ABSTRACT
The essay by Najīb al-Ḥaddād that I intend to discuss here was recently described, by Sasson Somekh, as “his famous article”. 1 I must confess that I myself, not a specialist in modern Arabic literature, was not aware of its existence until I saw the article reproduced in facsimile in the Cairene journal al-Fuṣūl of 1984, 2 taken from the journal al-Bayān in which it was originally published in 1897. That the essay did and still does enjoy some fame is evident from the fact that al-Manfalūṭī incorporated it in his anthology al-Mukhtārāt, forty years after its publication, 3 and that Fuṣūl recently, in 1992, reproduced it once more, this time taken from al-Manfalūṭī’s anthology, with a short introduction by Midḥat al-Jayyār. 4 Surprisingly, it seems that he as well as the editors of Fuṣūl were unaware of the fact that the essay had already appeared in the same journal eight years earlier.
