This paper compares three different cases made by Arab literary critics for al-adib al-multazim, “the committed author.” Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument that writers must take up the call of engagement or commitment, they each inflected the concept with a different temporal orientation to reflect their sense of the action required by the anticolonial nationalist struggle. Taha Husayn rejected the concept, arguing that it did not do justice to the enduring relevance of writers from the past. Commitment would necessarily lead writers to a dogmatic and detached understanding of the present. ‘Abd al-Azim Anis and Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim criticized the tendency they saw in both Husayn and more philosophically-minded existentialists like ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi to privilege the exploration of individual interiority. Such a project could only reproduce the general cultural malaise with which they thought contemporary Egypt was beset; in its place they suggested a literature oriented toward instilling hope in readers about the possibility for a more just future. Suhayl Idris, finally, linked commitment to the now-time of the anticolonial struggle and set it against the temporizing of colonial administrators. He suggested that literature should express the individual protagonist’s break with tradition and his or her dedication to the immediate goal of self-emancipation. Husayn’s focus on the past, Anis and al-‘Alim’s future orientation, and Idris’s presentism constituted three different interpretations of the ground that should sustain the efforts of writers—and by extension political activists—in their contemporary struggles to found an autonomous sphere for themselves. In foregrounding these differences, I draw two conclusions. The first is that social realism—-associated with Anis and al-Alim’s futural disposition—-won out over Husayn’s traditional aestheticism and Idris’s novel of psychic interiority because only it seemed to offer an alternative to the generalized impasse in the present. The second is that commitment fell out of fashion not because of Sartre’s equivocations on Palestinian independence, as is usually suggested, but because all of the Arab interpretations posited a transitive rather than a reflexive notion of committed action. When good-faith efforts to realize Palestinian independence came to naught, Arab intellectuals turned to experimental aesthetics and searching self-inquiry in order to bring the subject of action into question.

In 1959, an obscure graduate student from Beirut hit on a great idea as he scrambled to find a job. The time has never been as opportune to embrace his idea of creating a publishing house to propagate his Ba?thist ideology. Bashir al-Daouk, a scion of a Sunni family whose members occupied high ranking positions in Lebanon’s government, was only 27-years-old when he set out to put together Dar al-Tali?a, one of the most esteemed publishing houses in the Arabic speaking world. Between 1959-1999 Dar al-Tali?a printed more than 1100 titles, forging a place of honor among an expanding print industry. With clear-eyed judgement, Bashir al-Daouk was able to enlist the sharpest minds of time, young and established scholars, to get their works published in his newfound print. In its first decade Dar al-Tali?a emerged as an epicenter of revolutionary thought, marked by the affiliation of noticeable scholars: Nizar Qabbani, Nadim al-Bitar, Sadiq Jalal al ?Azm, Costantin Zuriq, Michael ?Aflaq, Sa?dun Hammadi, Yassin al-Hafiz, Ilyas Murqus and many other intellectuals with unmistakable Marxist bent. While the place of Dar al-Tali?a is central to the formation of Arab thought especially in the wake of the 1967 war, it has been overlooked in the explorations of the intellectual life in the Arab world. Rather than narrowly viewing it as merely publishing house, this paper aims at elaborating on this print as a powerhouse of innovative ideas out of which secular sentiments emerged. Al-Tali?a’s remarkable translations were not the primary reason for its thriving; its role in shaping and defining the climate of thought for more than two decades set this publishing house apart. Looking at the history of the books and writers of this publication, Dar al-Tali?a opens before historian of intellectual thought new vistas through which to write and revisit Arab intellectual history. Dar al-Tali?a created the most compelling corpus of works that fostered a secular impulse among Arab intellectuals. In its first decade, al-Tali?a had published works that undermined a longstanding tradition of writing, replacing it with writing practices teeming with ideological reflection. Much of these publications were not only transgressive but also tested the limits of the prevailing intellectual imagination. It was a striking departure from decades of writing orthodoxy. The study of Dar al-Tali’a becomes inevitable as an educational monument without which it is impossible to account for the dynamics that invigorates Arab intellectual landscape.

In a time when we are witnessing a seemingly unprecedented abundance of information, the lack of access to post 1952 historical archives in Egypt is still an issue. With the events of 2011, there emerged a discussion in the Egyptian public sphere of what kind of historical narratives can be circulated that counter official histories, in addition to what forms of subjectivity resulted from these previous narratives. Little is written on Arabic historical fiction, despite its persistence as a genre in modern times from the works of Jurj? Zayd?n right up to Rab?? J?ber. Within a comparative framework, I will be looking at two novels Faraj (2008) by the Egyptian writer Radwa ?Ash?r, and Nis?? l-Karant?na (2013) [The Women of Karantina] by another Egyptian writer N??il a?-??kh?. At their core, both novels are “Narratives on history” making history as much the subject of enquiry, as incorporating historical incidents. Although, the novels were published only five years apart, their respective writers belong to two different generations within the Egyptian literary scene. On the one hand, Radwa ?Ash?r is considered to be one of the 1970’s generation of writers who embraced the value of Adab al-?Iltiz?m [committed writing]. On the other hand, a?-??kh? is considered to be one of a generation of writers that has been termed as either the millennial writers or the “Two thousanders” whose writing has been described as postmodernist or metamodernist. Both novels span a period of around sixty years and three different generations; ?Ash?r’s novel starts in the 1950’s and ends with the American occupation of Iraq in 2003, while a?-??kh?’s novel covers the years from 2004 and projects into the future till 2064. In my paper, I will argue that these two novels show a drastic shift in consciousness between these two generations. While in Faraj, we see the notion of “speaking truth to power” and reclaiming the right to the unofficial histories of the oppressed, in Nis?? l-Karant?na, we see the unsettling of the very notion of power and facts and thus in many ways subverting our sense of what constitutes history and its importance. By doing this, I will explore how these perceptions can be understood within the larger context of the writers’ generations’ socio-political and cultural milieu and aesthetics and how each writer differently conceives of interpersonal subjectivity and responsibility, certain aspects of history and its constitutive role in subject formation.

Since nineteenth century, Iranian writers and intellectuals have been preoccupied with the question of Iran’s appropriation of European model of modernism and political nationalism, at the center of which lies a new understanding of the meaning of time and space. Anderson in Imagined Communities famously calls the modern nation a “sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous empty time.” By employing Chatterjee’s concept of heterogeneous time, i.e. co-presence of multiple times, and engaging in discursive analyses of representation of myth, history and modernity, the paper argues that such a conception of linear calendrical time is challenged and a local Iranian alternative is presented in Ja’far Modarres Sadeqi’s novels, especially Nakoja-abad (1990). In Nakoja-abad, the protagonists Ardashir and Dara traverse between two times and spaces disrupting the constant, stable and organized chronotope of linear progression. The modern day narrator (in Reza Shah’s period) is stranded in a deserted place during one of his trips back to Tehran because his car, symbol of the fast-paced ‘mechanical’ modern life, runs out of fuel. He walks behind a hill looking for one of his co-travelers and finds himself lost in the ancient world. The road, the car, the ‘modern world’ he was in just moments ago, all disappear; he miserably fails to make a return despite circling around the hill numerous times. The moment he enters the antiquity, his watch stops working, signifying beginning of a new time—disrupted and away from the modern calendrical time based on monotonous second, minutes and hours, to a cyclic time counted by days, nights and the moon. In the new time-space, he meets one of the ancient Iranian kings Dara. Later, the novel blurs the ancient and modern times so much that Dara and his son travels between the two ages back and forth without any obstacle. The homogenous empty time that linearly connects past, present and future gives way to a temporal labyrinth as the novel’s characters crisscross the two worlds, historically situated in different ages. In doing so, the novel presents the Iranian nation simultaneously living in multiple, traditional and modern, times, called by Chatterjee 'heterogeneous time of modernity' and offers—through the mediation of material artefacts, cultural symbols, and literary imageries— new alternative lived realities of modernity at its own national indigenous terms. Safar-i Kasra (1989) and Kallah-i Asb (1991) are among other novels by Sadeqi that portrays heterogeneity of Iranian modernity.