The Arabic Dystopian Novel: the Historical Context and Genre Features

Abstract

This paper tackles the Arabic dystopian novel, suggesting a definition of the dystopian novel, describing historical circumstances of its beginnings, and investigating its features.
The dystopia emerged at a late stage in the history of the Arabic novel, against a particular socio-artistic backdrop. It aims to shed light on the problems of the Arab society and strives to be an enlightening tool to change the reality for the better and rewrite it aesthetically, especially at the historical stage in which the voice of Arab Nationalism and Marxism have risen with an optimistic, progressive vision of literature.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the heroic and revolutionary aesthetic models capable of changing reality prevailed, despite the harsh social, economic and political conditions.
There was also the Arab existential novel, which did not quite exhibit the complete melancholy vision found in the European existential novel, as the circumstances of the Arab society, the level of its modernity, and the alienation of its citizens do not resemble those of European societies. Therefore, we found that the existential hero in the Arab novel is committed to the social or national cause, and is not disconnected from his society, unlike the existential hero in the European novel.
We can say that blows that the Arab socio-cultural structure suffered changed the nature of dealing with art, changing as well the aesthetic structure of the novel, which was no longer interested in raising optimism, all the while continuing to ask the same questions and retaining its enlightening mission.
The novelists were preoccupied with the formulation of new aesthetics that were pessimistic, shocking, harsh, and better able to expose the increasingly corrupt and bleak reality. The dystopia offers an aesthetic representation of reality, which is superior to its corruption and bleakness.
The term dystopia can be defined as the reverse of utopia, as proposed by Plato. Perhaps the first Arabic novel we can classify as dystopian is The Committee, by the Egyptian Sonallah Ibrahim, published in Beirut in 1981. It came after the great economic transformations in Egypt when the country entered an era of stark capitalism, corruption, poverty and slums. The dystopia is generally based on the ugly, as an aesthetic model, which is technically random, defeated, murderer, and other models outside the accepted moral system.
To creatе its counter-reality, the dystopia uses mostly unrealistic artistic means, such as fantastical, strange, futuristic, parallel and inhuman worlds, and science fiction.
The dystopian novel became a phenomenon with the myriad of texts that emerged after the Arab Spring, which did not yield the results the Arab nations had hoped for. It was an expression of frustration and abandonment, and the end of the project of the modern nation-state, which came after the defeat of the project of a great, united nation-state, which began in the twentieth century with the end of the Ottoman occupation of their land.