Mourning the Nahḍah

The 1880s, witnessing disappointing returns on silk in Syria, Salīm al-Bustānī’s far too early death in 1884, the increasing censure of the Sublime Porte, and the emigration to Cairo of Jurjī Zaydān, Fāris Nimr and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf -- fleeing the collapse of the Syrian Protestant College intellectual community --, disillusioned the dreams of material and intellectual progress that fueled the rise of the private Arabic press and the serialized Arabic novel in 1860s and 1870s Beirut. It is a macabre, melancholic turn for the Arabic novel, haunted by Salīm al-Bustānī, whose novels lie buried, Zaydān tells us, “in the pages of Al-Jinān.” Zaydān’s early 1892 novel Asīr al-Mutamahdī (Captive of the Self-Made or Would-Be Mahdi) emblematically pivots around a bloody lock of hair locked in a box in Cairo since the novel’s protagonist fled 1860 Mt. Lebanon. In Egypt, debts to British and French banks simultaneously funded the speculative irrigation of cotton land as well as the transformation of Cairo’s city center, sedimented in the public garden of Ezbekiyya. The addictive, illicit, nocturnal pleasures of Ezbekiyya would cast an anxious pall over its Edenic grounding of Egypt’s own Nahḍah, if only readers would decode its specious, speculative foundations.