Of all the European capitals, perhaps the French capital Paris has historically played the most important cultural role in the Arab world. Not only has the city been a magnet for students from across the region, but it has also played host to generations of Arab writers and intellectuals, often helping them to publish their work and become better known both in their home countries and abroad.
Paris and France more generally have also been important to many other people of Arab origin besides the region’s writers, notably as a place for those looking for work. This was particularly the case after the Second World War when France, like many other countries in Europe, was short of manpower in the period of post-War reconstruction.
Hundreds of thousands of workers were recruited from the Maghreb countries of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, under French colonial control until the 1950s or 1960s, as part of policies that only ended in the early 1970s with the end of the economic boom. Tens of thousands more came to France from Algeria in 1962 following the independence of that country from French colonial rule.
Many of these people left memoirs of coming to France and settling in the country behind them, often in the area around Paris. However, their experiences are not those that French author Coline Houssais has in mind in her new book Paris en lettres arabes, since this focuses on the French capital’s cultural role in the Arab world.
The “letters” of her title refer to the writings of Arab residents of Paris or of visitors to the city who identified themselves as writers. It is also a pun on the word Paris spelt out in Arab letters, in other words in the Arabic script. The focus on writers or gens de lettres, men and women working in the literary field, means that the book provides only a partial view of Arab Paris, since most people of Arab origin who lived in the city are not considered.
Its subject, covering almost 13 centuries, includes, in the author’s words, “Maronite priests and translators, Moroccan and Ottoman diplomats, adventurers and those willing to write purely for money, worldly intriguers, pioneers of journalism, reformist thinkers, stars of radio and television, students on grants, independence activists, poets moonlighting as factory workers, and novelists living in Paris out of necessity, or choice, or by chance.”
What all these people had in common is that they all made their homes, either temporarily or permanently, in Paris. But the line between them and other Arab residents and visitors to the city who were not engaged in such activities is not always very strictly drawn, and particularly in the book’s earlier parts almost anyone who was of Arab origin and came to Paris seems to be able to get a look in, even if they were not themselves writers.
What were such people looking for when they came to Paris? The answers to this question are likely to differ according to the individuals concerned, and probably different ones predominated in different periods. But Houssais suggests some common factors that may have appealed to many of the figures she considers, over and above the simple need to find somewhere to live or work.
“For many Arab writers, Paris meant something even before they arrived in the city, a sentiment reinforced by the history of the Arab intellectual presence within its walls. Coming to Paris was motivated by a desire for Paris as a physical or imaginary place in which one could discover oneself as a writer,” she says.
It was a complicated relationship, because in addition to being positioned face to face with Paris, with all that this implied in terms of a certain sort of audience, there was also the idea of being positioned within a certain kind of tradition, since generations of Arab writers would likely have already made the journey to Paris and produced work reflecting on it.
Very often the Arab presence was largely invisible in Paris itself, Houssais adds, and this could add another complication to the relationship between Arab writers and the city. “The invisibility of Arab writers in Paris over succeeding centuries was part of their being positioned with their backs towards Paris and using the French capital as a place from which to turn back towards their countries of origin,” she comments.
Paris could thus provide Arab writers with a source of stimulation, an audience, a place in which to discover themselves and others, a vantage point from which to address audiences back home, and a certain kind of anonymity since most, perhaps all, of the figures Houssais considers did not contribute to French literature or take part in French literary debates when living in Paris.
“Most often, the seeds [of being a writer] had already been planted, and it was in Paris that they germinated,” she says. “Paris was an antechamber of the literature of the Levant and the Maghreb, an echo chamber, a place where experiment could take place, both in content and in form.”
From the final decades of the 19th century onwards, the city acted as a midwife to the region’s modern literature, providing a relatively neutral space, outside the borders of the Arab world, in which writers from the Maghreb and the Mashraq could meet and mix together.
As well as serving as a kind of crucible for individual Arab writers, the French capital thus served as a place in which writers from countries that might otherwise have had few interactions could discover both each other and common purposes.
Writers of Arab Paris: The earliest Arab writers in the book go back to the early mediaeval period, fleshing out Houssais’s contention that the city has seen a stream of Arab visitors over the past 13 centuries.
Things gathered speed in the 17th and 18th centuries with the formation of the European trading companies that began to establish trading posts across Asia and further afield, and they reached a new level of intensity following the French Expedition to Egypt in the late 18th century and the beginnings of direct European rule in the Arab world with the French invasion of Algeria in 1830.
Among the earliest Arab visitors Houssais mentions are the ambassadors sent to Charlemagne, King of the Franks and later Carolingian Emperor, by the Abbasid Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in the late 8th century CE. Later contacts took place through Arab Spain, notably southern Spanish cities such as Cordoba and Granada, and led to the first translation of the Qur’an into Latin commissioned by Peter the Venerable, Abbot of the Cluny Abbey in Paris, in the 12th century CE.
Later centuries saw the establishment of the first university chair in Arabic by the French King Francois 1 at the Collège royal, today the Collège de France, in Paris in 1530. Francois called upon the services of Agostino Guistiniani, close to the Italian humanist philosopher Pico de Mirandola, to teach Arabic to the Parisians, though he was later replaced by the better-known Guillaume Postel.
It took some years before the teaching of Arabic was entrusted to native speakers of the language, though Maronite teachers from Lebanon began appearing in France in the 17th century, often extending their stay from periods spent at the Maronite College in Rome, founded in 1584 by the Roman Catholic Pope Gregory XIII.
Jibrail al-Sahyuni al-Ihdini, known in France as “Gabriel Sionite,” lived in Paris after 1614, for example, where he was “professor of oriental letters to the king.” He wrote an Arabic-Latin dictionary, the Grammatica Arabica Maronitarum, and was the first in a long line of Maronite professors of Arabic resident in the city.
Writers and translators from Lebanon and Syria continued to make the running in Paris throughout the 18th century, as is indicated by the story of Antoine Galland, first translator into French of the mediaeval Arabic story collection the Thousand and One Nights. Galland’s translation, appearing between 1704 and 1717, contains famous stories such as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” whose Arabic versions have not been found and may have been invented by Galland’s Syrian interlocutor and visitor to Paris Hanna Diyab.
“It is very probable that the monumental Bibliothèque orientale,” one of the most important productions of 17th-century French scholarship on the Middle East, “put together by Barthélemy d’Herbelot and published in 1697, drew on contributors who have remained unrecognised,” Houssais says. “Very often copyists, translators, and editors from the Levant were given the thankless task of producing such massive texts, while the French orientalists in charge merely supervised their labours and put their names on the result.”
After the French Expedition to Egypt between 1798 and 1801, an Egyptian presence swiftly grew in Paris. First there were the waves of Egyptians and others who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops back to France, earning the name of “French Mamelukes,” and then there were the groups of Egyptian students sent to France by the early 19th-century Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali to observe French education and industry and much else.
The most famous of these is Rifaa al-Tahtawi, head of a group of Egyptian students, many of them drawn from Al-Azhar University in Cairo like al-Tahtawi himself, who arrived in Paris in 1826 and stayed until 1831. He published his impressions in a volume called “The Gold of Paris” on his return to Cairo.
“France represented not only ‘cultural otherness,’ as it had since the Middle Ages, for the Arab world, but also a new [and more modern] society, a new system of governance, and another way of thinking,” Houssais says. “Mohammed Ali, wanting to modernise Egypt at all costs, was trying to turn it into the most important power in the Middle East and to rid it of Ottoman dominance.”
Al-Tahtawi’s mission opened the floodgates to ever greater numbers of visitors from across the Arab world, many of them from Egypt. They doubtless drew a distinction between France the “colonising monster” that had taken over first Algeria and then Tunisia and Morocco and had later laid its hands on Lebanon and Syria, and the France that represented emancipatory ideas and “a model of society that could be imitated,” Houssais says, drawing attention to France’s Enlightenment traditions of human rights.
By the late 19th century Paris was playing the kind of role for which it is probably still famous among the Arab, and non-Arab, literary and artistic avant-gardes. Houssais sums this up by saying that “Paris was a theatre in which a literary or artistic identity could be realised. It was enough simply to be there to be it” – another aspect of the still-seductive myth of Paris.
Coline Houssais, Paris en lettres arabes, Paris: Actes Sud, 2024, pp245.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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