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

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.