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University Life: Academics and Students

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  • ʿĀʾishah al-Aṣfar (1956-, Libya) – Kharījāt Qāriyūnis (‘Graduates of Garyounis University’, 2007). This novel centres a group of female students of the Garyounis University in Libya, now known as the University of Benghazi. It is made up of two parallel stories: the main storyline focusses on the intimate friendship of graduates as they discuss love, live, and philosophical questions, and the second refers to historical myths told by the main characters.
  • Raḍwā ʿĀshūr (1946 – 2014, Egypt) – al-Rihla: Ayyam Ṭalibah Misriyyah fi Amrīka (1983, English trans. The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America, 2018). This novel tells the story of the author’s journey to the USA and her experiences as a PhD student graduating from the Afro-American Studies department and the English Department of the University of Massachusetts in 1975. Her dissertation, among others, focused on the applicability of African American literature to her home country of Egypt, something she also reflects on in this memoir. As such, she added her translations of among others the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass (reference) (also in W: Outside the Arab world: America: United States of America).
  • ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī (1957-, Egypt) – Shīkāghū (2007, English trans. Chicago, 2007). Set in post 9/11 traumatized America, the novel describes several Egyptians clustered around the Illinois University adapting to the American way of life. This ranges from constantly maligning their homeland, Egypt, whose inhabitants are considered born stupid, to a strong attachment to what they left behind by for example an attempt by one of the professors to resume contact with a girlfriend of decades ago (reference). Furthermore, the novel touches upon the theme of the American system with all its shortcomings, such as capitalism and racism (reference) (also in W: Outside the Arab world: America: United States of America).
  • Luwīs ʿAwaḍ (1915 – 1990, Egypt) – Mudhakkirāt Ṭālib Baʿthah (‘Memoirs of a Scholarship Student’, 1965). Written in the Egyptian dialect, this memoir describes the author’s experiences during his master’s studies in Cambridge, England, in the 1930s and 1940s. Among others, he describes his relationship with English fellow students, who at times held orientalist views on Egyptians, and his Egyptian group of friends (also in W: Outside the Arab World Europe: England).
  • Ḥussayn Barghūthī (1954 – 2002, Palestine) – al-Dawʾ al-Azraq (2001. English trans. The Blue Light, 2023). This novel reflects on Barghūthī’s experiences living in Seattle as a post-graduate student, specifically with the ‘mad men’ on the streets of the city as he himself also increasingly descends into madness, not being able to find meaning in exile and in academia (reference). The book is also the author’s existential reflection on solitude using reference to Sufi philosophy and thinking back of his childhood years (also in W: Outside the Arab world: America: United States of America).
  • Ḥāmid Damanhūrī (1922 – 1965, Saudi Arabia) – Thaman al-Taḍḥiyah (1959, English trans. The Price of Sacrifice, 1965). This novel is generally considered Saudi Arabia’s first (reference). The novel keeps switching between Cairo and Mecca, as it describes the ideological and psychological changes its hero, Aḥmad, goes through when studying medicine in Egypt and falling in love with a female student, and returning to Mecca after obtaining his university degree. The novel also describes the changing Meccan society in the face of modernisation (also in C: Cities: Saudi Arabia: Mecca).
  • Bilāl Faḍl (1974-, Egypt) – Umm Mīmī (‘Mimi’s mother’, 2021). Protagonist of this satirical, comical novel rebels against his father in Alexandria by studying media in Cairo, where he rents a room in the apartment of the eccentric Umm Mimi and her son (reference). After Umm Mimi’s dies, however, he is stuck with her corpse and forced to arrange the funeral. While describing the student life of the protagonist, the novel also reflects on the historical, social, and geographical dimensions of the poor neighborhood he lives in (reference). The novel uses intertextuality to refer to folklore, and religious texts, and is written in both fuṣḥa, classical Arabic, and the Egyptian dialect, as well as a style in which it addresses the reader directly (also in S: Social Issues and Social Change: The Marginalized).
  • Aḥmad Ibrāhīm al-Faqīh’s (1942 – 2019, Libya) trilogy Hadāʾiq al-Layl (1990, English trans. Gardens of the Night: A Trilogy, 1995), consisting of Saʾahibuk Madīnah Ukhrāʾ (‘I shall offer you another city’), Hadhihi Tukhūm Mimlakatī (‘These are the borders of my kingdom’), and Nafaq Taḍīʾhu Imraʾah Wāhidah (‘A tunnel lit by one woman’), chronicles the life of the tormented Libyan Khalīl, who studies at the Edinburgh University in Scotland. The trilogy regularly refers to the desert, where Khalīl was born and returns to in the last two parts of the trilogy in search for happiness and peace of mind as he visits his ancestor’s tombs and seeks advice from Sufis (reference) (also in N: Nature: Desert).
  • Jamāl Abu Ghaydā (1966-, Jordan) – Khābiyyat al-Ḥanīn (‘Vessels of nostalgia’, 2016). This novel describes two periods in Jordan’s history: Black September in 1970 (also in 1970 Black September in Jordan) and the student demonstrations and subsequent clashes with the police at the Yarmouk University in Irbid in 1986. Its characters include the students Fawwāz, a Palestinian Fedayeen, and his nephew Nāyif, a left-wing student.
  • Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm (1937 – 2025, Egypt) – Amrīkānlī (‘Amricanly’, 2003) and al-Jalīd (2011, English trans. Ice, 2019) both centre an Egyptian professor who teaches overseas, the first in the USA and the second in the former Soviet Union.

Amrīkānlī portrays Shukrī, a professor of comparative history in Cairo who receives a scholarship during the late 1990s to teach in San Francisco. When he arrives, he is largely naïve to the ultra-hierarchical nature of racial categories in America. He starts to compare Egypt’s history to that of the USA and critiques the USA’ imperial and capitalist policy and interventions abroad, while also shedding light on its working poor and unemployed who often lack any form of a social network (reference) (also in W: Outside the Arab World: Americas: United States of America).

 

The PhD student in al-Jalīd, Shukrī, moves to Moscow in the 1970s as part of an academic exchange. He narrates his everyday experiences living in a student house for foreign students, as he observes how they eat, drink and sleep with each other while also not shying away from describing his own sexual encounters. In the meantime, the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union is stagnating and Shukrī’s descriptions include depictions of the Union’s ethnic and cultural diversity and reflections on the October 1973 war which erupts in native Egypt (also in W: Outside the Arab World: Russia and the former Soviet Union).

  • Shadhī al-Khaṭīb (?, Yemen) – al-Zanbaqah al-Sawdāʾ (‘The black lotus’, 2012). This novel describes the daily life of female students from different Arab majority countries living on the university campus in Amman, Jordan, including their relations with each other, their feeling of homesickness, and their social environment (reference).
  • Muḥammad ʿAbduh Yamānī (1940 – 2010, Saudi Arabia) – Fatḥ min Ḥāʾil (‘A girl from Haʾil’, 1980). In the first part of this novel, the author talks about his experiences as a lecturer at the King Saud University during the crisis between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, when many Egyptian academics left (reference). The second part of the novel focusses on a separate story of Hishām who serves in the army in Ḥāʾil, the north of Saudi Arabia, and meets his future fiancée with whom he eventually travels to the USA to study. The novel uses this trip to emphasize the importance of faith and religion (reference).
  • Hānī al-Rāhib’s (1939 – 2000, Syria) novels al-Mahzūmūn (‘The defeated’, 1961) and Rasamtu Khaṭṭan fī al-Rimāl (‘I drew a line in the sands’, 1999).

al-Rāhib wrote Al-Mahzūmūn when he was a student in Damascus in the 1960s. It narrates the story of Bashīr, a poor student who migrates to the city’s university. Having lost his faith in God and not believing in the pan-Arab discourse, he resorts to reading French authors, particularly Sartre, and chatting with friends in cafés, while he and his fellow students are overwhelmed with a feeling that life is pointless in a context in which basic human solidarity fail (reference).

 

Rasamtu Khaṭṭan fī al-Rimāl, spans a period of 3000 years, describing developments in the Gulf region at large, and includes autobiographical elements reflecting on the author’s experiences as an academic in Kuwait (reference). In also includes depictions of the 1967 Naksah war with Israel and the 1991 Gulf War.

 
  • Muṭāʿ Ṣafadī (1929 – 2016, Syria) – Jīl al-Qadar (‘Generation of fate’, 1960). This novel reflects on the alienation among students at the University of Damascus in the 1950s (reference). It is narrated by four existential philosophy-students who, on their journey to define themselves, regularly discuss their ideas against the backdrop of the Syrian political turmoil following decolonization, and their own, personal liberation from family and class traditions (reference). The novel also describes the developments of the Syrian Baʿth party in the period that it comprises, from 1953 until 1958.
  • Ḥayāh Sharārah (1935 – 1997, Iraq) –Idhā al-Ayyām Aghsaqat (‘When the Days Grow Dark’, 2000). This semi-autobiographical novel, published posthumously by her sister Balks Sharārah after the author’s controversial suicide, is set at Baghdad University during a bleak period when intelligence agents and informants linked to the ruling Baʿth Party fill the hallways. Its protagonist, Dr. Noaman, “depicts the agonies of the Iraqi intelligentsia” and, despite all his efforts to be a reputable academic, is forced to give false evaluations of his students’ work (reference). The novel portrays the dire circumstances of social and intellectual life in the period following the Baʿth Party’s coming to power, a time marked by repression and economic stagnation due to sanctions. Sharārah’s life closely reflects the novel’s themes, as she herself was an Iraqi educator and translator who refused to succumb political repression (also in 1968 Baʿthist coup in Iraq).
  • Ahdaf Soueif (1950-, Egypt) – In the Eye of the Sun (1992). At the centre of this novel is Asya al-Ulama, a woman of the Egyptian bourgeois class who travels to England with her husband Saif Madi, to write her dissertation on linguistics (reference). In England, she has an affair with an Englishman, Gerald Stone, and eventually divorces Saif. She returns to Egypt, to teach at the University of Cairo, but struggles to adapt to living with her extended family and teaching to conservative Islamic students. Her story is intertwined with political developments in Egypt and the Arab World from 1967 to 1980 (reference) (also in W: Outside the Arab World: Europe: England).
  • Ghāzī al-Quṣaybī (1940 – 2010, Saudi Arabia) – Shaqqat al-Ḥuriyyah (‘Appartment of freedom’, 1994). In the 1950s a group of Gulf-students moves to Cairo to finish their studies. Coming from a conservative country they suddenly experience freedom, be it in their apartment or in the city itself meeting different cultures and political and religious ideologies. The novel offers a historical perspective on Cairo as well as a description of students growing from puberty into adulthood, experiencing sex and love for the first time, in the context of local and international upheaval (reference) (also in F: Family Life: Children and Adolescents: Bildungsroman).
  • Kamāl al-Zaghbānī (1965 – 2020, Tunisia) – Mākīnah al-Saʿādah (‘Happiness machine’, 2016). This comedy novel paints the picture of Tunisian reality in the 1970s and 1980s through its characters who are each in their own pursuit of happiness (reference). One of these is Muḥammad al-Gharbī, who returns from Syria after obtaining a degree in philosophy but is a victim of a new Tunisian law preventing graduates from Syrian and Iraqi universities from teaching. Another character is the religious owner of a bar called ‘Madīnat al-Saʿadah’ (‘city of happiness’), where sexual relations are up for grabs.

Refrences:

In order of appearance

  1. Ira Dworkin. 2018. “Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5(1): 1-18, p. 6, 18
  2. Hartmut Fähndrich. 2016. “Chapter 6: Losing Home. Out of the Coziness into the Cold: Glimpses of the Idea of Home in a Few Novels of Modern Arabic Literature,” in Representations and Visions of Homeland in Modern Arabic Literature, eds. Sebastian Günter and Stephan Milich. Georg Olms Verlag: Hildesheim, Zürich, New York. pp. 103-115, p. 104
  3. Antonella Ghersetti. 2012. “Utopia and Dystopia in ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī’s Chicago.” MEL 15(3): 286-304, p. 291
  4. Loulwah Kutbi. 2021. “The Blue Light.” www.mathqaf.com, 27 May 2021, http://mathqaf.com/2021/05/27/the-blue-light/ (last accessed 4 December 2023)
  5. Fāris Tawfīq al-Bīl. 2015. Al-Riwāyah al-Khalījiyyah: Qirāʾah fī al-Ansāq al-Thaqāfiyyah. Dār al-Akādīmyyah li-Nashr wa al-Taqzīʿ: Amman, 29
  6. Nashwā Aḥmad. 2021. “al-Riwāʾī Bilāl Faḍl Yʿatamid al-Saḥriyyah fī Raṣd Azmah al-Wāqiʿa al-Maṣrī.” www.independentarabia.com, 26 July 2021 www.independentarabia.com/node/245071/ثقافة/الروائي-بلال-فضل-يعتمد- السخرية-في-رصد-أزمة-الواقع-المصري (last accessed 2 May 2022)
  7. Aḥmad Nājī. 2021. “‘Umm Mīmī’ li-Bilāl Faḍl Tarbiyyah al-Ṭālib al-Mughtarib fī ʿĀlam al-Qāhirah al-Suflī.” In Bidāyyāt (23) https://bidayatmag.com/node/1370 (last accessed 2 May 2022)
  8. Farida Abu-Haidar. 2004. “African Literature in Arabic” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, eds. F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 178-199, p. 194
  9. Mara Naaman. 2006. “America Undone: Sonallah Ibrahim’s Intra-Imperial Investigations.” AJCP 26: 71- 93, p. 78
  10. Lubnā al-Khaṭīb. 2012. “‘al-Zanbaqah al-Sawdāʾ’ Qiṣṣah li-l-Kātibah Shadhī al-Khaṭīb.” www.adengad.net, 30 January 2012, https://adengad.net/posts/7092.htm (last accessed 2 May 2012)
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  12. Yoav di-Capua. 2018. No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization. Chicago University Press: Chicago, p. 122-3
  13. Mahmoud Saeed. 2000. “Remembering Hani al-Rahib: Death Ends Novelist’s Portrayal of Arab World in Crisis.” Al Jadid, 6(31) www.aljadid.com/content/remembering-hani-al-rahib-death-ends-novelists-portrayal-arab-world-crisis (last accessed 28 September 2022)
  14. Roger Allen. 1992. “The Mature Arabic Novel Outside Egypt.” in Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 193-223, p. 212
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  16. Fadil Chalabi. 2018. “Herioc outcry against injustice.” Banipal 63: 26-28, p. 28
  17. Amin Malak. 2000. “Arab-Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif.” AJCP20: 140-183
  18. Nada Ayad. 2016. “The Politics of Foreignizing and Domesticating English in Ahdaf Soueif’s ‘In the Eye of the Sun’.” Translation Review 95(1): 55-66 p. 55
  19. Jābir ʿAṣfūr. 2000. “Istirāḥat al-Bayān, Shaqqat al-Ḥuriyyah, Yatubuhā al-Yawm: Jābir al-ʿAṣfūr.” www.albayan.ae Augustus 13, 2000 https://www.albayan.ae/five-senses/2000-08-13-1.1038416 (last accessed November 30, 2021)
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