Great Arabic Love Stories

As part of The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read bonanza, Ahdaf Soueif has selected five Arabic novels as part of today's "Love" issue. Soueif's punchy pull-out section is brilliant, claiming that "you could argue that the first narrative to emerge from what has come to be called the Middle East was the first love story of all time: the story of Isis and Osiris" and providing a swift history of writing about love in Arabic: most of it is excluded from the Guardian's selection because "the art form of record for the Arabs has always been poetry, and Arabic love poetry runs in an unbroken tradition from the 7th century until this day." On the other hand, the "novel form entered Arabic in the early 20th century and, as with most western imports of the time, it took root first in Egypt and greater Syria (now Syria, Palestine and Lebanon) - then in the rest of the Arab world," becoming "the art form of choice for depictions and critiques of societal norms and explorations of the great questions of the age."

Romantic love, argues Soueif, resonates in the novels she has chosen as it reveals questions of tradition vs. modernity, gendered and generational conflictions, ethnicity and sexuality, concluding that "the Arab novel is concerned with love, but cannot see it or deal with it independently of society." Her selections bear this out:

Latifa al-Zayyat: al-Bab al-Maftouh (1960)
Naguib Mahfouz: Cairo trilogy (1956-57)
Colette Khoury: Ayyam Ma'ah (1959)
Enayat el-Zayyat: Al-Hubb w'al-Samt (1967)
Layla al-Juhani: Jahiliyya (2006)

Bearing out the confluence of romance and politics, Khoury -- whose breakthrough novel shocked Syrian society with its depiction of female sexuality, in a semi-autobiographical account of her affair with Nizar Qabbani -- was last week announced as Syria's first ambassador to Lebanon, having served for a year as President Assad's literary advisor.

Mahfouz aside, Soueif emphasises the achievements of Arab women writers in using love and the erotic as prisms through which to consider social and political questions, particularly as conceptions of love have direct impact on their lives and imaginative possibilities. The "Love" issue is rich with women writers from around the world; it will be interesting to see if this gender parity is maintained in future issues (including Science Fiction and Fantasy). And The Cairo Trilogy aside, only Al-Bab Al-Maftouh has been translated into English (published by AUC). Al-Zayyat's novel is so influential that it has spurred a "We Are All Laila," a collective blog by young Egyptian feminists still fighting the same battles to open doors that confronted Laila, Al-Zayyat's protagonist, in 1960.

Also striking is that, apart from Amin Maalouf's Samarkand, no Arabic novels make the grade in the wider selection. Will Woman at Point Zero be selected for the "Family & Self" issue? And what Arabic novels do you think the panel could have considered for inclusion in their top 1000?

We Are All Laila Day: October 19

Amira al Husseini at Global Voices reports on the development of a unique blogging community in Egypt. We Are All Laila [Ar] started in September 2006 as an online conversation between a few women who identified themselves as (and with) Laila, the protagonist of Latifa al-Zayyat's groundbreaking novel The Open Door. al-Zayyat, a leftwing campaigner and distinguished professor of literary studies at Ain-Shams University, wrote The Open Door (al-Bab al-Maftuh) in 1960. As Amal Amireh at al-Jadid notes, like the author's,

Layla’s psychological, social, and political growth takes place in the context of the years from 1946 to 1956 — years that witnessed the revolt against the British and the Palace, the Free Officer’s Revolution of 1952, Jamal Abdul Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the Israeli-British-French attack that followed.

Amireh continues:

The same novel is now “an impossibility,” al-Zayyat said a few years ago [in the mid 1990s]. When she wrote it she shared with her audience a common language and a common vision. But things have changed. According to her, “roads to salvation are blocked; the common ground of shared values seem to break down into multiple different sets of values according to the varied social strata; the common sensibility and its language is no more; people lacking national unity are divided and subdivided until each is turned into an insular island.” One Egyptian critic recently wrote that his female students don’t see themselves in the heroine of The Open Door. They no longer believe that what Layla achieves by the end of the book is possible for them.

Yet We Are All Laila demonstrates that, ten years later, Laila is once again a role model who offers shared values to a group of Egyptian women connected by the internet, which offers the opportunity for the reclamation and mobilisation of a "common language and a common vision."

On October 19 2008, the bloggers at We Are All Laila will be:

asking specific questions, carefully selected by a few friends, which concern the status of Egyptian girls and women, in particular, and Egyptians, in general. The objective is to develop a dialogue stemming from the responses to better understand ourselves and those around us.

Laila was the writer's dream: a character larger than her novel, who embodies the hopes and thoughts of a generation -- and now she is taking life and shape again from a new generation.