Sunday 9 October marked the birth anniversary of the late Egyptian author Tawfik Al-Hakim (1898-1987), one of the leading figures in modern Arabic literature. A Cairo University law graduate, Al-Hakim travelled to Paris to continue his education but fell in love with theatre instead. On his return to Egypt in 1930 he worked briefly as a prosecutor but eventually resigned to devote himself to writing.
As well as practically founding the dramatic genre in Arabic letters, he wrote novels, short stories, essays and monographs. Of his novels, Awdet Al-Rouh (The Return of the Spirit, 1933) is the story of an aspiring writer, Mohsen, based on Al-Hakim’s own experience living with his family in Cairo in the years immediately before and after the 1919 Revolution. Another autobiographical novel Yawmeyat Naaeb fil Aryaf (The Maze of Justice: Diary of a Country Prosecutor, 1937) is a satire of Egyptian bureaucracy which was quickly translated into English, Spanish, German and Swedish, while Asfour Min Al-Sharq (A Sparrow from the East,1938), a short love story between an Egyptian student the ticket dispenser at a film theatre in Paris, was made into a film.
Al-Hakim wrote more than 50 plays mostly on social themes. They include Ahl Al-Kahf (The People of the Cave, 1933), based on the Quranic story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Shahrazad (1934) based on The Thousand and One Nights, Al-Malek Udib (King Oedipus, 1939) and Rusasah fil Qalb (A Bullet in the Heart, 1944).
Taha Hussein, Al-Ayam (The Days), AUC Press, 2022, pp224
The AUC press is marking the death anniversary of the late Dean of Arabic Literature Taha Hussein on the 28 October, by publishing an annotated edition of the first volume of Hussein’s autobiography, the classic Al-Ayam (The Days), with analytical exercises and support for advanced learners of Arabic. The annotation was made by David DiMeo. DiMeo, who earned his Ph.D. in Arabic literature from Harvard University in 1929.
The Days is a brilliant guide to the era of modern Arabic writing and is one of the classics of Arabic literature. This volume by the AUC press brings together a huge number of texts as windows onto various cultures and eras, using Hussein’s book as a portal and glossing his references in brilliant and unexpected ways. It is a rich, innovative and impressive introduction to Arabic literature for anyone.
Yasser Abdel-Hafez, Ramad Al-Abireen (The Ashes of Passers By), Al-Shorouk Publishing House, 2022, pp304
This novel is a new adventure for Egyptian author Yasser Abdel-Hafez, who opens it by laying down the law of a fictional afterlife in which, over the course of seven hours, the action proceeds. This consists in the protagonists of the novel restlessly trying to contain the anger and imbalance between the two worlds, which is fomented by shadows trying to escape their own destinies with the help of holding onto their memories. In the afterlife, the law is to understand the nature of existence through dismantling it to realise reality in its pure form, the main question being when do we really leave the world.
Yasser Abdel-Hafez is an Egyptian novelist and journalist born in 1969 in Cairo. He studied law at Ain Shams University, and worked as a journalist for the literary journal Akhbar Al-Adab. He published two novels Bi Monasbet Al-Haya (On the Occasion of Life, 2005), and Ketab Al-Aman (Book of Safety, 2013), won the Sawiris Literature Award in 2014.
Noha Dawoud, Garimat Al-Akar 47 (Crime of the Building 47), The Egyptian-Lebanese Publishing House, 2022, pp198
With this novel, writer Noha Dawoud continues with the crime writing to which she has dedicated her career, tracing the path of the heroine of her latest novel The Crime of Number 47. Safaa, who lives in that building, has been suffering from severe depression for a long time, and is now trying to fight her depression for the sake of her family. All of a sudden, she gains a supernatural power that enables her to reveal any hidden secrets around her. Later, when a brutal and perplexing crime is committed in her building, can she reveal the truth of it or is that supernatural power a delusion of hers?
Born in 1975, Noha Dawoud worked as engineer before turning to writing and found her passion in the crime genre. Her works include Mashhad Sima (A Cinema Scene, 2018), Garima fil Fondok (A Crime in the Hotel, 2019), Garima fi Leila Momtera (A Crime on a Rainy Night, 2020), and Garimet Al-Sayeda H (The Crime of Lady H, 2021).
Ashraf Al-Ashmawi, Al-Gamiaa Al-Seriya Lel Mowatnen (The Secret Association of Citizens), The Egyptian-Lebanese Publishing House, 2022, pp283
This novel spans the second half the term of President Anwar Al-Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981, and the entire period during which Hosni Mubarak – was toppled in 2011 – was in charge. It opens in the late 1970s against the backdrop of Sadat’s Open Door economic policy in a place called Ezzbet Al-Walda located in Helwan. There, a palace belonging to Khedive Ismail’s mother, with spacious gardens, shows just how much the area has deteriorated and no longer reflects its own history. As the cover shows, the brutal transformation in Egyptian society, too, is mirrored in the characters of the novel.
Those include an artist who cannot make ends meet and therefore begins to produce copies famous paintings to pass off as the genuine article, graduating to forging banknote, an October War veteran who becomes a drug dealer and informant, and a music teacher who becomes a sewerage worker and a nurse who becomes a doctor. The country’s social confusion becomes vividly apparent through these characters’ paths with such ugly transformations informing the whole book.
Al-Ashmawi is a judge and legal scholar who followed his passion for writing fiction in novels like Zaman Al-Debaa (The Time and the Hyenas, 2010), Al-Morshed (Informant, 2013), Toya (long-listed for the Arabic Booker in 2013), The Barman (2014), Tazkara Wahida Lel Qahira (A Lone Ticket to Cairo, 2016), Sayedat Al-Zamalek (The Lady of Zamalek, 2018), Beit Al-Qebtiyah (The Copt’s House, 2019) and Salet Orfanelli (Orfanelli’s Hall, 2021).
Reem Bassiouney, Al-Halawani: Tholathyet Al-Fatimyeen (Al-Halawani: The Trilogy of the Fatimids), Nahdet Masr Publishing House, 2022, pp672
In the course of three novels, author Reem Bassiouney writes about Egyptians at a crucial moment in history, when they come face to face with these very significant rulers: Jawhar Al-Siqilli, Badr Al-Jamali and Salaheddin Al-Ayoubi. Tracing some of the less savoury events that happened in Egypt under Fatimid rule, like the Crusades approaching the Egyptian borders and the huge fire in Fustat, here as elsewhere in her books Bassiouney captures the Egyptian identity and its developments and transformations in this era. Her latest book is another huge novel that tackles a vast number of historical incidents over the course of nearly two centuries.
Reem Bassiouney is an Egyptian author born in 1973. She is a professor of sociolinguistics and the Chair Department of Applied Linguistics at the American University in Cairo. She is also the editor of the Routledge Series of Language and Identity and the editor and creator of the journal Arabic Sociolinguistics Edinburgh. She has published several novels and short story collections, and won the Sawiris Foundation Literary Prize for Young Writers in 2009 for her novel Dr Hanaa. The English translation of her novel The Pistachio Seller was published by Syracuse University Press in 2009, the year she won the King Fahd Centre for Middle East and Islamic Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award. She also received the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for her novel The Mameluke Trilogy.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 13 October, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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