By the 1930s the theatre had become firmly rooted in the Egyptian soil: seeds sown in the previous decades now began to shoot up and bear some fruit. Egyptian theatregoers were getting used to the presence of good actors and actresses, particularly the talented Jūrj Abyaḍ who had received a proper training in Paris. They were also introduced to the concepts of a director (ʿAzīz ʿĪd), a theatre-manager and producer (Yūsuf Wahbī), and a highly disciplined company (Ramsīs, founded in 1923). A national company was formed under government auspices (1935), was given financial support and placed under the joint management of a poet with wide and varied cultural interests, Khalīl Muṭrān, and some of the most prominent men of letters of the day, including Ṭāhā Ḥusayn. No less important was the emergence of a gifted playwright who dedicated his best abilities to dramatic writing and who was soon to become, by dint of hard work and continuous presence on the scene, Egypt's national dramatist, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm. The forties brought with them further consolidation. The High Institute of Drama, which had been forced to close down after a brief appearance in 1931, was reopened in 1944, headed by the properly trained Zakī Ṭulaymāt.

Even twenty years ago the Arabic novel was regarded as practically synonymous with the Egyptian novel. Since then the novel has acquired an established place in the literary production of most, if not all, Arab countries, as is described elsewhere in this volume. Yet the Egyptian novel still deserves a place apart in a survey of modern Arabic literature because of the number of works of quality written in Egypt, while the relatively longer history of the genre there enables its different stages of development to be distinguished and studied more easily than is the case in countries where it has had a life of only two or three decades. It is a far cry from Haykal's Zaynab to Idwār al-Kharrāṭ's al-Zaman al-ākhar, but thanks to the abundance of material it is possible to explain, at least in some measure, the relationship between the restrained and rather conventional grandmother and her adventurous and unbridled grandchild.

PIONEERS

When Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal published his novel Zaynab in 1913 he had some models to follow. Apart from the translations and adaptations of European fiction other examples from which he could learn included Zaydān's historical novels, Ṣarrūf's novels of social concern, al-Manfalūṭī's sentimental fiction and al-Muwayliḥī's Ḥadīth ʿĪsā b. Hishām with its combination of classical form and modern subject matter.

INTRODUCTION

The emergence of Neo-classical poetry in modern Arabic literature in the nineteenth century was not the outcome of the sudden incursion of a new literary model upon the established system of literature. Neither was it the product of a literary grouping around an innovative poet (or group of poets) endowed with revolutionary zeal. Quite the contrary. Its development was quiet, involving no visible upheavals. The main trend of this school (if school it was) was to go back to an old, venerable model, and to relive the glorious experience of ancient poets. The model is, of course, that of medieval Arabic poetry at its peak, as represented by the spirited bards of the Jāhilī (Pre-Islamic) and early Islamic periods and, more emphatically, by the great urbane poets of the heyday of Abbasid creativity: al-Mutanabbī, al-Buḥturī, Abū Tammām, Abū 'l-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarrī and al-Sharīf al-Raḍiyy.

In point of fact, modern neo-classical poetry does not constitute a phase of literature that can be sharply separated from its immediate ancestry. Arab poets, writing in traditional fashions, never ceased operating in the Arabic-speaking regions. Even in the darkest of times, for example between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, the production of poetry in fuṣḥā (= literary Arabic) and according to the traditional metres continued.

WRITING IN THE WILDERNESS

To assess Arab women's writings in the twentieth century, we must go back to the latter half of the nineteenth. The late 1880s were a time of turmoil in Egypt, the contemporary cultural heartland of the Arab world. There was a climate of openness and acceptance of the new. Egypt was attracting Arab intellectuals – including women like the Lebanese Zaynab Fawwāz (1850–1914) in 1870, Wardah al-Yāzijī (1838–1924) in 1899 and the Palestinian-Lebanese Mayy Ziyādah (1886–1941) in 1908 – who could not find such intellectual freedom at home. Many of these immigrants became journalists, thus overcoming their outsider status and becoming intellectually integrated into their new society. Persistent contact with Europe throughout the nineteenth century was beginning to have a profound effect in Egypt. The values and philosophies of this alien culture were being absorbed and slowly transformed into indigenous commodities. The novel and the short story became for the Egyptians, as for their European counterparts, forays into reality. Writers, using these genres, could begin to create themselves as subjects within their transforming social context.

Women, too, were beginning to write. Contrary to what is generally believed, there were some women in the nineteenth century who were educated and could write.

TRADITIONAL FORMS OF DRAMATIC ENTERTAINMENT

In spite of several well-intentioned attempts to prove the contrary, classical Arab literature did not know drama as it was conceived in the west from the times of the ancient Greeks to the present, namely as an art form in which an action is ‘imitated’ through dialogue spoken by human actors on a stage. True enough, a specifically Arabic literary form, the maqāmah, developed in the tenth century, generally assumed to be the invention of al-Hamadhānī (969–1008): a tale in elaborate euphuistic rhyming prose intermixed with verse, often relating the adventures of an eloquent vagabond who ekes out a living by impersonating other characters and fooling people. It is a unique form, incorporating both narrative and dramatic elements without being either a short story or a drama proper. Clearly, out of the maqāmah grew the Arabic shadow play (khayāl al-ẓill), probably under Far Eastern influence, in which human characters are represented by shadows cast upon a screen by flat, coloured leather puppets held in front of a torch and manipulated by a hidden puppet master (khayāliyy or rayyis), who also introduced the characters and delivered dialogue and songs with the help of associates.

The shadow play, particularly in its earliest (and, as it happens, most sophisticated) surviving examples, namely the work of Ibn Dāniyāl (1248–1311), is the closest thing in classical Arabic literature to western drama, even though the actors are only puppets.

No other musical instrument has until recent years been so widely used among all classes throughout the world as the violin. One reason, of course, is quite simply the musical perfection of the instrument – its sonority and flexibility in the hands of musicians anywhere, especially, with its capacity for clean and strongly rhythmic articulation and its penetrating tone, its suitability for the performance of dance music of all styles. At the time of its invention dance musicians throughout Europe were playing a variety of bowed string instruments from the gue (probably a type of rectangular box zither) in Britain's northernmost islands, to the rebec-like lira of Greece. Such musicians, professional and amateur, looked favourably on the newcomer: first, they must have found the violin an improvement on their own instruments and, for the most part, they could readily transfer their bowing and fingering techniques to the violin. Secondly, there must have been some status attached to an instrument which found favour in courts and homes of the wealthy, even though in those milieux the violinist was often considered to be a professional musician of rather low rank.

Outside Europe the adoption of the violin can further be seen as an index to the expansion of European influence over the centuries. Wherever they went colonists and traders took violins with them and, as often as not, encouraged indigenous musicians to learn to make and play them. Because we know that professional violinists were seen as low-class providers of dance music compared with the more genteel amateur players of the viol family, we are not surprised to learn, for example, that the early white settlers in North America preferred to teach their musically talented black slaves to play the violin for them so that they themselves were spared the task and were free to indulge in what became at times a passion for social dancing.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the violin underwent an astonishing transformation of role. A lowly dance instrument at the beginning of the period, it had by 1800 become a dominant force in Western musical culture. Virtuoso violinists were feted at court and public concert alike, and only singers were more highly rewarded. While none could perhaps be placed among the very front rank of composers, many violinists were important creative figures, including Heinrich von Biber, Arcangelo Carelli, Antonio Vivaldi and Giovanni Battista Viotti. Indeed the instrument's capabilities influenced the course of musical style itself, to the extent that singers in the early eighteenth century were expected to be able to rival the figurations of violin music. The period also saw the establishment of the string basis of the orchestra, and violinists such as Jean-Baptiste Lully and Johann Stamitz played a major part in the refinement of orchestral discipline. In addition the violin was accepted during the eighteenth century as an accomplishment for gentlemen amateurs.

These developments were closely tied in with those of musical life in general. Early-seventeenth-century Italy was a hotbed of experiment, culminating in the operatic masterpieces of Monteverdi. The violin was the only instrument fully able to match the voice in the new aesthetic, which favoured a subjective and strongly projected individuality, expressed in a dramatic ‘affective’ idiom, with exuberant virtuosity and ornamentation. Both violinists and style spread through Austria and Germany, but the new Italian manner was rejected in seventeenth-century France, and only guardedly accepted in England.

Violin treatises through the years have consistently emphasised the importance of a comfortable and natural bearing when holding the instrument, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that there was any general agreement on the precise position to be adopted. The nineteenth-century violinist's goal was a noble and relaxed posture, with head upright, feet normally in line but slightly apart, and body-weight distributed with a slight bias towards the left side. The seated position involved bending the right wrist and elbow rather more, turning the right leg slightly inwards (to avoid contact between knee and bow when bowing at the point on the upper strings) and supporting the left leg (and hence the body-weight) on a footstool, thereby enabling the trunk to remain erect. Flesch (1923) considers the position of the feet extremely important, discussing three possible positions: the joined-together, rectangular leg position in which the feet are close together; the acutangular leg position, in which the feet are separated, with either right or left foot advanced and the body-weight on the rear foot (this resembles the recommendations of Suzuki, but the advanced left foot takes the bodyweight); and his preferred ‘spread leg’ position, which offers the greatest stability and freedom. Galamian is more flexible of attitude, claiming that ‘How to stand or to sit should not be the object of exact prescriptions other than that the player should feel at ease.’ However, he does insist that exaggerated body movement should be avoided when playing.

The Baroque

The term ‘concerto’, implying an aggregation of performing forces large or small, described many musical genres in the early seventeenth century. These ranged from vocal music accompanied by instrumentalists, to purely instrumental music in which the element of contrast was prominent. The development of the concertato style is witnessed both in the later madrigal books of Monteverdi and in the church music and madrigals of Venetian composers such as Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. The Gabrielis' Concerti per voci e stromenti musicali (1587), comprising sacred music and madrigals in six to sixteen parts, is the earliest known publication to use the term ‘concerto’ in its title. The instrumental concerto emerged as an independent form towards the end of the seventeenth century and soon evolved into a genre in which virtuosity was a significant ingredient.

Italy

The earliest type of purely instrumental concerto, the concerto grosso, contrasted a large (concerto grosso) and a small group (concertino) of performers. The first essays in this genre emerged with Stradella in Rome in the 1670s, but Corelli brought the form to its first peak with his collection of twelve concerti grossi for strings Op. 6 (1714). these are essentially elaborations of Corelli's trio sonata ideal, the ‘concertino’ section consisting of two violins and a cello. Eight of the set conform to the da chiesa (church) slow–fast–slow–fast pattern, excluding movements of a dance character but including fugal fast movements; the other four comprise largely sequences of dance-like movements in da camera (chamber) fashion.

During its history, the violin has been associated with an abundance of other instruments, not to mention its particularly close relationship with the human voice, to which it has often been compared. To chronicle this would be a formidable task, but fortunately, over a number of centuries, musical taste has favoured a quite limited range of specific groupings which quickly acquired the status of ‘genre’. A Haydn string quartet suggests not just an instrumental combination but a specific mode of treatment, and it is such characteristic forms rather than any ad hoc instrumentation which must demand the closest attention. For the present purposes an ensemble is defined rather arbitrarily as any group of two or more instrumentalists, but excluding compositions for violin and keyboard, the main concern being that repertory categorised today by the equally arbitrary term ‘chamber music’. The New Grove Dictionary defines this as ‘music for small ensembles of solo instruments, written for performance under domestic circumstances’, but this is especially inadequate for the seventeenth century, when small ensemble music need not have been performed in ‘chambers’, while ‘chamber ensembles’ may have been used as ‘orchestras’ in public theatres or churches. Some flexibility has therefore seemed advisable, at least for the first two centuries of this development.