ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Adīb (1935, A Man of Letters 1994) by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and on Qindīl Umm Hāshim (1945, The Lamp of the Saint 2004) by Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī. It analyses themes linked to the discovery and exploration of modernity via the narrative trope of migration to Europe for study purposes. These novels, traditionally seen as the tale of the “encounter-clash” between East and West, are here re-interpreted as a “crisis plot”; that is, the narration of their protagonists’ inner torment, which a stay in Europe – or a subsequent return to Egypt – “detonates” into a severe crisis expressed in the madness of Adīb, the protagonist of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s novel of the same name, and in Ismā‘īl’s radical change in views and perspectives.
This analysis highlights the occasionally anti-realist and expressionist language corresponding to these crisis narratives, which strives to recreate in readers the same feeling of disorientation the two protagonists experience in the “foreign land” of their interior maskh (“transformation”, “alteration”).
