1. INTRODUCTION

Poetry was the principal channel of literary creativity and served as the chronicle and public register of the Arabs (al-Shi‘r Dīwān al-‘Arab), recording their very appearance on the stage of history. No other genres could challenge the supremacy of poetry in the field of belles lettres across more than 1,500 years of literary history. The high status poetry enjoyed among the Arabs was reflected in a passage by the eleventh-century scholar Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī (d. 1063 or 1071), which concludes with the statement that “they used not to wish one another joy but for three things: the birth of a boy, the coming to light of a poet, and the foaling of a noble mare.” Only in the second half of the twentieth century was poetry pushed to the margins, and fiction, especially the novel, brought to the forefront. In the early 1970s, the Egyptian magazine al-Ṭalī‘a issued a feature called al-riwāya mir’āt al-sha‘b (the novel is the mirror of the people), and more than twenty years later, upon his nomination as head of the prose committee of the Supreme Council for Culture in Egypt, the critic ‘Alī al-Rā‘ī (1920–1999) asserted: “This is the time of the novel … the novel is the new chronicle of the Arabs” (“al-riwāya dīwān al-‘arab al-jadīd”). “Glory to the Arabic novel!” declared al-Rā‘ī, “the best of its writers have made it a mouthpiece of the nation, the new annals of the Arabs, and a reservoir of the hopes and agonies of our great but torn nation.” A book published in 2001 by the Egyptian Ṭāhā Wādī (1937–2008) bears the title al-Qiṣṣa Dīwān al-‘Arab (Fiction Is the New Annals of the Arabs), and the author explains that the narrative genres have become the new Arab chronicle because “they truly reflect their general and personal reality, the social and subjective one.”