From Gardens of Knowledge to Ezbekiyya after Midnight: The Novel and the Arabic Press from Beirut to Cairo, 1870-1892

Abstract

Late 19th-century Beirut and Cairo were capitals of Arabic literary production and press activity. A period, oft deemed a nahḍa, that witnessed the advent of the novel form or riwāya in Arabic, this was also the moment of intensified French and British imperial involvement in the region, and the concomitant industrialization of Beirut's silk and Egypt's cotton markets. This article argues that, through the novels published in and promoted through the region's burgeoning private journals and newspapers, editors and novelists revived the literary trope of the garden of knowledge as a spatial metaphor for the Arabic reading public. While the 1870s in Beirut began as a hopeful decade—the civil war of 1860 buried in the fortunes being made off Mt Lebanon's mulberry orchards—by 1890s Cairo these Edenic hopes were replaced by a sense of melancholy in the face of rampant speculation, accumulating in the gardens of Ezbekiyya. Reading two novels, Salīm al-Bustānī's 1870 al-Huyām fī-jinān al-Shām and Jurjī Zaydān's 1892 Asīr al-mutamahdī, against the literary and press activities of the Bustānī family's al-Jinān, Zaydān's al-Hilāl, Khalīl al-Khūrī's Hadīqat al-akhbār, Yūsuf al-Shalfūn's Al-Zahrah, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī's Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq, and Fāris Nimr and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf's al-Muqtaṭaf, this article offers a literary history of speculation and capital for late 19th-century Arabic.

Acknowledgements

This paper is deeply indebted to the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Research Center in Egypt in Cairo.

Notes

1. The phrase is Benedict Anderson's. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

2. Roger Allen calls upon literary historians of Arabic narrative to ‘investigate continuities alongside ruptures’ in a move away from the ‘developmental model’ he sees epitomized ‘in the way in which Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal's novel, Zaynab, has been evaluated.’ Allen, ‘Rewriting Literary History,’ 253.

3. The term in this period is decisively riwāya, offering further evidence of the limits of Charles Pellat's claims to the novel being qiṣṣa in Arabic. On this point, see Allen, ‘Narrative Genre and Nomenclature,’ 213. Riwāyāt in Arabic are figured as generic equivalents to the European literary production being translated, albeit not without their differences, both historically and otherwise. Readers of the late nineteenth century as well as our own contemporary moment could take this as an invitation to reconsider how Arabic inherits both the European novel and that genre's own indebtedness to Arabic popular story cycles, and most especially Alf layla wa-layla. Rastegar, ‘Literary Modernity,’ 359. See also Rastegar, Literary Modernity. For more on Salīm al-Bustānī and Jurjī Zaydān as early Arabic novelists, see Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity; and Moosa, Origins of Modern Arabic. Fiction.

4. On the changing status of adab, see Allan, ‘How Adab Became Literary.’

5. See Holt, ‘Narrative and Reading Public.’

6. For the proceedings of the Syrian Scientific Society, mailed periodically in the late 1860s to members, see Khūrī, Aʿmāl.

7. Profuse thanks are due to Christine Boustany, Nora Boustany, Kamran Rastegar and Christine Lindner for their help in locating biographical information regarding Adelaide. In Holt, ‘Narrative and Reading Public,’ I suggested that Adelaide may have been a pen name used by Salīm al-Bustānī to encourage women readers to write. Adelaide was in fact real, ‘Hanrī wa Amīliyā’ standing as her only published riwāya.

8. Adelaide al-Bustānī, ‘Hanrī wa Amīliyā,’al-Jinān 13 (1870): 407.

9. Mariana Marrāsh responded to Adelaide al-Bustānī's invitation to enter the gate of al-Jinān and seconded her call: ‘Let us then gird ourselves with wisdom and understanding, and robe ourselves with true politeness and meakness, and be crowned with the flowers of the “jenan” of knowledge now open to us.’ Translation from Jessup, Women of the Arabs, 163.

10. See some of the titles listed in Orfali, ‘Sketch Map of Arabic Poetry.’ I am indebted to Bilal Orfali for his research and guidance on an earlier Arabic tradition of cultivating gardens of knowledge.

11. Allen, ‘Narrative Genre and Nomenclature,’ 211.

12. This and several other excerpts cited in the body of this article will be included in an anthology of nahḍa texts in translation. El-Ariss, The Arab Renaissance.

13. Consider Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan al-Kirmānī al-Sīrjānī's (d. ca. 470/1077) Kitāb al-Bayāḍ wa-l-sawād min khaṣāʾiṣ ḥikam al-ʿibād fī naʿt al-murīd wa-l-murād, an anthology of Sufi anecdotes that includes the following: ‘Some of the poor said: If you see a poor [man] leave his food know that he has succumbed to thought, and if you see him return to it know that he is in the garden of knowledge [ḥadīqat al-maʿrifa].’ Orfali and Saab, eds. Sufism, Black and White, 154.

14. Quoted in Orfali, ‘Art of the Muqaddima,’ 189.

15. Ibid., 194.

16. Quoted in Ibid., 193–194.

17. B. al-Bustānī, Dāʾirat al-maʿārif, 559.

18. ‘Dāʾirat al-maʿārif li-l-Bustānī.’ al-Hilāl 7, no. 1 (1 October 1898), 24. Jurjī Zaydān would include Dāʾirat al-maʿārif among his footnoted sources in historical novels such as Fatāt Ghassān (serialized in al-Hilāl's fifth year, 1896/97).

19. Ibn Jubayr, a Muslim traveler from al-Andalus visiting the gardens of Damascus in the late 12th century, is quoted to have said: ‘By Allah, they spoke truth who said, “If Paradise be on earth it is Damascus without a doubt; and if it be in Heaven, Damascus is its earthly counterpart and equivalent.”’ Quoted in Lehrman, Earthly Paradise, 190.

20. ‘Al-Jinān,’ al-Jinān 1, no. 22 (1870): 686–687.

21. For more on allegory, melancholy and finance capital, see Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, especially Chapter 8.

22. Sehnaoui, L'occidentalisation de Beyrouth; and Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Beirut.

23. S. al-Bustānī, ‘al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām,' al-Jinān 1, no. 2 (January 1870): 59.

24. Ibid., 56.

25. See Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, on smoking in the works of Salīm al-Bustānī.

26. S. al-Bustānī, ‘al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām,' al-Jinān 1, no. 2 (January 1870): 60.

27. Ibid., 61.

28. S. al-Bustānī, ‘al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām,’ al-Jinān 1, no. 15 (1870): 479; and Al-Jinān 1, no. 16 (1870): 506.

29. ‘Jabal Lubnān,’ al-Jinān 1, no. 10 (1870): 300.

30. S. al-Bustānī, ‘al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām,’ al-Jinān 1, no. 10 (1870): 313.

31. ‘Wilāyat Sūriyya,’ al-Jinān 1, no. 11 (1870): 326.

32. El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity, 64.

33. Benjamin, ‘Paris.’

34. See the fourth volume of Zaydān, Tārīkh ādāb al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya, written in 1914.

35. ‘Muʾallafāt Jurjī Zaydān,’ al-Hilāl 1, no. 4 (December 1892, first edition): 192.

36. Zaydān, Asīr al-mutamahdī (originally published by Maṭbaʿat al-Hilāl and advertised for sale in al-Hilal).

37. Ibid., 9.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 11.

40. Notably, al-Jinān does not make the list.

41. On women writers and the Arabic press in late 19th-century Egypt, see Baron, Booth and Cannon; on Syria, see Zachs and Jessup.

42. Zaydān, Asīr al-mutamahdī, 12.

43. Ibid., 14.

44. Ibid., 12.

45. In this respect, Asīr al-mutamahdī stands as a literary augury, and a rather subdued one at that, of Ezbekiyya at the turn of the century in Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī's Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām aw fatra min al-zaman, first published serially in al-Muwayliḥī's Miṣbāḥ al-sharq from 1898 through the end of the century, with the first book edition appearing in Cairo in 1907. See in particular chapter twenty-four in al-Muwayliḥī Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām on the umdah in the garden, and his ensuing late-night escapades in the taverns, clubs and theater encircling the garden of Ezbekiyya. Allen, A Period of Time.

46. Zaydān, Asīr al-mutamahdī, 20.

47. ‘Shajarat Ādam,’ al-Hilāl 4, no. 9 (1 January 1896): 341.

48. Ibid.

49. Abu Lughod, ‘Tale of Two Cities’, 444.

50. See Zaydān, Yawmiyyāt riḥla baḥriyya.

51. Zaydān, Asīr al-mutamahdī, 39; 89; 109; 119; 121; and 145.

52. Ibid., 22.

53. See his introduction to his third serialized novel. Zaydān, Fatāt Ghassān, al-Hilāl 5, no. 1 (1 September 1896).