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The Lamp of Umm Hashim: And Other Stories (Modern Arabic Writing)

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This book was published in 2004. It collected four short stories by Yahya Hakki (1905-90), a writer, critic and magazine editor who helped to contribute in Egypt to the birth of modern Arabic literature, together with Taha Hussein, Mahmoud Teymour, Tewfik al-Hakim and Naguib Mahfouz.

The collection contained four of Hakki's short stories written around the mid-20th century. They included his longest and best-known one, "The Lamp of Umm Hashim" (1944), called by translator Denys Johnson-Davies the first fictional work in Arabic to deal with the psychological problems faced by students returning home from Europe after finishing their education. Another piece, "A Story from Prison" (1955), reflected Hakki's sympathy for peasants, who were described as under-represented in Egyptian writing and Arabic writing in general.

"Mother of the Destitute" (1947) showed similar compassion for the underdog, this time in working-class Cairo. The fourth piece, "Story in the Form of a Petition" -- which was dated 1955 but which Johnson-Davies said he'd first translated in the 1940s -- was a slight comic tale that was called a rare example of humor in Arabic writing.

For this reader, "Story from Prison" and "Lamp" were the most impressive tales. In the former, written in the third person, a prisoner told a mocking cellmate how he'd ended up in jail. A simple peasant, he'd gotten involved with a gypsy woman and expanded his narrow world, but lost everything from his former existence in the process. "As for now, he was a gypsy concerned only with the day he was in: the whole world was before him and it had no boundaries. If he was able to get something from it, he should grab it. He was happy." Much of the story consisted of dialogue and was well told.

In "Lamp," a nephew narrated the experiences of his uncle, who'd been sent abroad for his education and returned greatly changed. The uncle's mother had "imagined 'foreign parts' as being at the end of a tall stairway that ended at a land covered in snow and inhabited by peoples who possessed the wiles and tricks of the djinn." His father had advised him to be scrupulous about his religion and its duties: "If you once become negligent about them you don't know where that will lead you."

Naturally, after arriving in Europe, he fell in love with a Western woman who taught him new ways and had passed through "that crisis which afflicts many of his young compatriots when they are in Europe. He came through it with a new self, one that was stable and confident; if this new self had cast aside religious belief, it had substituted for it a stronger faith in science." After returning to Egypt, he felt that the nation was like "the forest bride touched by the wand of a wicked witch that had sent her to sleep . . . . When will she wake up?" He noted the toll the years had taken on his parents, yet wondered whether he could readjust to the ways of his native country, which he now looked down on.

His dilemma was symbolized eventually by a struggle with his family over the best way to treat his fiancée's eye disease: with lamp oil from a revered mosque or with scientific methods learned in the West. For this reader, at this point the story copped out by having the scientific method fail before the character came to the realization that knowledge must be guided by faith -- a worthy claim, but how would this have worked in real life? Some 20 years later, Tayeb Salih would describe the dilemma of returnees from the West in more detail, and with a grimmer resolution, in Season of Migration to the North.

The collection was certainly worthwhile in that it collected some writing from an important pioneer in modern Arabic fiction. Various other anthologies have contained other good short stories of Hakki's -- "The Brass Four-Poster," for example, which used a bed as the setting for life and death, and "The Divining Stones," in which a fortune-teller's prediction of imminent trouble came true in an ironic way -- and I wondered why the present slim collection didn't include more than just the four tales.

In the edition of this book that I read, there were problems with continuity: "Lamp" appeared on pp. 23 and 46-88, and "Story from Prison" appeared on pp. 45 and 24-43. Once this was figured out, comprehension improved.

Hakki is a must for those who want to read classical arab literature. I liked his style and the main short story of the book - the Lamp of Umm Hashim - is very good. I strongly recommend it, you won't get bored and you will have the sense of being in the stories yourself.