Towards the end of BSB Cod.arab. 464—an autograph manuscript of Zakariya al-Qazwini’s (d. 1283) renowned book of mirabilia, the ʿAjaʾib al-Makhluqat wa-Gharaʾib al-Mawjudat (Wonders of Creation and Oddities of Existence)—a monster called al-ṣannāja suddenly leaps out at the reader. Until this page, nearly all the illustrations of sentient beings in the ʿAjaʾib have been presented to the reader in profile, and/or with eyes pointed obliquely, almost bashfully away from the reader, whose own gaze has been cultivated, seduced, and trained to glisten and glare, precisely God-like, at all the objects of His creation following the order in which He created them. But the ṣannāja looks back: two black, beady, “soft eyes,” implanted in a massive orange cranium with wispy hair that rests atop the body of something resembling an American snapping turtle (chelydra serpentina), seize the viewer with a stare at once frightened and frightening. That’s not all: the text informs the reader that if another living being looks upon the ṣannāja in the wild, that being will instantly perish; however, if the ṣannāja sees the being first, then it will perish instead. Looking at the “other” is a dangerous game. Yet on the page, in the literary text, the gaze of the monster and the reader coincide, and the effect seems to render both the subject and the object more alive, not less. It is all very disorienting, and that is probably the point: after many pages of pleasurable looking and learning, the ṣannāja arrests the reader and forces him not only to look again, but to reconsider his former ways of seeing and seeking.

I was reminded of this enlivening, re-orientation effect while reading Emily Drumsta’s Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation. Superficially, al-Qazwini’s book and Ways of Seeking look nothing alike: the former is famous for its rich and colorful illustrations, and is ostensibly encyclopedic; the latter undertakes its quest primarily as a printed text, and excels in the humanistic knowledge production practices of late capitalist Anglophone academia. But just as al-Qazwini (hopefully) short-circuits the taxonomic, scientific, and racially “othering” aspects of his work through strategies of defamiliarization, gharāba (strangeness), taʿajjub (wonder), and what we might call istiṣnāj (enlivening distortion, from ṣannāja)—all deployed within a deeply spiritual epistemology premised on the hidden connections between all living beings—so does Drumsta’s book encourage us to abandon hegemonic modes of scholarly, scientific, and state baḥth (investigation) and to consider alternatives. These alternatives are to be found hidden in a set of (mostly canonical) Arabic novels, that have “used fictional investigations to bracket and provincialize state-sanctioned, colonial, and academic truth-seeking practices,” and have “simultaneously revalorized alternative, metaphysical forms of seeking that are less focused on the knowledge itself than on the ethics cultivated in its pursuit”(4). Drumsta’s book is itself fashioned as an alternative baḥth: instead of capturing totalities or compiling taxonomies, Ways of Seeking promises “to peer through the gaps in the greenery of the Arabic novel and construct a history of knowledge from what” it has found there (10). This beautifully crafted sentence, and many others like it, add delightful literary flourishes to a book that is clearly also fluent in multiple and diverse registers of literary criticism and analysis.

Some of the spirit of Drumsta’s arguments about truth seeking and its novelistic alternatives, specifically as concerns the Egyptian writers she engages, will already be familiar to readers of Samia Mehrez’s Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction (1994). In Drumsta’s words, literary authors “craft a new epistemology of fiction, a poetics of investigation that destabilizes the self-assurance of the all-knowing narrative subject and, by extension, that of the reader herself” (114). Ways of Seeking, though, not only refines some of those older arguments in an updated literary theoretical language; it also performs brilliant, in-depth readings of works by Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987), Yusuf Idris (1927-1991), Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-1994), Elias Khoury (1948-2024), and Fathy Ghanim (1924-1999). In these readings, Drumsta engages extensively with the “Western” academic canon of postcolonial studies, while also demonstrating extensive familiarity with pre-modern Arabic literary traditions and creatively calling on the Arabic language itself to do some of the baḥth. True to the spirit of open-ended, journey-over-destination seeking and searching evoked in the introduction, the author’s close readings of literary texts display an erudition, patience, and insightfulness that promises to set a new standard for the field of Arabic literary criticism, and thus constitute the book’s most laudable and original contribution, perhaps more so than the ultimate arguments or conclusions proposed. Drumsta’s deft gumshoeing also leaves sprinkled throughout the book a trail of fascinating little clues that the reader may wish to pursue further: I did not know that Abba Eban, the Israeli politician, had spent part of the late nineteen-forties translating al-Hakim’s Diary of a County Prosecutor (1937) (19), or that Naguib Mahfouz had once advocated something he called “Sufi socialism” (111).

As one small part of her rich and much broader reading of al-Hakim’s aforementioned novel, Drumsta briefly nominates “radaḥ” (more correctly, radḥ)—a traditional, female form of verbal mudslinging in Egypt—as among the many alternative forms of truth seeking that challenge dominant regimes of knowing (27). One wishes to see this suggestion expanded upon and taken more seriously, particularly as it constitutes one of the very few abḥāth undertaken by women anywhere in Ways of Seeking. To be fair, the book does begin with a thoughtful reconsideration of the character Amina from Mahfouz’s trilogy and also spends a good deal of time with Sonallah Ibrahim’s characters Zaat and Umm Wahid. But these are all characters ventriloquized by male authors. (Of course these women are not only that, and Drumsta makes a convincing case for revisiting narratives that have previously been dismissed as nothing more than expressions of the classist, racist, or sexist biases of their authors). Still, one wonders why women authors have been excluded, why nearly all of the “seekers” are men, and why, in a book where the male gaze is so dominant, seeing or seeking seems to be an almost totally sexless, asexual enterprise. I pose these questions only as issues for further consideration, not as criticism. I reserve my radḥ instead for Drumsta’s chapter on Sonallah Ibrahim (1937-2025).

The chapter in question looks at Ibrahim’s The Committee (1981) and Zaat (1992). In reading the former novel, Drumsta performs a grotesque distortion (istiṣnāj) of the argument I made in Conspiracy in Modern Egyptian Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)—grotesque precisely as prefigured by al-Qazwini’s ṣannāja. First, here is how I understand what I wrote back then: in my book, I turned to Ibrahim’s Kafkaesque tale in order to try to make sense of why the author, who wrote from a militant leftist perspective for his entire career, had in 2013 made a notorious “authoritarian turn” to support Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s violent seizure of power. Ibrahim even went so far as to deny the Rabaa massacre, when Egyptian military and police murdered around 1000 civilians in broad daylight. My reading of The Committee was an attempt to trace Ibrahim’s shockingly fascistic views to problematic tendencies manifested by his fictional protagonist. Like Ibrahim, the protagonist of his novel had been understood by most readers as a militant leftist, particularly as the protagonist performs an important critique of United States empire, capitalism, and most especially the Coca-Cola corporation. Yet also like Ibrahim, the protagonist eventually goes off the rails—he literally eats himself in the end—partly as a result, in my analysis, of an investigative “style” I characterized as agency-fetishizing, male-gazing, Committee-directed, and indeed “conspiracist.”

Now, in Drumsta’s reading of my reading, I had apparently claimed that Ibrahim’s protagonist was just some kind of “delusional” lunatic (Ways of Seeking, 139), and that his truth claims vis-à-vis political conspiracies should be written off entirely. In a pedantic recitation of well-known historical facts over several pages (139-141), Drumsta even appears to suggest—wrongly—that my argument, by taking a critical lens to Ibrahim’s character (fictional or biographical), somehow dismisses, denies, or wishes to downplay the manifold evils committed by of the capitalist behemoths critiqued in The Committee. Let me state clearly here that I do not recognize my own positions or politics in Drumsta’s weirdly antagonistic reading of my work. I specifically state in my chapter that I do not regard Ibrahim’s amateur detective in such reductionist terms, and indeed I repeat throughout my book that I do not view “conspiracism” (as I define it) as a totally “delusional” practice. (To be sure, the fictional detective’s claim that the Great Pyramid was built by “crypto-Jews” certainly does qualify as delusional, or at least wildly ahistorical). My issue is not with the content of The Committee’s anti-capitalist critique, but how—with what figurations, tropes, accents, and intertexts—that critique is articulated, and where that “how” eventually takes the detective. Ultimately, I do not see my reading as so incompatible with Drumsta’s own take on Ibrahim’s protagonist: he is a “Marxist,” she argues, whose real problem is not his method of investigation as such but his “atomization.” There of course remains a disagreement between us about the nature of the baḥth in question, but in the end I can find no good reason to see our two readings in such stark opposition to each other: a pseudo-Marxist loner can be driven to autophagia both by his problematic, mildly conspiracist method of seeking, and by his crippling alienation (and also, I would stress, by the hegemonic power of the Committee, which had set the conspiracist terms for his quest from the very beginning). That is how the protagonist in The Committee met his end, and in a terribly tragic and not dissimilar way, it is also how, in 2013, Sonallah Ibrahim’s own integrity as an ethical “seeker” met its end, at least in my view.

Al-Qazwini’s book of wonders holds yet more lessons when read together with Ways of Seeking. Both are concerned, in a sense, with the condition of postcoloniality, as they are with Orientalism. While the ʿAjaʾib al-Makhluqat was written by a colonized or post-colonial subject who lived through the cataclysmic nakba (catastrophe) of 1258 (the Mongol destruction of Baghdad), the work yet abounds with monstrous figurations of sundry cultural and biological “others”—performing, as it were, its own colonizing gaze, enabled by the privileges provided by a well-remunerated career in the justice system and the patronage of the author’s new Ilkhanid overlords. In al-Qazwini’s book, both colonialism and resistance to colonialism sit uncomfortably together, as surely they do also in many twentieth-century Arabic novels. While these texts may “offer us lessons in how to read, see, seek, and know differently” (124), one still wonders (not just tasāʾul but maybe also taʿajjub) how much some of their “alternative epistemologies” differ from those they are meant to resist.