Sample Solution

Socio-political background during the maturity:
The novel, according to Philippe Sollers, is “la maniere don’t cette societe se parle.” 57 During the last five decades the societies within the Arab world have witnessed changes on a wide scale in both their political and economic way of life. This period has seen a tremendous expansion within the field of the Arabic novel. It is the purpose of this chapter to trace the developments and experiments which have taken place by examining themes and technique used by novelists writing since the outset of the Second World War. It is useful here to give a brief summary of some of the major events and trends in the Arab world against the background of which this outpouring of fiction will be viewed.
To the West the mention of the Arab World has traditionally invoked images of the camel and men wearing the Kaffiyyah and headband. To these stereotypical images has surely been added in recent decades that of the oil well. The discovery of oil in the Arab World has of course had an immense impact on the recent history of the region and has caused a radical shift in the balance of influence within the area itself and of economic power within the world as a whole. Abdul Rahman Munif (b. 1933), the Saudi novelist asserts in an interview that, “as a sphere and topic, oil may help uncover some novelistic aspects in our contemporary life in the Arab world.” 58 It should be noted that Munif’s academic training was a petroleum economist; he may thus be not a little part ipris. Indeed, during the 1980s he has followed up on this somewhat coy opinion by penning the Arab world’s largest novelistic project to date, the quintet of novels, Mudun almilh. In his novel al-Bahth an Walid Masud, (In Search of Walid Masud, 1978), Jabra Ibrahim Jabra provides us with a historical frame of reference on this point from which to view the extent of the changes which have occurred. Ibrahim al-Hajj Nawfal, one of the narrators in the novel, comments on his career as a businessman in Iraq and points out to his audience that he had been writing about economics at a time when “the demand that Iraq have a twenty-percent share in the revenu