It is well established that ancient pasts became a major preoccupation of Arab intellectuals in the nineteenth century, as a central theme of “nahda” discourse. As Samah Selim has put it in Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (2019), “nahda discourse was backward looking: to golden ages, lost empires, and pure languages.” According to existing scholarship on this phenomenon — for example in the work of Stephen Sheehi and Shaden Tageldin — figures such as Rifāʿah al-Ṭahṭāwī in Egypt and Buṭrus al-Bustānī in Lebanon sought to develop accounts of history that established a place for their own social and political worlds within a basically European narrative of civilization. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of the historical thought of thinkers like Ṭahṭāwī and Bustānī misses an essential aspect of the historiographical project of the nahda; namely, what I characterize as the territorialization of the past. This was a process whereby territory became the basic unit of historical writing, so that all of the pasts within a defined space, such as Egypt or Greater Syria, assumed significance simply by virtue of their geographic location. This marked a partial shift away from an approach to the past in which concepts of virtue and exemplarity were the basic units of historical inquiry. The discursive importance of highlighting this process is that it illuminates how Arabic historical thought in this period was a counter-hegemonic force: the territorialization of the past was a means of affirming local political power, at least as an ideal, against the incursions of European imperialism. To make this argument, the paper focuses on three works: Miṣbāḥ al-Sārī wa-Nuzhat al-Qarī (1855), a personal memoir-cum-history of Turkey by the Lebanese doctor Ibrahim al-Najjār; Khalīl al-Khūrī’s Kharābāt Sūriyā (1859); and Ṭahṭāwī’s history of ancient Egypt, Anwār Tawfīq al-Jalīl (1868). The paper by no means denies that intensive engagement with European universal history was an important dimension of Arabic historical thought in this period. Indeed, each of these works is in large part a translation of a volume from L’Univers, a contemporary French series of national histories that purported to cover the entire world. The point of the paper is that this engagement did not take the form of simply inserting the Arabs into a basically European story, but that it was an exercise in articulating the need for local power against the threat of domination by Europe.

This paper takes as its subject of analysis the fictional works of three modern Arab writers: Ibrahim al-Koni, Abdelrahman Munif, and Ghassan Kanafani. In particular, I study as desert literature The Bleeding of the Stone, Endings, and All That’s Left to You, written by al-Koni, Munif and Kanafani, respectively. I define those novels in relation to the conceptual triad of modernity, the nation-state, and the novel, delineating how they depart from, and challenge, the most sustainable theorizations of the three nodes of the triad. Collectively, these novels challenge ontological definitions of modernity that either locate it in a specific geographical area or describe it according to a certain set of technological advances. Instead, they promote a relational understanding of modernity in which alterity is not necessarily key to the encounter with the other. This way, modernity becomes forever restless, sliding, resisting settling down, much like the desert itself. In addition, these novels reject the expectations of politically committed and nationalistic literature often governing postcolonial contexts. Rather, they complicate the conception of the nation-state and hardly lend themselves to a nationalistic allegorical reading. Moreover, the novels of al-Koni, Munif and Kanafani present serious contests to generic and formalistic conventions of the novel, especially in its realist strain. Rather, they employ a wide array of aesthetics, most notably intertextuality, magical realism, palimpsestic time, storytelling, and border aesthetics, that are informed by the desert, both as a topographical and conceptual space. In this sense, these novels establish an antidote to what Aidan Tynan calls “wasteland aesthetics,” in which the desert functions as a speculative terrain against which modern Western literature and philosophy test themselves. Reading these desert novels as world literature, I dwell on the challenges that the novels in question bring to the Eurocentric assumptions that continue to predominate in the field, especially the work of Franco Moretti, Fredric Jameson, John Updike, and others.

Literary scholars have yet to explore the significance of architecture and real estate in twenty-first century Arab detective novels. An investigation into how Arab authors engage with the themes of urban crime, political-economic corruption, social inequity, and real estate investment could reveal more about a new trend in Arab fiction where authors write about real estate and the politics of space. In this presentation, I analyze Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace (Tawq al-Hamam 2010), a detective novel that explores the moral landscape of commercialization and gentrification in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. I argue that the novel interrogates the relationship between selfhood and the built environment by staging the tension between an individualist and elitist real estate market and a collectivist desire to preserve the historical built environment where socio-economic heterogeneity can exist. One way Alem stages this tension is by using corporeality--corpses and bodily decay--to signify the death of historical, communal space and the birth of commercial space for the elite. Alem navigates epistemological boundaries to answer the question How does the social--social ideologies like individualism, elitism, and collectivism--get mapped, built, or unbuilt by the built environment? The built environment’s mapping of the social is accompanied by the novel’s narrative techniques, which also map the social through polyphonic narration and multi-textuality. Alem’s polyphonic and multi-textual novel departs from the individualism of the traditional detective novel--where the singular detective takes responsibility for solving a single case--in favor of a collectivism in which multiple characters aim to solve a variety of cases. This polyphony and multi-textuality ultimately challenges the reader’s ability to imagine the social when the social has been mapped onto a built environment made by and for the individualist elite. My findings suggest literary scholarship on the Arab detective novel would benefit from a closer look at the relationship between narrative form and spatial politics, especially given the detective genre’s investment in mapping social ideologies. Throughout my study, I employ postcolonial critique to understand how this narrative about state collusion in real estate schemes echoes larger narratives about imperial state control. Finally, I briefly suggest how my analysis of Alem’s novel applies to other Arab detective novels, such as Ahmed Naji’s Using Life (Istikhdam al-haya 2014).