ABSTRACT
In the Arab World, the Age of Translation and Adaptation revealed the extent to which it had borne fruit when the novel Zaynab was published in Egypt in 1913. It was not the first original novel to appear in Arabic, but more than any other work of its type it established this genre as a serious and permanent feature of modem Egyptian and indeed of the whole of modem Arabic literature. It was written by Muhammad Husayn Haykal (188&-1956), the son of the 'umda of the village of Kafr Ghannam in the delta, and a totally typical member of that new Egyptian meritocracy which was rising to prominence in the first decade of the twentieth century. Many of them were the products of the institutions of non-Azhari education which had received such a boost to their development during the Khedivate of Isma'il (1863-79): the government schools, dar al-'ulum, and the Egyptian University itself which was founded in 1908. From such places there began to emerge in increasing numbers the equivalent of an Egyptian liberal bourgeoisie: the professional groups of doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, journalists and administrators who were to supersede the power. groups which had held sway in the nineteenth century, namely the court circles and the Turko-Egyptian aristocracy. These were the characters who had been both described and satirized at the tum of the century by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi in his Hadith '/sa b. Hisham, a book which is both the death of an old literary form and the birth of something new. Both the language and the inner structure of this work indicated that the traditional maqama was not to be the literary form which would express the visions of the new bourgeoisie, but at the same time the book makes it quite clear that the future of the country depended on the eventual success of their efforts to emancipate themselves from both British imperialism and the old court aristocracy.
