How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crisis

When opening a work of historical fiction—whether it’s A Tale of Two Cities or the latest paperback—the reader immediately understands the basic parameters of the genre and its assumptions about mankind and reality. The same is true of other forms, including the political essay, which emerged in the 18th century as the basic means of addressing the problems of government and society.

Historical fiction came to the Middle East thanks to Jurji Zaydan, a Beirut-born Christian who settled in Cairo. In 1892, he founded the magazine The Crescent, in which he serialized his literary efforts. Altogether, he wrote 22 historical novels from the material of Islamic history with the devices Walter Scott had invented some 80 years earlier for portraying the Scottish past: private lives caught up in public events, a hero of modest rank rather than a prince, a period depicted with its distinct manners and forms of speech. Zaydan sought to enliven history, making it vivid and compelling to the general reader. He succeeded: generations of Arab readers learned their early Islamic history from his novels. But his work did more than that: it also conveyed a new understanding of history itself.

The premodern Arabic chronicles simply record events: in a given year the Nile rose to such a height, a governor was appointed, a plague came, a noted scholar died. There is no sense that these years fell into particular epoch, and no overarching patterns of progress or development. A reader of Ivanhoe, by contrast, presumes that he is reading about a different time—the Middle Ages—with its own ways of doing things. Zaydan taught Arab readers to think of the past as history, not as mere chronology.