Middle East - Anthony Ham [67]
The Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany also enjoyed international success for his 2006 novel The Yacoubian Building. But by selling the film rights to what became a successful movie in his home country (see the boxed text, Click here), al-Aswany drew a whole new local audience into his grasp.
Whether the successes of Darwish and al-Aswany are a prototype for the future or isolated cases remains to be seen.
Poetry
* * *
Nights and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, edited by Robert Irwin, traces the roots of Arabic poetry from the Quran to the modern day.
* * *
The Lebanese-born poet Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) is, by some estimates, the third biggest-selling poet in history behind Shakespeare and Lao Tse. Born in Bcharré in Lebanon, he spent most of his working life in the US, but it didn’t stop him from becoming a flag-bearer for Arabic poetry. His masterpiece, The Prophet (1923), which consists of 26 poetic essays, became, after the Bible, America’s second biggest-selling book of the 20th century.
Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) has become one of the most eloquent spokesmen for Palestinian rights, his more than thirty volumes of poetry reading like a beautifully composed love letter to the lost land of his childhood. At his funeral in August 2008, one mourner told the BBC that he ‘symbolises the Palestinian memory’. Another leading Arab poet and one of the great celebrities of the Arab literary scene is Syria’s Nizar Qabbani (1923–98), who was unusual in that he was able to balance closeness to successive Syrian regimes with subject matter (love, eroticism and feminism) that challenged many prevailing opinions within conservative Syrian society. His funeral in Damascus – a city that he described in his will as ‘the womb that taught me poetry, taught me creativity and granted me the alphabet of jasmine’ – was broadcast live around the Arab world.
* * *
The Thousand & One Nights
After the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights (in Arabic, Alf Layla w’Layla, also known as The Arabian Nights) must be one of the best-known, least-read books in the English language. It owes its existence in the popular consciousness almost entirely to the Disneyfied tales of Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, but it’s equally revered by literature scholars and historians for its use (some would say invention) of classic storytelling devices and illuminating historical descriptions. It’s from this book, more than anywhere else, that the Middle East gets its whiff of the exotic in the popular imagination.
That few people have read the actual text is unsurprising considering that its most famous English-language edition (translated by the Victorian adventurer Sir Richard Burton) runs to 16 volumes. The appeal of reading the volumes is further reduced by the old Middle Eastern superstition that nobody can read the entire text of The Thousand and One Nights without dying.
With origins that range from pre-Islamic Persia, India and Arabia, the stories as we now know them were first gathered together in written form in the 14th century. The Thousand and One Nights is a portmanteau title for a mixed bag of colourful and fantastic tales (there are 271 core stories). The stories are mainly set in the semifabled Baghdad of Haroun ar-Rashid (r AD 786–809), and in Mamluk-era (1250–1517) Cairo and Damascus. For the latter two cities in particular, The Thousand and One Nights provides a wealth of period detail.
All versions of The Thousand and One Nights begin with the same premise: the misogynist King Shahriyar discovers that his wife has been unfaithful, whereafter he murders her and takes a new wife every night before killing each in turn before sunrise. The wily Sheherezade, the daughter of the king’s vizier, insists that she will be next, only to nightly postpone her death with a string of stories that leaves the king in such suspense that he spares her life so as to hear the next instalment.
Devotees of the collection wondered for centuries what happened next