ABSTRACT
Most Arab scholars and western orientalists have emphasized that Arabs did not know theatre before the nineteenth century. They consider a theatrical tradition of foreign origin to have twice reached the eastern Mediterranean: first, the Hellenistic theatre that arrived in the wake of the Greek and Roman conquests of the Near East; and second, the Arab imitation of western theatre that had come into being in the nineteenth century. In contrast, some scholars have recently concluded that there already existed a secular and live theatre in the pre-modern Arab world before the nineteenth century (Moreh, 1992). Notwithstanding this controversy (Snir, 1993b), the pioneering Arab ventures into modern drama clearly occurred in Egypt in the middle of the nineteenth century, although the very first attempt was Syrian: after visiting Europe, the Syrian Christian merchant Mārūn al-Naqqāsh (1817-1855), being impressed particularly by Italian opera, in 1848 wrote and produced at his own house in Beirut a play entitled Riwāyat al-Bakhīl (The Story of the Miser) which drew heavily on Molière’s L’Avare, though it was not a direct translation and involved a great deal of singing (Landau, 1958, pp. 57-58). After Mārūn al-Naqqāsh’s death, his nephew Salīm al-Naqqāsh (d. 1884) moved the theatrical troupe to Alexandria. Since the middle of the nineteenth century the influx of Syrian Christian men of letters into Egypt, where they pioneered free journalism and various cultural activities, was a contributory factor to the lead taken by that country in the Arab renaissance in the nineteenth century. This was due in part to the stimulation provided by Bonaparte’s expedition at the turn of the century, and in part to the drive for modernization embarked upon by the dynasty of ‘Alī (1769-1849). Indeed, from the nineteenth century Egypt became the center of the theatrical movement in the Arab World and produced the first notables in the modern Arab theatre, such as the Egyptian Jew Ya’qūb (Jacob Sanua) (1839-1912) and the Syrian Abū Khalīl al-Qabbānī (1836-1902), who was the first Muslim to rise to prominence in this field. Both these men produced their plays in Egypt.
