From Gardens of Knowledge to Ezbekiyya after Midnight: The Novel and the Arabic Press from Beirut to Cairo, 1870-1892

Abstract

Late 19th-century Beirut and Cairo were capitals of Arabic literary production and press activity. A period, oft deemed a nahḍa, that witnessed the advent of the novel form or riwāya in Arabic, this was also the moment of intensified French and British imperial involvement in the region, and the concomitant industrialization of Beirut's silk and Egypt's cotton markets. This article argues that, through the novels published in and promoted through the region's burgeoning private journals and newspapers, editors and novelists revived the literary trope of the garden of knowledge as a spatial metaphor for the Arabic reading public. While the 1870s in Beirut began as a hopeful decade—the civil war of 1860 buried in the fortunes being made off Mt Lebanon's mulberry orchards—by 1890s Cairo these Edenic hopes were replaced by a sense of melancholy in the face of rampant speculation, accumulating in the gardens of Ezbekiyya. Reading two novels, Salīm al-Bustānī's 1870 al-Huyām fī-jinān al-Shām and Jurjī Zaydān's 1892 Asīr al-mutamahdī, against the literary and press activities of the Bustānī family's al-Jinān, Zaydān's al-Hilāl, Khalīl al-Khūrī's Hadīqat al-akhbār, Yūsuf al-Shalfūn's Al-Zahrah, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī's Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq, and Fāris Nimr and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf's al-Muqtaṭaf, this article offers a literary history of speculation and capital for late 19th-century Arabic.

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