Introduction

In the 1956 introduction to Yūsuf Idrīs’ novel Qiṣṣat aubb (A Love Story), Ṭāhā Ḥusayn praises the young writer but adds that the author's use of colloquial denigrates his work. Ḥusayn ends his introduction with the hope that Idrīs will strive to present the voices of his characters in Arabic fuṣḥā (standard Arabic) in his upcoming works. “I want to become an artist even though I write in the language of the street” was Idrīs’ response to Ḥusayn, explaining that he did not see a contradiction between art and the use of colloquial Arabic. Indeed Idrīs’ innovation lay largely in his move away from the literary production of his predecessors, of the giants such as Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, who had dominated the landscape. In creating a linguistic and geographical map of Cairo, Idrīs departs from the rural novel that marked the canonical literary production of the nahḍa (renaissance) period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead he places the urban metropolis front and center in his literary exploration of a transformative moment in Egypt's history. His work invites crucial questions about the role of literature in times of revolution and its capacity to interrogate and expand official nationalist discourse.

This chapter focuses upon Qiṣṣat ḥubb, Idrīs’ first novel and a strongly anti-colonial work, published four years after the July Revolution of 1952, which ended British colonial rule in Egypt. Although Idrīs is known first and foremost for his short stories and plays, it is this early novel which opens up the question of the national. I employ recent scholarship that has drawn attention to the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, drawing on the work of Franco Moretti in particular, to reveal the complexity of Idrīs’ nationalist vision, through a reading of the different spaces constructed in the novel. It is Moretti's contention that a “literary geography” in the sense of “a study of space in literature” or of “literature in space” can inform our reading of literary texts in crucial ways. Moretti's “study of space in literature” frames the current analysis, illuminating the geographic imaginary at the heart of Idrīs’ first novel.