Avant the Avant-Garde: Mikhail Naimy and the Literature of Commitment (al-Iltiz?m) The 1950s witnessed the emergence of a “literature of commitment” in the Arab world, led by writers and critics such as Suhayl Idr?s, ‘Abd al-Ra?m?n al-Sharq?w? and Y?suf Idr?s, who called for and produced realistic fiction that focused on the political, social and moral development of their societies. These writers, inspired by the Sartrean notion of engagement, spurned the notion of art for art’s sake defended by literary figures of the preceding generation, such as ??h? ?usayn and ‘Abb?s Ma?m?d al-‘Aqq?d. The two groups joined in literary debates in the pages of the journal al-?d?b and elsewhere, with the younger, “committed” writers assuming the position of a literary avant-garde. What is seldom acknowledged is that literary commitment was not entirely new to Arab letters in the 1950s. There were writers producing “committed” fiction well before the concept came to dominate Arab literary thought. This paper argues that one of the best examples of a committed Arab writer in the period before commitment became a recognized literary movement was Mikhail Naimy. Though a contemporary of the literary old-guard (Naimy, ??h? ?usayn and al-‘Aqq?d were all born in 1889), Naimy wrote prose, poetry, drama and non-fiction between 1915 and 1930 that any reader of the 1950s or later would recognize as fully committed, both in form and content. Despite the commitment evident in Naimy’s writing, two reasons are suggested for its having gone largely unrecognized. First, Naimy’s committed works of the early 20th century were simply too far ahead of their time to be understood as “committed,” an idea that had yet to become established—or even named—in the Arab world. Second, by the time literary commitment had come to dominate Arab writing, Naimy had moved on intellectually and begun to devote almost all of his writing to spiritual, otherworldly concerns. Thus, not only was Naimy’s early commitment neglected but also, in the 1950s, his spiritual ideas were so at odds with prevailing standards of “commitment” that he seemed, in Salma Jayyusi’s words, “a strange voice coming from another world.” (Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, vol. 1, p. 117 [Brill, 1977])