Middle Eastern Short Fiction

Introduction

In at least five countries (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran) covered in this survey, a “classical” literary tradition existed before modern forms of short fiction. In the other cases (Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which became formal political and cultural entities in the middle decades of the twentieth century), different conditions influenced short fiction writers.

Although two languages are common in Iran and the Arabic-speaking Middle East, both regions have deep roots in Islamic culture in the broadest sense. In terms of literature, this connection was quite close in the premodern centuries. Concerning the short story, for example, there was a classical tradition familiar to both Iranians and Arabs: the hikayat, meaning in modern Arabic “story.”

Many such writings were in contrast to mainly religious and legalistic classical writings. An early prototype (taken over from the Sanskrit fourth-century Tales of Bidpai) has lived on for centuries in the collection of animal fables Kalila wa Dimna. Equally iconic examples of pithy Arabic prose are seen in the many satiric short essays by al-Jahiz (776-868 CE), notably his “Al-Bukhala” (“Book of Misers,” 1997).

Early Pioneers

Modern literature in Arabic, and the possibility of short fiction in particular, stemmed from the Arabic Nahdah (rebirth) in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Many (mainly general historical and poetic) writings appeared, first in Syria and Lebanon and then in Egypt, often penned by Syro-Lebanese Christians. Some of these immigrated to Egypt, founding what became well-known newspapers and literary journals. Writers of the Nahdah generation introduced new subjects for literary treatment. Some (such as the Egyptian Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s unprecedented 1913 novel Zaynab, the story of a common Egyptian peasant girl) encouraged others to condense images of everyday socioeconomic and cultural life in short stories.

Most commentators suggest that Middle Eastern short fiction owes a lasting debt to several nearly monumental writers, especially the Egyptians Mahmoud Taymour (1894-1973) and Husayn ibn Ali (1889-1973), whose literary careers inspired several generations in several countries. In the 1920s, Taymour’s collected stories Sheikh Gomaa (1925) and Sayyed the Idiot (1928) painted lasting images of traditional village figures evident in many authors’ works across the Middle East.

Recent and Contemporary Egyptian Writers

Because of Egypt’s centrality in Middle Eastern history and culture, many short-fiction writers have focused on their country's recent history, leading to its contemporary socioeconomic experiences. Those with a strong political or ideological bent have found themselves frequently confronted by regime censorship. A notable example would be Gamal al-Ghitani (1945-2015), a leftist who has published several short-story collections that ostensibly aim at linking Egypt’s past with its near present, particularly in the 1970s. The breadth of his imagination in this respect is striking, as seen in the 1969 collection Diary of a Young Man Who Died a Thousand Years Ago. Later work, including Fruits of Time (1990) and Approaching Eternity (2000), suggest lines of continuity in his comparisons of past societies with life in contemporary Egypt. Al-Ghitani cultivates an unusual style that consciously reflects the traditional Arabic tale or hikāyāt.

‘Abd al-Al al-Hamamsi (1932-2009), formerly deputy president of the Egyptian Writers’ Union, is one of the few writers to have his entire short fiction published under the title Complete Works (between 1995 and 2003). Most of his subjects—without simply mirroring the fictional products of Egypt’s internationally recognized “master” (Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz)—delve deeply into the psychology of human behavior as it unfolds in typical Egyptian social settings.

Folkloric themes, however, continue to resurface in Egyptian short fiction. Prominent examples are seen in the work of Yahya Taher ‘Abdallah (1938-1981). Before his death in an automobile accident, ‘Abdallah combined rich literary imagination with traditional village scenes in collections such as Three Large Trees Producing Oranges (1970) and Images from Earth, Water, and Sun (1981).

Other important Egyptian short fiction authors and their works include Radwa Ashour's Al Tantouria (2010), Ahdaf Soueif's Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012), Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's Utopia (2017), and Omar Taher's Ketab el Mowasalat (2018; The Transportation Book).

Lebanese authors have traditionally reacted to influences coming from their much larger Syrian neighbor and Europe, mainly France. Lebanon has always occupied a unique position in Middle Eastern history, largely because of its mixed sectarian (Maronite and Orthodox, plus Catholic and Protestant Christian, Sunni and Shia Muslim and Druze) population. As a result, many prominent short-fiction writers concentrated their attention on interrelationships among different sections of Lebanese society and avoided politically sensitive issues.

A good example would be Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad (1911-1989). Yusuf Habashi al Ashqar (1929-1992) counts among the first short-story writers to focus on the social tensions caused by regional violence, starting with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war on Lebanon.

Since the 1960s, Lebanese women have played a growing role as short fiction writers. A prominent example is Layla Baalbaki (1936-2023). A strong feminist, Baalbaki had to defend her 1964 collection of short stories, A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon, in court, following charges that she disregarded traditional values—values she challenged as outmoded patriarchal control over women. Her emphasis on women’s need to confront male domination is visible in one of the stories from Spaceship, “From Mare to Mouse,” in which she describes a return from a symbolic dream involving a mare’s unwilling docility to face an indifferent and unresponsive male partner-husband.

Syria: Between Classical and Modern Short Fiction

Syrian literary figures, traditionally respected for their contributions to “pure” Arabic literature (with an emphasis on classical Arabic), have made somewhat less of a mark in modern short fiction than other Middle Easterners. Exceptions, however, stand out, including one of the founders of Damascus’s prestigious Union of Arab Writers, Shawqi Baghdadi (1928-2023), who suffered years of prison for reflections in his stories of opposition to Syria’s autocratic rule system. An internationally known female short-story writer, Nadia Ghazzi (b. 1935), is a descendant of a family with a centuries-long literary lineage. Behind the title of one of her best-known short stories, “The Man Who Saw His Own Funeral,” one finds a clever combination of contemporary realism and a genre practiced by mystery writers worldwide.

The premature death of a prominent member of Syria’s Union of Arab Writers, Jameel Hatmal (1956-1994), ended a career that produced four volumes of short fiction, the last of which, Stories of Illness . . . Stories of Madness (1994), is considered a masterwork of (autobiographical) insight into the psychology of individual human distress.

Short Fiction in Iraq

Creative writing by Iraqi authors has, depending on the period in question, been affected by unsettled political conditions. Moreover, low literacy rates created a limited reading audience; readers tended to look to imported writings, mainly from Egypt and Lebanon. Among pre-1940 writers of note was Ya’qub Bilbul, who published in 1938 a volume of short stories (The First Faggot) which focused on the internal social problems of Iraq.

Shortly after World War II, a new “school of realism,” inspired by Bilbul’s work, surfaced and was active into the first years of the 1950s. Representative short-fiction writers of this period (before cultural repression set in after 1955) included ‘Abd al-Malik Nuri (1921-1992), whose works described the plight of Iraq’s disadvantaged classes, with undertones of naturalism—describing, for example, the closeness of relations between humans and domesticated animals. Zafira Jamil Hafiz (b. 1931), a female short-story writer of the same period, published Dolls and Children. The title of one of her stories, “The Ice-Cream Seller,” symbolizes many of her insightful scenes of everyday popular life.

Fewer and lesser-known Iraqi writers contributed to short fiction during the politically disruptive years between 1960 and 2000 (many as expatriates living abroad). Again, the symbolism of titles, such as The Far Away Country We Love (1964) and Then Returns the Wave (1969), by another Iraqi woman, Daisy al-Amir (1935-2018, moved to Beirut), suggests reactions to difficult experiences undergone by her generation.

Later, Iraqi writers such as Abdullah Abd al Qadir (1940-2001, an immigrant to the United Arab Emirates who has published ten collections of short fiction) inspired an emergent younger generation by publishing works of short fiction that tried to return, despite the major changes that have affected Iraq, to a realistic narrative form. Abd al-Qadir’s 2003 The Gate of Freedom . . . The Gate of Death suggests that the coming challenge of a new generation is trying to find a cultural identity despite dislocations caused by Iraq’s political and military dilemmas since 2003. One description of these years of conflict is Iranian author Habib Ahmadzadeh's A City Under Siege: Tales of the Iran–Iraq War (2000). Other notable works from Iraq include Shahad Al Rawi's "On Jumhuriya Bridge" (2023) and the anthology Iraq +100 (2017), edited by Hassan Blasim.

Old and New Schools in Saudi Arabia

Two currents are visible in short fiction by Saudi Arabian writers. One tends to portray social and cultural situations typical of traditional Saudi life. They may focus on tensions within Saudi society but deal with issues that affect groups, not individuals. The work of Muhammad Ali Maghribi (b. 1914) is typical here since his stories focus on subjects such as marriage and family values. Although it is difficult to say when different emphases began to emerge, later writers (including a growing, but still limited, number of women) have turned more attention to the world of the individual.

Examples of this shift occasionally came from unexpected quarters, including short fiction works by Muhammad Abd-Allah al-Mulbari (1931-1991), who, after gaining recognition for writings on the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad and a long history of Mecca, published three collections of short stories with titles suggesting a high degree of literary flexibility: With Luck, Sunburn, and The Devil’s Killer.

One of al-Mulbari’s stories, “Poor, Oh! Chastity!,” is almost prototypical of writers’ descriptions of the psychological dilemmas of Saudi women aware of, but unable to express themselves in, modern social and cultural frames of reference.

Another Saudi writer who focuses on issues of internal identity with a high degree of imagination is Khalil al-Fuzayyi' (b. 1944), who published two volumes of short fiction, the best known being The Clock and the Palm Tree (1978).

Saudi writer Umaima al-Khamis's The Book Smuggler (2021) won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and was widely praised by critics. She also authored the short story collections Al-Bahriyat (2006), The Leafy Tree (2009), and Saja’s Visit (2013), as well as the novel Voyage of the Cranes in the Cities of Agate (2017).

Iran: A Century-Old Legacy of Short Fiction

The father of Iranian short fiction, Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh (1892-1997), published his first short story, Yeki bud Yeki Nabud (once upon a time), in Berlin in 1921. His eyes, however, were clearly fixed on Iran, focusing on his country's social, economic, and political conditions when strongman Reza Shah came to power in 1925. For two decades, and despite Reza Shah’s iron rule, Iranian writers experimented with what would become a hallmark of their literary skills. What Jamalzadeh began was expanded greatly by Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), the “dean” of Iranian short fiction. His 1937 story “Buf-e Kur” (“The Blind Owl”) set the stage for recurring themes in Hedayat’s short fiction over the years: pessimism and stark scenes of individual human destinies.

Thirty-eight years of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi's rule (1919-1980) began in 1941 and had uneven effects on Iran's literary climate. Although certain constraints existed in short fiction writing, one notable change was underway after 1950, when Iranian women writers emerged.

Several Iranian female authors have used short fiction to experiment with narratives that take the reader beyond perceptible reality. Some have suggested that this approach provides a shield against official censorship. For writers such as Shiva Arastuyi (b. 1961), the story “I Came to Have Tea with My Mother” involves the narrator’s attempt to define herself with respect to her husband and men in general, but scenarios shift constantly, weaving an almost surrealistic web of intertwined personages, events, and levels of consciousness. Another representative of this trend, Khatereh Hejazi (b. 1961), verges on imaginative science fiction in her “Cling to Your Life with Your Whole Body,” which, when interpreted as an allegory, appears to be a reflection of real dilemmas of existence in contemporary Iran. Fereshteh Sari (b. 1957), by contrast, deals in “The Absent Soldier” with women’s experiences in the real and tragic 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, seen from a localized neighborhood perspective, where members of the same family or neighbors think back on their lives in an earlier era. Other important female short fiction writers from Iran include Fereshteh Molavi, Marjane Satrapi, Fariba Vafi, and Sholeh Wolpé.

Israeli Short Fiction

Most Israeli cultural creativity, including short fiction, before and after 1948 springs from the early Zionist movement’s desire to develop modern Hebrew (as opposed to classical Hebrew) as a dominant symbol of the re-emergence of Israel. Foremost among the “fathers” of modern Hebrew was Hayim Bialik (1873-1934), whose works inspired many writers in the decades before and after his death.

Amos Oz (1939-2018) is among the best-known Israeli short fiction writers. His first stories were published in 1963 in the literary quarterly Keshet. In 1965, he published a full volume of short stories: “Where the Jackals Howl.” These portrayed imagined contacts between life in a kibbutz and the “real world.” They began to earn him a reputation for frank and truthful descriptions of the aspirations of the Israeli people. He nearly always attempts to overcome the limitations of narrow polemics by exploring variations of human nature, irrespective of national origins or religion. Although opposition to Israel’s invasions of Lebanon marked several of his novels in the 1980s, his interest in “inner examinations” returned to the fore by 2000. Reflections of his early short-fiction themes appear, for example, in “Waiting,” depicting the everyday lives of ordinary people in a small Israeli town. Oz’s short fiction “The King of Norway,” again a story drawn from the personal lives of ordinary people living on a kibbutz, was published in The New Yorker on January 17, 2011.

Some Israeli authors may naturally focus on issues of military organization (not necessarily war) for the country’s security. A representative example of such short fiction appears in Avraham Raz’s “Oded Yarkoni’s Private War” and Etgar Keret's "Intention: A Short Story Written in the Aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October Attack on Israel," published in the Guardian in 2023.

Equally important for the ideals of modern Israel would be full and ready recognition of female writers. An early example of an Israeli female author whose influence continues to be recognized would be Yehudit Hendel (1925-2014), recipient (among other awards) of the prestigious Bialik Prize in 1996. Several of Hendel’s (unfortunately few) short stories (most reflecting the nature of intimate human relationships) include “Zili and My Friend Shaul” and “Low, Close to the Floor.”

Bibliography

Ad-Dawsari, Fatimah, et al. Voices of Change: Short Stories by Saudi Arabian Women Writers. Lynne Rienner, 2022.

Bakalla, Muhammad Hasan. Arabic Culture: Through its Language and Literature. Taylor & Francis, 2023.

Bâqâdir, Abû Bakr, et al., eds. and trans. Voices of Change: Short Stories by Saudi Arabian Women Writers. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998.

Çelik, Hülya. Selected Studies on Genre in Middle Eastern Literatures from Epics to Novels. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.

Glazer, Miriyam. Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry by Israeli Women Writers. SUNY Press, 2000.

Grumberg, Karen. Middle Eastern Gothics: Literature, Spectral Modernities and the Restless Past. University of Wales Press, 2022.

Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology. Columbia University Press, 2005.

Kennedy, Elaine. Under a Kabul Sky: Short Fiction by Afghan Women. Inanna Publications and Education, 2022.

Keret, Etgar. "Intention: A Short Story Written in the Aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October Attack on Israel by Etgar Keret." Guardian, 3 Dec. 2023, www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/03/intention-a-short-story-written-in-the-aftermath-of-hamass-7-october-attack-on-israel-by-etgar-keret. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Marzolph, Ulrich. 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition. Wayne State University Press, 2020.