Anxious Advocacy: The Novel, the Law, and Extrajudicial Appeals in Egypt

Elliott Colla

In 1937, when Tawfiq al-Hakim serialized Yawmiyyat na’ib fi-l-aryaf (Diary of a Prosecutor in the Provinces) in the recently launched journal al-Riwaya (Narrative), most readers thought it was a detective novel.1 The text played by the rules of the genre: its central character was involved in the investigation of a murder, and the narrative was organized in cliff-hanging chapters with unfolding clues and dead ends. Indeed, the editors launched a promotional contest, soliciting solutions to the mystery from readers. None of this would have been especially remarkable for the first Egyptian readers of Yawmiyyat in 1937; from the turn of the century, they had been accustomed to a steady stream of detective pulp fiction.2 Despite this, later critics have avoided treating Yawmiyyat as a detective novel, nor do canonical accounts of modern Egyptian literature include the pulp tradition of mysteries. Instead, Hakim’s novel has been read as fictional autobiography; the author had once worked as a provincial state bureaucrat in the Nile Delta, and the novel is composed in memoir form.3 Yet, even by this consideration, we might link the novel to an earlier pulp genre from the 1920s: the fictional memoirs often entitled Mudhakkirat . . . (Memoirs of . . .) or I 3tirafat . . . (Confessions of . . .). Like detective fiction, fictional memoirs were relatively popular in their heyday and dealt explicitly with the social problems of the city—from prostitution, crime, and drug abuse among the new urban working classes to the hypocrisy of the Turkish aristocracy and Egyptian effendiyya (lettered class).

In this essay, I will argue that these pulp genres, from which Yawmiyyat derived, are critical if we are to understand the emergence of the novel as a literary form in Egypt. Moreover, I will argue that novels had a special relationship to the new legal institutions of colonial Egypt. To develop this point, I will outline the emergence of the legal professions during the colonial period and suggest ways in which they intersected with the novel form.4 Just as the novel became synonymous with the effendiyya during the early twentieth century, so too was it tied to new forms of law.5 For Hakim and the pulp authors upon whose works he drew, writing fiction about impolite or contentious social issues became an alternative way of addressing problems normally resolved through legal deliberation and action. What is more, these fictions often focused on issues the legal system could not redress. As such, these works are deeply conflicted: on the one hand, they appeal to legal standards; on the other, they express doubts about the ability of the legal system to resolve such issues.

Although these novels target particular social problems, their appeal does not lie in this narrow focus. Rather, they address a more abstract problem: the emerging practices of legal mediation. They articulate not so much a specific complaint about a particular law or judgment but, rather, a wider critique of the institutions of representation within the new secular legal system. Police and defense lawyers, attorneys and judges all drew their authority by reference to the emerging notion of “society,” on whose behalf they spoke. While some mediatory roles had existed within earlier Egyptian legal practice, others, such as lawyers, were still recent innovations in the early 1900s.

These mediatory innovations, I argue, are often depicted as problematic in early Egyptian novels and are signaled most clearly in references to the na’ib (public prosecutor) whose office, the Parquet, had only been recently created in Egypt. The protagonist of Hakim’s novel is a na’ib, and this figure recurs in other novels as well. The na’ib embodies the main themes of Egyptian literary modernism: progressive reform, order, and (European) reason. In this sense, the na’ib might easily have become an obvious symbol for the most idealistic impulses in modern Egyptian literature, which itself was a crucial component of al-Nahda (Renaissance), the nineteenth- and twentieth-century project of social and economic modernization and cultural modernism throughout the Arab world.6 But instead, this literary figure is wholly ambiguous. He represents both the ideals of Egyptian modernity and its flaws, the gap between the “enlightened” theory of modern (European) law in colonial Egypt and the often irrational and unjust practice of that theory.

While in both canonical and pulp novels the figure of the na’ib is relatively ambiguous, the representation of lawyers is unambiguously negative. Yet both figures, the na’ib and the lawyer, express an anxiety about the activity they share: speaking for others before the law. Hakim’s novel presents and complicates the deeper anxieties signaled by the na’ib, but to appreciate the text’s significance and ambivalence, it needs to be situated within both a broad history of the legal profession in colonial Egypt as well as the tradition of representing the law in Egyptian novels. To accomplish this, I will make special reference to two novels in which the law features prominently, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s Fitra min alzaman (A Period of Time, 1898–1900) and Yusuf Abu Haggag’s Mudhakkirat fitiwwa (Memoirs of a Street Thug, 1926).

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Notes

The author would like to thank the participants of the Law and Order in Egypt symposium at CUNY Graduate Center for suggestions on an earlier draft and Khaled Fahmy, Sonallah Ibrahim, Mara Naaman, and Nader Uthman for their comments on earlier versions of this argument. Special thanks to Everett K. Rowson for his translation suggestions.

1. See al-Riwaya 1, nos. 1–4 (1937).
2. The subject of pulp genres associated with the rise of mass print media (romance, mystery, science fiction) remains understudied in Arabic literature. See Pierre Cachia’s “Unwritten Arabic Fiction and Drama,” in An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 171–78.
3. See, for example, Muhammad Hasan 3Abd Allah, al-Rif fi-l-riwaya al-3arabiyya (Kuwait: 3Alim al-Ma3rafa, 1989), 64–65; Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 38; 3Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, al-Riwa’i wa-l-ard (Cairo: Dar al-Ma3arif, n.d.), 79; Kawsar Abdel Salam el Beheiry, L’Influence de la littérature française sur le roman arabe (Québec: Éditions Naaman, 1980), 242; Cachia, “Unwritten Arabic Fiction and Drama,” 159; Shawqi Dayf, al-Adab al-3arabi al-mu3asir fi-Misr (Cairo: Dar al-Ma3arif, 1992), 291.
4. Just as many of the jurists in the national courts worked as journalists, many of the first generation of twentieth-century Egyptian littérateurs were educated in law and pursued legal careers. See Farhat Ziadeh, Lawyers, the Rule of Law, and Liberalism in Modern Egypt (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1968); Byron Canon, Politics of Law and the Courts in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988).
5. Yawmiyyat’s author, like so many novelists of his generation, has been trained in law. A list of the most prominent Egyptian public authors reads like a “who’s who” of the Egyptian Bar Association in the early 1900s: Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Tawfiq al-Hakim. This connection (and competition) between the practices of law and novel writing existed through the 1940s. See “Ma3 Najib Mahfuz,” Atahaddath 3alaykum (Beirut: Dar al-3Awda, 1977), 54–55; and, also, Mahmoud Kamel, Journal d’un avocat égyptien (Cairo: Al Kadaa Al Misri, 1946). Angel Rama and Julio Ramos have made similar cases in their discussions of the letrado (lettered) class in Latin America. See Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1984); and Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: Literatura y política en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989).
6. The classic text on the Nahda remains Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). For more recent discussions of the Nahda and its cultural aftermath, see Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Saree Makdisi, “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 266–91.