Israel and Palestine

This chapter examines the works of Arab and Israeli authors who celebrate diversity, humanity, and humanism. These include Anglo-Palestinian novelist Samir el-Youssef (b. 1965), Fawaz Turki (b. 1940), and polyglot Israeli essayist Jacqueline Kahanoff (1917–79). Fawaz Turki and Samir el-Youssef, although outside the circle of those considered paragons of Palestinian literature, are exquisite—albeit contrasting—representatives of the Palestinian condition and the Palestinians' intellectual trajectories of the past fifty years. Rather than being representatives of a single state, they are mostly ensconced in a state of liminality, straddling Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and other areas of dispersion, both East and West. Kahanoff's relevance is that her work, her thought, and the intellectual school to which she belonged are being excavated, rehabilitated, and valorized by both Israelis and Palestinians today.

Lebanon

This chapter features Lebanese authors spanning the period of the “pioneers” of modern Lebanese literature. Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), Nadia Tuéni (1935–83), Charles Corm (1894–1963), and Anis Freyha (1903–93), whose works spanned the first century of Lebanon's modern history, wrote tirelessly, extolling the glory of ancient Lebanon, recalling the “golden age” of its Phoenician ancestors and the era spanning “classical antiquity,” expressing both hope and concern for the future of a nascent political entity gushing out of a region torn by conflict, irredentism, and resentful nationalisms. Their works reflect elements and profiles of Lebanese life, Lebanese history, and Lebanese landscapes unfolding with both precision and symbolism.

Prolegomena

This chapter discusses the various meanings of the term Levant. The term, which was traditionally used in reference to lands around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, often distinguished from strictly or exclusively “Arab” or “Muslim” lands, has come to carry a number of negative stigmas. For instance, being a Levantine was to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. However, the children of the Levant seldom viewed things in such a negative manner. Levantines, particularly the intellectuals considered in this volume, saw themselves as sophisticated, urbane cosmopolitan, iconoclastic mongrels, intimately acquainted with multiple cultures, skillfully wielding multiple languages, and elegantly straddling multiple traditions, identities, and civilizations.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The evocative texts explored in this volume—which remain a drop in the vast ocean of modern Levantine cultural production—reveal charming facets of the Eastern Mediterranean in its natural settings and its spiritual and intellectual dimensions; a Levant at once extolled and condemned by both its offspring and its gods; a Levant brimming with histories and rituals and civilizations that are at the same time exhilarating and exasperating, somber and cheerful, grim and hopeful. It is hoped that this volume has offered a glimpse into another Middle East, largely suppressed but still bustling with life under the ashes of orthodoxy and the remains of shattered nations, pining to be rediscovered, restituted.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This volume explores the lives, thought, and works of some twelve Levantine literati, while assessing the possibility of valorizing a greater degree of pluralism in Middle Eastern public life, even as the modern Middle East as we have come to know it through the twentieth century seems to have “collapsed” in the aftermath of the 2010 events formerly known as the “Arab Spring.” Such pluralism may be found in a number of salient features of Levantine society, among them Levantinism, Mediterraneanism, Pharaonism, Phoenicianism, and Syrianism. Indeed, the authors considered in this volume have dramatically shifted their opinions and orientations over the years, often in meteoric bouts and at breakneck speed.

Syria

Syria's literati have been producing work alluding to the nebulous nature of their modern state, and perhaps foretelling its unmaking; not because multi-ethnic nation-states are by their very nature doomed to failure, but because inherently multi-ethnic states preening themselves to be unitary, monocultural, and monolingual, must sooner or later come to terms with their diversity, and must find ways to valorize and celebrate that diversity. This chapter features authors that attempted to do their part in acknowledging textured identities. These include Nizar Qabbani (1923–98), recognized as the Arabs' leading feminist and advocate of women's rights; and Syro-Lebanese writer Ali Ahmad Said Ispir—known primarily by his nom de plume, Adonis (b. 1930).

Egypt

This chapter analyzes the work of Ali Salem (1936–2015) and Taha Husayn (1889–1973). Husayn, the doyen of modern Arabic literature, and Salem, a leading Arabic-language playwright, are considered two of the main avatars of Pharaonism; the former dominating the early decades of the twentieth century, the latter commanding influence in the early twenty-first. In The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938), Husayn made the case for an Egyptian Egypt and an Egyptian identity separate and distinct from the worlds of Islam and Arab nationalism. Salem's 2004 satire, The Odd Man and the Sea, presents a spacious notion of the Mediterranean as a sea of culture—fluid, inclusive, pantheist by its very nature, and of which Egypt is a vital current.