Return of the Spirit

by Tawfiq al-Hakim

  Dear reader, you now have in your hands one of the greatest works of twentieth-century Arabic literature, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

  ALAA AL ASWANY

  Translator’s Note

  This translation has been thoroughly revised, with multiple changes on every page to improve its accuracy and flow. I have benefited from two decades of translation practice and especially from the line-by-line editing by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis of each of the volumes of the Cairo Trilogy; from the 1986 publication of A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic: Arabic-English, by Martin Hinds and El-Said Badawi; and from sections of the M.A. thesis by Amira Salah El-Deen Askar for the Department of English Language and Literature of the Faculty of Arts of Zagazig University: “Text Migration: A Study of William M. Hutchins’ Translation into English of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Awdat Ar-Ruh as Return of the Spirit.”

  —W. M. H.

  Introduction

  Return of the Spirit is a gloriously Romantic tribute to the solidarity of the Egyptian people of all classes and religions and to their good taste and excellent sense of humor. It begins with the flu pandemic of 1918 and ends with the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. Admiration for the novel by the military entrepreneurs who replaced the monarchy in Egypt’s 1952 revolution may have dampened enthusiasm for it, but the 2011 Egyptian revolution has brought new life to the work, making it seem like today’s news, all fresh and glowing again.

  Novels celebrating the 2011 revolution will appear in due time, but Alaa Al Aswany, author of the immensely successful novel The Yacoubian Building, is already in print with remarks that echo Return of the Spirit: “The revolution makes much better people. When you participate in it, you regain your ability to say ‘no.’ . . . Egypt regained its identity. . . . And I believe that the personality now of Egyptians is very different. I think we regained what we lost in the [past] thirty years.”1

  Egyptian critic and journalist Ghali Shukri, in his book-length study of Tawfiq al-Hakim, responded to criticism that the 1919 revolution was merely used by the author as a deus ex machina to end the novel: “The truth is that al-Hakim intended it to be that way. . . . He wished to affirm that the Revolution was latent in the Egyptian Spirit so that it was hidden from the naked eye,” in such fashion that at the right moment, given the right catalyst, “the Revolution would explode.”2

  Return of the Spirit is a comic novel with a serious, nationalist theme that is as relevant today as it was when it was published more than eighty years ago. The plot has the snowballing inevitability of a tragedy as the character flaws of Muhsin’s relatives accelerate the romance between their love interest, Saniya, and their rival, Mustafa Bey, for whose sake Muhsin’s aunt, Zanuba, invests scant family resources on love charms. Their failures in love strengthen the young men and motivate them to join the 1919 revolution against the British, who throw them in prison. Through his suffering, Muhsin finds his calling as an artist who aspires to become the eloquent tongue of his nation.

  Return of the Spirit is, then, at once a portrait of an Egyptian as a young artist and therefore an apprenticeship novel; the narrative of a failed romance that transforms everything; a political novel that celebrates the 1919 revolution in Egypt and calls for national solidarity; a work of Arab Muslim literature; and a novel that presents its blended family as a model for Egyptian society and its characters as symbols for tendencies and ideas.

  The novel is also simply enjoyable reading. Because it was a first novel and subject to little if any editing, not surprisingly it retains certain infelicities: the digressions, the political ambiguities, the possible symbolic overload, and the ending that perhaps arrives too abruptly. All the same, there are more than enough felicities to make up for these.

  AN APPRENTICESHIP NOVEL

  Return of the Spirit is comparable in certain respects to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both novels were written in the early twentieth century; have positive, upbeat endings as the young protagonists find their callings as artists; are rich in dialogue and colloquialisms; celebrate significant details of daily life; and have a political agenda, namely, liberation from British rule and recovery of their nation’s authentic culture and consciousness.

  Both heroes appeal to a feminine religious intercessor: Stephen Dedalus to Mary and Muhsin al-Atifi to Sayyidah Zaynab bint Ali, a female descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and the de facto patron saint of the Cairo neighborhood where Muhsin’s extended family lives. Both heroes, who are approximately the same age, struggle with lust or love; and both are haunted by language. Irish Stephen is of course fluent in English, but finds that this language, “so familiar and so foreign,” causes him “unrest of spirit.”3 The one characteristic that most significantly ties Stephen to Muhsin is belief in his vocation as an artist. Stephen’s desire “to forge . . . the uncreated conscience of my race”4 is the Egyptian Muhsin’s dedication to become the eloquent tongue of the Egyptian people.

  A NARRATIVE OF FAILED ROMANCE

  Like Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Return of the Spirit recounts a failed romance, and each work caught the imagination of its contemporaries by capturing the spirit of its generation. Muhsin, who is only just past puberty, falls madly in love with his talented teenage neighbor, Saniya, when he is grudgingly allowed to exchange music lessons with her. After flirting with Muhsin, Saniya breaks his heart and also the hearts of his adult relatives Hanafi and Salim. When Charlotte and her fiancé, Albert, present Werther with the pink ribbon she wore the first time he saw her, he kisses it repeatedly, like Muhsin with Saniya’s handkerchief.5 Werther consoles himself for his lost love and for the falsity of contemporary society by pairing simple, rural life with Homer.6 Muhsin rebels against his parents’ snobbery and seeks out the company of farm laborers, thinking not of Homer but of ancient Egypt. For Muhsin (and for al-Hakim at the time he wrote the novel), the Egyptian farm worker was a link to what is ancient and authentic in Egypt. Both Werther and Muhsin tend toward nature pantheism, with Muhsin’s revealed by his vision in the cowshed. As his despair increases, Werther’s earlier cheerful pantheism takes on a terrifying, malevolent form.7

  Goethe’s book was said to have been carried by Napoleon on his campaigns and to have caused countless suicides,8 and al-Hakim’s book is said to have influenced Gamal Abdel Nasser in a significant way and to have contributed to an acceptance of totalitarian rule by Egyptian intellectuals.9

  A POLITICAL NOVEL

  Al-Hakim’s response to European colonialism was less a call to arms than a call to spiritual rebirth through pride in Egypt’s heritage. Although tension between modern, urban Cairo and ancient, rural Egypt is a vital element of the novel, for Muhsin the choice is not exclusive. Muhsin is as positive about streetcars as he is about waterwheels powered by oxen. What he opposes is the suppression of human dignity. The waterwheel, in fact, guarantees that Egypt will have streetcars (and astronauts). The tip of the pyramid points, metaphorically, to the Aswan High Dam and beyond.

  From Return of the Spirit to later works such as The Thorns of Peace and Voyage to Tomorrow, solidarity has been an important theme for al-Hakim. M. M. Badawi says of al-Hakim’s 1956 folk play al-Safqa [The Deal]: “In their desire to possess the land they have been tilling with such toil and dedication, the peasants present a remarkable spectacle of solidarity and self-denial.”10 He adds: “The peasants are not devoid of foibles. . . . They are a noisy, but good-humoured crowd, who with a few bold strokes are brought to life as distinct individuals.”11

  Joseph Conrad placed comparable emphasis on solidarity, as for example in a famous preface in which he said that the artist speaks to the “conviction of solidarity . . . which binds men together.”12 Al-Hakim, like Conrad, understood that art has political implications and that the artist has a duty to champion human solidarity. In Return of the Spirit, al-Hakim focused on an Egyptian nationalist solidarity that cut across class lines; in later works the human solidarity stress
ed was international, as in his play Poet on the Moon.

  In a newspaper column dated November 13, 1948, Tawfiq al-Hakim compared the events of the Egyptian uprising of 1919, celebrated in Return of the Spirit, with later strikes and demonstrations in Egypt and concluded that the difference between these diverse moments of civil unrest was the unanimity of heart in 1919—a solidarity as much spiritual or religious as political.13 Critic Ali B. Jad has observed: “The author is determined to see manifestations of the special unity of the Egyptian people in almost any ordinary social phenomenon, be it the gregariousness of passengers on Egyptian trains or the crowdedness of some Egyptian houses.”14

  In Return of the Spirit, instead of angry denunciations of British imperialism, there are happy expressions of the solidarity of adverse circumstances. Even as a child, Muhsin insists on eating with the members of the musical troupe instead of with the guests. In the digression about the Sudan, the story about the monkeys down the well celebrates their primate solidarity, which holds up even under attack. If an artist is to become the eloquent tongue of his people, the solidarity of a nation’s citizens (as in Return of the Spirit) or of all earthlings (as in al-Hakim’s Voyage to Tomorrow) must be assumed.

  In Egyptian literature, Return of the Spirit was a pioneer political novel that tied an individual’s awakening to the political awakening of the nation. It clearly served as a precedent for the Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz and for Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door. Hilary Kilpatrick, in The Modern Egyptian Novel, characterized Return of the Spirit as “a wonderfully romantic expression of that nationalist philosophy of rebirth which inspired the revolution of 1919” and observed that the book has won “the admiration of successive generations of Egyptian readers.”15 Bayly Winder, who called Return of the Spirit “al-Hakim’s most important and famous novel,” explained, “This story of middle-class Cairo life plays on the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris to set al-Hakim’s theme that the revolution of 1919 . . . constituted the return of national spirit to Egypt.”16 The Egyptian critic Ghali Shukri wrote that the Cairo Trilogy is a natural outgrowth of Return of the Spirit, pointing out that both works end with the revolutionaries in prison—as part of a social revolution in the Mahfouz trilogy and of a nationalist one in Return of the Spirit.17

  Toward the end of his life, Naguib Mahfouz, in an interview he granted Mohamed Salmawy for Al-Ahram Weekly, said that al-Hakim’s “works were truly landmarks in the evolution of Arab novel-writing. In the truest sense they represented and helped shape a new age. . . . My direct mentor was El-Hakim. Return of the Spirit, I believe, marked the true birth of the Arab novel. It was written using what were then cutting-edge narrative devices.” In fact, it was so unlike previous Arab attempts at writing novels that it “was a bombshell.”18 Mahfouz also told me in a private conversation (circa 1991) that until he wrote the trilogy, al-Hakim’s Return of the Spirit was the best Arabic novel.

  Mahfouz’s hero Kamal in Palace of Desire, the middle volume of the Cairo Trilogy, is comparable to al-Hakim’s hero Muhsin. The important scene in which Kamal’s father confronts him about his future and the choice of a branch of education (law school versus teachers college), although dissimilar in details, is directly parallel to the scene in volume one, chapter seven of Return of the Spirit, in which Muhsin insists that he and his friend Abbas must enter a secondary school for the arts. In each scene, the young hero takes his stand and voices his aspiration to become an artist—a responsible, authentic Egyptian artist.

  AN ARAB AND ISLAMIC NOVEL

  If Return of the Spirit resembles several Western types of novel—whether portraits of a young artist, stories of an unsatisfied and transforming love, or political novels—it is also an Arab and Islamic work. Denis Hoppe, while criticizing al-Hakim for being an author who “more than any other Arab writer, sees the Arab world through the rose-colored glasses of the West,” also mentioned that one of his “most striking characteristics” was “his sensitivity to the Arab past.”19 Perhaps Hoppe did not contradict himself. A Muslim author who looks at Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther can find there the story of Majnun, the hero of numerous works of Islamic literature, such as Nizami’s The Story of Layla and Majnun,20 a story of self-sacrificing, Udhri love. Majnun goes insane when his love for the beautiful Layla is thwarted by her family. Layla’s life too is transformed by her love for Majnun. At a deeper level, the story relates Majnun’s quest for God, whose earthly reflection—Layla—he pursues. Return of the Spirit differs from Nizami’s tale of unconsummated but all-consuming love, because it is a realistic story of modern, urban life and because it substitutes the artist’s calling for the mind-ravished spiritual quest of the desert wanderer. Majnun, however, was also an artist, a poet. At the end of Return of the Spirit, Muhsin delights in his physical contact with the other prisoners in his prison cell. Recognition of this physical, human solidarity signals a spiritual rebirth. From a Sufi perspective, Majnun is not a failure or a tragic hero, because he progresses by leaps and bounds in his quest for the divine. Of the three—Muhsin, Majnun, and Werther—only Goethe’s Werther seems suicidal and despairing.

  It is more difficult to find premodern Islamic apprenticeship novels. A study called Interpreting the Self, edited by Dwight F. Reynolds, includes translations of autobiographical selections by thirteen authors, ranging from the ninth-century Hunayn ibn Ishaq to the nineteenth-century Ali Mubarak.21 The Book of Contemplation, by Usama ibn Munqidh (d. AD 1188), although a book of edifying reflections on God’s creation, contains elements of an apprenticeship novel like the author’s account of his youthful adventures combating serpents, lions, and Franks.22 Deliverance from Error, by al-Ghazali (d. AD 1111), is another example of religious discourse decorated with autobiographical details, as the author recounts the stages of the intellectual and spiritual apprenticeship that led him to embrace Sufism.23 Hayy ibn Yaqzan, by Ibn Tufayl (d. AD 1185), although a work of philosophy, is also an apprenticeship novel that relates the story of a wild child who grows to manhood nurtured by a kindly doe and who gains, by his use of reason alone, complete knowledge of the Aristotelian universe surrounding him on his desert island—although he does need to travel to a nearby inhabited island to discover how many times to pray each day.24

  In Return of the Spirit, the main religious, symbolic framework is admittedly not Shariah-based, act-right Islam. Throughout much of the novel Saniya is portrayed as Isis. A hint of earth goddess symbolism comes when a green field reminds Abduh of Saniya in her green dress. In his later novel The Sacred Bond, al-Hakim also has his hero recognize that he had transfigured a young woman into “more than a living being; she was lofty and abstract and no longer real. She was a poem and a legend.”25 No matter how beautiful and talented she is, Saniya is not the twentieth-century Isis. She is at best a representative of Isis. The Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter Sayyidah Zaynab bint Ali has a better claim to being the novel’s Isis. Although not a character, she is invoked throughout, and the novel takes place on her turf.

  Muhsin has trouble realizing that the Saniya to whom he is speaking is not the Saniya of his dreams, not the new Isis. Ali Jad has claimed that disappointment with an overly idealized woman is a recurrent theme in al-Hakim’s fiction, whether here, in The Sacred Bond, in Bird of the East, in Shahrazad, or, arguably, in Maze of Justice.26 The tension between dream and reality is an important theme in al-Hakim’s works; even Muhsin’s adolescent wet dream, after he discovers the true nature of Saniya’s feelings toward him, is treated by al-Hakim as an example of this tension.

  When a traditional Muslim implies in Return of the Spirit that there is only one choice—Islam or nothing—a fellow traveler gently corrects him and says that the question is rather of having a heart or not having one. Egypt in 1918 was still, the modern gentleman held, traditional enough to have a heart, whereas Europe was so modern that, like the Tin Woodman, it lacked one. In other words, Egyptian Christians and Egyptian Muslims are brothers
; they all have hearts, even the same heart. This is the true meaning of Islam. For al-Hakim this was not secular humanism. It was important to be religious, but not in a one-dimensional way. He did not see Islam as having had a single pure and perfect era that needed to be revived. The issue was to reawaken the Egyptian spirit. This nation-building task was spiritual and therefore religious. In the discussion between the French archaeologist and the English irrigation inspector, the Frenchman argues that whereas the uneducated Egyptian farm laborer is heir to the wisdom of ancient Egypt, the typical European has no inherited culture. These ideas turn up again in al-Hakim’s Bird of the East,27 in which the title refers to the hero, who is an Egyptian student in France and therefore an heir of the spiritual East, defined to include Egypt. On the other hand, al-Hakim in the preface to King Oedipus credits the French with a literary inheritance that goes back to the ancient Greeks, and he contrasts the rich French inheritance with a gaping theatrical void faced by a twentieth-century Egyptian author like himself.