Focus on Arts and Ecology

The contemporary Arabic novel. 

By Claudia Roth Pierpont, January 10, 2010

What do you know about how people live in Cairo or Beirut or Riyadh? What bearing does such information have upon your life? There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need? The ways that people think and work and suffer and fall in love and make enemies and sometimes make revolutions is the stuff of novels, and Arabic novels, while not yet lining the shelves of the local bookstore, have been increasingly available in English translation, offering a marvellous array of answers to questions we did not know we wanted to ask. On such subjects as: the nature of the clientele of the elegantly crumbling pre-Islamist bars in downtown Cairo, straight and gay (“The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany); what it felt like to live through the massacre in the Shatila refugee camp, in 1982, and how some of the people who still live there have been managing since (“Gate of the Sun,” by Elias Khoury); the optimal tactics that a good Saudi girl should use to avoid being married off, which appear to require that she study either medicine or dentistry (“Girls of Riyadh,” by the twenty-something Rajaa Alsanea, who has herself completed an advanced degree in endodontics). There is clearly insight as well as information in these books. And then, considering the reduced size and the volatility of the world we share, we might recall the essential lesson of a very old Arabic book that everyone knows, “The Thousand and One Nights”—that stories can have the power to save your life.

Our long history of indifference has made it difficult, down the years, to come by stories of Arab life that do not involve genies or magic lamps. True, the novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Arabic literature; poetry, an ancient art, has traditionally held wider prestige. The exciting new storytelling form, barely a century old, was adapted from the European novels that European armies brought in their wake: Napoleon’s troops were in Cairo for three years, but, thanks to Egypt’s Paris-worshipping nineteenth-century khedives, Balzac and Zola stayed for good. The form developed sporadically in the first half of the last century, and no more than three or four Arabic novels appeared in English before the mid-fifties. After the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, in 1988, there was a significant surge of interest—Mahfouz himself finally got an American commercial publisher—but the burden of bringing Arabic books to English readers still falls mainly on devoted translators, and on the small and heroic presses that have performed this service from the start. Their joint efforts have rarely mattered more. The Arab reading public, although avid for all sorts of fiction, in a plethora of newspapers and cheap feuilletons, has (for evident economic reasons) not fully embraced the novel as a published book. Few Arabic novels sell enough copies to earn their authors anything like a living income; even Mahfouz kept a civil-service job until he was sixty. Today, the most sophisticated literary public is under siege. “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads” is a saying that prevailed in what now seems a dream of literary possibility, free of stifling fundamentalism, civic chaos, and bombs.

Lately, there has been a concerted effort by forces of intercultural good will, Arab and otherwise, to bring newer Arabic literary works to our attention, with annual prizes—culminating in the so-called Arabic Booker Prize, established in 2007, in Abu Dhabi—whose principal aim is to secure international (but primarily English-language) publication. From the fifties through the seventies, the United States pursued a far more extensive project: the Franklin Book Programs translated and distributed American books in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and not only textbooks and dictionaries but “Little Women,” “Ethan Frome,” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”—books meant to promote “the Western ideals of the dignity and freedom of individual men” and to “minimize the difficulty of Arab-Western collaboration.” These days, the privately sponsored Global Americana Institute is attempting to renew this sort of literary diplomacy, starting with the publication of selected essays by Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. Yet, if the goal is collaboration, isn’t it as important to listen as to speak? There is little danger of encountering anything like official propaganda, since the Arab novelist stands, almost by definition—as a thinker, as a conduit of intellectual life—in opposition to the retrogressive forces in the modern Arab state.

Six years after winning the Nobel Prize, Mahfouz, aged eighty-two, was knifed in the neck by a religious zealot carrying out a fatwa issued by an Islamic cleric outraged by one of the books the Nobel committee had cited. (Mahfouz survived, and lived for twelve more years, although he temporarily lost the use of his right hand and had to relearn how to write.* The cleric is currently serving a life sentence in the United States, for his part in a conspiracy to bomb the United Nations and other New York monuments.) Nothing so grave has happened to Alaa Al Aswany, whose “Yacoubian Building,” a skillful page-turner with a winning cast of characters, takes on the subjects of class oppression, government corruption, torture in prison, the rise of fundamentalism, and the Egyptian state’s propensity to push even profoundly decent but poor young men to religious extremism and, ultimately, to killing.

Published in 2002, by a private Cairo firm—there being no way to get such a manuscript through the state’s official publishing house—“The Yacoubian Building” quickly became one of the biggest best-sellers that the Arab world has ever seen. In Humphrey Davies’s smooth English translation (Harper Perennial; $13.95), it has been an astonishingly big seller here, too, and the book has appeared in more than twenty other languages around the globe. Al Aswany believes that his international fame has kept him safe, although he has frequently been accused in the state-run media of the crime of “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad,” and the public discussions that he used to host at a Cairo café were shut down by the police. (He quickly relocated the discussions elsewhere.)

Even Rajaa Alsanea’s breezy “Sex and the City” takeoff, “Girls of Riyadh,” was initially banned in the author’s native Saudi Arabia, apparently for suggesting that upper-class Saudi girls might wish to escape their luxurious designer cages. The details of life within the cage have riveted non-Saudi readers, and have made the suitably hip and chirpy English translation—by the estimable Marilyn Booth, in conjunction with the author—another rare example of the Arabic novel as American best-seller. In this tight-locked cultural milieu, college girls who defy the Religious Police by wearing red on Valentine’s Day take on the sheen of political subversives.

But what about literature? Is it possible for anything like the grandly traditional novel of character development and moral nuance to emerge from societies in extremis, from writers routinely constrained or assailed? A critic reviewing Orwell’s “1984” complained that it might be truth, but it wasn’t fiction. We have, of course, come to see the novel as a form with many variant possibilities. Mahfouz, who spun complex social tales out of the apparently unquenchable vivacity of Cairo life, was able to reanimate the models of Balzac and Zola, but more recent Arab writers tend, understandably, toward Kafka or García Márquez. It should be no surprise that the prison novel has become a major Arabic genre; the icy emptiness of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag has been replaced, in the literature of duress, with Arab writers’ crowded and sweltering cells. How could traditional fiction comprehend this reality? Whether any book will outlast its moment is impossible to say, but what follows is an account of some novels that are worth reading now, and that may prove to be worth reading even when newspapers divert our attention to wars and prisons somewhere else.

Iraq is clearly not an easy place to write a novel these days. Even the brave young blogger known as Riverbend, the author of two published collections titled “Baghdad Burning,” fled with her family to Syria in the fall of 2007, and was last heard from as she rediscovered the pleasures of walking without continuously looking behind her. The American occupation has been the subject of a number of documentary films—more documentaries have been made about Iraq than about any other active conflict, thanks to the light weight and low cost of video cameras—but the care and cogitation required for a novel (never mind the publishers and bookstores) appear to have been most obtainable among members of the far-flung Iraqi diaspora, free in foreign lands to publish works that have often been simmering for years.

Mahmoud Saeed’s “Saddam City” (translated by Ahmad Sadri; Saqi Books; $12.95) was written in the early nineteen-eighties, soon after the author was released from the last of six terms of incarceration under Saddam Hussein. Saeed left Iraq in 1985, and managed to publish his book in Syria, albeit with two chapters destroyed, in the mid-nineties. Since 1999, he has lived in the United States, and for the past few years has taught Arabic literature and calligraphy in Chicago. He is in his seventies now, with a substantial and award-winning body of work in Arabic behind him. “Saddam City,” published at last in English in 2004, is based on what he saw in jail—the original Arabic title is literally “I Am the One Who Saw”—which he recorded, he says, “so that it would remain for future generations.”

For all the horror it details, this is a startlingly warm and humane book. Saeed, despite the incitements of his subject, does not aspire to the Kafkaesque—Kafka, it must be admitted, is among the most impossible of authors to emulate, along with García Márquez—but maintains a specificity of place and history (this happened in Basra, that happened in Mosul) and of the individuals who inhabit them. Set mostly in the run-up to the Iran-Iraq War, in the late nineteen-seventies, this slender novel tells of a mild-mannered Basra schoolteacher who, although cautiously apolitical, is whisked off one day for “a simple interrogation.” His subsequent experience in six levels of hell—six prisons in all—is exactingly described, but the long ordeal is mitigated, both for him and for the reader, by a dose of bitter humor, a share of personal good will, and the mutual trust that he discovers among the prisoners, a trust long since forfeited in the larger prison of the informer-ridden society outside.

Saeed’s style is plain and direct, without literary pretensions, but with a tone of emotional delicacy that is as odd in the circumstances as it is touching: treated with courtesy by a single officer, after much cruelty, the prisoner refrains from asking questions about his arrest, because “I did not want to appear to be exploiting his kindness.” Some references to unfamiliar figures and events benefit from the book’s tidy footnotes. And although Sadri’s rendering begins stiffly, it soon becomes rhythmically fluent, and one’s sense of reading a translation fades away.

Resilience against all odds appears to be characteristic of Saeed: the same force rises to a point of madcap buoyancy in “The Soldier and the Pigs,” one of four Saeed stories available from Amazon.com, in uneven English, for forty-nine cents each. (A writer new to the country must try to make his work known any way he can.) In this riotously original little tale of a soldier’s plight among not only pigs but many, many frogs, also set during the Iran-Iraq War, we catch another glimpse of a writer with the power to translate foreign histories into stories that we can make our own.

Sinan Antoon’s “I’jaam” (City Lights; $11.95) is in many ways about translation, and although it is also an Iraqi prison novel set in the era of Saddam, it is hard to imagine a treatment of that terrible subject more different from Saeed’s. Antoon is Baghdad-born, in his early forties, and he left Iraq after the first Gulf War, in 1991; he has a doctorate in Arabic literature from Harvard. “I’jaam,” his first novel, was published in Beirut in 2004, and, impeccably translated by the author and Rebecca C. Johnson, appeared in English in 2007. Antoon, who currently teaches at New York University, has never been in prison. His brief novel is a self-consciously literary work, complete with references to Orwell and an epigraph from Akhmatova, and is alert to the uses of language, in a closed political society, for both indoctrination and rebellion.

The title refers to the practice of adding dots—diacritical marks—to various letters of the Arabic alphabet, some of which are indistinguishable without these marks in place. An undotted sequence of letters may signify a number of different words; the correct translation can be determined only by context. The story’s intriguing premise is that a handwritten, undotted manuscript has been found in a file in Baghdad’s Interior Ministry, and a functionary assigned to add the necessary dots and make a transcription: the resulting manuscript forms the body of the book. The text turns out to be the work of a university student whose gift for political mockery got him sent to prison, where he wrote the manuscript—leaving out the dots to avoid further incrimination. Its uncertain readings cause the scribe to offer footnotes to such perplexing references as “the Ministry of Rupture and Inflammation” (“Could this be the Ministry of Culture and Information?”) and to such obvious errors as occur in the well-known song lyric that details how the nation’s leader moves from house to house and “fucks us into bed.” (“Note: the original lyrics read ‘tucks.’ ”)

The student’s (and the author’s) delight in word games brightens the narrative but does not overwhelm it. At times, the prison almost disappears, as the student seeks refuge in his memories of soccer games, of campus romance, even of the mandatory political demonstrations in support of the person identified only as the Leader. Nevertheless, darkness closes in: the formerly dauntless young man, an aspiring poet, is raped by a prison guard and increasingly breaks down. In his delirium, his fantasies are alluringly, if postmodernly, alphabetical:

The laughter rose and the dots fell, one after the other. The letters that take no dots began to pick them up from the ground and put them in their buttonholes or on their heads, or to stand on them and look at themselves in the mirror. One began to fight with the others, and stole their dots. The sin stole shin’s dots and then raised its fingers to its lips, with a loud “Shhhh!” The mim lay down on his stomach and raised his head to swallow the two dots he had picked up off the ground. A lustful laughter swelled up, and the letters danced together, coupling in forbidden positions.

Still, the core of the experience is meant to be horribly real. Antoon has said that he required years to approach the harsher aspects of the story, implying that he feared seeming presumptuous in claiming experience not his own. What, after all, is the relevance of fact to fiction in a book like this? Should it be different from any other type of novel? There is surely a relationship between the density of detail in Saeed’s book and his experience, as against Antoon’s more formally focussed, internally preoccupied tone. Or is this to confound truth with style? When reality is framed and shaped by imagination—in novels, as opposed to memoirs or histories—all the truth that we can vouch for is emotional and intellectual, and on the page.

“Politics and the novel are an indivisible case,” the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani wrote. But even Kanafani, who also worked as a newspaperman and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, expressed the modern writer’s absolute faith in the primacy of art. “My political position springs from my being a novelist,” he explained. “I started writing the story of my Palestinian life before I found a clear political position or joined any organization.” Born under the British Mandate, in Acre, in 1936, he was initially educated in French missionary schools, and—a fitting irony for a writer who all but invented a new national literature—he had to improve his Arabic later on. He was twelve years old when Israel was founded, in 1948, and he and his family ended up in a refugee camp in Damascus. He worked as a teacher, first in the camp and then in Kuwait for several years, before moving to Beirut to begin his association with a new political magazine and a newly stirring Palestinian consciousness. There, in 1962, aged twenty-six and in hiding for want of a passport, he wrote “Men in the Sun” (Lynne Rienner; $12.95), a novella about three Palestinian refugees who pay a smuggler to take them across a swath of the Iraqi desert to Kuwait: a work as searing as the relentless desert sun that blinds and burns the men, a work in which politics and art cannot be told apart.

“Men in the Sun” is a classic of Palestinian writing, and mentioning it among recent Arabic books is a bit like mentioning a work by Hemingway in a discussion of up-and-coming Americans, except that Kanafani remains almost entirely unknown to English readers. A few of the stories that round out the present volume are polemical and coarsely melodramatic; Kanafani was nothing if not a man with a mission. But “Men in the Sun” is, on the simplest level, a gripping tale that unfolds with Hitchcockian suspense as the reader is reduced to fearfully counting the minutes on the smuggler’s wristwatch. The prose is lean, swift, and—in Hilary Kilpatrick’s translation—filled with phrases of startling rightness: “The lorry, a small world, black as night, made its way across the desert like a heavy drop of oil on a burning sheet of tin”; or, even better, “The speedometer leapt forward like a white dog tied to a tent peg.” The realistic intensity of Kanafani’s world tends to conceal his stylistic ambitions: the intricacy with which he weaves together past and present, fact and delusion, and the alternating voices of his characters, each of whom is drawn with the rapid assurance of a charcoal sketch. But on a deeper level Kanafani’s work is about the desperation that drove these men to such lengths to regain work and dignity; it is about the longing—just emerging in the Palestinian public voice—for the moist earth and the olive trees of the villages left behind in 1948. Most painfully, it is about the awakening of self-recrimination for acquiescence in the loss, as in the thoughts of an old man who has been living “like a beggar” and decides to risk the journey:

In the last ten years you have done nothing but wait. You have needed ten big hungry years to be convinced that you have lost your trees, your house, your youth, and your whole village. . . . What do you think you were waiting for?
More than one of Kanafani’s stories depict Israeli soldiers as bloodthirsty villains. Yet he also portrays Israeli settlers sympathetically—perhaps for the first time in modern Arabic literature—in the novella “Returning to Haifa,” written after the 1967 war and available in another collection of his work, titled “Palestine’s Children” (translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley; Lynne Rienner; $14.95). This novella is less formally daring than “Men in the Sun”; stylistic experiment may have seemed irrelevant in the wake of the Arab defeat. But it is no less gripping, as it traces the daylong trip of a middle-aged Arab couple from their West Bank home, in 1967. The border has been newly opened, and, with much trepidation, they are travelling to see their old house in Haifa for the first time since they fled, nearly twenty years before. The elderly Jewish woman who comes to the door is anything but a stereotype: a Holocaust survivor and a widow, she is a complex and poignant figure, whose moral politics turn out to be not so far from those of her visitors. Her husband had been seduced by reading a pro-Zionist novel—“Thieves in the Night,” by Arthur Koestler—into half believing that the land itself was waiting for them. She had wanted to leave almost as soon as she arrived, in 1948, upon seeing the mistreatment of an Arab child, and after realizing the cultural cost of the victory. This realization came to her the very first Saturday that she and her husband walked through newly captured Haifa:

He was immediately struck by the fact that he didn’t see any cars. It was a true Jewish Sabbath! This brought tears to his eyes for reasons he couldn’t explain. When his wife saw this, she too was surprised and said to him with tears in her own eyes: “I’m crying for another reason. Yes, this is a true Sabbath. But there is no longer a true Sabbath on Friday, nor a true one on Sunday.”

Yet she stayed, mostly because along with the house the childless couple were given a baby: the baby that the Arab couple left behind when the wildly fleeing Palestinian population swept them along to the port and the waiting boats. The confrontation between the now grown son, brought up by the Jewish family, and his Arab parents is the climax of the story, and what it loses in parablelike neatness it repays in emotional force. The message of generational failure and the new imperative of resistance is not so different from the message of the author’s earlier work, but it is more urgent, hectoring, and stark.

This may have seemed the only possible message at the time. It is also the message of Kanafani’s opposite number and comic doppelgänger, Emile Habiby. A Palestinian Christian who refused to leave Haifa after 1948, Habiby eventually served as a member of the Israeli Knesset. His own post-1967 novel, “The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist” (translated by Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick; Interlink; $12.95), is an excruciatingly funny tour de force about “an Arab who had remained, by some magic, in Israel.” Habiby’s antihero, an informer for the Israeli state, is a guileless fool (the book pays tribute to “Candide”) whose spinelessness is matched by his ineptitude, and who is as much a victim as a rogue. Then, one day in 1967, hearing a radio report that all defeated Arabs must surrender, he flies a white flag from his Haifa house as an “extravagant symbol of my loyalty,” and is thrown in jail for insinuating that Haifa is on occupied land. Beaten and left in a cell, too ashamed to admit his identity or even where he lives, he is transformed when he is mistaken for a resistance fighter: “A fierce desire gripped me to clap my hands, to sing, to ululate and scream until the layers of necessity, silence, humiliation, and submission were all gone. It had always been ‘Yes, sir!’; ‘At your command, sir!’ But now my spirit would fly free.”

For Kanafani, there was no significant later work: he was killed in 1972, aged thirty-six, when his car was booby-trapped, apparently by Israeli security forces, in reprisal for the Popular Front’s attack on an Israeli airport. Habiby died at seventy-four, in 1996, after a lifetime of arguing for the rights of Israeli Arabs; the only writer to win (and accept) important literary awards from both the P.L.O. and Israel, he chose an inscription for his tombstone that reads, whether in pride or in shame, “Remained in Haifa.” Both these works by pillars of Palestinian literature, so dissimilar in every way, are at once cries from the heart and calls to arms.

Kanafani plays a recurring role in Elias Khoury’s novel “Gate of the Sun” (Picador; $15), published in Arabic in 1998, to enormous acclaim, and in Humphrey Davies’s award-winning English translation eight years later (thanks to the tiny, not-for-profit Archipelago Books). A tremendously ambitious work, covering half a century of Palestinian history, it begins with maps of the region dotted with the names of old Palestinian villages, the way big Russian novels begin with family trees: here, through all the narrative advance and obliteration, is what you must keep steady in your mind. Set in a dilapidated hospital in the Shatila refugee camp, in Beirut, in the mid-nineties, the book’s many winding stories are told by a male Scheherazade, a fortyish Palestinian medic whose unceasing talk is intended to rouse a comatose old man, a resistance hero who spent decades sneaking over the Lebanese border into Israel, to carry out attacks that earned him the title the Wolf of Galilee. We do not see much of the attacks; instead, we see the warrior as a lover—not as the Wolf but simply as a man—paying secret visits to his wife, left behind on what has become Israeli land. As a result of these conjugal visits, the hero plants his children in Galilee, before going away again to fight to liberate them.

The medic, Khalil—an intellectual and a bit of a coward, who once memorized all of “Men in the Sun”—reports that Kanafani came to interview the old fighter once, during the nineteen-fifties, but did not find the mythic figure that he needed for his writing. It is Khoury’s intent to see through an earlier age’s myths, to expose the flawed and merely human at their core; this attitude lends his historical saga a contemporary feel, even while the debunking of heroism allows him to rescue, for a more cynical era, whatever sorely tested scraps of heroism remain. In true Scheherazade story-within-a-story fashion, the novel itself is foretold, in Khalil’s tale of a Palestinian fighter who had planned “a book without a beginning or an end . . . an epic of the Palestinian people, which he’d start by recounting the details of the great expulsion of ’48.” That fighter, however, died during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, reportedly of shock—“but I’m not convinced that is the reason,” Khalil confides. “I mean, after all those who were killed in fighting and in massacres, along comes someone who dies of sentiment!” It is just one of many, many signs that people dramatize, or lie, or remember things that never happened, and that stories are not to be trusted.

Elias Khoury is a Lebanese Christian who was born in Beirut in 1948, and whose sympathy for Palestinian refugees sent him to Amman to join the P.L.O.’s military unit, Fatah, in 1967, when he was nineteen. Unlike the would-be author in his book, Khoury was more a literary man than a fighter, and in the mid-seventies, back in Beirut, he took up work for the Palestine Research Center and began writing novels; during the next decade he collected thousands of stories from refugees about the “great expulsion of ’48,” an oral history that he felt required an “Arab Tolstoy” to wield into fiction. (“Everybody laughed,” he says.) “Gate of the Sun” is indeed Tolstoyan in scope: the expulsion stories are woven through a long first section, while the second focusses on the later lives of those who fled to Lebanon only to spend whole generations in the camps. “Over there you’d become the Jews’ Jews,” one character observes, “and over here you were the Arabs’ Arabs.”

But the book is far from Tolstoyan in the telling. Its difficulties are many: the loquacious storyteller’s voice at times becomes so irritating that one longs for the sick man to rise from his bed simply to make him stop talking; a strong gust of hot air blows about some truly ghastly phrases (“A woman only dies if her man stops loving her”); and the later pages (even a book without an ending must come to an end) lack energy. Moreover, Khoury’s structure is a patchwork, an assembly of fragments that intersect and repeat or simply disappear. Khoury has said that this approach most accurately captures the history he writes about; it is not postmodern literary affect but the plain reality where he comes from.

As a matter of style, the point is worth debating. The Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh has written several novels about the conflict in a purely traditional form. Her finest work, “Wild Thorns” (translated by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea; Interlink; $12.95), about two Palestinian cousins who take opposing sides—one shoots an Israeli officer, the other comes to the aid of the officer’s terrified wife and child—conveys the moral complexity of West Bank family life, and street life, with detailed conviction. The book is neatly plotted and easily read; it leaves us in no doubt about its characters’ desperate choices and inner lives. Khalifeh, who was born in Nablus in 1941 (and continues to live there, at least for part of the year), clearly understands her subject, and knows how to tell a story. But, then, she does not attempt to trace the surging history that has led to the daily turmoil she describes.

Khoury, by contrast, is working on a grand scale, and—even while one is chafing at his methods—his repetitions and dislocations become, in an almost visceral way, part of the reader’s sense of exile and, ultimately, part of the book’s rewards. If few of the characters are sufficiently sustained to carry our emotions over the long haul, there are many passing characters whose stories come to unforgettable life. I threw this book aside several times on first reading, but the power of these stories drew me back. “Gate of the Sun” is, as it turns out, worth reading twice—because it is so hard to see whole the first time, and because it is so insidiously rich.

There is Salim, who was five years old when, as he recalls, his mother carried him through the fire at the siege of Shatila (“ ‘There wasn’t a fire,’ I said”) and is now learning English so that he can follow her to America, although everyone knows that she died in the siege. There is Abu Aref, a Bedouin who went off one day with his family’s herd of buffalo and returned saying that the Israelis had killed them, but whose wife knew that they had really been stolen by his cousin, and that he’d invented the buffalo massacre to cover his shame. (“Everything foolish we do,” she says, “we blame on the Jews.”)

And there are the human massacres, in Palestinian villages, in 1948, by Israeli troops: in Ain al-Zaitoun, forty young men were slaughtered; in al-Safsaf, sixty men were executed wearing the white sheets they had worn to surrender; in Sha’ab, twenty old men were forced to march in the mud and nineteen died. The list goes on. The villages are real, the dates are real, and while some of the wildest embellishments are shown to be false—a crucifixion, most notably—the stories are told in the voices of those who were there, or those who heard the stories from them. The Israeli historians Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris have presented irrefutable evidence that atrocities occurred during the founding of the Israeli state, although arguments persist about the accuracy of reports, responsibility for actions, and degrees of brutality. When “Gate of the Sun” was published in Hebrew, in 2002, it won critical praise but was also severely criticized for mixing fact with incendiary fiction—because such stories, even in a novel that insists on the unreliability of stories, have the sound of reality and bear its charge. Khoury has countered that his book presents the truth, wholly inarguable, of Palestinian memory and belief.

Khoury was attacked in the Egyptian press for allowing his book to be published in Israel, although this seems to have been one of his goals: he has said that, in a metaphorical sense, he wrote the book not only in Arabic but in Hebrew. A self-confessed secular democrat, Khoury is one of the few Arab writers to recognize the Holocaust as part of the moral equation in the Middle East. Khalil, when talking about the Palestinian revolts of the late nineteen-thirties, demands of his ever-silent foil, “What did the nationalist movement posted in the cities do apart from demonstrate against Jewish immigration? . . . Tell me, in the faces of people being driven to slaughter, don’t you see something resembling your own?” In 2001, Khoury signed a statement opposing the holding of a Holocaust-denial conference in Beirut. Both the author and his character make their arguments in terms of keeping Arab culture free of soul-destroying European-style racism, and of preserving a larger moral dignity. It is crucial to have stood up to such a terrible history, and to face it in the present, “not because the victims were Jews,” Khalil says, “but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.”

For all its large ideas and its high-flown rhetoric, the novel’s most substantial character is the hero’s pragmatic wife, who turns both the nationalist epic and the great love story upside down when, after years of lightning visits by her husband, she makes it clear just who the true Palestinian hero is. It was she who fed and brought up their children, she who was in charge of the “ordinary and meaningless” details that allowed them all to survive. Now she has decided that the children will not spend their lives waiting for their lives to begin, as she has done: “I want the illusions to end.” She has become an Israeli citizen. She votes for the Arab Communist Party in the Knesset, “and I attend the meetings and demonstrations, in an attempt to preserve what’s left of our land.” She will raise the money for one of their sons to open a garage in the village. A daughter will get the wedding that she wants. Another son will receive his master’s degree, in Arabic literature, from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and begin his doctoral thesis on the works of Ghassan Kanafani.

Seven children in all. And, eventually, twenty-five grandchildren, about whom the Wolf of Galilee, giving the story one more twist, has the final word:

Here we are, thrown out of our country in ’48, and with only a hundred thousand of us left over there. The hundred thousand have become a million, and the eight hundred thousand who were thrown out have become five million. They bring in immigrants and we have children, and we’ll see who wins in the end.

George Orwell claimed that in a peaceful age he would have been not a political writer but, rather, an author of “ornate or merely descriptive books” (which lets us know what he really thought of nonpolitical writing). In America, where authors enjoy the right to be as ornate or descriptive as they wish, the political necessity that drives so many Arab writers may seem like a literary ball and chain. It is, of course, possible to find Arabic works about other subjects. Curiously, both of the Arabic Bookers awarded so far have gone to Egyptian historical novels: Bahaa Taher’s “Sunset Oasis” (translated by Humphrey Davies; McClelland & Stewart; $34.99), a solid, if stolid, piece of work that gains its interest mostly from being set in Egypt’s Siwa Oasis, during the late nineteenth century, and ends—just when we thought we were getting away from such things—with someone blowing something up; and Yusuf Zeydan’s “Beelzebub,” not yet translated, which is set in the relative safety of the fifth century A.D. But it isn’t necessary to escape our time in order to be free of politics; geographic distance can have the same effect, particularly in lands so vast and thinly populated. Go far enough and you can escape the entire modern world, as in the Libyan Tuareg writer Ibrahim al-Koni’s desert fable “Gold Dust” (translated by Elliott Colla; American University in Cairo; $17.95), in which a man trades his wife and son for a beloved camel, and the engrossed reader feels no doubt that he has chosen well.

Despite the continued existence of such pristine literary realms, there is some fear that the lure of English translation and American publication is a corrupting force—that Arab novelists, consciously or not, will begin to court the larger market, and leave their own audiences behind. As for us, we would end up reading only versions of what we want to hear. There is not much evidence that anything like this has happened yet, and the benefits for all seem to outweigh the risks. Alaa Al Aswany’s second novel, “Chicago” (translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab; Harper Perennial; $14.99), set amid Egyptian émigrés in that city, where the author went to graduate school, attempts to deal with both worlds, and comes down as hard on America for sustaining Egyptian tyranny as on Egyptian tyranny itself. It is, frankly, a disappointing book, in that the author’s typically ambitious reach proves beyond his grasp. Nevertheless, Al Aswany’s reputation and his undeniable storytelling ease have made “Chicago” the biggest Arabic best-seller since his first novel, and have won it many readers—frustrated, thinking, caught up—in the West as well.

Certainly, not every part of this literary exchange will be ideal. There will be good books and not so good ones, just as with American fiction. Still, it is unquestionably good to have stories that we hold in common. And it would be better to have more. Nobody is under the illusion that literature can change the world. But, as Al Aswany has pointed out, “literature does something much more important—it changes us.” Contemporary Arabic literature—which is not a monolithic literature but a series of imaginative works by individuals who happen to be Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian, Moroccan, Lebanese, and so on, twenty-two nations strong—is one of the few reliable forces working to impel these varied countries toward a cultural (and perhaps even a political) openness, in which Arab writers will one day be able to write about anything at all.

*Correction, February 11, 2010: Mahfouz lived for twelve more years, not two, as originally stated.

Published in the print edition of the January 18, 2010, issue.

Claudia Roth Pierpont has contributed to The New Yorker since 1990 and became a staff writer in 2004.

(Sources: The New Yorker)