Middle East - Anthony Ham [68]
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Modern Arabic Poetry, by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, can be a bit dense for the uninitiated, but there’s no more comprehensive work about the Middle East’s most enduring and popular literary form.
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Novels
The novel as a literary form may have come late to the Middle East, but that didn’t stop the region producing three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1966), a Zionist Israeli writer whose works are published in English under the name SY Agnon; Naguib Mahfouz (1988); and Orhan Pamuk (2006).
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Naguib Mahfouz: His Life and Times, by Rasheed El-Elnany, is the first (and, it must be said, long-overdue) English-language biography of the Arab world’s most accomplished and prolific novelist.
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Much of the credit for the maturing of Arabic literature can be given to Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), who was unquestionably the single most important writer of fiction in Arabic in the 20th century. A life-long native of Cairo, Mahfouz began writing in the 1930s. From Western-copyist origins he went on to develop a voice that is uniquely of the Arab world and draws its inspiration from storytelling in the coffeehouses and the dialect and slang of the streets. Although widely respected throughout the Arab world, he fell foul of Egypt’s fundamentalist Islamists, first for his 1959 novel Children of Gebelawi (which was banned for blasphemy in Egypt) and later for defending Salman Rushdie; Mahfouz was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in 1994. His best-known works are collectively known as The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street.
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In 2006, Orhan Pamuk was charged with ‘insulting Turkishness’ for claiming that a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds had been killed in Turkey in 1915. The charges were dropped after an international outcry.
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Orhan Pamuk (b 1952) is Turkey’s latest literary celebrity. His works include an impressive corpus of novels and an acclaimed memoir of İstanbul, Istanbul – Memories of a City. His work has been translated into more than 50 languages and, like Mahfouz, Pamuk has never shirked from the difficult issues; in Snow (2004), Pamuk unflinchingly explores the fraught relationship between two of the great themes of modern Turkish life: Islamic extremism and the pull of the West. Also like Mahfouz, Pamuk is known as a staunch defender of the freedom speech.
Among the region’s other best-known writers are Turkey’s Yaşar Kemal (b 1923) and the Israeli writer, Amos Oz; Oz’s name regularly appears as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature and his work includes essays and award-winning novels with themes that speak to the pride and angst at the centre of modern Israeli life. Of the native Lebanese writers, the most famous is Hanan al-Shaykh (b 1945), who writes poignant but humorous novels that resonate beyond the bounds of the Middle East. Also worth tracking down are the works of Jordan’s Abdelrahman Munif (1933–2004), Egypt’s prolific Nawal el-Saadawi (b 1931) and Lebanese-born Amin Maalouf (b 1949).
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the best of middle eastern literature
▪ Arabic Short Stories, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, is an excellent primer with tales from all over the Middle East.
▪ The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran, somehow expounds in poetic form on the great philosophical questions while speaking to the dilemmas of everyday life.
▪ Choose anything by Orhan Pamuk and you won’t be disappointed, but it was with The Black Book that he leapt onto the international