Decolonizing Arabic Literary Studies

Introduction 

Recent efforts to decolonize Arabic literary studies are informed by a central question: how does one go about studying Arabic literature, or any non-Western literary tradition for that matter, without conforming to the bounds of Western-dominated interpretative tools? What do we gain, and what do we lose, by attempting to forego positivist methods or Western theoretical literary frameworks? This essay aims to illustrate the dilemmas that scholars of Arabic literature face on this matter, and points to recent promising developments in the field, which manage to forge new methods of engagement that move beyond this binary approach.

The study of Arabic literature since the 19^th century, during the period known as the nahda or the Arab Renaissance, was already influenced, both explicitly and implicitly, by Orientalist models of study. Adopting prevalent academic approaches from the 18^th century to their literary and cultural analyses, European Orientalists engaged non-Western texts from a positivist framework, striving “to classify Man and Nature into [universal] types.”¹ This means that they studied texts in ways that enabled their conclusions to be considered “objective science.”² For this purpose, they employed philology, the classification and comparison of languages and their historical developments over time.³ This dichotomy was not simply taxonomical, that is, a classification and collection of knowledge, but rather, it was a means of creating a “Self” and an “Other.” In literary studies, therefore, Orientalism emerged as a “refinement” of the positivist tradition, which classified actors as Self or Other.⁴

With the development of the field of comparative literature in the United States, students and scholars of Arabic literature saw a way out of Orientalist modes of analysis.⁵ Moving away from positivist models of scholarship, Western academics enlisted tools of theoretical inquiry to engage with Arabic texts. Yet, applying Western theory to non-Western texts was also regarded as a kind of imperialism, a reading over the tradition. As Tarek El-Ariss, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College, argues, it was as if the West could exist theoretically, and its models universally applicable, while the East could only exist as a particular example or instance that is not generalizable.⁶ Non-Western texts were read in a sociological or anthropological vein, as a window into the so-called Eastern psyche, including its politics and society.⁷

For scholars of Arabic literature, this is the double bind at the crux of decolonizing the field: should we be positivist, thus positioning ourselves within an Orientalist genealogy, or should we be theoretical, and risk embodying the colonial frameworks which we aim to move away from?

Education Reform in 19^th Century Egypt 

In 1826, Rifa’a Rafi al-Tahtawi, an Egyptian imam, was sent on “one of the first [Egyptian] educational missions to France,” sponsored by Muhammad Ali Pasha.⁸ Tahtawi’s job description was limited; he was to be a murshid, a religious guide, for other members of the mission so that “they would not lose their faith and moral compass in the West.”⁹ Once in France, however, Tahtawi instead studied French and translated French texts. When he returned to Egypt, he eventually founded, in 1835, Madrasat al-Alsun, or the School of Languages.¹⁰

This project was part of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s larger plan of “modernizing” Egypt. Western models, especially French ones, enchanted him, and he borrowed from existing French models regularly during his rule.¹¹ A central element of his modernization project involved reforming the Egyptian education system, supported by expeditions to the West, such as the one in which Tahtawi participated. Education was one of the systems most pervasively affected by colonization. Uneven knowledge exchange between Europe and the Arab world meant that the education system in the latter, beginning with Egypt, was deeply transformed by Western thought structures, and their effects lasted long after the withdrawal of colonial powers from their colonies. While Arabs visited Europe and Europeans visited the Arab world, cultural models flowed in one direction only. Europeans traveled to impart their supposed “superior” systems and thought to the Arabs.¹²

In these ways, the “modern” educational systems in the Arab world were born in translation, in between languages and cultures. Arabs, however, were not merely passive recipients of European thought. Recent academic work in Arabic literature has used translation to challenge this notion of passivity.¹³ Scholars have shown that Arab thinkers and writers adapted European thought, and translated it into familiar idioms, and thus were active negotiators in the reception process. Nevertheless, while Arab thinkers in the 19^th century were not “clear vessel[s] [who] mediate[d] the passage of the original word to its target text,”¹⁴ power dynamics were incredibly imbalanced. On a systemic level, European models became dominant.

Modern Arabic Literature in the Early 20^th Century 

The Europeanization of the educational system in the Arab world was also reflected in Arab intellectuals’ scholarly practice, whose works were at times informed by European scholarship. For instance, at the cusp of the 20^th century, Jurji Zaydan, a prominent Arab intellectual, wrote Tarikh ādāb al-lugha al-‘arabiyya, that is, The History of Arabic Language Arts.¹⁵ Inspired by Orientalist methods, most notably that of Carl Brockelmann, Zaydan wrote a complete history of Arabic literature. Although “it is unclear whether or not Zaydan would have actually been able to read the German sources,”¹⁶ he nonetheless does reference them in his introduction, thus situating himself within an Orientalist genealogy. Notably, instead of using the singular Arabic word for literature, adab, in his title, Zaydan uses the plural, ādāb, or literary arts. This plural form mimics the German word Lit(t)eratur, ¹⁷ utilized in the German title of Brockelmann’s History of the Arabic Written Tradition, ¹⁸ “which addresses anything written in Arabic,” and not just “literature” in its strict English definition.¹⁹

By the early decades of the 20^th century, Westernization and modernization were often conflated. With the continued secularization of education, for example, Taha Husayn—one of the pioneering figures in the study of Arabic literature who was known as the “Dean of Arabic Letters”—called for a “scientific” approach to literature in order to modernize the field,²⁰ following in Zaydan’s steps. Husayn was the author of many foundational works in modern Arabic literary studies, such as On Pre-Islamic Poetry in 1926, With Al-Mutanabbi in 1936, and various studies of the Arabic poet Abu Al-Ala’ Al-Ma’arri. In The Future of Culture in Egypt, published in 1938, he stated that “while Europe moved forward, ‘the East started its decline, and overdid its decline, until it almost lost its rational character. Then Egypt awoke, and with it the Near East.’”²¹

Although Husayn’s relationship to Arab culture was complex, especially in his fictional work and translations into Arabic,²² he still very much celebrated Europe and European methods of study. Often, though not always, he also held the modern West on a pedestal vis-à-vis the modern East.²³ As the aforementioned quote illustrates, he spoke regularly of a long-lost glorious East before the rise of the West. 

Considering that Husayn has been portrayed as a pioneer in promoting the study of Arabic literature, it is possible to conclude that the field within its own context has been plagued by a certain methodological problem: an insistence on European, “scientific” approaches to literature. Thus, modern Arabic literary studies cannot be understood independently from its colonial influences.

Looking Ahead 

A cursory look at the latest publications in Arabic literature, especially modern literature, does not yield a drastically different picture regarding the dominance of Western theories. Theorists like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin still populate, even crowd, Arabic scholars’ footnotes. This is not likely to change anytime soon, and it is not, in principle, a negative feature of these studies. Often, these theories illuminate certain texts, and indeed, the work of post-structuralist, postcolonial, and Marxist thinkers interrogates, and often dismantles, power structures, including unequal epistemic relations between “East” and “West.”

That said, there is a new wave in international scholarship that seeks to uncover the existing Arabic literary heritage, particularly the theoretical one. Lara Harb, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, for instance, studies Arabic theorists from the medieval period in her recent book Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature.²⁴ She describes how medieval critics, chief among them Abd Al-Qahir Al-Jurjani, judged language. She argues that underlying various critics’ views on Arabic literature, especially poetry, is an aesthetic of wonder.²⁵ The value of Harb’s argument lies inasmuch in her unearthing of this critical corpus as in her assertion that Arab civilizations had theories of their own. 

This call towards excavating the Arabic literary critical tradition is part of a more general trend to make Arabic texts, whether theoretical or not, better understood and widely available. The most prominent example in this regard is the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute’s Library of Arabic Literature (LAL). “A corpus, not a canon (nor an anthology)” of Arabic texts accompanied by English translations,²⁶ LAL publishes everything from canonical texts and translations to hitherto unknown texts beyond the confines of the field, such as The Discourses by the 17^th century Maghrebi scholar al-Hasan al-Yusi.²⁷ In so doing, LAL seeks to introduce otherwise obscure texts to a larger group of readers, in both Arabic and English.

Thus, the field seems to be moving forward in two directions. First, we continue to see an engagement with European theory in an attempt to show that the Arabic context is generalizable. As El-Ariss has argued, we are moving away from “applying” European theory to Arabic texts toward a different engagement model that puts texts and contexts in conversation.²⁸ A noteworthy example he mentions is the work of the intellectual historian Omnia El Shakry, who in her book The Arabic Freud, shows how the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was inspired by Sufism.²⁹ By exposing this “traffic” of ideas,³⁰ we are able to move away from a place where the Arabic context is non-generalizable to a place where it is on par with other literary studies. A second direction is not so much interested in Euro-American theory. Instead, it seeks to revise Arabic textual anthologies, whether theoretical or otherwise. Rather than turning to European theoretical work, scholars turn to understudied Arabic texts, some of which have also been misinterpreted or misread over the years.

Conclusion

As scholars wrestle with the legacy of Orientalism, and disagree about what a “new Arabic literary studies” might look like in terms of method and canon, productive solutions are constantly sought and often achieved. As a student of Arabic literature myself, I am optimistic about where the field is going. There are, however, a number of hurdles, including decreased funding for the humanities, an increase in right-wing rhetoric that vilifies Arabs, and hence their culture, and an overall shift, especially in the Arab world, away from the humanities and toward the sciences, engineering, and economics. 

Moving forward, it is my hope that scholars in the West place more effort in engaging with scholars from the Arab world. It is one thing to speak about the Arab world, but a completely different thing to be in conversation with it. If the goal is to decolonize Arabic literary studies and steer away from hegemonic Western modes of engagement, then what better way to do so than by learning from those who have been critically considering the relationship between context and interpretation for decades?

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The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute.