In an attempt to resurrect pre-modern national histories and cultural memories of peaceful co-existence, Hoda Barakat’s The Tiller of Waters (1998) unearths the buried city of ancient Beirut through the protagonist’s exploration of the city’s underground tunnels and the history of fabric. The story of the buried city intertwines with the national narrative of destruction, dispossession, and domination. Furthermore, it reflects a refusal of the repressive, possessive, and essentialist form of modern day articulations of nationalism and statehood. By resurrecting the buried memories, the interchangeability of fabric, fabrication, and the claims of nationalism, this novel’s anti-hero resurrects multiple histories of the buried city of pre-civil war Beirut, thereby reconstituting an all-inclusive national history that, just like fabric, acknowledges the vertical and horizontal, in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s words, “rhizomatic” threads of national narrative. Unlike other studies that emphasized the one–dimensional historicity of the protagonist’s narration, or evoking in Homi Bhabha’s style, the “marginality” of his positioning, I contend that he articulates an effective, rhizomatic narrative stance. By tapping into the power of the rhizome in intersecting past and present, in forging national relationships based on alliances rather than ethnic affiliations, and in retrieving latent traumas, Barakat resurrects the lost memory of the peace-loving voice of pre-war Beirut. This articulation bespeaks of a desire to retrieve layers of lost cultural memory that predates war trauma and authoritarian regimes intent on erasing traces of difference, and on dominating the national scene. References to trauma theory’s employment of personal and national traumas as well as recent interviews with the author will inform the findings of this research.

Assia Djebar’s novel, Far from Madina, retells the stories of the community of women who appear on the margins of the earliest sources of Islamic history from a contemporary Muslim feminist’s perspective. In the work, Djebar uses formal elements of early Islamic historiography and relies upon classical Sunni sources. These techniques place her novel in conversation with classical Islamic traditions and bring legitimacy to her subversive project which aims to shift the boundaries of that canon. Djebar improvises female voices in an effort to restore female agency and subjectivity to the historical narrative and draws portraits of women who posed vocal and direct challenges to authority. This essay examines Djebar’s overall project in Far from Madina and treatment of Fatima in particular. I consider Djebar’s selection of classical sources and compare the earliest canonical Sunni renderings of Fatima and those found in the novel. I argue that the vision of empowered women in the first Muslim community posited in Far from Madina destabilizes the ideal of gender identity constructed in early Islamic historiography. Though crafted in relation to classical sources, Djebar’s critique of gender identity is also addressed to the discourses and institutions of Islamic authority that evolved over the centuries and that continue to delineate narrow roles for women, up to and including contemporary regimes. This study argues that by grounding her critique of circulating discourses on Muslim women within a project that appropriates classical canonical Sunni historiography, Djebar refuses the disjunction between feminism and Islam, critiquing normative Islamic discourse on women in contemporary Algeria without framing the conflict in terms of an East/West or a religious/secular binary. Far from Madina focuses on the moment after the death of the Prophet when the Muslim community was left to interpret the scripture and collectively recall the words and deeds of Prophet. Djebar constructs the novel around the question of what role Muslim women would play in this process which mirrors her own choice to write the novel and embraces her role as witness and transmitter of the stories of these early women. This essay will examine the reflexive and autobiographical nature of Far from Madina and examine how Djebar’s narrative strategies and hermeneutical approach facilitate the articulation of identity through difference. I will argue that the narrative can be read as Djebar’s performance of contemporary Muslim identity.

Title: The City and the Beast: The Relationship between Intellectuals and the Authorities As Reflected in Mid-Twentieth-Century Iraqi Literature A historical examination of the relationship between intellectuals, particularly those with Leftist views, and the Iraqi regime in the mid-twentieth century reveals tensions and persecution, even torture and public executions. I propose to examine whether and how this state of affairs is reflected in works of literature beyond mere narrative documentation; in particular, I wish to inquire into the unique artistic devices used by two prominent Iraqi writers in the mid-twentieth century, Ghaib Tu'ma Farman (1927-1990) and Buland al-Haydari (1926-1996) in order to describe life under a repressive regime. The research method consists of close reading and a textual criticism that examines not only the themes and the conceptual aspects of the works in question, but also the artistic devices chosen by the authors and the intended objectives of using these devices. I choose to focus on two prominent elements in their works that will be exemplified in the course of the lecture: their attitude towards the city, and their extensive use of imagery taken from the animal world in their works, and the purposes of both. The sources that were examined for this study consist of Farman's novels and short stories as well as the collected works of Buland al-Haydari. The latter has to date received only scant scholarly attention, and the present study thus has the additional advantage of highlighting al-Haydari's methods for dealing with the regime in his works, in comparison with his contemporary Farman. The study shows that the ideological facet in the works of these two writers conforms to the way they perceive the city, its past and its future, and reveals a close connection between their charged relationship with the regime and the imagery that they choose to use.

“It is always dangerous to present intellectuals in the novel,” warns one of Gide’s characters in a 1925 novel. “They bore the reader to death.” Arabic novelists could not have heeded this warning any less. Egyptian novels, from Haykal’s Zaynab (1911) to al- Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (2002) and beyond, teem with intellectuals, much like their contemporaries in other Arab countries, and often with excellent results. This paper is a study of Intellectuals as represented in a selection of Egyptian novels, an analysis of these ‘fictional intellectuals’ and how they figure into the discussion(s) of what/who is an intellectual in modern Arabic thought. The appellation “intellectual” and its Arabic equivalent “muthaqqaf” are relatively new to both Arab and Western writings, fictional and non-fictional alike. One of the paper’s goals is to trace the earliest incidence of the term in Arabic writings and its infiltration into the Arabic novel around the beginning of the twentieth century. Another goal is show the diversity of the representation of the “intellectual” in the Egyptian novel and to contextualize it within the differences in the author’s ideologies and/or generation as well as within the country’s socio-political conditions at the time of the novels’ authorship and publications. The paper draws on the discussions that Edward Said presents in his Representations of the Intellectual, and on the discussions of what constitutes “al-thaqafa” and “al-muthaqqaf,” in Arab society. Such discussions have actively engaged many of Egypt’s thinkers and writers from Taha Hussein and ‘Abbas al-‘Aqqad in the early twentieth century to Najib Mahfuz and Luwis ‘Awad a few decades later and have more recently engaged novelists of the younger generation of novelists, including Ibrahim ‘Abd el-Meguid ‘Alaa al-Aswany, and Hamdy Abu Golayyel. Outside of the novel, the paper draws on the non-fictional writings, published interviews and some interviews that I have personally conducted in 2010/2011. This paper is part of a larger work in progress.

My paper explores the literary process of recasting the space of the Lebanese countryside, and particularly the mythicized northern reaches of Mount Lebanon. The early canonical works of Lebanese fiction, like much of popular and political culture in the pre- and early-Independence period, served to cast the Lebanese mountain as the location of a nostalgically figured idyll. In the writings of Amin Rihani, Jubran Khalil Jubran, Khalil Taqi al-Din, Karam Mulhim Karam, Marun ‘Abbud, and others the spaces of a seemingly timeless yet in fact historically constructed Lebanese pastoral were established. In their romantic fictions and “biographies,” the spaces of a seemingly timeless yet in fact historically constructed pastoral were established. In the first half of my paper I will discuss some of the unifiying narrative strategies of these authors, and the structures of feeling in both fictional narratives and the popular political discourse of this period. This representational posture towards the countryside was continued although considerably complicated by the writers of the mid-twentieth century, and particularly practitioners of the novel. In the novelistic productions of writers such as Y?suf ?abash? al-Ashqar and Tawf?q Y?suf ?Aww?d, the pastoral narrative was often in tension with the counterpastoral, and these spaces began to function textually as the point of opposition to the modern urban formation of Beirut. In light of this Lebanese literary history, I will then offer readings of two contemporary novels, one by Jabbur Douaihy and the other by Hoda Barakat, that treat this same space of Mount Lebanon. The Civil War has certainly served to recode the space of Mount Lebanon, and the texts of Barakat and Douaihy are noticeable for their depiction of violence and deprivation. However, there is more at work than reversal, and these works are not merely counterpastoral. I will argue in my paper that these works can be read as a post-War an effort at literary re-enchantment.