Earlier this year, during the Cairo International Book Fair, the National Centre for Translation (NCT) issued the first Arabic translation of one of the oldest and most significant works of world literature, a 166-page book called The Rapture, or The Book of Sleep. Translated into Arabic by Nagat Al-Sheikh under the title Kitab Al-Ru’ya (literally “The Book of Dreams”), this 19th-century work – interrupted by the death of its author – is by the Qajar courtier and man of letters, Mohamed Hassan Khan, and tells the story of a minister who travels with the Iranian King of Kings to Iraq.
There, on his own, he enters a mosque to pray. After the prayers are performed, he falls asleep and dreams of angels coming down to clean the mosque before putting together a setting similar to that of the European courts of law at the time. Once the Jury is assembled it starts calling a line-up of earlier rulers, prime ministers and ministers of the Qajar Dynasty – that reigned in Iran from the last decades of the 18th until the early decades of the 20th century, when the Pahlavis took over. In the dream, each ruler and minister is summoned to present a balance sheet of his time in office to be judged as either a doer of good who deserves to go to heaven or a doer of evil who deserves severe punishment. The accounts themselves offer an insight into the history of the Qajar Dynasty, the political and cultural norms of the times and the relations that connected this court with other regional dynasties, especially the Ottomans.
“This book truly resembles Naguib Mahfouz’s Amam Al-A’arsh (Before the Throne), first published in 1983, in which prominent rulers of Egypt from ancient times until Anwar Al-Sadat [who died in 1981] are summoned for judgement,” Al-Sheikh said. However, she added that “the big difference is that Kitab Al-Ru’ya, though written in Tehran in 1896, was not published until 1945, half a century later. We can only assume that it was due to the sensitive position of the author at the court of the Iranian ruler and to his sudden death that this novel stayed unpublished for so long. Clearly, this is a work of socio-political satire that is based on true stories that the author was witness to or had heard about from his father and other family members who had served at the Qajar palace; it makes perfect sense that he would have been worried about revealing such ‘secrets’ of the Iranian palace in his lifetime.”
According to Al-Sheikh, the significance of this book goes far beyond its literary quality. “Despite the fact that this novel prompted a revision of the history of modern and contemporary Iranian literature, which was traditionally thought to have taken shape in the early 20th century, after the Persian Constitutional Revolution that took place in the first decade of the last century.” This, she said, was what got her interested to provide the first Arabic translation of the text in cooperation with the NCT. “I think that readers in Egypt, and the Arabic reading audience in general, do not know much about the Persian literature of the time because despite the fact that the Persian literature departments at Egyptian universities, which had been established one after the other since the 1950s, have put out translations of many important titles, only very few have been published. Obviously, the Arabic reading audience was introduced to translations of Persian literature, essentially Persian poetry, in the early 20th century, when the works of Omar Al-Khayyam and Hafez Shriazi came out in their Arabic versions. Much earlier, in the eighth century, during the Abbasid dynasty, there was the translation of Kalila and Demna by Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa,” Al-Sheikh noted.
In 2024, she added, the General Authority for Cultural Palaces put out Hekayat Farissiyah (Persian Tales), a selection of translations of old Persian fictional work produced by prominent Egyptian scholar Yahya Al-Khashab. The book is an insight into the style and content of the Persian fiction produced in the late Middle Ages, generally focused on the history of rulers and the lands of Persia. Essentially, Al-Sheikh says, there is limited interest in Arabic translations of Iranian literature on the part of private publishing houses in Egypt, and that applies even to “contemporary Iranian authors who are not living in the West. What we often see are the translations of Iranian writers who live in the West and whose writings on Iran are always narrowed down to the downside of Iranian reality, but in fact contemporary Iranian literature production goes far beyond titles like Reading Lolita in Tehran or Rooftops of Tehran.”
Originally published in English in 2003, Reading Lolita in Tehran is authored by Iranian-American novelist Azar Nafisi. It is an autobiographical account of a teacher who decides to defy the rules imposed by the Islamic Revolution and has her students read books that are banned in the country. Nafisi was born in Tehran in 1948 and has been living in the US since 1998. She became a US citizen in 2008. Published in 2009, Rooftops of Tehran is authored by another Iranian-American novelist, Mahbod Seraji, who was born in 1956 in Bandar Anzali, a port city located in the northwest of the country. With events unfolding in 1973, the novel offers a reflection on the brutality of the country’s policy apparatus at the time. Like Nafisi, Seraji was born under Iran’s last Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. However, unlike her, he left the country before the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
“These are interesting novels; and there are similar works like Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran, a novel that documents the author’s 1982 arrest and torture as a young Iranian woman by the Islamic Revolution regime in Tehran’s Evin prison,” Al-Sheikh said. Nemat has been living in Canada and her novel came out in 2007. However, Al-Sheikh argued that such novels are indicative of only certain elements of a much more complex Iranian society. She added, “there is so much that is being produced in Iran by novelists, both men and women, who actually reflect more broadly on Iranian reality today.” Al-Sheikh refers to authors like Fariba Vafi, who was born in 1963 in Tabriz, and Zoya Pirzad, an Iranian-Armenian born in 1952 in Abadan. “Vafi’s novel My Bird reflects on the struggles of contemporary Iranian women through marriage and motherhood under socio-economic pressures; Pirzad’s Things We Left Unsaid is another close-up of the life of middle-class Iranians but in pre-Islamic Revolution times,” Al-Sheikh said. “I think these works are a lot more representative of the modern and contemporary Iranian story.
“But it is also important to recall that Persian literature has a much wider scope, historically, than that of modern and contemporary Iranian literature, given the fact that both today’s Afghanistan and Tajikistan were part of historic Persia,” Al-Sheikh noted. Afghanistan split off in the mid-18th century while Tajikistan fell under the Russian rule in the mid-19th century during the Russo-Persian wars that went on from the 17th until the 19th century, granting Russia significant territorial gains from the Safavid and Qajar empires. With such a broad geographic scope, literary production was definitely very diverse,” she noted. Today, she added, it is always important to look at contemporary Afghani literature alongside with contemporary Iranian literature. “Equally, it is important to approach contemporary Afghani literature beyond a few famous titles,” she said. “In general, it is wrong to assume that only those novelists who live in the West reflect the socio-political issues faced by Iranians and Afghans of today,” Al-Sheikh said. “There are representations of the realities of both societies in the works of novelists living in their homelands, often more than direct political criticism; some have actually inspired very impressive films.”
Of the contemporary Afghani authors, Al-Sheikh said the Arabic reading audience seem to be familiar only with a very few such as the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, with his acclaimed English-language best-sellers The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, published in 2003 and 2007, respectively, and which reflect on the tumultuous politics of Afghanistan from a father-son and a mother-daughter perspective. But there are others who are really very good even if they are not known to our readers, like Spojami Zaryab and Homeira Qaderi. Zaryab was born in Kabul in the middle of the 20th century and her work was published in Afghanistan before the Russian invasion of 1979. However, Zaryab was forced to go into exile in France in 1991, two years after the end of the Russian invasion. Of a later generation, Qaderi was born in 1980, also in Kabul. Living under the rule of the Taliban, Qaderi had to move to Iran to pursue her education before she ended up as a professor in Tehran. Having joined the 2009 demonstrations against the Iranian government, Qaderi was expelled from Iran. She later moved to India where she received her PhD at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, with a dissertation that focused on the plight of women during occupation and immigration.
“Clearly, one cannot compare the situation of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, who are actually prohibiting girls’ education and women’s movement, to that of women in Iran, and this difference is certainly reflected in the literary production of novelists in both countries and also in their choice of where to live,” Al-Sheikh said. “In all cases, politics have had a great influence on Persian literature as a whole and on contemporary Iranian, and for that matter Afghani, literature. There are so many works that carry very poignant but subtle political criticism, both in the case of contemporary Iran and Afghanistan.” There are also some great works that reflect on the decade of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the eight-year Iran-Iraq War that started in 1980. “Societal changes, opposition to foreign intervention and occupation and the aspirations to freedom are all reflected in the works of novelists in both countries,” Al-Sheikh stated. “Of course one cannot forget the sad story of Nadia Anjuman, the Afghani poet who was born in 1980 in Herat and died at the age of 24 after being severely beaten by her husband due to Taliban’s tolerance of violence against women. Overall, I think there are so many interesting titles from the volumes of Persian literature, both old and new, that merit a lot more attention from publishers in Egypt. Many translations have already been made by scholars and they just need to be published.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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