Randa Sadek

Latin writer Gabriel Garcia says: "I lived to tell and I wrote to live." He realized that the pen's fuel is thought and its ink is need. Creativity has no identity; it is the son of man wherever he is. We cannot understand the history of peoples without studying their creators and thinkers. Literature depicts the history of the stage in which it was written. There is a dialectical relationship between literature and politics. The novel can become conclusive evidence of what happens in homelands. The novel is defined as: "A modern fictional literary genre, relying on narration and prose, gathering intertwined elements; most importantly the narrator, events, characters, time and place." It is distinguished from the old epic by its use of prose and portrayal of real society, and from the autobiography by its fictional nature.

Critics and historians point to the emergence of the Arabic novel in the second half of the 19th century as an effect of contact with the European novel. Georg Lukacs sees the novel as linked to the emergence of Western bourgeois societies. The Arabic novel began with prose writing expressing simple subjects in the form of messages and Maqamat. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi's "Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz" is considered the seed for the educational novel. Jurji Zaydan introduced the historical novel genre with works like "The Maiden of Ghassan" and "The Virgin of Quraish".

The artistic novel emerged with Muhammad Husayn Haykal's "Zaynab," published under a pseudonym. Then came Taha Hussein, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Al-Aqqad, and others. Taha Hussein's "The Days" and "The Curlew's Prayer" established him as the dean of Arabic literature. Al-Aqqad wrote "Sara", his only novel. The novel moved to its lden age with Naguib Mahfouz, who brought the Arabic novel to global fame and won the Nobel Prize. He was obsessed with Egypt, making his works part of Egypt's 20th-century national history. Others like Yusuf al-Sibai and Ihsan Abdel Quddus followed. The "third generation" included Ghada al-Samman, Ghassan Kanafani, and Ahlam Mosteghanemi. They showed the difference between the old story and the modern realistic novel that enters the core of life and transmits people's pain and suffering. Today we might face a problem of marketing and readers rather than creativity, but the Arabic mind remains fine and creativity will not stop.