In the Twilight of Nostalgia Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in Two Classic Muslim Novels Monika Fludernik The article maps out the affinities between Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk (1956). It traces the central mood of nostalgia for a lost past in the two novels and demonstrates how this ambivalent mood plays out in three respects: in the characters’ leisure activities, marked by their indolence and retrospective yearning; in the exaggerated assertion of patriarchal self-importance, compensating for a loss of actual political significance; and in the fraught relationship with the British. These three issues coalesce in the male protagonists’ amorous exploits, which link with the production of traditional poetry and song, serial adultery and the cultural clash between British and vernacular culture. In the final section, I discuss the two novels from the perspective of literary history and propose that they may be typical of a genre of the Muslim novel on its emergence from colonialism. The topic of my essay is the combination of several observable ambivalences due to colonial disempowerment and its clash with aspirations towards modernity, illustrated in two novels which I happened to read in close proximity with one another, namely Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk (1956). In both novels, an atmosphere of nostalgia and indolence prevails, a conjunction typical of South Asian texts focusing on otium or otiose leisure and which has been a recent focus of my research. 1 I was greatly struck by the similarities between the two novels despite their apparently very different spatial and 1 See Fludernik (2020, 2021) as well as Pernau (2015) and Noor (2020) for this connection. Research conducted on Ahmed Ali was part of the SFB 1015 (CRC 1015) AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2021-0006 Monika Fludernik 4 political settings, i.e. Delhi in 1911-1919 versus Cairo after the British takeover during World War I (1917-1919). Besides displaying a marked temporal overlap in the period before 1919, both novels are infused with a number of key affects: nostalgia for former national glory (of Muslims in Delhi and Egyptians under Ottoman rule); resentment of British colonial intervention; and a celebration of a class of (Muslim) citizens that is comparatively well-to-do but finds itself to be disintegrating and passing into the twilight of its former social and financial elite status. 2 Another prominent aspect shared by the two novels concerns the focus on a male family patriarch. In both cases, this figure keeps a strict discipline on his family at home, lording it over his sons and women folk, while secretly indulging in drink and sexual exploits outside the family residence. Both novels implicitly criticize the patriarchs’ hypocrisy and at least to some extent sympathize with the perspective of the oppressed family members. The two texts moreover thematize the budding nationalist movements against British colonial power. In what follows, I will first provide a brief background on the two works and then discuss three sets of ambivalences that emerge from the analysis of the texts. Section 1 will discuss the practices of leisure and indolence in Ali and Mahfouz, concentrating on flânerie, hobbyhorses and sexual exploits. I will show how the background of political disempowerment and the nostalgia for former times of national glory play out in a retreat into privacy, passivity and idleness. In both novels, the spaces of the old Delhi and the old Cairo are juxtaposed with the invasions by the colonial power and result in a nostalgia for the ancient city. Section 2 will focus on the ambivalences of patriarchy. My analysis will foreground the attempts to preserve self-respect despite the humiliations endured under colonialism, but also expose the resulting victimization of women. I will moreover trace the connection between patriarchy and religion, a fraught relation especially in Mahfouz. Section 3 returns to nostalgia and its political instrumentalizations and ambivalences. Section 4, finally, will consider the ambivalence between literary tradition and the influence from international modernist fiction on the two authors and presents a thesis regarding the genre of a Muslim colonial novel. It should be underlined at the outset that I am a scholar of English studies and not of comparative literature and that, alas, I do not know any Arabic and have therefore had to rely the English translation of Mahfouz’ text and on criticism in English. Ahmed Ali’s novel was written under British tutelage before the Second World War and published in 1940, thus before Indian Independence in funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project number 197396619. 2 Haider (2017: 169) characterizes Mir Nihal as belonging to the “ashraf or the uppermiddle-class Muslim family” in Delhi at the turn of the century and adds that he is a “Sayyed, an Arabic honorific title denoting descendants of the Islamic prophet Muhammad” (172). Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 5 1947. By contrast, the publication of Mahfouz’s text occurred after Egyptian independence in 1952, though the novel’s setting during and after World War I frames it within the British protectorate. 3 Palace Walk was written and completed between 1945 and “just before the Free Officers Revolution of July 1952 brought both British Empire and Turco-Egyptian puppet monarchy in Egypt to an end […]” (Tageldin 2012: 87). The political situation of the setting of Mahfouz’s novel therefore much resembles the real-life situation of Ahmed Ali. The two novels depict the fraught relationship between tradition and modern colonial influences in the experiences of the two representatives of their respective cultures. These experiences are inherently ambivalent. The two families find themselves torn between nostalgia for former glory and self-confidence (the older generation, labouring under a feeling of dispossession) and a desire to participate in scientific and political progress, associated with the British oppressor (the sons). In Twilight in Delhi, nostalgia is linked to politics and to the negative social and economic consequences that affected the Islamic population in India after the destruction of the Delhi sultanate and the move of political power away from Delhi. Chapter 8 of Part II of the novel, describing the massacre in Delhi during the rebellion of 1857, 4 highlights the protagonist’s resentment of colonial domination. In Palace Walk, active political anticolonialism is more or less restricted to the younger generation, though the father is certainly in favour of political independence. In the subsequent volumes of the Cairo Trilogy, the sons become political rebels. 1. Spaces and Practices of Leisure: Nostalgia, Disaffection and the Retreat into Privacy The atmosphere of both novels and the activities of the family heads are characterized by their leisurely life style, which revives nostalgic memories of former cultural preeminence. These leisure activities include strolling through the old town, reminiscent of traditional native life, reciting poetry, womanizing and daydreaming besides engaging in a number of hobbies. In Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, the patriarch Mir Nihal and his son Ashgar love to quote poetry to delineate their mood or corroborate an argument, as does Ashgar in his discussion with his friend Bari. Leisure activities in Twilight 3 It was in 1914 that the de facto protectorate over Egypt (in force since 1882) was declared official and the Ottoman Empire superseded by British rule. The British takeover in 1882 occurred in response to the threat by the ministry under Ahmad Urabi of the Egyptian independence movement (from 1879) to introduce democratic reforms. The Muhammad Ali dynasty, which had survived the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, was now reduced to serving as a figurehead. 4 The publisher thought this was seditious, and only E. M. Foster’s intercession with the censor allowed the novel to be printed in unabbreviated form (Joshi 2002: 213). Monika Fludernik 6 also include Ashgar’s sessions of daydreaming, for instance when he is looking at the stars (I,ii; 11-3; I,xii; 56). 5 Mir Nihal, on the other hand, indulges in the “idleness” of his interest in “medicine and alchemy” (II,v; 87). In Palace Walk, Kamal and his father go strolling through the old Cairo. The pastimes of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad are singing and playing the tambourine in an almost professional manner (xxxix, 248). 6 He is also said to be an expert in the conversational arts and in flirting. Flânerie is an important motif in both novels. As Trivedi notes, Mir Nihal lives near the Chandni Chowk in Mohalla Niyariyan; he walks home “from the shop in Chandni Chowk via the Clock Tower and Balli Maran” (Trivedi 1986: 52) and continues on via the Kucha Pandit and Jangli Kuan (Ali II,i; 66-7), while Ashgar returns home “from Mushtari Bai’s Kotha in Chaori Bazar [sic] via Hauz Qazi and Lal Darwaza” 7 (Trivedi 52), turning into Kucha Pandit and then into Jangli Kuan (Ali I,ii; 55-6). Father and son meet and observe many people and exchange greetings; they also appreciate the wares on display and delight in the buildings they pass, especially landmarks like the Fatehpuri Mosque “at the bottom of Chandni Chowk” (Trivedi 52) or the Jama Masjid (Ali I,I; 4, I,iv; 23 et passim). In Palace Walk, too, the male characters are depicted roaming the streets. Yasin, the eldest son, “headed toward the Goldsmiths Bazaar and then to al-Ghuriya. He turned into al-Sayyid Ali’s coffee shop on the corner of al-Sanadiqiya” (xii, 71). Especially the youngest son Kamal likes to loiter in the streets after school. He passes the “mosque of al-Husayn” (viii, 48) and crosses “al-Husayn Street”; then he “turned into Khan Ja’far. From there he headed for Bayt al-Qadi Square. Instead of going home by way of al-Nahhasin, he crossed the square to Qirmiz Alley, despite its desolation and the fears it aroused in him, in order to avoid passing by his father’s store” (viii, 49). He “approached Qirmiz Alley with its vaulted roof” (viii, 50) and reaches home: “At the end he could see Palace Walk and the entrance of Hammam al-Sultan. Then his eyes fell on his home’s dark green wooden grilles and the large door with its bronze knocker” (viii, 50-1). The fateful outing with his mother is described in great detail, particularly Kamal’s headstrong decision to extend the excursion by passing through busier thoroughfares (xxvii, 167-73). As Williams observes, “[e]ven within this limited area [the “Al-Gamaliyya and al-Ghuriyya quarters of al-Qahira” - 52], the action of each novel [of the trilogy] is primarily confined to only a few blocks” (53). 5 Quotations from Twilight reference Part and chapter numbers in Roman numerals and use Arabic for page numbers. 6 Roman numerals are used for chapter numbers, Arabic for page numbers in Mahfouz’s Palace Walk (1991). 7 Note that the spellings in Ali’s novel are often different from those common in anglophone novels set in India: bazar and not bazaar, begam and not begum; moazzin and not muezzin; darbar and not durbar. Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 7 As has been noted in the criticism of Twilight, the town which serves as the scenery of Mir Nihal’s and Ashgar’s walks is a setting that brilliantly evokes the feel of the old Delhi, circumscribed by the religious affiliation of its inhabitants (Trivedi 1986: 65). According to Iftikhar, Mir Nihal is “a representative of a whole Muslim culture, through which Ali [focuses] on every nook and corner of individual as well as collective lives of Muslims” (2012: 396). The fact that Delhi had more Hindu inhabitants than Muslim ones (Malik 2008: 436-8) is backgrounded against the all-pervasive, indeed predominant and even exclusive, atmosphere of a Muslim community and neighbourhood (Trivedi 51-3). Not least does this become obvious from the central importance of the Muezzins’ prayers from the towers of the Mosques: A moazzin from a nearby mosque raised his voice, calling the faithful to the evening prayer. Other moazzins called from the other mosques. As their voices were nearing an end there rose on the wind the voice of Nisar Ahmad, for Ashgar’s mohallah was not far away from where he sat. His resonant voice came bringing peace and rest, and a sense of the transience of life, that all that we do is meaningless and vain. Ashgar sat listening to the azaan until it died away […] (I,iv; 23) The pastimes of the inhabitants of “the Muslim Delhi founded by the Mughals” (Trivedi 65) focus on religious holidays, ceremonies and songs. Thus, we learn that Ashgar, who is an excellent singer, regularly performs at the “meelad” (mawlid, birthday of the prophet) (II,xii; 58-9). Among the other Islamic festivals mentioned is the feast of Eid (Eid-al-Fitz - “Eed” - II,vi; 93-6), the conclusion of the Ramadan. Other ‘pastimes’ of the Delhi inhabitants mentioned in the book include watching the ceremony of King George V’s coronation durbar in December 1911. Though Mir Nihal belongs to those who “rag[e] within their hearts at the thought of subjection to a foreign race” (II,vi; 97), many others were “dying” to see “the big fair”: For the residents of Delhi never miss an opportunity of enjoying themselves, and this quality is peculiar to Delhi-ites alone of all the peoples of India. Even during the terrible days of 1857, when the guns were spitting fire, they used to climb up on the roofs to watch the fun of cannon balls shooting red hot out of the cannons’ mouths, and compared the firing to fireworks during the festival of Shab-barat. (II,vii; 99) Mir Nihal compares the valour of Delhi’s citizens defending the Jama Masjid against the British army during the Mutiny to the cowardly inhabitants of Delhi in the present, excoriating “their slavishness and their treacherous acceptance of the foreign yoke” (II,viii; 105); yet, the above passage Monika Fludernik 8 demonstrates that already in 1857 there existed numerous inhabitants who were indifferent or politically uninvolved. A particularly interesting pastime of Mir Nihal’s is pigeon-flying. As Brown (2018: 842) points out, pigeon-flying “was referred to as love-play or ishq-baazi”. His love for pigeons and women are thus related. Mir Nihal flies his pigeons in the morning (I,v; 28) before he goes to the “shop of lace dealers” in which he has a “share” (ibid). Since he belongs to the ruined class of Delhi Muslims who lost property and income in the wake of the Mutiny (IV,ix; 192, see also Haider 2017: 175), he needs to supplement his income by working to meet the expenses of a growing family (I,v; 28), but also to pay for his pigeons and his mistress (II,iii; 82). His pigeon-flying has a central symbolic status in the novel, since the loss of the pigeons due to a cat sneaking into their cage coincides with Mir Nihal’s loss of his beloved courtesan, Babban Jan. Both disasters are to some extent incurred through his fault: he leaves the cage door open; he leaves it until too late to call a doctor for Babban Jan. Moreover, he fails to visit her in time before she dies from typhoid fever because he was busy buying new pigeons (II,iii; 83). Mir Nihal’s pastime of flying his pigeons is parallelized in the novel with his son’s, Ashgar’s, flying of his kite (I,iv; 21-6), which in turn comes to symbolize sexual attraction or even obsession. It is during his kite-flying that Ashgar talks to his friend Bari about his love for Bilqueece; similarly, Mr. Nihal’s pigeons invoke his relationship to women and his sexual prowess.Let me turn to Palace Walk. Strolling through town is a frequent pastime also in Mahfouz’s novel, and the motif of idleness and indolence plays an important role in the text. While the patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al- Jawad, often referred to as “the proprietor”, takes a walk through town mostly en route to the shop and to his various amorous assignations, his leisure activities concentrate on the art of conversation, especially of the humorous kind, the reciting of poetry and the playing of the tambourine. His oldest son Yasin, who is a “civil servant” (lvi, 373), seems to spend most of his office hours in Ahmad Abduh’s coffee house (lvii, 377) and his evenings in Costaki’s bar or “al-Sayyid Ali’s coffee house in al-Ghuriya” (ibid), where he watches out for Zanuba, his latest mistress. Even the second and favourite son Fahmy is a frequenter of coffee houses, where he talks to his fellow students about politics. As El-Enany observes, [n]o account of Mahfouz is complete without mention of the maqhā (café) and the important role it played both in his life and in his fiction. In his youth, in common with men of his generation, the café acted as a social club - much like a public house in Britain. There personal and literary friendships were forged and many intellectual, heart-searching discussions took place […]. There is hardly a novel by Mahfouz in which the café does not represent a significant part of the scene, and there are several in which the café is the most important element in the setting. (32) Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 9 The reference to intellectual exchange in coffee-houses provides a parallel with the Bengali practice of adda described by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Strolling through town is an activity that allows one to observe others, but also to display oneself. Yasin comes across as a bit of a dandy and most closely resembles a flâneur: He went along slowly in a friendly, complaisant manner. He strutted vainly and proudly […], his face radiating vitality and manliness, his elegant garments that received more than their fair share of attention, the fly whisk with its ivory handle that never left his hand winter or summer, and his tall fez tilted to the right so it almost touched his eyebrows. (xii, 70) Even the youngest son, Kamal, likes to rove through town and he also sings and plays with the British soldiers encamped before the house after the rebellion. The most indolent person in the novel, though, is Aisha’s husband Khalil, who does nothing all day but “smoking his water pipe or strumming his lute” (xlvii, 317). Aisha’s sister Khadija notes the couple’s “laziness, mildness, and indolence”, commenting that “her husband spends the whole day smoking and playing music while she adorns herself and flits back and forth in front of the mirror” (lxvi, 458). We can therefore observe that both novels are concerned with forms of urban leisure that have a correlation with art; moreover, eroticism (as we will see in the next section) plays a constitutive role in the daily activities of the two patriarchs. Both novels depict their settings in great topographical detail and paint a portrait of the Muslim community in Cairo and in Delhi. In what follows, I will focus on the institution of patriarchy in the two texts and their implicit censure of Mir Nihal’s, al-Sayyid’s and Yasin’s womanizing. The two novels showcase the patriarchs’ hypocrisy regarding their morality but also in reference to al-Sayyid Ahmad’s religiosity. 2. The Ravages of Patriarchy and the Uncovering of Hypocrisy Twilight in Delhi dwells extensively on Mir Nihal’s authoritarian behaviour in relation to his household and demonstrates that he is responsible for the suffering of those around him. At the same time, the high moral horse on which he takes his stand is being undercut by his philandering, insensitivity and even cruelty. Thus, it emerges that Begum Nihal had a complete mental breakdown when her husband’s affair with the maid Dilchain resulted in the latter’s pregnancy (I,vi; 33) and that he banished her from his house with their two children (Ashgar and Begum Nihal) until she got better. Besides this ugly affair there is Mir Nihal’s failure to save Mehro from a disappointing marriage to a very ugly man because his honour cannot brook a reneging on his promise (III,iv; 138). Mehro, as a result, “felt like Monika Fludernik 10 a cow under butcher’s knife. But she could not alter her fate, and had to accept it with as much courage as she could muster” (ibid). Another passage hints at Mir Nihal’s irresponsible arrangement of a marriage for his servant Ghafoor to Sheikh Mohammad Sadiq’s niece, with tragic consequences for the bride: […] the girl had died within six months of the marriage of ulcers in the womb. She was really too young for the strong and virile Ghafoor, and the strain had been too much for her. Sheikh Mohammad Sadiq had wished to get some compensation, but Mir Nihal had got rid of him. He had warned him that the girl was too young for Ghafoor. If he had persisted in his folly it was his lookout. (III,vi; 147) Obviously Mir Nihal had been aware of possible negative consequences of such a marriage but had refused to take responsibility for his insouciance either morally or financially. The unenviable situation of women in Indian Muslim society is not merely criticized implicitly, it is also counterpointed by an extensive emphasis on the female characters’ perspective, including access to their consciousness. The female point of view emerges in connection with the depiction of the women’s domestic environment. The novel dwells at length on the atmosphere of the zenana, and it does so by representing the conversations of the female characters among themselves before even having the patriarch enter the scene. Thus, in the opening chapter, after the panorama of Old Delhi and the history of Delhi, the narrative enters “the house of Mir Nihal” (I,I; 5) and moves directly into the zenana. The conversation of the women introduces major thematic leitmotifs of the novel like the Mutiny (I,I; 6), the criticism of British cruelty as well as the nostalgic mood centring on former Mughal greatness. We thus encounter the patriarchal setting of “Mir Nihal’s house” (I,I; 5), but - unlike the contemporary Muslim man in real life, for whom the zenana is a no-go area - are allowed to visit. Not only does the novel start by introducing readers directly into this secret sphere; the zenana setting recurs frequently throughout the novel and quantitatively is more important than the rooms in which Mir Nihal stays in the house (Begum 1995). With its atmosphere of stagnation (one could almost speak of Joycean paralysis), the zenana serves as a counterpoint to the men’s strolls around town; thus we have a juxtaposition of female enclosure (compare the pigeons in the cage) and promiscuous male roaming (in the public sphere). The atemporality of female existence in the zenana is underlined in the text: In the zenana things went on with the monotonous sameness of Indian life. No one went out anywhere. Only now and then some cousin or aunt or some other relation came to see them. […] Mostly life stayed like water in a pond with nothing to break the monotony of its static life. Walls stood surrounding them Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 11 on all sides, shutting the women in from the prying eyes of men, guarding their beauty and virtue with the millions of their bricks. (I,v; 29) The initial displacement of the patriarch through the focus of the text on the zenana is rectified when Mir Nihal returns home. His status as the head of the household emerges immediately: everybody has had to wait for his return to have dinner. He is consulted about Mehro’s marriage. Most importantly, he demonstrates his virility by killing the snake that is threatening his pigeons (I,I; 9) - and therefore his womenfolk. His violence in killing the snake in the opening chapter represents heroic action. However, when he later kills the cat that has eaten his pigeons (II,iii; 81), his fury, fuelled also by his grief over the loss of his mistress, results in excessive cruelty, a cruelty that harkens back to his behaviour towards his wife when he banned her. This cruelty hints at his unbalanced emotional state of mind. Finally, when he threatens the children with the sword in III,vi, his anger, which is morally justified as a didactic lesson, gets the better of him: the boys are frightened. The formerly heroic sword is abusively employed to intimidate children (not men! ), and the whole scene turns into bathetic melodrama (146). It is instructive to compare this behaviour with the heroic defenders of the Jama Masjid during the Mutiny and Mir Nihal’s disgust at the “chickenhearted” citizens of Delhi in 1911 (II,viii; 107). Though his contemporaries are admittedly opportunists, he himself also fails to exemplify traditional heroism when succumbing to anger and violence directed at vicarious objects. His eventual humiliation at the hand of a kind of poetic justice arrives in the shape of a heart attack on the way back from a funeral (III,ix; 156). In the course of the novel, Mir Nihal declines in vigour and health as he ages from 62 at the start of the novel to 71 at the end (Trivedi 47). Significantly, his malaise begins when he looks at a dead pigeon before attending the funeral and remembers his grief for Babban-Jan. The paragon of patriarchal values is not only compromised by his actions but also by his own body. Mir Nihal emerges as a representative of a male-centred culture whose claim to moral superiority is being seriously undercut by his hypocrisy especially in the realm of sexual mores. Psycho-analytically, his assumption of the role of the strong man can be argued to correlate with nostalgia and to compensate for his social inferiority complex under colonialism. Turning to Palace Walk, one can observe that the sway of al-Sayyid Ahmad’s power in the family is apparent everywhere. He lords it over the household, expecting complete obedience and submission to his dictates, which are overly traditional and restrictive. 8 He is especially hard on the 8 Malak (2005: 32-3) cites Iqbalumisa Hussain’s novel Purdah and Polygamy (1944), who ironically presents the traditional doxa of the Muslim husband: “A woman as a Monika Fludernik 12 women; thus, from sheer malice he at first forbids his wife to visit Aisha after her confinement. When his first wife Haniyya (El-Enany 1993: 79) had refused to obey him, he had beaten her and she had escaped to her father’s house and insisted on a divorce (ch. xvii). Al-Sayyid Ahmad primarily wishes to “protect his dignity and image at home” (ii, 9) and cannot brook being overruled by others. He is indignant when he hears that Fahmy would like to marry the neighbour’s daughter Maryam (before he himself had taken a decision). When his beloved second son, Fahmy, turns out to be a revolutionary and refuses to swear on the Koran that he will not again participate in demonstrations (lxii, 425), Ahmad is furious. Even when the British seem to have relented regarding Egyptian agitation for political freedom and he makes up with his son (lxx), he continues to resent the fact that his will has not been consulted and bowed to (lxii, 422); he is only concerned to have Fahmy admit he cannot live without his father’s approval (lxx, 486). Actually, al-Sayyid Ahmad is in favour of the demonstrators’ aspirations for Egyptian independence and even signs a petition (xlix), but, despite his approbation of the demonstration in principle, “[…] it was a totally different matter for any of these deeds to be performed by a son of his” (lxii, 425). The patriarch is a very ambivalent figure, combining the roles of “disciplinarian despot” and “convivial epicure” (Siddiq 2007: 124). He instils both fear and admiration in his family. When he leaves the house to attend to his business, [e]veryone greeted it [“their father’s departure”] with a relief that was innocent rather than reprehensible, like a prisoner’s satisfaction on hearing the clatter of chains being unfastened from his hands and feet. Each knew that he would shortly regain his liberty to talk, laugh, sing, and do many other things free from danger. (iv, 22) Kamal is unable to face his father’s “haughty, tyrannical will” (viii, 49). Though al-Sayyid Ahmad used to be kind to him when he was a child (viii, 50), he has now turned into a strict disciplinarian (viii, 49). When the father has banished Kamal’s mother from the family residence after their illfated excursion to the mosque, Kamal visits the proprietor in the store to plead for her. Though tongue-tied with fear in his father’s presence, when escaping from the shop, he finally manages to shout: “Bring back Mama” (xxxiv, 217). Kamal’s terror of his father is mixed with respect and love: He admired his strong, imposing appearance, his dignity that swept everyone along with it, the elegance of his clothing, and the ability he believed him to wife should be subservient in everything to man’s comfort and exist for him and for him alone”. Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 13 have to do anything. […] He could not imagine that any other man in the world could equal al-Sayyid Ahamd’s power, dignity, or wealth. (viii, 50) In fact, “everyone in the household loved the man to the point of worship. Kamal’s small heart absorbed its love for him from this environment, but that love remained a hidden jewel, locked up inside him by fear and terror” (ibid). As El-Enany notes, the novel portrays al-Sayyid Ahmad as a god, “attribut[ing] to him epithets and qualities appropriate to Allah” (81; 227, n.18). It is therefore logical that respect for the father and belief in God disappear together when all authority becomes suspect. 9 In Siddiq’s reading of Kamal, he suffers from an Oedipus complex (2007: 126-32). Fahmy, too, is in awe of his father, and would face death rather than his parent’s ire: “He could rebel against the English and defy their bullets almost every day, but the English were a frightening and hated enemy, while his father was his father, a frightening and beloved man” (lxii, 424). This puts the colonial power and God on the same level as al-Sayyid. Despite being an anti-colonialist, the father compensates for his political disempowerment by assuming the authority of a ruler, thereby directing the sons’ rebellion in the direction of Egyptian nationalism against British rule. Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s treatment of women is even more dogmatic than that of his sons. He has found a very uncomplaining wife in Amina, whom he wedded when she was only thirteen. She, too, finds her husband “so wealthy, strong, and handsome” (i, 5) and has become used to his moods, obeying him blindly. When he banishes her, he does so not out of anger— he had been really concerned for her health and allowed her to get well again, so had time for his anger at her disobedience in leaving the house to cool down—, but is afraid of losing control of his household: he wants to reassert his patriarchal position of unquestioned authority (xxxi, 194). He jealously guards the virtue of his women. For instance, when Aisha is very weak after giving birth to a girl, al-Sayyid Ahmad blames her husband Khalil for calling a doctor, who will “take such a searching look at your wife” (lxviii, 476). The unblemished reputation of his daughter, i.e. his own dignity, are more important to him than her life. Not only does he smell a rat when a proposal of marriage for Aisha comes in from of a police officer (in fact, Aisha has been smiling at the man from a window), but he also suspects, again correctly, that Fahmy’s wish to marry Maryam from next door derives from his having seen her, which throws a bad light on the neighbour’s reputation. The conflict about women’s proper behaviour comes to a head around Zaynab, Yasin’s wife. Yasin takes her out at night 9 In Palace of Desire, Kamal, too, also ends up rebelling against religion with a God that is like his father: “But it is not you alone whose image has changed. God himself is no longer God as I worshipped Him in the past. I am sifting through His attributes to clean them from tyranny, despotism, coercion, dictatorship and the whole gamut of human instincts” (xxxvii, 1991: 396; qtd. El-Enany 83, quoting a different translation). Monika Fludernik 14 to the theatre (xlvi, 309) and when he comes home, there is an altercation. Ahmad accuses his two grown sons of being ‘women’, i.e. of lacking male authority, dignity or proper pride in their family honour: if they had, they would not have put the women’s reputation at risk. When shouted at by his father, Yasin, chicken-hearted, blames his wife, and Ahmad responds he should have beaten her into obedience to his will (xlvi, 314-15): “‘[…] Only men can ruin women, and not every man is capable of being a guardian for them’ (Qur’an 4: 34)”. 10 Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s tyrannical behaviour and cruelty are fuelled by his extremely strict views regarding female honour, and this profound traditionalism relates to an inherent gynophobia and to a need to defend his domestic power under the cloak of family honour. Yasin, the eldest son from his first marriage, shares this gynophobic inclination, but is even more excessive in both his lust for and his disparagement of women. Yasin soon gets bored with his wife Zaynab 11 after his initial satisfaction of having somebody to sleep with constantly at his disposal (xliv, 300). When she becomes unhappy at his neglect of her, he quips: “What more does any woman want than a home of her own and sexual gratification? Nothing! Women are just another kind of domestic animal, and must be treated like one” (l, 338). Not only does he have no romantic strain in him, but sees women exclusively as objects of his lust; when his desire for his mistress Zanuba overtakes him, “he fell on her like a bull elephant crushing a gazelle” (xxxix, 251). As for his wife, he regards her as his “property” (xlvi, 307), since her presence and availability can now be taken for granted: his desire for his wife “was no longer the desire of a fasting person for a tasty delicacy” (xlvi, 308). Stuck at home during the curfew, Yasin descends into a “life of idling his time away” in order to fend off his “boredom or ‘the emptiness of life,’ as he put it” (l, 333). Having before the curfew escaped the tedium of marriage by again devoting his evenings to drinking and womanizing, “[h]e thought to escape through relaxation, entertainment, and distraction” in a manner similar to his earlier “temporary life of amusement” (ibid). This leads to his rape of the maid Nur. Zaynab catches him in flagranti and loudly complains of his infidelity - a behaviour both Amina and her husband find off-putting—a decent wife does not advertise her husband’s lapses. When Zaynab’s father insists on a divorce, Yasin’s primary emotion is related to his honour, thus replicating his father’s priorities: he feels “more humiliated by this than by anything else in his life except his mother’s conduct” and comments: “There was nothing strange in a man casting out a pair of shoes, but shoes were not supposed to throw away their owner” (all lx, 409). This pronouncement 12 The Koran reference is in the original. 11 Her name may be meant as an ironic reference to the first Egyptian novel, Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab (published 1913). Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 15 again exposes his conception of a wife as his property, and one that can be disposed of when soiled or no longer of use. Yasin’s attitude towards women may have been provoked by his problems with his mother, who keeps getting married and divorced again - a behaviour that he considers harmful to his personal honour. 12 Yasin and his father share a neurotic regard for their own dignity. Sexual affairs are a pastime that both the father and Yasin indulge in; they are philanderers and extremely virile. Al-Sayyid Ahmad, at the age of “fortyfive […] still “enjoy[s] an ardent and exuberant vigor like that of an adolescent youth” (vii, 41). For Yasin, as for his father, “[w]ine and women in his life were inseparable and complementary” (xii, 75). Al-Sayyid’s “amorous adventures” (xvi, 99), like his son’s, are centred on lust: “His lust was always distinguished by a taste for luxury”, by “a refined sense of selection” and “social qualifications” (all lviii, 390): “Just as he loved beauty in the abstract, he loved it in its glittering social framework. […] He had been the lover of some of the most famous entertainers of his time” (lviii, 390- 1 1). Yet, in many ways he resembles Yasin: “In his fury, he neglected to remember that his own past was a long and repeated series of slips like Yasin’s” (lviii, 388). However, unlike Yasin, Ahmad plays the role of the unimpeachable authoritarian with a reputation for honesty and virtue. This takes me to the issue of hypocrisy, a theme that the novel dwells on in detail. Hypocrisy derives from the inherent ambivalences experienced by the characters. The motif appears early in Palace Walk when al- Sayyid Ahmad receives a visit from Shaykh Mutawalli Abd-al-Samad, who upbraids the proprietor for his indulgence in alcohol and his adultery (“What do you have to say as a devout Muslim concerning your lust for women? ” - vii, 40), even calling him “you, fornicator” (vii, 41). Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s answer reflects his manner of guarding his reputation above everything else: “I have never allowed myself to offend against honor or dignity at all” (40). He then excuses himself for not taking an additional wife to take care of his sexual urges by claiming that this would reduce the inheritance of his sons. In response to the shaykh’s reprimand for his drinking, al-Sayyid ends up telling the shaykh that he is a good person, and why should it be wrong for him “to refresh myself with a little fun, harming no one, or for me to overlook one rule? ” (vii, 43). 13 It is therefore obvious that the patriarch is perfectly aware of his sins, but mainly interested in keeping up the façade of reputation, honour and dignity. When Yasin, going to his assignation with Zanuba, finds that the gentleman visiting her foster mother, the famous singer Madame Zubayda, is his own father, he is completely amazed that the expert player of the tambourine could be identical with “[t]hat stern, tyrannical, terrifying, God-fearing, reserved man who 12 See chapters 13, 17, 18 and 63. Compare Siddiq (2007) and his Freudian reading of the novel. 13 For a very insightful analysis of this scene see Siddiq (2007: 123-4). Monika Fludernik 16 kills everyone around him with fright […]” (xxxix, 248). Yasin had “never before seen his face smile. It was glistening with such affection and goodwill that Yasin was stunned […]” (xxxix, 249). Unlike Mir Nihal’s secret liaison with Babban Jan, Ahmad’s womanizing is not only discovered by Yasin (and later by Fahmy, who is deeply shaken by the revelation - xl, 270-1), but it is even made public at Aisha’s wedding (xl, 265-8). Although the patriarch at first “curs[es] his luck which had decreed for him to be disgraced before the eyes of many, including his family, who knew him as a shining example of earnestness and dignity” (xl, 269), yet, “assuming the worst”, he is not overly worried: “Their [his family’s] subservience to him and his domination over them both assured that no convulsion would shake them, not even this scandal” (ibid). Where the secret practices of the patriarch are most strikingly at odds with his self-image is in the context of his religious beliefs. He prays fervently every morning: When he prayed, his face was humble, not the smiling, merry face his friends encountered or the stern, resolute one his family knew. […] Piety, love, and hope shone from its relaxed features, which were molded by a wish to ingratiate, cajole, and seek forgiveness. He did not pray in a mechanical way limited to recitation, standing, and prostration. His prayer was based on affection, emotion, and feelings. (iii, 17) The omniscient narrator’s portrait of al-Sayyid Ahmad therefore grants the patriarch a valid religious life, which sits uneasily side by side his philandering, lack of affection in his amorous escapades and his demonstrated cruelty. When Yasin attends the Friday prayers with his father, he speculates on his father’s hypocrisy (lxi, 413-14). Yet hypocrisy extends even to the preacher, who is rumoured to have a preference for boys. The father’s sincere religious belief could be contrasted with Yasin’s lack of commitment in this scene. As the narrator remarks, he “did not have [the] ability to reconcile his piety and his practice or did not feel in need of it” (lxi, 413), whereas his father, listening to the preacher, is “troubled by anxiety and doubt”, as he was on the day of Shaykh Mutawalli’s visit. Ahmad prays for “pardon, forgiveness, and mercy” but not for “repentance, or if he did it was only with his tongue and not his heart” (all 413). He experiences the strife between tongue and heart as “a pair of musical instruments playing together in a single orchestra but rendering different tunes”. And he manages to excuse himself by vowing to “increase [his] dedication to the performance of [his] religious duties and [his] ability to do good deeds” (413). Yasin’s doubts do not go as deep. He complacently imagines that his sins are not all that serious: “God was too merciful to cause a Muslim like himself to burn in hell for transitory lapses that harmed no one. And there was always repentance. … It would come one day and erase everything that had preceded it” (413). Thus, though Yasin and the Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 17 patriarch differ in their religious commitment, in practice they both expose themselves to the censure of hypocrisy. I have demonstrated that both novels focus on a patriarch whose furtive sexual exploits undermine their public dignity and status and their moral authority. Implicit criticism of patriarchy in Palace Walk operates much in the same manner as it does in Twilight. One of the most striking parallels between Palace Walk and Twilight emerges in the opening of the two novels: both texts start with a view into the zenana; Palace Walk even begins with a chapter written from Amina’s perspective on her apparently happy marriage. As in Twilight, we have the wife wait up for the return of her husband. This ‘feminization’ of the novel has been discussed in detail by Shaden M. Tageldin (2012): The original Arabic […] begins not with this pronoun [she] but with an expression of time […] ‘At midnight she awoke’ […] the sentence ends with the verb ‘awoke’ conjugated in the third-person-feminine singular, rendering feminine the condition of the novel’s awakening and perhaps also that of the Egyptian nation. (91) This “awakening” can be linked to the political one, of “Nahda, or Arab literary renaissance” (91), though the unlettered Amina is actually against the revolution. 14 Like Ahmed Ali’s novel, this book therefore likewise offers extensive insights into the women’s perspective. However, its main strategy of criticizing patriarchy is not through the depiction of Amina’s consciousness but in the listing of the patriarch’s and Yasin’s actions against women: the banishment of Amina; the rapes committed by Yasin; the unreasonable restriction of women’s lives; and al-Sayyid Ahmad’s overly strict role as a father, meant to support his own self-esteem rather than justice or morality in the abstract. Similar implicit strategies of critique are utilized in Twilight, though Mir Nihal’s sexual exploits are not as serious as al-Sayyid Ahmad’s. Both novels present a situation in which the fathers are unhappy about their three sons, who fail to attain the level of manliness that the patriarchs themselves (believe they) symbolize. The stories are therefore also tales of the emasculation of a family dynasty, of its decline. Which returns us to the subject of the nostalgic mood in the two works, meant to ‘shore up’ the ruins of former significance. 14 Tageldin talks about “Amina’s antinationalist vision of the nation” (95). Amina’s role as mother is linked to “the prenational Islamic umma, the mother ‘community of Muhammad’” (96), umma deriving from umm, ‘mother’ (95). Tageldin argues that “[the] laws of the domestic world of women - to which men are subject in the family home - obstruct, enable, and obstruct again Fahmy’s access to the house for which he years: the House of the Nation, the public sphere of nationalist struggle” (94). On the nahda, see Starkey (2006, chapter 2). Monika Fludernik 18 3. Political Marginalization of Muslims and Nostalgia Mir Nihal in Twilight in Delhi is depicted as chafing against colonial power and especially at the marginalization of Indian Muslims, who used to rule the subcontinent. 15 The trigger for political disaffection in Twilight is the coronation of George V - a ceremony perceived by Nihal and his friends as an affront against the citizens of Delhi, Delhi having been the seat of the Mughal ruler whom the British have exiled. Since, politically, the inhabitants of Old Delhi can do nothing against the coronation, their response limits itself to emotional frustration and a nostalgic memorialization of Mughal culture (especially poetry). It is interesting to observe that there are few passages that celebrate Mughal victories or Mughal power. What is emphasized in the opening chapter is the Mughals’ building of Delhi, which is contrasted with the British supplanting of Old Delhi with colonial New Delhi and the partial destruction of the old town (III,vi; 143-4). The nostalgic memories focus on the armed resistance to the British troops during the Mutiny and on Delhian prowess and heroism in defence of the central mosque, the Jama Masjid (II,viii). Delhians’ erstwhile virility, as already noted, is contrasted with present-day opportunism and cowardice (II,viii; 105-7). The second focus of nostalgia relates to the former Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah, and his offspring, who have been reduced to beggary. Mir Nihal primarily reproaches the British for the Mughal downfall (“the treachery of the East India Company had become too well known” - II,vii; 103). In a discussion with his son, Mir Nihal additionally blames intrigues against the ruler as a further reason for his defeat. He charges “Zinat Mahal, the second wife of Bahadur Shah, who wanted the throne for her son Jawan Bakht” (II,vii; 102), with the shah’s downfall. Moreover, the “real Emperor of India” was “deceived by that traitor, Mirza Elahi Bakhsh” (II,vii; 103), whom Mir Nihal accuses of having been a spy in the employ of the British and having convinced the shah of “the honourable intentions of the English which proved to be nothing else but imprisonment, murder and banishment” (103). The beggaring of the Shah’s numerous offspring provides a recurrent element in the text’s nostalgic discourse. II,viii ends on Mir Nihal’s encounter with Mirza Nasirul Mulk, the youngest son of the exiled emperor (109). The women receive a visit from Gul Bano, a granddaughter of the Shah, who sings songs of Bahadur (II,vii; 100-2). And then there is the blind beggar who goes under the name of “Bahadur Shah” (II,vi; 96-7). What is particularly pathetic about the economic destitution of the former Shah’s 15 Malik (2008) quotes Sayyid Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi’s What has the World Lost with the Decline of the Muslims? (wr. 1944-1947), in which he insists on ‘Islamic superiority’: “Muslims, he claimed, had awakened every country and also India from a deep slumber and had led it to the heights of civilisation” (438). Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 19 family is its contrast with the traditional expected bounty and hospitality of the Mughals. Shahs were expected to lavish gifts on their retinue, including generous sponsoring of the poetic arts. Mir Nihal’s frequent reciting of poems and his familiarity with the Mughal literary tradition invoke the Mughals’ symbolic connection with the arts. He considers British culture vastly inferior to the civilization of the Mughals, whose stellar accomplishments he cherishes: “The glory had gone, and only dreariness remained. The richness of life had been looted and despoiled by the foreigners, and vulgarity and cheapness had taken its place” (IV,iv; 176). The pervasive nostalgia in the novel has been a recurrent focus in the criticism. In sociology and literary studies, the concept of nostalgia has moreover become a much debated issue. Naqvi (2007) and Pernau (2015) outline how the term nostalgia started out as a medical concept, soon associated with pathology and linked to what Lombroso considered as the degeneracy and atavism of criminal (wo)man. Subsequently, nostalgia became associated with ‘primitive’ peoples and generally with those unable to adapt to modern life (Naqvi). In this semantic history, the symptoms of nostalgia (depression) are malingering (in the army) and the rueful hankering after one’s former life of freedom from constraint. Hence, both Naqvi and Pernau assume that nostalgia is a subversive strategy against, or a manifestation of disaffection with, the forces of modernity (especially industrialization and disciplining in the Foucauldian mould). Originally a descriptor of those overwhelmed by the exigencies of modernity, nostalgia turns into a source of consolation or retrospective fantasy and ultimately into a nucleus of envisaging a better future (Smith 2000). These conceptualizations of nostalgia are focused on the perspective of the subaltern, but can be extended to mainstream scenarios of failed adaptation. (The story of British Heritage movies and their influence on Brexit might be cited.) Much on these lines, Alam argues that political disenfranchisement results in a “potent assertion of one’s role in these private spaces” (2016: 31) - implicitly suggesting that Mir Nihal’s authoritarianism at home is a compensation for his feelings of public disempowerment. Alam sees the most important private space as that of religion, which provides an environment “where anti-colonial nationalism finds its potent expression” (32). It seems to me that religion certainly provides a framework for the traditional life that the Nihal household upholds, but for Ashgar it is poetry - and love (since the ghazals are love poems) - that plays a much more central role in the novel. Nostalgia of course features prominently in immigrant fiction, not only from South Asia, and could be argued to constitute a tradition in South Asian fiction in the past half century. (A classic example is Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye Blackbird, 1968.) What is particular about the nostalgia in Ahmed Ali’s novel is its close link with Islam and Indian Muslim culture. Most critics link the atmosphere of nostalgia in Twilight with Islam. Niven even ascribes to Islam an inherent gloominess and pessimism: Monika Fludernik 20 What Ali seeks to distil in these novels is the essence of Muslim philosophy, the encompassing despondency, the hankering for former glories, and the discomfort not just of individuals within a community but a complete society facing a derelict future. (1980: 5) On this view, nostalgia is not merely a politically motivated nostalgia for the loss of cultural importance and the marginalization experienced in the wake of colonial oppression. In a trenchant analysis of the novel, Padamsee argues that the Indian concept of time is cyclical, but that in Indian Muslim culture cyclical renewal has been displaced by traditional uprootedness. In his view, Ali “repositions Indo-Muslim culture as a transitional moment between the colony and the nation, a temporality defined by its elusive ‘passing’” (Padamsee 2011: 34): “The ‘twilight’ of the title […] underlines that somewhere between Azad and Ali the temporal has slipped from an instrumental tool for locating the community into a form of homelessness” (34). 16 From this perspective, nostalgia is less compensatory than centred on an elimination of history through negation. The timelessness of nostalgic presentification of the past allows for the suppression of current agency, indulging in lethargy, without any prospects for an apparent future. 17 As Brown puts it, “Ali sees literature as offering a mode of rescue - rather than a mode of solace, catharsis, or political intervention […]” (842). 18 Indeed, most readings of the novel, though they deplore Mir Nihal’s nostalgia, do not see it as a strategy of subversion or resistance. This viewpoint links with the combination of nostalgia and leisure that I have noted above. These concerns will take me in the next section to the question of style and Ali’s choice to compose the novel in English, which may have led to its discounting in both Indian and Pakistani literary history. Like Twilight, Palace Walk is steeped in the appreciation of traditional poetry and song, at least for the patriarch. Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s nearly professional handling of the tambourine and his ability to sing well and quote 16 Azad refers to Muhammad Husain Azad, author of a commentary on Urdu poetry entitled Water of Life (1880). 17 Compare: “Competing within the space of Delhi, then, are at least two temporal modes: one a nostalgic historical memory and the other a flattened present with no energy to spare” (Brown 831). Pernau (2015: 75-6) also emphasizes the prevalence of literature about a lost Delhi and conceptions of nostalgia as an “emotion turned exclusively towards the past and lacking the will to confront the present and the future” (76). 18 See also: “[…] the passivity that is read exclusively as a political stance […] must be interpreted more broadly as an enabling fantasy of survival at the thinnest edges of life, or as the persistence of an alternative temporality that cannot accept death even while death exerts its inarguable force” (Brown 842). By contrast, Alam sees the novel as basically hopeful; nostalgia does not constitute a check on energetic renewal: “The writer believes that the time of awakening has approached. Delhi has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. But it has an unprecedented political strength and resilience and like a phoenix, it always builds itself from its own ashes” (2016: 28). Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 21 poetry in style convey an atmosphere of nostalgia for a former past of cultural achievement based on political power. As in the case of Delhi and the Mughals, the patriarch and his friends wish for a restoration of the former Turkish rulers, the Ottomans, and lament the enthronization of a stooge by the British. Yet unlike the ill-fated Bahadur Shah of Twilight, the exiled person on which the Egyptians pin their hopes - namely Sa’d Zaghlul Pasha, or Saad Zaghloul (1859-1927) - is still alive. While in Twilight the political nadir for Mir Nihal is the coronation of the British king, in Palace Walk, it is the arrest of Saad after the independence movement wanted to participate in the peace negotiations after World War I. The banishing of Saad to Malta triggers the 1919 revolution, which involved all levels of Egyptian society (DeYoung 2012: 53). That revolution led to Egyptian independence as a monarchy under the Muhammad Ali dynasty in 1922 and, under Fuad I, to the creation of a constitution in 1923. Saad became the first Egyptian prime minister. At the end of Palace Walk, the revolution has not yet won out against the British. The period during which the novel was written was also one of despondency, with the loss of the Palestine war in 1948-9; a final break from Britain was imminent but not yet achieved. 19 This political situation prepares the soil, generating a longing for the recovery of erstwhile self-esteem and a nostalgic retreat into tradition and faith. That wistful yearning is especially marked in the title Palace Walk (Bayn al-qasrayn), originally the name of the undivided very long novel, whose first third was published serially in the journal Al-Risala ad-Jadida between April 1954 and April 1956. Thus the novel unfolds, as its Arabic title suggests, […] between two palaces: the crumbling edifice of the Ottoman Empire and the thickening stronghold of the British. It also unfolds between two other ‘palaces,’ […]. The first is the house of the merchant, bon vivant, patriarch, and philanderer Ahmad ‘Abd al-Jawwad [standard Arabic spelling Abd al-Jawad] […]. This family house is situated in the medieval quarter of Cairo for which the novel is named: ‘Palace Walk.’ The other palace is the more distant House of the Nation (Bayt al-Umma) of the Egyptian nationalist leader Sa’d Zaghlul […]. (Tageldin 87) Pace Tageldin, I think that in the first book of the trilogy the Bayt al-Umma plays no role at all, but the opposition of Ottoman Empire and British occupation is patent. The old city of Cairo seems to be menaced by the British (as Delhi is in Twilight), particularly in the scene where curfew is imposed and the weapons of the British soldiers appear as a haystack or pyramid in front of the proprietor’s house. It is noteworthy that Amina is the first to 19 Ramadan (2019) discusses another Cairo novel set before the Free Officers’ Revolution, Yūsuf Idrīs’s A Love Story (1956; translated title). Monika Fludernik 22 notice this arrival of the British troops acoustically by their noise, and that these unfamiliar sounds are contrasted with the familiar pounding of the dough, which usually wakes up the household (iii). The world of Amina, which is the symbol of the old Egypt, is therefore invaded by the British just as the men of the family are prevented from going about their business and pleasure. One could therefore argue that there are two sites of nostalgia in the novel - the home overseen by Amina and the old city of male business and pleasure. Both are disrupted by colonial occupation. The political background of the novel emerges forcefully in the episode of al-Sayyid’s detention and subjection to forced labour 20 meant to offset the revolutionaries’ attempted traffic boycott (ch. lxv). The emphasis in the narrative is on the patriarch’s humiliation at being compelled to work under threat of death: “Abd al-Jawwād’s family is thus made to embody the condition of the entire nation and historical danger is seen to be as close to the individual as the front door of his own house” (El-Enany 74). 21 For the younger generation, the British are not merely a nuisance and a source of vexation. They experience a seductive attraction to the occupying force since the British symbolize progress and civilization in contrast to the strictness and fossilized traditionalism of Arab society. In Chapter 59 of Palace Walk, Yasin encounters a smiling Englishman, whom “he imagined to embody all the perfections of the human race. Yasin probably detested the English as all Egyptians did, but deep inside he respected and venerated them so much that he frequently imagined they were made from a different stuff than the rest of mankind” (lix, 395). Kamal, too, thinks the English are extremely good-looking (lvii, 382; lix, 402). What Tageldin (2012: 99) sees as an ambivalent love and hate relationship to the British, to me also appears to be a fascination for the other and a desire to escape from the fetters of traditionalism. 22 After Fahmy’s death, the family’s attitude towards the English naturally swings towards hatred. Even earlier, Kamal is disgusted with the soldier’s interest in the womenfolk of the houses they are watching and refuses to take a message to Maryam, who has been ogling his British soldier friend Julian (lxiv). The family evinces the typical ambivalence felt by the colonized between the “emotive appeal of progressive and humane Western ideas in the abstract, and the unspeakable historical record of Western brutalization of much of the non-Western world” (Siddiq 2007: 13). 20 The arrest is his own fault for leaving the house and indulging in an assignation with Umm Maryam. 21 But see DeYoung, who criticizes Fredric Jameson’s 1986 essay on the allegorical quality of postcolonial literature (“[t]he story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” - 1986: 69; DeYoung 2012: 56). 22 I do not agree with Tageldin that in the scenes of Yasin’s and Kamal’s gushing enthusiasm “the colonizing Englishman, by masking his power with love, effectively seduces the colonized Egyptian into submission to his power” (99). Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 23 Though both novels are steeped in nostalgia, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi has less prospect of a future for Indian Muslims, paradoxically so since the creation of Pakistan followed close on the publication of the text. While in Twilight nostalgia relates to the grand Mughal past, there is no comparable hankering for the former glories of the Ottoman Empire in Mahfouz 23 ; al-Sayyid Ahmad’s nostalgia relates to traditional values, especially to the values of his class, the lower middle-class (El-Enany 1993: 27- 8; Starkey 2006: 123): “The nostalgia behind [the city] is not nostalgia for village life but a need for a stable focus-for the kind of stability and trust found in a solid setting-and for a dependable narrator’s voice, which characterizes the realistic novel” (Beard & Haydar 1993: 3). With the mention of realism, we can turn to the final section of this essay and for a concern with literary history. 4. A New Genre? Muslim Novels and Nostalgia Palace Walk and Twilight in Delhi are both notable for the successful blending of vernacular generic and stylistic features on the one hand and, on the other, narrative strategies familiar to Western readers as key elements of the Modernist novel, particularly the extensive representation of consciousness of the main characters, especially the women. Both works therefore display an ambivalence between native tradition and Western influence. Ahmed Ali’s novel has been praised extensively for its poetry and its use of traditional poetic models. 24 Brown emphasizes the inclusion of “Urdu poetry” in the novel: “its presence refuses the effacing of a vibrant poetic culture” (Brown 831). Snehal Shingavi (2013: 110) “reports that more than 60 verses of poetry appear in the novel’s pages, ranging from ghazals, qawwalis, songs, to shehrashob” (cited Brown 831). The last of these is “a lament on a misgoverned, ruined, or declining city in classical Urdu poetry” (Haider 180-1; citing Sharma 2004: 77 and Joshi 2002: 216). Ali’s use of indigenous writing traditions is also foregrounded by Padamsee, who illustrates the importance of the shehrashob with reference to the kite passage: “the author turns the kites into a shahrashob motif, drawing on its earlier more celebratory mode of sheer variety, and predicated on forms of repetition and variation which apparently foreground the priority of wordplay” (Padamsee 2011: 39). Suggestively, Pernau notes that the shehrashob (“shahr-e ashob”) originated in Persia and developed from a lament about the lost beloved, imagined as a city, to the Urdu topos of the destruction of the city (Pernau 2015: 85). Padamsee moreover emphasizes the “shahr- 23 But see the political attempts to revive Ottoman ‘nationality’, if not rule, on the part of various political actors (Siddiq 2007: Chapter 3). 24 But see Niven, who considers the style faulty: “Ali’s writing can be charged […] with two permeating weaknesses: its tendency towards a tired vocabulary and its sorrow for the past which at times collapses into ineffective nostalgia” (1980: 9). Monika Fludernik 24 ashob’s” “necessary priority […] of linguistic wordplay over its literal referents” (39). This, as Niven points out, results in a “mood of sustained elegy” (1980: 9). Yet this reliance on Urdu traditions of poetry is not necessarily always regarded as an exclusively anti-Western strategy; in fact, it reaches out to Western traditions of writing: clearly, Ali as a member of the Progressive Movement - like Premchand - was initially critical of Urdu literature 25 and keen to adopt a progressive Western modernist poetics: “Ali’s use of the ghazal, in addition to other poetic forms, not only channels an Urdu literary tradition, but also demonstrates some affinities with a cosmopolitan effort to remake the novel for poetic ends or to bring poetry’s powerful expressive capacity to a modern and innovative prose form” (Brown 836). Virginia Woolf and her deployment of poetic prose is frequently mentioned in this connection (Stilz 1990: 380). Ali could therefore be argued to balance the traditional and contemporary British models, reserving the former mode for the delineation of a nostalgic vision of the past and tempering it by means of modernist techniques of writing. Similarly, Mahfouz’s work is appreciated as a fruitful coalescence of Arab and Western traditions. Mahfouz is said to have been strongly influenced by Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987), particularly his novel The Return of the Spirit (1933). Another influence was Tāhā Husayn’s The Tree of Misery (1944), the first Egyptian novel to present three generations of the same family, as the Cairo Trilogy was to do (Sakkut 2000: 25). On the other hand, Mahfouz’s oeuvre spans several decades of artistic developments. He started out with historical novels, moved into realism and modernism in the Cairo Trilogy, later turning to writing that is more experimental, using multiperspectivism (Starkey 2006: 125-6, DeYoung 2012: 60), and ending with a more pointedly political phase (Allen 1982: 63-4; El-Enany 1993: 23-6). According to Sakkut, Mahfouz’s oeuvre moreover includes “novels of the absurd, existentialist novels, and novels of magical realism” (2000: 27). The move from translations, travelogues of a semi-autobiographical nature (with protagonists returning from sojourns in the West), to historical novels and then imitations of Western realism and modernism seems to be a recurrent pattern in the Arab novel (Sakkut 2000: 17-25, Starkey 2006: 121). Like Ali, Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim before him, belonged to a generation of writers initially attempting to implement realism on the 25 Premchand and the other followers of the Progressive Movement counted “the paintings of the Bengal school, and of Chugtai, all mystical, devotional and dream literature and art” as “futile” (Brown 828). As Ali argued, they “drag us down to inaction, and are moribund” (cited Brown 828; Ali, “Progressive Views” 72). He moreover criticized Tagore and Iqbal: “Iqbal sings of the sorrow of Islam, preaches an impossible and meaningless Pan-Islamism, cries, weeps, denounces, sings of the ancient Bulbul and the Rose” (829; citing Ali, “Progressive Views” 80). On the Progressive Movement see also Stilz (373-6) and Joshi (2002: 206-11). Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 25 Western model and to leave behind traditional modes of fabulation: “Realism thus moved - transported and translated - becomes a literary analogue of modernization, indistinguishable from modernism at its least resistant to the pressures of modernity” (Tageldin 89). More recently, the characterization of the Egyptian novel as a cultural import from the West has been questioned. Thus, Siddiq (2007), Gana (2013) and Hassan (2017) argue for a continuity between traditional genres of Arabic narration and nineteenth-century Arab texts that are usually not classified as novels. El-Enany draws attention to the fact that Mahfouz “was well aware that realism was already a spent force in Europe”, having “read Proust, Joyce, Lawrence and other contemporary modernists”. Mahfouz had to “go through the natural stages of evolution” (all 18). Siddiq (2007: 22) moreover underlines a traditional combination of aṣāla (‘authenticity’) and ḥadātha (‘novelty’) in Egyptian and Arab literature, thus locating realism inside vernacular forms of narrative. In Mahfouz, this nationalist consciousness is undergirded by his use of Arabic in his novelistic oeuvre. With Ali, the choice of the novel as genre and of the English language remains an oddity that cries out for explanation: Twilight in Delhi, in consonance with its grand theme, is very likely the most indigenous and home-spun of all Indo-Anglian novels, and if it is a triumph, as it undoubtedly is, it is so in utter disregard of the alien literary language and form which are to all appearances its putative progenitors. (Trivedi 1986: 70) Here the argument is that the novel is successful and fulfils its purpose of conveying Indianness despite its alien form and language. Priya Joshi, by contrast, finds the choice condign and a successful attempt to marry East and West: The narrative Twilight deploys, seeped in nostalgia and despair, nevertheless posits an alternate way of apprehending historical rhythms and preserving them within the once alien form of Macaulay’s literary legacy that serves this time to connect Ali’s world within the British rather than to alienate one from the other. (Joshi 2002: 227) In a similar vein, for Haider the triumph of the novel lies in its being “the first major work of fiction written by a Muslim ever to be published in English” (2017: 170). This emphasizes the work of cultural transfer that Ali achieves: he gives Western readers an insight into a world that is alien to them and different from the (Hindu) South Asia that they are familiar with from colonial and (mostly) Bengali novels about India. 26 26 I noted Tawfiq al-Hakim as a model for Mahfouz. As for Ali, there are several novelists in Bengal and Delhi that wrote novels in Bangla and Urdu in the nineteenth century. For Urdu one can mention Altaf Hussain Hali, Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi, Mirza Monika Fludernik 26 This viewpoint can be extended to observe that Ali goes both beyond a focus on Muslims in India and beyond a nationalist representation of the particular situation of Mir Nihal. In a review of the novel, Muhammad Hasan Askarei saw the twilight of the title as pointing to the “dawn of Pakistan” (1949, quoted Anjaria 2011: 200). In response, Anjaria underlines that “the paucity of language in nationalist discourse with which to imagine a heterogeneous and minoritarian nation makes it ultimately uncertain to which nation the novel refers” (201). This ambivalence, she argues, suggests “the absurdity of Partition and the impossibility of separating a shared colonial history into two, often opposed national histories”; in fact, “[…] the novel […] offers us a place where the content of the nation in question can safely be neither India nor Pakistan - in fact, can be nothing […] recognizably nationalist” (all 201; original emphasis). Certainly, the nationalism of the novel consists in anti-colonial feeling rather than a call for action or a vision of a future independent nation. In this respect it differs strongly from Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, which does have a very definite plan for Egyptian independence lined up. Both Twilight and Palace Walk participate in the movement affecting many postcolonial literatures, namely a common attempt to create sympathy for the respective countries’ culture and citizens, and to do so by deploying the genre of the novel and the modernist techniques of consciousness representation to achieve this objective. Yet, the literary historical affinity goes beyond mere narrative strategy. Tageldin notes that “Egypt and India [are] two regions whose experiences of modern European colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries engendered surprisingly similar debates about the idea of literature and the forms that literature should take” (89). What I would therefore like to propose, with all due tentativeness, is whether there might not exist a subgenre of this modernist postcolonial novel which portrays Islamic societies and attempts to convey sympathy and understanding for Muslims from a variety of colonial cultural backgrounds. The specifically ‘Muslim’ nature of these texts would consist in their nostalgia both for traditional life in a society steeped in Islamic faith and for the country’s original political power and importance now lost. Since I am not an Arab scholar or even a proper comparatist by training, I would like to merely mention Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina (first published in 1945), which nostalgically laments the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and provides insights into several characters’ minds (though not into women’s). I am fairly confident that similar novels exist from Turkey and the Near East, especially from what are now Lebanon, Hadi Ruswa and Sajjad Zaheer; for Bangla, Peary Chand Mitra, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Bibbhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. However, Ali’s Twilight is the first anglophone Muslim novel from South Asia, preceded only by a short story written in English (Malak 2005: 2-3). Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 27 Palestine, Syria and Iraq. My essay is therefore meant to stimulate a discussion with scholars familiar with Turkish and Arab literature to find out whether they, too, can observe such a genre having arisen in the wake of Ottoman and Mughal power. Positing a genre of this type must not involve a neglect of the specific national qualities of the novels belonging to it; the centrality of Islam and the theme of nostalgia for former political relevance need not inevitably eradicate all other social, political and cultural alignments, even though this happened politically in South Asia and, to some extent, in Egypt: […] the religious representatives of the Muslim elites who remained in India sought to imagine a corporate Muslim identity - as did those in Pakistan - irrespective of the fact that Muslim communities themselves are highly differentiated in terms of education, social and cultural and economic capital […]. The representatives of this mostly urban religious elite […] holding on to the fabulous narratives of a glorious past, usually supported some kind of an Arabised or Persianised version of Islam […]. … they considered ‘their’ community as a religious minority - in contrast to a national minority. (Malik 2008: 436, my emphasis) Likewise, as Siddiq (2007: 144-7) notes, similar tensions were to be observed during the rise of nationalism in Egypt, where secular versus religious, and nativist versus Ottoman, concepts of an Egyptian state were being played out against one another. When I focus on the commonality of such early nationalist novels, the idea is to underline a particular moment in the phase between colonization and independence, during which the historical novel and the techniques of modernist fiction offered a particularly useful mould for nationalist aspirations and their embedding within cultural traditions that were perceived to be under threat and which therefore evoked nostalgic longing, particularly in conjunction with memories of former political power and significance. Both Ali and Mahfouz see the nostalgia evinced by their protagonists as a strategy of preserving one’s dignity in the humiliating circumstances of colonial oppression, but also as problematically directed towards the past rather than a national future that should be actively brought into being. The same ambivalence attaches to the function of the novels’ immersion in traditional religion, since Islam provides a cultural and personal home for the characters but also impedes their growing away from religious precepts that are no longer appropriate to a world determined by Western modernity, science and progress (however threatening these influences are to social and religious customs and attitudes). Both novels therefore reflect the irresolvable cultural hybridity engendered by colonialism, in which the promise of renewal is compromised by disillusionment with the West. At the same time, nostalgia for a traditional past, reflected in the exaggerated performance of patriarchal authority, is paired with the Monika Fludernik 28 younger generation’s impatience at religious and cultural traditions that are experienced as overly restrictive or hypocritical. Nostalgia itself is an ambivalent emotion, merging a love for the past with disaffection for the present, though - for the young - it may also contain the seed of nationalist revival. Works Cited Alam, Khurshid (2016). “Private Space as a Site for Anti-Colonial Imagination: A Critical Study of Twilight in Delhi”. Journal of Research (Humanities) 52. 23-40. Al-Hakim, Tawfiq (2019). The Return of the Spirit [1933]. Trans. Russell Harris & William Maynard Hutchins. New York: Penguin Books. Ali, Ahmed (1979). “View of Art”. The Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936-47). Ed. Sudhi Pradhan. Calcutta: Mrs. Santi Pradhan. 67- 83. Ali, Ahmed (1998-1999 [sic]). “Our Lane. Translated from Urdu by the Author”. Journal of South Asian Literature 33-34 (1-2). 218-30. Ali, Ahmed (1994). Twilight in Delhi [1940]. New York: New Directions. Allen, Roger (1982). The Arabic Novel: A Historical and Critical Introduction. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press. Andrić, Ivo (1977). The Bridge on the Drina [1945]. Trans. Lovett F. Edwards. Chicago, IL: Chicago Univ. Press. Anjaria, Ulka (2011). “Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism in the Colonial Novel”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44 (2). 186-207. Beard, Michael & Adnan Haydar (1993). Ed. Naguib Mahfouz. From Regional Fame to Global Recognition. Ithaca, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press. Beard, Michael & Adnan Haydar (1993). “Mapping the World of Naguib Mahfouz”. In: Beard, Michael & Adnan Haydar (Eds.). Naguib Mahfouz. From Regional Fame to Global Recognition. Ithaca, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press. 1-9. Begum, Jameela (1995). “Reconstructing Personal History: The Purdah in Twilight in Delhi and Sunlight on a Broken Column”. In: Ed. Jasbir Jain & Amina Amin (Eds.). Margins of Erasure: Purdah in the Subcontinental Novel in English. New Delhi: Sterling. 206-15. Brown, Judith (2018). “Ahmed Ali and the Art of Languishing”. ELH: English Literary History 85 (3). 823-46. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2008). “Adda: A History of Sociality”. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference [2000]. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 180-213. Desai, Anita (1991). Bye-Bye Blackbird [1968]. Delhi: Orient. DeYoung, Terri (2012). “Mahfouz’s Novels and the Nation”. In: Hassan, Waïl S. & Susan Muaddi Darraj (Eds.). Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz. New York: Modern Language Association of America. 53-64. El-Enany, Rashee (1993). Naguib Mahfouz. The Pursuit of Meaning. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika (2020). “Nostalgia for Otiose Leisure: Laying Claim to an Indian Tradition of Otium”. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 7 (1). 14- 34. Fludernik, Monika (2021). “Narrating Otium - A Narratology of Leisure? ” Journal of Narrative Theory 51 (2). 179-99. Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in two Classic Muslim Novels 29 Gana, Nouri (2013). “Introduction: The Intellectual History and Contemporary Significance of the Arab Novel in English”. The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo-Arab and Arab-American Literature and Culture. Ed. Nouri Gana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. 1-35. Haider, Nishat (2017). “Imag(in)ing the City: A Study of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi”. In: Madhurima Chakraborty & Umme Al-wazedi (Eds.). Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature. New York: Routledge. 169- 86. Hassan, Waïl S. (2017). “Toward a Theory of the Arabic Novel”. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions. Ed. Waïl S. Hassan. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 19-47. Hassan, Waïl S., and Susan Muaddi Darraj (Eds.) (2012). Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Iftikhar, Shabnum (2012). “The Twilight of Muslims in Ahmad Ali’s Twilight in Delhi”. Language in India 12 (9). 395-403. Jameson, Fredric (1986). “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”. Social Text 15. 65-88. Joshi, Priya (2002). “Chapter 6. The Exile at Home: Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi”. In: Another Country. Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 205-27. Mahfouz, Naguib (1991). Palace of Desire [1957]. Trans. William Maynard Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny & Olive E. Kenny. London: Doubleday. Mahfouz, Naguib (1994). Palace Walk [1956]. Trans. William Maynard Hutchins & Olive E. Kenny. London: Black Swan. Malak, Amin (2005). “Ahmed Ali and the Emergence of Muslim Fiction in English”. Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. 19-27. Malik, Jamal (2008). Islam in South Asia. A Short History. Leiden: Brill. Naqvi, Naumann (2007). “The Nostalgic Subject: A Genealogy of the ‘Critique of Nostalgia’”. CIRSDIG Working Paper 23. 4-54. Niven, Alistair (1980). “Historical Imagination in the Novels of Ahmed Ali”. Journal of Indian Writing in English 8 (1-2). 3-13. Noor, Farha (2020). “Negotiating Nostalgia: Progressive Women’s Memoirs in Urdu”. South Asian History and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/ 19472498.2020.1848144. Padamsee, Alex (2011). “Postnational Aesthetics and the Work of Mourning in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46 (1). 27-44. Pernau, Margrit (2015). “Nostalgia: Tears of Blood for a Lost World”. South Asia Graduate Research Journal (SAGAR) 23. 74-109. Rahman, Tariq (2015). “Chapter 2: Ahmed Ali”. A History of Pakistani Literature in English: 1947-1988. Karachi: Oxford Univ. Press. 35-68. Ramadan, Yasmine (2019). “Revolutionary Cityscapes: Yūsuf Idrīs and the National Imaginary”. Nizar F. Hermes & Gretchen Head (Eds.). The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. 186- 205. Sakkut, Hamdi (2000). The Arabic Novel. Bibliography and Critical Introduction, 1865-1995. Vol. 1. Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press. Sharma, Sunil (2004). “The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape”. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24 (2). 73-81. Shingavi, Snehal (2013). The Mahatma Misunderstood. The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India. London: Anthem Press. Siddiq, Muhammad (2007). Arab Culture and the Novel. Genre, Identity, and Agency in Egyptian Fiction. London: Routledge. Monika Fludernik 30 Smith, Kimberly K. (2000). “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory”. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3 (4). 505-27. Starkey, Paul (2006). Modern Arabic Literature. New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. Stilz, Gerhard (1990). “‘Live in Fragments No Longer’: A Conciliatory Analysis of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight”. In: Geoffrey V. Davis & Hena Maes-Jelinek (Eds.). Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English: Cross/ Cultures. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 369-88. Tageldin, Shaden M. (2012) “Mahfouz’s Posts”. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz. In: Hassan, Waïl S., & Susan Muaddi Darraj (Eds.). Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz. New York: Modern Language Association of America. 85-104. Trivedi, Harish (1968). “Ahmed Ali: Twilight in Delhi”. Major Indian Novels: An Evaluation. Ed. N.S. Pradhan. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Open Humanities Press. 41- 73. Williams, Caroline (1993). “Place and Time in Mahfouz’s Al-Qahira”. In: Beard, Michael & Adnan Haydar (Eds.). Naguib Mahfouz. From Regional Fame to Global Recognition. Ithaca, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press. 52-60. Monika Fludernik English Department University of Freiburg