Introduction

Fictitious Capital is a book that looks to the history of the Arabic novel and reads an untold tale of finance that precedes the familiar narrative of the nation. Beginning in 1859, Khalīl al-Khūrī serializes a novel in his official newspaper Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār. Like many an Arabic novel to come, al-Khūrī’s readers find themselves dreaming of gardens set apart from the rush of the industrializing world, and at the same time, of a future of “material and literary progress.” Textiles are central to this alchemical dream, hinged to the fate of the silkworm, caught between the collapsing Ottoman Empire and the rise of the French in the affairs of Mt. Lebanon. Reading the silkmoth’s serial reapperances in the turn-of-the-century Arabic press and in theories of capital, Novel Material argues that finance capital and its fictions were reconfiguring time itself in an age of hope, fear and speculation.

It Was Cotton Money Now

Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf’s first foray in the novel genre, Fatāt Miṣr (The Girl of Egypt) was serialized as a literary supplement to Al-Muqtaṭaf over the course of 1905. A tale of finance capital’s restless wandering in Egyptian cotton fields, Cairo apartment buildings, Japanese war bonds, and the stock markets of the world -- from London, to St. Petersburg, Tokyo and back to Cairo --, Fatāt Miṣr met with critical praise upon its initial publication. Soon forgotten, the novel has been left unread by Arabic literary critics, despite the prescient augury it held for how a culture of speculation in Arabic would culminate in Egypt less than two years later in the stock and real estate crash of 1907. Indeed, the plot of Fatāt Miṣr owes much to Ṣarrūf’s own personal financial speculation in Egyptian land.

Fictions of Capital in 1870s and 1880s Beirut

Arabic readers in the late nineteenth century struggled to negotiate the contradictions of their position in the world economy: Beirut was at once a peripheral hub of speculation, a market for finished French textiles, and an industrializing source of the unrefined silk off which French factory owners profited. While Al-Muqtaṭaf, founded in 1876, was averse (at least in its Beirut years) to speculation and instead championed the local production of commodities in all their materiality, for Salīm al-Bustānī and Al-Jinān, it was becoming clear that finance, through the many fictions it enabled, was decisively changing the future of the region. Al-Bustānī offered late nineteenth-century Beirut and more generally readers of Arabic lessons in how the credit-driven consumption of material goods allowed the keeping up of appearances in his novels Budūr (1872), Bint al-ʿaṣr (1875, Daughter of the Age) and the early 1880s Sāmiyyah.

Like a Butterfly Stirring within a Chrysalis

Finance infiltrated fiction, just as fiction enabled readers of the early 1870s Arabic press to apprehend the dangerous and deceptive fictitiousness underwriting a financialized society. With the rise of a credit economy in Beirut, transactions textualized in the form of ledgers, receipts, checks, promissory notes, and mortgages were securing the economy, but the very immateriality of these exchanges introduced a new kind of risk and uncertainty. Fiction loomed within finance and threatened dreams of progress; speculating in Arabic became the province of novelists and financiers alike. Merchants and brokers became stock protagonists of novels by Salīm al-Bustānī and Yūsuf al- Shalfūn. Enabled by the telegraph, a new kind of speed emerged: merchants and traders relied on the press for the latest shipping news and commodity prices; a single year’s silk harvests could make or break fortunes; and imported fashions changed so fast, as one printed anecdote had it, that a wife’s hat could go out of style before her husband even made it home from the shop. Ultimately, a sense of anxiety pervaded a Beirut reading public increasingly worried about the costs of keeping pace with the flows and imbalances of a global order of finance capital.

In the Garden

Numerous new periodicals joined Beirut’s lone newspaper Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār (The Garden of News) beginning in 1870. After a decade of increasing returns from silk, readers were invited to imagine Beirut and its new journals as so many gardens of culture, economics and useful news: the gardens of Al-Jinān, the Paradise-like Al-Jannah, or the smaller still garden of Al-Junaynah; the flower of Al-Zahrah; the bee of Al-Naḥlah; joined later in the decade by the choice clippings of Al-Muqtaṭaf, and the fruitful arts of Thamarāt al-Funūn. Reworking a far older adab and poetic tradition of figuring knowledge as the product of idyllic gardens, the Beirut press’s editors and authors cultivated a utopian fiction of the garden as site of what Zaydān would later call the Nahḍah. As in Eden, the garden is always threatened with a fall, and both Salīm al-Bustānī’s novel Al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām (Love in the Gardens of Damascus) and Yūsuf al-Shalfūn’s novel Al-Shābb al- maghrūr (The Conceited Youth; serialized simultaneously over the course of 1870 in Al-Jinān and Al-Zahrah, respectively), deliver that story.

Coda

Historians of the Arabic novel typically tell a tale of the rise of the novel and the nation. Overlooked in the process has been the centrality of finance to the early Arabic novel. Reading serialized fiction allows for the novel form to be seen as open to its historical moment and agentive in generating the fictions that subtend it. The nation and the anticolonial movement from the first World War are in Arabic critiques of an earlier Arabic dream of a cosmopolitan Eden of empire. Tethered to maritime risk, the novel of finance would be replaced with a return to the village and its land, much of it now mortgaged.

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.

Of Literary Supplements, Second Editions, and the Lottery

While Zaydān serialized novels in early issues of Al-Hilāl, which began publishing in Cairo in September 1892, the novel installments staged a gradual migration, from the center of each issue, to the end of the issue, later to become a stand- alone supplement that could be bound as a book at year-end. In later reprints of back issues of the early years of Al-Hilāl -- offered in Zaydān’s time as bound volumes, and comprising the majority of library archives today -- Zaydān’s novels are nowhere to be found. While many a scholar of Arabic literature has been left befuddled by this archive’s early literary poverty, this chapter argues that by carefully attending to these palimpsestic traces of serialization, a history of the Arabic novel comes into view: these early editions reveal to us the historical moment of which they were a product, bearing the mark of a contingent mode of speculation, and of the threatening porosity of fiction and finance.