STATE RIVALRY AND CYCLICITY

Geographical, cultural and ethnic diversity renders any overview of Southeast Asia’s history a difficult task. The same problems of diversity are met even in the study of individual components of the region, given, for example, the differences between Shan and Mon in Burma, Vietnamese and Khmer in the Indochinese peninsula, Tagalog and Moro in the Philippines, and coastal Malay and hill Batak in north Sumatra. What cultural and historical identity obtained between or within particular segments was, to a large extent, the dictate of geography. A Confucianist Vietnam and a Christian Philippines on Southeast Asia’s fringes confirm the significance of geographical location. Beneath the striking overlay of differences, Southeast Asian societies shared a substratum of distinct traditions of lineage patterns, social structuring and belief systems which were related to the overarching concern over resource management within their particular environment. In time, the accommodation of these features with varying degrees of external influences added a second dimension to the identity of pre-modern societies. Burmese and Thai responses to Theravāda Buddhism were different, as were the responses to Islam in Java and in the Malay world. The European element added a third dimension to the evolution of these societies. European penetration has, in fact, been considered a watershed, with its earlier inroads into the maritime regions constituting a further distancing between developments there and the mainland. To what extent was this dichotomy between colonial and indigenous administrations real in terms of social impact?

The historical record for Southeast Asia begins with the arrival of Chinese soldiers and officials along the shores of the South China Sea towards the end of the third century BC. Archaeological evidence reveals the existence of many polities distributed across the terrain of Southeast Asia at that time.

VIETNAM

The one most directly encountered by record-keeping Chinese officials lay in the plain of the Hong (Red) River, in what is today northern Vietnam. Han Chinese armies conquered this area in the first century CE and, by the end of the third century, the efforts of Chinese frontier administrators and leading local clans had produced a relatively stable provincial polity, sensitive to Chinese imperial interests while at the same time representing a local system of power capable of taking initiative on behalf of its own interests when Chinese dynastic power was weak or in transition.

In the sixth century, provincial leaders renounced the overlordship of feeble Chinese dynasties, but in the early seventh century they gave no effective resistance to the arrival of Sui and Tang dynastic authority. During the seventh and eighth centuries, Tang administrators established the Protectorate of An Nam in northern Vietnam; the Protectorate was a type of frontier polity designed for remote, strategic areas inhabited by non-Chinese peoples. Establishment of the Protectorate of An Nam was accompanied by the absorption of the local ruling class into the hierarchy of imperial officialdom. So long as Tang dynastic power remained strong, the region remained relatively peaceful.

The immense cultural diversity of Southeast Asia and the linguistic skills required to approach the sources have tended to encourage localized rather than general studies of the region. The yawning gaps in our knowledge, the difficulties in interpreting information and the very real differences within even the larger divisions of ‘island’ and ‘mainland’ do not facilitate efforts to draw the Southeast Asian past together. What can the highly literate, Sinicised élite of seventeenth-century Vietnam have in common with the more oral, Muslim courts of the Malay states? Is it possible to conceive of a Shan community in the hills of upper Burma as sharing in any sense the same world as villagers on a small isolated island in eastern Indonesia? At times it seems that the more closely one approaches the material, the more elusive a common history becomes. Yet the longer view may make the task less formidable. From a contemporary vantage-point the most significant development of the pre-modern period is the slow movement towards the larger political groupings which were to form the bases of later nation-states. This movement was by no means irrevocable, nor was it everywhere apparent. But whereas throughout Southeast Asia the ‘states’ at the beginning of the sixteenth century only generally approximate those we know today, three hundred years later the current shape of Southeast Asia is clearly discernible. It is the process which brought this about which we shall now examine.

The world of Southeast Asia presents a variegated cultural pattern. Geographically, the area can be divided into mainland and maritime Southeast Asia with the Malay peninsula as the dividing line, the southern part of which belongs to the island world, whereas its northern part is more continental in nature. As to maritime Southeast Asia, the motto of the modern Republic of Indonesia: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, freely translated as Unity in Diversity, can be applied to the area as a whole. For, although numerous different languages are used in this vast area, they all belong to the family of Austronesian languages—apart from small pockets of tribal areas. Culturally, too, there is an underlying concept of unity despite the astounding diversity in almost every aspect. The conception of Indonesia as a ‘field of ethnological study’, as formulated by Dutch anthropologists, can be applied to the entire area.

As far as religion is concerned, the diversity is less pronounced since Islam strongly predominates in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the southern Philippines, and Catholic Christianity in the major part of the Philippines. In mainland Southeast Asia, on the other hand, Theravāda Buddhism is the established religion of all states except Vietnam, where both Mahāyāna Buddhism and Confucianism predominate. Yet Hindu-Buddhist religion prevails in Bali, and tribal religions have persisted almost everywhere in the more remote areas. Moreover, the great religions have been influenced by earlier tribal beliefs. It is the task of the historian to describe and, if possible, to elucidate the religious developments in order to enable us to look at the present conditions against their historical background.

The second part of this work covers the period from the late fifteenth century to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of the Christian era. The opening chapter places the region in an international context, affected by changes of which the advent of the Europeans was only one. The three chapters that follow outline the political, economic and social, and religious changes that Southeast Asia underwent. A fifth chapter surveys the region on the eve of the phase in which it came almost entirely under European political control.

In the period 1500-1800 Indians and Chinese, who had visited Southeast Asia since the early Christian era, came in far greater numbers. In the seventeenth century the Japanese became involved in Southeast Asian trade for the first time. But the latest and most formidable arrivals were the Europeans. Chapter 6 deals with the arrival and establishment of these groups in the region. It also deals with the interaction between the foreign and Southeast Asian communities, and the innovations and adaptations that resulted. These included the establishment of European-controlled cities and the emergence of mestizo communities. The chapter also discusses developments in shipbuilding and firearms technology that had important repercussions for Southeast Asian societies.

It has been conventional to assume a new era began in Southeast Asia in 1500 with the arrival of Europeans, if for no better reason than that the sources become much richer and more accessible at this point. If one looked back from the age of high imperialism it was also obvious that the expansion of European empire in Asia began with Vasco da Gama and the discovery of a sea route from Europe to India. If we take our viewpoint from Southeast Asia, on the other hand, it is clear that the rapid social changes transforming the region were already in full flight before 1500, with the upsurge in international commerce of which the arrival of the Portuguese was a consequence, not a cause. The explosion of energy from the new Ming dynasty in China a century earlier is a more appropriate starting point for this new era of economic expansion, since it had some causal relation with a new dynasty in Vietnam, the decline of the ‘classical’ empires of Angkor and Majapahit, and their replacement by a string of new maritime city-states. Although most evidence about economic and social matters comes from a later period, we will therefore have to go back to 1400 in tracing the reasons for many of the changes.

POPULATION

To understand the impact of the major economic trends in the period it is necessary to have some impression of population levels. Contemporary estimates of population are extremely unreliable, but a combination of the more plausible of them with backward projection from somewhat more reliable and abundant nineteenth-century estimates yields roughly the order of population in 1600 shown in the table on page 463.

The present chapter, which continues the account of religious developments in Southeast Asia from about 1500, is divided into five sections. The first draws on the European source material that becomes available in the sixteenth century to survey important features of indigenous beliefs as they were practised in areas then little touched by the world religions. An examination of the advance of Islam and Christianity, destined to have such fundamental effects on the evolution of island Southeast Asia, makes up the second and third sections. It will become apparent that the manner in which these newer religions adapted to the local context in many respects resembles the previous infusion of Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian ideas already discussed in Chapter 5. The fourth section therefore takes up several themes common across the region as the world religions extended and consolidated their position. The chapter closes with an overview of the eighteenth century, identified as a time when unprecedented pressures, both internal and external, created new demands in Southeast Asia’s religious environment.

INDIGENOUS BELIEFS

An important contribution to our understanding of indigenous beliefs comes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as European missionaries began to move into areas of eastern Indonesia and the Philippines which had to this point been relatively isolated from external religious ideas. Despite their obvious cultural bias, the accounts missionaries compiled provide the historian with the first sustained contemporary descriptions of native religious customs outside a court environment.

Two ideas came together in the project for a Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. One was the concept of the Cambridge Histories themselves. The other was the possibility of a new approach to the history of Southeast Asia.

In the English-speaking and English-reading world the Cambridge Histories have, since the beginning of the century, set high standards in collaborative scholarship and provided a model for multi-volume works of history. The original Cambridge Modern History appeared in sixteen volumes between 1902 and 1912, and was followed by the Cambridge Ancient History, the Cambridge Medieval History, the Cambridge History of India and others.

A new generation of projects continues and builds on this foundation. Recently completed are the Cambridge Histories of Africa and Latin America. Cambridge Histories of China and of Japan are in progress, as well as the New Cambridge History of India. Though the pattern and the size have varied, the essential feature, multi-authorship, has remained.

The initial focus was European, but albeit in an approach that initially savoured rather of the old Cambridge Tripos course ‘The Expansion of Europe’, it moved more out of the European sphere than the often brilliant one-author Oxford histories. But it left a gap which that course did not leave, the history of Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia has long been seen as a whole, though other terms have been used for it. The title Southeast Asia, becoming current during World War II, has been accepted as recognizing the unity of the region, while not prejudging the nature of that unity.

THE BACKGROUND

The Nahḍah

Compared with earlier periods of Arabic literature the Modern period, often referred to in Arabic as al-Nahḍah (= renaissance), requires an approach that is at once simpler and more complicated. While Classical Arabic literature can safely be regarded as fundamentally a continuum, Modern literature constitutes in certain important respects an entirely new departure, even though its break with the Classical has sometimes been exaggerated, for despite its borrowing of European forms such as drama and the novel, Modern literature never really completely severed its link with its past. The Nahḍah was in fact a product of a fruitful meeting of two forces: the indigenous tradition, and the imported western forms. Moreover, the change from the past was an extremely slow and gradual process. However, because of the profound influence exercised by western literature on the Nahḍah, it seems more natural to divide its treatment into chapters on poetry, the novel, short story, drama and literary criticism, much as one might do in a traditional survey of a western literature. But it would be wrong to be blind to the continuities in Arabic literature, Classical and Modern: continuities that have determined the manner of the Arabs' apprehension and hence adaptation of the imported genres.

INTRODUCTION

In modern Arabic literature the close interaction between literature and socio-political issues makes it difficult to isolate one from the other. The importance of the socio-cultural dimension is particularly relevant in dealing with narrative forms, because narrative mediates human experience and derives its significance from probing it. This chapter describes briefly the context necessary for an understanding of the modern Arabic short story throughout the various stages of its development, and also outlines the history of the genre itself and the development of its formal and thematic elements. As is shown in the most comprehensive survey of the genre, published in The Kenyon Review (vols 30–32, 1968–70), the short story has been marginalized in most advanced western cultures. In the Arab world, however, as in other developing and semi-developed countries such as India, South Africa and Yugoslavia, for various reasons the short story has emerged as the most popular and arguably the most significant literary medium.

In Arabic literature, while one can trace its descent from other traditional forms of narrative going back to the Arabian Nights, the short story in the modern sense of the term is a new literary genre that developed in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and reached maturity only in the early decades of this century.

It is not accidental that the rise of Romantic poetry coincided with a period of convulsive change which was to shape the lives of many Arab countries for most of the twentieth century. As a result of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire, which had been the most successful political system in the history of Islam, no longer existed. What had been the Arab provinces of the Empire in Egypt and the Levant became new nation-states in the course of the 1920s. In spite of these new political forms, Anglo-French domination of the Nile Valley and the Levant remained very much in place, as in 1922 the League of Nations approved the mandate system for Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine with Transjordan. Although both Egypt and Iraq were declared sovereign independent states, these new versions of national independence were harshly circumscribed by the continuing reality of European power, while in North Africa the French colonial system had a depressingly permanent air. Yet in spite of all these deceptions these were heady days in Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. The final downfall of the Ottoman system gave great new impetus to the forces of Arab nationalism, which had to some extent been held in check during the war years, and the appearance of these new national political forms was accompanied by waves of strong, sincere emotions on the part of Arab populations and their leaders.

The lively presence of Arabic dialect poetry in the eighth to the fourteenth centuries is remarked upon by Ibn Khaldūn. Criticizing the grammarians' rejection of colloquial poetry, he notes that it has its own rules and eloquence, rooted in each dialect's milieu. Eloquence, he states, has nothing to do with grammatical rules, but is ‘the suitability of the utterance to the meaning desired and the demands of the situation.’

DEFINITIONS

Today, vernacular Arabic is chosen by poets who feel that what they want to express, and the milieu in which they practise their art, demand an idiom based on everyday speech. Drawing upon a heritage of local oral folk traditions and an elite colloquial poetry originating in medieval Andalusia, this poetry is often labelled al-shiʿr al-shaʿbī (folk or popular poetry), or zajal, as colloquial Andalusian strophic verse was called, attesting to these links. Other terms define it by what it ‘lacks’, echoing attitudes that Ibn Khaldūn attacked: in the Maghrib, it is known as al-shiʿr al-malḥūn (from laḥn, that is, not adhering to fuṣḥā grammar) and, in the Arabian peninsula, as al-shiʿr al-nabaṭī (Nabatean, thus ‘non-Arab’). While contemporary poets refer to it as shiʿr al-ʿāmmiyyah (poetry of the colloquial), negative connotations remain: ʿāmmī means not only ‘colloquial’ but also ‘common’ or ‘vulgar’.

The beginnings of a fictional tradition in modern Arabic literature are part of the wider process of revival and cultural assimilation known in Arabic as al-Nahḍah. This process involved a creative fusion of two separate forces. One is the rediscovery of the treasures of the Arabic literary heritage and the emergence therefrom of a ‘neo-classical’ movement. The other is the translation of works of European fiction into Arabic, their adaptation and imitation, and the eventual appearance of an indigenous tradition of modern Arabic fiction. Not surprisingly, these two tendencies find themselves pitted against each other during the initial phases of development under the rubrics of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’.

In the case of fiction, such a ‘revival’ involved the investigation of the earlier tradition of Arabic prose in quest of precedents and models. To a western audience which has come to regard The one thousand and one nights as a great repository of tales, it may seem surprising that, in the process of reexamining the genres of prose writing, there was little recourse to this great collection; it was regarded as a repository of ‘popular’ culture and thus not part of the repertoire under consideration. However, a prose genre which had flourished within the thoroughly rhetoricized tradition of criticism during the preceding centuries was the maqāmah, the initiation of which is attributed to Badīʿ al-zamān al-Hamadhānī (969–1008).

By the eighteenth century, Arab literary criticism had been reduced to blanket judgements, usually unsupported, on the literary qualities of men of learning who earned a place in biographical dictionaries, and to ever more elaborate treatises on rhetoric, especially on that branch of it known as badīʿ, which concerned itself mostly with tropes that exploit not imagery but the forms of words. In prose and poetry alike, it was the ability to juggle with words that was most highly prized.

The challenge set by European powers, first to the Ottomans in the Balkans then more directly through the Bonaparte expedition to Egypt in 1798, was soon to lead to changes that were initially designed to strengthen the armed forces, but that inevitably went on to affect administrative, educational and economic practices in one Arab country after another. Not surprisingly, it was the material benefits of western technology that were most readily accepted – Egypt had a railway line as early as 1854 – whereas an appreciation of its intellectual underpinnings came later, and of European aesthetic perceptions later still.

INITIAL CONSERVATISM

Of the first Arabs to be directly exposed to European life, Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–73) readily opened his gigantic intellect to new ideas without surrendering his independence of judgement.

The Arab literary establishment of the period immediately preceding the nineteenth century had reached such stability in social status, such homogeneity in education and such unanimity in cultural values that it was no longer searching for innovative ideas, and of its men of letters – poets and prose writers alike – it expected not originality but consummate skill in the use of words. The prose that it favoured was not only rhymed, but laden with tropes, especially those developed in the branch of rhetoric known as badīʿ, which concerns itself not so much with imagery as with verbal artifices (such as the paronomasia, the double entendre, and the palindrome) of which by then over 150 varieties had been devised.

INHERITED PRIORITIES

An indication of the priorities of the period is that one of the most celebrated prose writers whose activities extended into the modern period, Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār (c. 1766–1834 or 1838), devoted some of his energies to a book of inshāʾ which he described as ‘divided into two sections: the drafting of contracts and title-deeds, and the composition of letters and communications exchanged between common people and kings. With these two arts is the ordering of the world effected, for they form one of the wings of kingship, the other being its sword.’

THE EMERGENCE OF THE NOVEL: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONCERNS

My survey of the earliest stages in the development of the modern Arabic novel in the preceding chapter concluded with a brief discussion of Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal's novel, Zaynab. While this novel was much concerned, like many other examples of its own and earlier times, with romance, Haykal placed a set of Egyptian characters firmly into the present and proceeded to use them in a discussion of a societal problem which was of great interest to himself and to many other Egyptian intellectuals, namely the role of women in society. In the decades that have followed the publication of Zaynab, at the hands of some writers the novel continues its functions as both entertainer and educator. Novels of romance, designed to divert, continue to appear and have more recently provided ready material for both television and film. The tradition of the historical novel has also continued, particularly under the impetus of a growing sense of national pride fostered by Arab Nationalism but, in more recent times, the attention of novelists has tended to be more devoted to the events of the recent past and the lessons to be gleaned from them.

Arab poetic modernity resulted from two major forces: the influence of the western modernist movement and of the other major experiments that preceded or accompanied it, and the state of Arabic poetry itself at the midpoint of the twentieth century, which responded to intrinsic needs for a change towards a more ‘modern’ apprehension of experience, aesthetic and otherwise. Major poetic change in any language is never wholly a matter of intention; neither the result of sheer conscious adoption, nor the following of fashion. The success of a major poetic change in any direction, no matter how drastic, proves not simply that genius and cogent talents lie behind it, but also the important fact that poetry at the time was, if not absolutely and specifically in need of the kind of change in question, at least potentially receptive to it. The second of these factors, the intrinsic need for change, will be in evidence throughout this essay. However, the first factor, the influence of western modernism on the Arab movement, needs more explicit consideration before we continue further.

There is a clear ambiguity in Arab writings between ‘modern’ and ‘modernism’, which is a term applied to a specific movement in art and literature in the west.