Al-Nahda - The Influence of Al-Nahda - Literature

Literature

Further information: Egyptian literature and Arabic literature

Through the 19th century and early 20th centuries, a number of new developments in Arabic literature started to emerge, initially sticking closely to the classical forms, but addressing modern themes and the challenges faced by the Arab world in the modern era.

In 1865, Syrian writer Francis Marrash published Ghabat al-haqq, an allegory which deals with ideas of peace, freedom and equality. Aleppine writer Qustaki al-Himsi is considered to have founded modern literary criticism, with one of his works, The researcher's source in the science of criticism.

In 1914, Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1888–1956) published Zaynab, the first Egyptian novel written in Egyptian Arabic. Prose writing rapidly developed from this date.

A group of young writers formed The New School, and in 1925 began publishing the a weekly literary journal al-Fajr (The Dawn), which would have a great impact on Arabic literature. The group was especially influenced by 19th-century Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol.

In poetry, the Egyptian Ahmad Shawqi, among others, began to explore the limits of the classical qasida, although he remained a clearly neo-classical poet. After him, others, including Hafez Ibrahim began to use poetry to explore themes of anticolonialism as well as the classical concepts. The Mahjar poets, of whom the most famous is the Lebanese Khalil Gibran (1883–1931), but which included other writers, in South America as well as the USA, further contributed to the development of the forms available to Arab poets.

The Prophet, published in 1923 by the Boston-based Gibran, is perhaps the best known work of the era in the West, but was actually first written in English (Read The Prophet online here). Gibran's associate in the Arab-American League of the Pen (al-Rabita al-Qalamiyya), Mikha'il Na'ima (1898–1989) would later return to Lebanon and contribute to the development of the novel there.

One of the main literary innovators in the later stages of al-Nahda was Prof. Taha Hussein (1889–1973), the blind child of an Egyptian peasant family who is today widely considered an intellectual giant of Egypt, and apart from his Qur'anic education at al-Azhar held triple doctorates from Cairo University, the University of Sorbonne and the University of Paris. He served as Minister of Education in Egypt in the 1950s, and was responsible for creating free and mandatory schooling. His best known book is the autobiographical el-Ayyam (The Days).