The Best 20th-Century Arab Novels

You’re recommending five 20th-century Arab novels. Before we get to your choices, could you tell me a bit about your criteria? Obviously, not every country in the Middle East is or can be represented, why did you pick these particular books?

As we discuss each novel, it will become clear that although these are all good novels, I have not tried to give a list of the five best Arabic novels of the 20th century. I tried to pick books from a range of countries that deal with a range of themes. There are some Palestinian ones, a Sudanese one, an Egyptian one and the first one that I went with is an Arab American novel. I have tried to give a cross-section of some of the more important trends in Arabic novels but I have also tried to pick books that are a little bit daring and innovative.

They are quite different stylistically, but they are all, in some way, invested in the question of how to write a novel in the 20th-century Arab world. Because—for a bit of history—the novel, as a genre, doesn’t really come into the Arab world until the late 19th century—perhaps later. There is considerable debate over exactly when and how this happened but, whichever way you slice it, it’s a pretty new genre. The novel, as a genre, is carnivorous, eating other genres and assimilating them, and the Arabic novel is no different; it takes prose genres that existed in Arabic before it but does different things with them. I’m teaching a class now on the Arabic novel, and a huge part of that has been trying to define what a novel is and what an Arabic novel might be.

How much were your choices limited once you narrowed it down to novels that are available in English?

Broadly speaking, although the majority of Arabic novels have not been translated into English, most of the big hits are translated and there are few classics that cannot be found in some kind of English translation. But there is a big focus these days on contemporary literature in translation, so a lot of slightly less canonical 20th-century texts are hard to find. If you didn’t get translated the first time around, it’s a big uphill struggle trying to get translated now, because publishers want what’s relevant, what’s contemporary, what’s hip. One of the novels in this list by Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns, I picked partly because the sequel to it, Sunflower, has not yet been translated into English. It was written in the 1970s and is very highly regarded in Palestine but there is no English language version available.

Let’s turn to your recommendations. I’m going to take them in chronological order, starting with the earliest book. This is The Book of Khalid by Ameen Rihani, from 1911. Tell me what it’s about and why it’s on your list. 

This is the only one I picked that’s written in English. Part of the reason I picked a book written in English was to ask, ‘What do we mean by the Arabic novel? Does it have to be written in Arabic?’ Especially now, in the 21st century, there are a lot of people who identify as Arabs but are writing in other languages. Hisham Matar, Susan Abulhawa, Ahdaf Soueif and Layla Aboulela are all well-known examples. And there are probably more writing in French.

The Book of Khalid is both an early example of an Arabic novel and an example of the Arabic-English novel. It’s about the migratory diaspora Arab experience and it’s very strange to read. It sits between Arabic and English literature in a striking way both in terms of plot and style.

The novel’s set-up is a classic modernist trick. The unnamed narrator of the book comes across a manuscript in a library in Cairo, written by someone called Khalid, telling his life story. The narrator, using some other sources, weaves this into a fuller narrative telling the story of Khalid traveling to America in the early 20th century. This was a time when a lot of people from the Arab world emigrated to America just as Italians, Eastern European Jews and Irish people did too. In fact, in the steerage class of the Titanic, the largest single nationality was Syrian. The book, in part, is a description of this Arab immigrant experience in America and New York in particular: being quite poor, living hand to mouth, peddling to earn a wage—but in a very interesting and charismatic way.

Then, about halfway through, the book becomes very strange. Khalid, upsetting the classic American immigrant story, goes back to the Arab world where he tries to become a prophet of the modern age who can unite the spirits of the East and the West into a new philosophy. He spends much of the last section of the book preaching in the Arab world. He’s very controversial, causing something of a scandal wherever he goes. At one point he’s kicked out of a mosque for what he’s saying but (without giving spoilers) the whole story ends without the triumphal end we seem primed for.

The whole book is written in the most unusual way – it’s unlike anything I have ever read before. It’s a proto-modernist story of movement and Arab displacement and the attempt to reconcile East with West. It is also, at times, quite difficult to read. Sometimes, you feel you could be reading some lost masterpiece by James Joyce; at others, it feels like an overly literal translation of a classical Arabic poem; at others, it is more like a religious treatise written by a madman.

On top of all of this, it’s also kind of Rihani’s life story too. He was born in what’s now Lebanon, moved to America, where he lived for a while, and then moved back to the Middle East, and traveled quite a lot. It’s a little bit like a fantasy autobiography.

This book was very influential in the formation of the Arab American literary tradition. By far the best-known Arab-American writer, whom I assume many people will know, is Kahlil Gibran. He wrote The Prophet, which was very big in the mid-20th century but less so now. Gibran is, apparently, the third best-selling poet of all time. But I have always found him boring and painfully clichéd. Rihani knew Gibran. They’re trying to do a similar thing: revive the spirit of the East and combine it with the best parts of the West. Whereas Gibran seems hackneyed, Rihani, in his slightly mad-cap, crazy way, seems totally original.

Let’s move on to your next choice, which is The Open Door (1960) by Latifa al-Zayyat. This is set in Egypt, around the time of the 1952 Revolution and the overthrow of King Farouk, is that right?

Yes. It spans a period of around ten years, starting before the revolution and ending after it. It’s told through the perspective of the central character, Layla, and follows her coming of age in the context of bourgeois Egyptian family life, which is shown to be simultaneously stultifying and oppressive for independent-minded women.

Layla is beset on all sides by people who undermine her in different ways. The older patriarch is mostly just unpleasant. He is tough, unbending, thinks everything should be done by his rules and doesn’t brook any dissent. At the same time, men of Layla’s generation (including her brother and cousin), speak like feminists and claim to support the advancement of women, but when it comes down to it, they don’t take Layla very seriously. They’re nice to her and they’re not domineering but they talk down to her and say she shouldn’t do various things for her own safety and so on. At the same time, the large majority of the women around her are so obsessed with status, keeping up appearances and doing the right thing that they cannot offer a way out for her. It’s a book about an (internally) rebellious woman in a society that has various ways of suppressing that rebellion.

Everything changes as Layla becomes involved with the revolutionary moment following 1952 when, to put it very simply, Nasser and his Free Officers’ movement overthrew the king and the vestiges of the British Empire, ushering in a moment of national rebirth for Egypt and the beginning of a truly post-colonial era.

It’s through these that Layla manages to become a fully realized woman. This is where, probably for a modern reader, the book falls a little flat because the message is quite uncomplicated: Layla is liberated both as an Egyptian and as a woman by being part of the revolution. The book ends with a great celebration of anti-colonial resistance and the freedom it offers women in a way that feels overly idealized – at least that’s how I read it.

Is it a good read? Are you carried along by her story?

It is. There are some very good characters in it, and some good moments of humour alongside the social observation. One of my favourite characters is the odious Dr Ramzi, who is a professor at the university she goes to. He takes her under his wing, but then turns out to be the most boring, self-obsessed type of academic who has no interest in her whatsoever except as a status symbol.

It’s translated by Marilyn Booth, who is one of the great Arabic translators working today. She has a little afterword in it, written in 2000, in which she says that it is a little too melodramatic for a modern audience. But reading it again now, I wonder whether we might be back into the age of melodrama. It might have been too melodramatic for a 2000s audience, but maybe a 2025 audience is ready for that again.

It’s probably a little bit too long.

Is it a doorstopper?

No, it’s about 380 pages. But it’s probably about 60 pages too long. By the end, we’ve got the point.

Let’s go on to Season of Migration to the North (1966) by Tayeb Salih, which has been recommended many times on Five Books. Is this the best Arabic novel of the 20th century?

In my opinion, it might be one of the best novels of the 20th century full stop. I picked it because it’s really good. It often comes top of these kinds of lists. It’s one of the few Arabic novels that has entered the canon of world literature.

The book starts when the unnamed narrator comes back home to his small rural village after seven years of education abroad. That’s a classic trope of Arabic literature, so we are immediately on familiar ground. But things quickly move in unexpected directions. The narrator finds that there is a new resident of the village called Mustafa Sa’eed who has come from the capital Khartoum and is very popular with everyone there, although his past is a little murky. One night at a party, Mustafa gets very drunk and the narrator hears him reciting an English poem (Ford Madox Ford’s “In October 1914 [Antwerp]”). This appearance of Anglophone culture in a village, which seemed untouched by the outside world, disturbs the narrator. He begins to question him. It turns out that Mustafa has a whole previous life as a prominent economist in London.

Not long after Mustafa reveals his whole background to the narrator, he drowns in the Nile (perhaps an accident, perhaps suicide). The rest of the book is this layering of three different stories. The first is flashbacks of Mustafa Sa’eed’s life in London where, we discover, he had embarked on a campaign of revenge against his former colonial overlord, sleeping with British women who all kill themselves except for the last whom he murders (a crime for which he serves time in prison). The second story is that of the narrator’s life in a newly independent Sudan. He has come back with his foreign education and is trying to build the country and move it forward while at the same time coming across all the typical problems of a post-colonial society: the kleptocratic elites, the feeling the British have set up a system which was doomed to fail. The final story is that of Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow who is forced into a marriage against her will and, on the wedding night, kills her new husband and then herself. It is a very violent book! Or, at least, there is always an undertone of violence, which occasionally rises to the surface.

Season of Migration to the North pulls from many different traditions. People have often interpreted it as a reversal of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the story of Mustafa Sa’eed’s corruption by the violence of the imperial center, rather than the African wilderness. But the novel is also deeply invested in the Arabic literary tradition

What elements make it part of the Arab literary tradition, would you say?

The book is deconstructing a classic, and increasingly hackneyed, trope of the 20th-century Arabic novel. Many Arabic novels from the 1930s and 1940s centre on a young man who gets educated in the West (usually Paris, or perhaps London), returns home to experience an internal clash of cultures, finds a way to rectify it in some way—often by finding a happy medium in which he can take the best of the West and the best of the East and combine it into something great.

This book is clearly playing with that trope but complicating it. The people in the book—whether they are victims or perpetrators—feel like real people and the relationship between ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘Coloniser’ and ‘Colonised’ is never simple.

What’s it like to read?

It’s short, under 200 pages, and the narrative jumps around quite a lot. This form works well with the content. It is a book that never lets simple explanations stand and that always offers different perspectives. In the book, we move quickly between different viewpoints without being able to identify fully with any of them.

On top of this, it’s very well written—and translated. It’s an interesting example of the translation process because Denys Johnson-Davies, who did a lot of classic books in the period, was friends with Tayeb Salih and they worked on it together. So Tayeb Salih would write one chapter in Arabic and then send it straight to Denys Johnson-Davies, who would translate it and have the opportunity to ask questions. It’s a work of collaborative translation and it reads very well for that reason.

We’re now in the 1970s and a book called Saeed the Pessoptimist (1974) by Emile Habibi. This is the one to read if you’re looking for humor, is that right?

Yes, it’s a hoot. It’s also another one whose position in the canon is pretty much guaranteed now. It frequently appears in lists of the ’10 best Arabic novels.’ It’s also the first Palestinian novel I have picked, and I have been reading quite a lot of Palestinian literature recently for obvious reasons.

The plot centers around a guy called Saeed, a hapless, naïve, Forest Gump-esque character who lives through several momentous events in Palestinian history. He is the kind of person that things always seem to happen to, but who never appears to be in control. It starts, more or less, with the events of 1948, which is the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion of a large number of Palestinians. Saeed himself is expelled from his home, but through a series of connections (and quite a lot of luck), he manages to find his way back into the country.

It’s divided into 44 little segments, all of which are comic vignettes about Saeed and his life. It is very picaresque. The book is, in part, inspired by the pre-modern Arabic prose genre called the maqama, which is a collection of short, very loosely connected tales usually centered around a trickster protagonist and his companions. Maqamas didn’t have plots, they were just these episodes. This is very similar to that, which is why the plot is a little bit hard to summarize—it does have a plot, but it isn’t the most important thing. The book ends with Saeed flying into outer space in an alien spaceship, gazing down at Palestine below him.

Despite the zany plot and the comic delivery, this book covers serious themes – the central one being how to live as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Saeed comes to represent that whole experience where, whatever you do, you are constantly forced into choosing between, broadly speaking, ‘collaboration’ or ‘resistance.’ Everything that you do as a Palestinian is refracted through that lens. Even going for a cup of coffee somehow becomes either an act of resistance or collaboration.

Habibi turns this reality into a comic set piece. He doesn’t make it heavy, although the lessons are serious. So Saeed becomes an exaggeratedly committed collaborator, to the point of absurdity. There’s one episode that I always remember, which happens in 1967, as Israel occupies the West Bank. There’s a very funny vignette where they broadcast a message on the radio saying that any Arabs who surrender should raise a white flag. And Saeed, in his comic excess, raises a white flag from his house in Haifa because he thinks, ‘Well, they need to know I’m surrendering so they don’t come to get me!’ Then he’s arrested because the Israelis think he’s taking the piss.

Why is it on your (and others’) lists of top Arabic novels? What is it that makes it so good?

For me, it’s this juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic, which it does so well. It’s constantly either describing a very tragic scene and then undercutting it with some comedy or describing a very comic scene, which you gradually come to realize is actually a tragic scene. It does both.

Annoyingly, the translation of this book is the one I like the least. I feel slightly bad saying that because it’s translated by one of the greats of Palestinian literature and literary criticism, Salma Khadra Jayyusi (in collaboration with Trevor LeGassick). But this novel depends so much on lightness of touch and the English prose sometimes feels a little bit too heavy or unwieldy. Maybe translating this book is an impossible task. Translating comedy is very difficult. But if there was any Arabic novel I would like to see re-translated, it would probably be this one.

I saw that Emile Habibi was a member of the Communist Party of Israel, and I was wondering if that was relevant. Is the novel at all autobiographical?

In a sense, yes. One thing that it’s about—which he was obsessed with—is what it’s like to be a Palestinian who stayed in Israel. The Communist Party was basically the only party in which Israelis and Palestinians worked together on something like an equal footing. Being a member of the Communist Party is a political statement in that you’re a communist, but it’s also a political statement about working with Israelis towards some other future—though it’s certainly not an acceptance of the system as it is.

Habibi received both the Israel state prize for literature and the Palestinian state prize for this book, which was pretty controversial at the time.

Let’s turn to the last novel you’ve chosen, Wild Thorns (1976) by Sahar Khalifeh.

This is the second Palestinian novel in this list and it’s another book about hopelessness, about the constant tension between collaboration and resistance. Unlike Habibi’s book, it’s set in the West Bank, in Nablus, which has been recently occupied. This makes the tenor somewhat different. It’s much heavier, I suppose.

The book is about a man, Usama, who has come back to Palestine from working in the Gulf. He finds that following the conquest of the West Bank, no one is resisting. Lots of his family have got jobs in Israel, and they’re in this period of stasis. He’s very upset about it, and tells them that they need to resist. In his fervour, Usama joins a militant movement, who plan to blow up busses of Palestinians going to work in Israel—collaborators. Usama’s cousin is one of the people riding those buses—clearly a symbolic choice from Khalifeh.

But, to take things from the other side, Usama’s friends and relatives who stayed in the West Bank are a little suspicious of him. ‘You haven’t been here! You’re just coming back from abroad, you don’t know what it’s like,’ they say. What Sahar Khalifeh does really well is let all of those tensions and juxtapositions sit alongside each other in the characters. I think if this book does have a message, it’s that violent resistance is self-destructive and perhaps pointless. But the novel also allows for the complexity of what it is like to be in this situation, caught between resistance and collaboration. What do you do and how do you live your life?

The follow-up to this book is called Abbad El Shams, which has not yet been translated into English. Wild Thorns is largely about male resistance fighters or men who go and work in Israel. Abbad El Shams is much more focused on women in the West Bank. People are always slightly confused why it hasn’t been translated into English because she’s one of the most famous Palestinian authors. When you ask Palestinians, ‘Who should I read?’ Sahar Khalifeh is one of the writers they often recommend.

I think it’s sad that someone with this complex but also well-grounded and sensitive portrayal of West Bank Palestinian life does not have an English audience, whereas many more simplistic books on Israel-Palestine do.

Are there any big Arabic novels that you haven’t chosen? If an Arabist saw this list, would they say ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe he hasn’t included that?’ Or is it hard to pin down the canon?

I haven’t chosen the one Arabic language Nobel prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz, which I suppose stands out as a gap. To be honest, I have never really got along with his epic, state-of-the-nation Cairo Trilogy—it all feels so momentous and serious—but I do like his shorter novels, such as Adrift on the Nile or The Thief and the Dogs. I also haven’t included any Lebanese novels in Arabic, which some people might disagree with. There’s no Hoda Barakat, no Elias Khoury, no Hanan al-Shaykh, for instance.

Though I did notice, when I was going through them, that the majority of my choices are from the 1960s and 1970s. I didn’t pick them for that reason, but that does fit the idea that this period was the golden age of Arabic literature. It was a post-colonial moment when there was a lot of funding behind Arab culture. It came particularly from left wing regimes, partly as a propaganda move, but one which contributed to a flourishing of literary production. A lot of other classic novels came out in this period: That Smell by Sonallah Ibrahim, for instance, and Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani. As well as plays, poems, films, and so on.

You mentioned funding, I think in Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih writes in the introduction to the edition I was reading something along the lines of, ‘Some people are angry that this novel was funded by the CIA.’ I was like, ‘Wow. That’s not what I was expecting to read in the foreword to a literary masterpiece.’

The story behind that is that it was serialized in a magazine called Hiwar, which was based in Beirut. It was a bit like Encounter magazine in the UK. The CIA was funding magazines everywhere! Lots of well-respected writers published in Encounter: Robert Graves, Frank Kermode, Anthony Burgess, John le Carré. Both Encounter and Hiwar met with opposition when the source of their funding emerged.

It might be a little dramatic to say the CIA funded Season of Migration to the North except in a very convoluted way, but there are perhaps reasons to think that Cold War politics also lie in the background of this novel (the academic Elizabeth Holt has certainly argued this). Though there is also an argument that Salih was primarily supporting his friend Tawfiq Sayegh, the editor of Hiwar who had been boycotted by many writers in response to the revelations of CIA funding. Another layer to its complexity!

Finally, tell me about your latest book, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age, and the story it tells.

It’s a history of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, told through the lives of two occult performers. One of them, Tahra Bey, was an Armenian born in Istanbul, who lived through the violent collapse of the Ottoman Empire, ended up as a refugee in Europe, and created the persona of a mystical Egyptian fakir. As Tahra Bey ‘the fakir,’ he took Paris by storm in the 1920s, performing all kinds of inexplicable feats of wonder and preaching a gospel of Eastern spiritual sciences. Through this character, I tell the story of interwar Europe, lost in a post-World War I malaise and grasping at anything to rebuild their ailing civilization. I wanted to answer the question of why so many people were drawn to the occult in that period, and he offers a good perspective on that.

The second half of the book is more focused on a man called Dr Dahesh. He started as a copycat Tahra Bey performer in Jerusalem, then became a hypnotist, then a spiritualist and then a spiritual leader. In 1940s Beirut, he started his own religion called Daheshism. I use him to look at what’s going on in the Middle East. My contention is that the Middle East is too often left out of these big global stories of the 1920s and 30s.

My first book, Midnight in Cairo, was about female cabaret stars in Cairo. It was a way of saying, ‘We hear a lot about Berlin and Paris in the roaring 20s, but what does the story look like from the Middle East?’ In the case of the occult, there’s this weird mirror image happening, where in the West, everyone’s obsessed with these bizarre Eastern sages and the secrets of the East, whereas in the Middle East, people become obsessed with hypnotism and spiritualism as manifestations of modern science.

So the book is about big global trends and the insecure world of the early twentieth century from the Middle East to America. But it also tells the life stories of these two very complicated men. It is about identity and fakery, science and wonder, suffering and turmoil—life, if you want.