ABSTRACT
The conscious and purposeful use of history by the novelist always causes the critic an obvious uneasiness. When the novelist himself turns into a critic this uneasiness often develops into an apologia. Peter Green, in his Aspects of the Historical Novel has made an inclusive attempt to classify all historical novels into three broad categories, which may for convenience be labelled Propaganda, Education, and Escapism.” As the psychoanalists have found, anxiety arises about something that may happen in the future, therefore our memory operates in a way which mirrors the individual's expectations of the future. The differences between cultures as reflected in their images of past and future cannot be analyzed here. Islam's first pronouncements on the present state of man, delivered by the Prophet Muhammad, were gloomy and pessimistic. There are of course Egyptians for whom the concept of Pharaonism is still a value which most definitely displaces existing Egyptian values though perhaps in a rather indefinable way.
