ABSTRACT
By the mid-1940s a wave of emerging awareness and pressing needs on the national, social and cultural levels was sweeping over Egypt. In 1946 the patriotic movement was violently demanding the evacuation of the British occupation troops. Both Marxist and Muslim fundamentalist groups emerged powerfully on the political scene, and the first clearly attributable socialist-realist trends and experimental, avant-garde modernist trends made their appearance in Egyptian literature. Even Taha Husayn, who gave us his exquisite piece of autobiography in al-Ayyam, dabbled in fiction writing with near-revolutionary intent, in his alMu'adhdhabun fi' l-Ard (1949). A heavy-handed, sometimes sententious story-teller (his lasting contribution to Arab culture lies elsewhere), he was almost swept off his feet by that upsurge of social awareness and unrest. The book was originally banned and was a resounding call for social justice, however utopian and abstract it might have been. Comparable situations prevailed in the other Arab countries of the Mashriq, with the Levant struggling for the end of the French protectorate and Iraq seething against a semi-feudal regime subservient to the British.
