New book aims to bring the history of Arab literature to the fore

Desert Songs of the Night: 1500 Years of Arabic Literature edited by Suheil Bushrui and James M Malarkey.

Ask someone about the history of French literature and they might recite a couple of Voltaire quotes before extolling the virtues of Victor Hugo and challenging the ideas of Camus.

Ask about German literature and they will perhaps tell you about the Brothers Grimm before mourning the late, great Günter Grass.

Ask about Arabic literature, however, and, well, they’ve probably heard of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and … that’s often as far as their experience goes.

It can feel, to those in and from the West, that Arabic literature and literary tradition is a something we would never have the time to catch up with. From romantic poets, religious texts and revolutionary philosophers, there’s simply too much reading to get through – we could never get to a point where we might understand the references and canon well enough to enjoy the modern output.

We’ve all been waiting, then, for a book like Desert Songs of the Night: 1500 Years of Arabic Literature – and it feels like it has been a long time coming. The book, published by UK publisher Saqi Books and edited by Suheil Bushrui and James M Malarkey, takes on the daunting task of anthologising Arabic literature.

Starting in the pre-Islamic age (Jahiliyya), it meanders through the Abbasid Dynasty and five other literary ages before arriving at Modern Arabic Literature.

This wide-ranging book encompasses well-known names such as Ibn Battuta and puts them in the context of their contemporaries and the wider history of writing that has come out of the region.

It also features extracts from the Holy Quran and selected ­poems from Mahmoud Darwish. And yes, it has a few ­stories from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

When choosing what should be included in the book, Bushrui and Malarkey stuck to one major principle: what has been the main foundation of a literary tradition that has survived for so long?

“It had everything to do with cultural heritage and the very roots of poetic foundation, ­established over centuries,” says Bushrui.

And what about the modern literature?

“There were many that we wished to include but it was impossible,” says Bushrui. “This was a selective anthology based on a criterion of what we both believed to have been one of the major foundations of Arabic ­literature.”

The anthology is also important because it begins to scratch the surface of what a huge influence Arabic literature has had on world culture.

“The influence of Arabic literature on world culture has been enormous,” Bushrui says. “Arabic literature and civilisation under the Umayyads spread across North Africa, going as far as Spain where the influence of Arabic is most evident … the further influence that took place in the Abbasid period reached Asia (Iran, Pakistan, and parts of ­China), and the rest of the world.”

With the publication of a book such as Desert Songs of the Night, and a recent report by the British Council that listed Arabic as the second-most important language for the UK to focus on, it seems the world is starting to see the importance of the ancient language and the culture that developed and travelled with it.

The Arabic literary tradition also is not one that is forgotten, left in the poetry of the dark ages and religious texts – modern writers from across the region are still telling stories of people in countries that have undergone upheaval, most recently during and in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, all as part of a new canon of art and culture that is booming in newly liberalised societies.

In searching for the right modern writers to include, Bushrui and Malarkey found one obstacle was that they had look hard to find writers who had been “well and accurately translated into English” – the fact that Bushrui had to translate a number of the modern poets himself is a sign of how ignored the full-spectrum of Arabic literature has been by English-speaking audiences.

But when asked whether the West ignores Arabic literature, it wasn’t the modern works that the editors brought up, it was the classical. “The Arabic literature that is ignored by the West is that great humanitarian tradition of human dignity, of chivalry, of forgiveness, of generosity, that is expressed in the classical tradition of Arabic poetry,” says Bushrui.

“That aspect of Arabic literature is ignored in the West.”

Books such as Desert Song of the Night and the British Council report leave you feeling – and hoping – that Arabic literature is heading towards a renaissance, when it might take its rightful place on the world’s cultural stage.

But, as Bushrui says, “we must not forget that The Arabian Nights, as William Butler Yeats considered it to be, is the greatest folk literature the world has produced. It is the one dynamic, inspirational, Arabic literary influence that has permeated world literature.”

As you delve into this new ­anthology, it’s easy to see that it is far from the only dynamic and inspirational piece of literature to come out of the Arabic speaking world.