the short story is a compressed, highly concentrated work that catches a single fleeting moment and gives a single impression.
• Characters: the novel has many characters (main and secondary) whose relations interweave and develop psychologically; the story keeps to one character or very few, shown in one defined situation.
• Time and place range: the novel stretches over years or decades and moves between different places and cities; the story occupies a brief time (a few hours or days) in one enclosed place.
• Narrative language: the novel is marked by expansion, length and fine detail, allowing digressions from which parts can be cut without structural damage; the story is marked by extreme concision and linguistic compression, so that no single word or sentence can be cut without the whole architectural build being disturbed — as the American writer Edgar Allan Poe affirmed.
• Size: the novel begins at 30,000 words and extends to hundreds of pages and volumes; the short story starts from 100 words, never exceeds 12,000, and is read in a few minutes.

08Critical exam notes ("give the reason" items)

• Why did the intellectual side dominate the poets of al-Diwan? Because of their deep absorption in English philosophy and Western Romanticism, their pride in rational culture, and their attempt to deepen meanings and psychological analysis — which made the idea precede the emotion in their poetry and gave it a mental dryness.
• Difference between the Pencil League and the Andalusian League: the Pencil League (Northern Mahjar, New York) was radically revolutionary, calling for total renewal and metrical latitude; the Andalusian League (Southern Mahjar, Brazil) was conservative, careful for the eloquent language and the inherited metres.
• The short story is not an abridged novel: beware this widespread misunderstanding — it is an independent literary art with its own philosophy based on compression and concentration and on lighting one single point in the character's path (the moment of insight).

09Real-life applications

• Drama, screenplay and television and film production: turning masterpieces of the Arabic novel and play — as the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris — into successful dramatic screenplays which shape the Arab conscience and document the social and historical transformations of the nation.
• Digital literature and the interactive novel (hypertext fiction): employing digital technologies and multimedia to write new interactive novels in which the reader takes part in determining the course of the events and the endings of the characters through branching electronic links.

10Exam traps and key takeaways

• Dates chain to keep straight: 1908 Mutran's preface · 1913 Haykal's "Zaynab" (first modern Arabic novel) · 1914 Nuayma's "The New Saddle" (pioneering short story) · 1921 "al-Diwan in Literature and Criticism" · 1920 Pencil League in New York · 1932 Apollo magazine and society · 1932 Andalusian League in Brazil · 1927 Shawqi acclaimed Amir of Poets · 1933 "The Glory of Islam" · 1945 the Second World War ends and realism rises.
• Numbers: short story 100 words up to 12,000, read in minutes to two hours; novel from 30,000 words upward; between about 12,000 and 30,000 it is called a short novel.
• The decisive difference between novel and short story is the nature of the artistic build, not length; and the story is not an abridgement of the novel.
• Organic unity has three terms — unity of subject, unity of psychological mood, and the interlinking of ideas. Its denial is the standard criticism levelled by the Romantics at the Revival school (whose poems suffered "the unity of the single line").
• The dramatic build has three interlinked parts — presentation (first act), complication, resolution; and theatrical conflict is moral, social or intellectual, never mere quarrelling.
• Do not mix the two Mahjar leagues: Pencil League = New York, 1920, Gibrán, Nuayma, Abu Madi, revolutionary; Andalusian League = Brazil, 1932, Michel Mualif and Rachid Khoury, conservative.
• Founders and leaders: Revival = al-Barudi; emotional trend = Mutran; al-Diwan = the trio Aqqad, Mazini, Shukri; Apollo = Abu Shadi with Ibrahim Nagi; realism = Nazik al-Malaika with al-Sayyab, Abdel-Sabour, al-Sharqawi, Amal Dunqul.
• The technical definition of tafʿīlah poetry: the poetic line is the unit of build · the number of feet varies with the emotional flow · the rhyme is freed and varied · the two symmetrical halves are abandoned.
• Al-Diwan's distinguishing cost is the dominance of mind over conscience — the "give the reason" answer is English philosophy + rational culture + deepening of meanings and psychological analysis → the idea precedes the emotion → mental dryness.
• Shawqi's renewal is content-side (historical poetry, inventions, verse drama) while his form stayed classical — one metre, one rhyme, strong inherited vocabulary, opening interrogation. A question asking "where is the conservation in the aeroplane poem" expects exactly these three.
• Apollo's language inventions to recognise on sight: the lunar perfume, the soft fragrance, the lost sailor, the burnt breaths; and its two figure-types are personification (dead things given human attributes) and embodiment (abstractions turned into material bodies).
• Essay division: subjective = feelings and thoughts in an exquisite literary style; objective = facts and arguments in scientific or scientific-literary manner (philosophical and economic essays) — the prescribed text "Social Solidarity in Islam" is a social essay in a literary style.
• Live applications: the adaptation of Mahfouz's and Idris's novels into screenplays (documenting social and historical transformation) and hypertext interactive fiction where the reader chooses the course of events.