Born in a Greek Orthodox Christian family in Lebanon, Jurji Zaidan (1861–1914) is responsible for establishing fiction pertaining to the Islamic past as a prominent genre in modern Arabic literature. His work was part of a widespread literary cultural movement called the Nahda (Awakening, Arising, or Renaissance) that arose in Arabic-speaking societies in the wake of European colonial expansion and worldwide socioeconomic dominance during the nineteenth century.
The Nahda grew through authors who urged local reforms while also resisting European hegemony. Its proponents used the rapidly expanding popular press, and print more generally, as means to shape public opinion. Print was a key technology to broadcast new ideas and undertake polemics within societies as well as across nations and empires. Moreover, the forms print took—newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and relatively cheap books—spurred the creation of a new literary idiom for the written language that is today called Modern Standard Arabic.
Postcard showing the doorway to the Mouski Bazaars in Cairo (early twentieth century).
Lehnert & Landrock, Cairo, 1116
The Nahda was well underway by the time Zaidan came of age, and he eventually became regarded as one of its most influential proponents. He began his higher education as a medical student in the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut (now the American University of Beirut). His interest in literature and social issues led him to learn French, English, and German, enabling him access to global currents of ideas spreading at ever higher speeds due to new technologies.
Having spent some time in Egypt and Europe already, he emigrated to Egypt permanently in 1883, a year after the British invaded and occupied the country. In Cairo, Zaidan dedicated himself to a career in writing and publishing. In a short life of fifty-three years, he generated a vast literary corpus that has circulated widely, influencing people wherever Arabic was read.
Between 1892 and 1914, Zaidan published twenty-one historical novels that are his most enduring legacy. Through continuous publication in Arabic to the present, and translation into many languages, his fictional work has played a critical role in creating a distinctively modern view of the Islamic past. A meaningful assessment of the Islamic, Arab, and global past was essential to his ambitious work, and fiction was a major venue for him to pursue his larger purpose. Zaidan’s novels implemented a complex linguistic and narrative formula to deliver the past in an accessible yet authoritative way. Most prominently, he highlighted Islam’s place in universal “civilization” seen as a single current flowing from ancient times to the present.
Following the lead of European orientalists, for Zaidan, Islam was an unavoidable missing link that filled the gap between (Greek and Roman) antiquity and (European) modernity. A crucial corollary to this view was that Islam was also unexceptional. That is, Islam’s specificity marked a surface difference, since, underneath, whatever was valuable or reprehensible in it was the same in other contributors to universal civilization. This characteristic of Zaidan’s historical fiction contrasts strongly with the other novels discussed in this chapter.
Zaidan was an autodidact who never received formal training in areas engaged in his publications. He worked assiduously to create summaries of topics based on literature available to him in multiple languages. His presentation of his research was consistently keyed to the imperative of rejuvenating “Eastern” societies through the reform of ideas and practices. His fictional and nonfictional works represent the past in conceptual formulations and language accessible to a contemporary nonspecialist reader. In nonfiction, Zaidan’s approach can be seen in two five-volume works that were published toward the end of his life: Ta’rikh at-tamaddun al-Islami (History of Islamic Civilization, 1902–1906) and Ta’rikh al-lugha al-’Arabiyya (History of the Arabic Language, 1911–1914). These are programmatic treatments of large topics that leverage the author’s extensive familiarity with premodern sources and modern scholarship to create digestible accounts. In them, Zaidan informs while also prescribing the right way to see the evidence.
Sources of information mentioned in Zaidan’s introduction to his history of Islamic civilization.
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Zaidan’s celebrity during his lifetime rested also on his editorship of the journal al-Hilal (The Crescent) that he began publishing in September 1892, which he did to both earn a living and propagate his ideas. The journal circulated widely around the world, garnering him the reputation of an influential public intellectual. The journal’s first issue indicated that future issues would contain sections on the following five topics: 1) famous events and great men, 2) topical articles from the editor or other contemporary writers, 3) historical and literary stories from lands near and far, 4) news of events over the past month from around the world, and selections from reports, criticism, and reviews from other journals.
Issues of al-Hilal in years to come provide a sense of the world Zaidan inhabited and to which he wished to contribute through the journal. Especially noteworthy was his attention to established political power, the cosmopolitan scope and broad audience of Arabic journalism at the time he was writing, and a concern for social issues such as women’s representation in society. A meaningful assessment of the Islamic, Arab, and global past was essential to all of Zaidan’s ambitious work. His historical fiction created broad panoramas of life at particular moments in past time. In them, he treated history as a concern for all rather than the scholarly or literary elites.
