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‘tirafat . . . (Confessions of . . . ). Like detective fiction, fictional memoirs were relatively popular in their heyday 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.
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 ‘Abd Allah, al-Rif fi-l-riwaya al-‘arabiyya (Kuwait: ‘Alim al-Ma‘rafa, 1989), 64–65; Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 38; ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, al-Riwa’i wa-l-ard (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 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-‘arabi al-mu‘asir fi-Misr (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 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 whoâ€? 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 “Ma‘ Najib Mahfuz,â€? Atahaddath ‘alaykum (Beirut: Dar al-‘Awda, 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 polÃtica en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989).
