Criticism and Theory of Arabic SF: Science Fiction in "Arabic"

CHAPTER 4
Criticism and Theory of Arabic SF
As we saw in Chapter 2, Western SF has a robust and extensive body

of critical theory. Arabic SF (ASF), by contrast, has comparatively lit-
tle, mostly as a result of the comparatively recent development of the
genre and its marginal status with respect to canonical literary fiction. By
now, however, enough critical discourse in Arabic on ASF has accreted
to make something of a coherent framework. This chapter will under-
take an examination of Arab perspectives on ASF, in conjunction with
Western perspectives on the genre, in order to construct a tentative
theoretical apparatus for ASF. The close readings of ASF novels in sub-
sequent chapters will test and refine this apparatus. But first, we must
address a linguistic issue that does not meaningfully pertain in English
but is critical in understanding Arabic literature in general and ASF in
particular.
Science Fiction in “Arabic”

Western scholars of SF may be unaware of the issue in Arabic usually
called “diglossia” in English. The Arabic language is really more of a
family of dialects: different Arabic-speaking countries, and often differ-
ent regions within a country, will speak different dialects. These dialects
are significantly further apart than, say, British and American English:
© The Author(s) 2018 77

I. Campbell, Arabic Science Fiction, Studies in Global
Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91433-6_4
78 I. CAMPBELL
uneducated people from distantly separated parts of the Arab world can
have a difficult time understanding one another. A separate dialect exists,
called fuṣḥā in Arabic: the word means “most eloquent.”1 It is the lan-
guage of the Qur’an and other texts of the Middle Ages, when classi-
cal Arabic (CA) was the common language of the Muslim world. Native
speakers of Arabic dialects in modern schools in their home countries
study fuṣḥā in their classes: when educated people from different parts
of the Arab world meet, they quickly sort out just how much fuṣḥā they
have to mix into their colloquial dialects in order to make themselves
mutually intelligible. “Diglossia” is in fact a misleading term, as it’s much
more a spectrum than two mutually exclusive modes of speech. It should
be noted that most contemporary scholars understand that the dialects
are not the daughter languages and fuṣḥā the mother, as in the case of
Latin and the various modern Romance languages; rather, diglossia goes
all the way back to the early days of Islam and even before. Different
tribes of Arabs in the pre-Islamic period spoke different (sub-)dialects.
Fuṣḥā, which lends itself much better to meter and especially rhyme, was
used in the performative oral poetry that gave prestige to poets and thus
to their tribes.
In response to colonialism and the import of the printing press dur-
ing the nineteenth century, various reformers and publishers, many
of them educated in the West, advocated for and ultimately created
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a lightly simplified version of CA
expanded to include vocabulary relating to modern technology and
other borrowings from the West. MSA retains a grammar significantly
more complex than those of the various dialects. Confusingly, both CA
and MSA are referred to as fuṣḥā by native speakers. In modern Arabic,
formal written discourses such as academic papers, journalism, and liter-
ature are for the very most part in fuṣḥā, though film and television are
nearly always in dialect. The dominance of Egypt in film and broadcast
media has enabled most native speakers of other dialects to at least par-
tially understand the Egyptian dialect. Niloofar Haeri writes at length
about the relationship of ordinary Egyptians to fuṣḥā. The govern-
ment educates citizens in MSA and claims it as the national language
for political reasons: continuity with the glorious past and pan-Arab
unity in the modern world (Haeri, pp. 10–11). Most ordinary educated
1 The S and the H are pronounced as separate letters, not a blend.

4 CRITICISM AND THEORY OF ARABIC SF 79
Egyptians, in Haeri’s experience, don’t view MSA as either a modern

language or one in which they’re comfortable: they conflate MSA and
CA not only using the same word for both, but also because the lines
between the two are unclear even to well-educated people. They tend
to view MSA as the language of the Qur’ān, worthy of respect but not
especially well-suited for modern communication, and use dialect when-
ever possible—though there is a general perception that the dialects
are “weak” languages, improper for formal discourse. The grammar of
MSA and especially CA is baroquely complicated, making people reluc-
tant to use either language for fear of losing face by making a mistake.
Haeri gives stories of well-educated people who have suffered academic
or professional reversals by making grammatical mistakes, or who look
back on their days of learning fuṣḥā as an unpleasant experience (Haeri,
pp. 37–46). The effect of this use of fuṣḥā for literature in general is to
render modern literature the nearly exclusive province of a small class of
highly educated people. The average educated Arab can and does read
the newspaper in fuṣḥā, but often shies away from long literary texts,
especially given the habit of many of the even smaller class of authors
of using the novel as an opportunity to demonstrate the very eloquence
denoted by the word fuṣḥā. Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, for exam-
ple, is particularly difficult to read in Arabic, due in part to his habit of
using abstruse vocabulary.
The effect of diglossia on SF in particular is to render even the most
futuristic fiction always already archaic. Readers unfamiliar with diglossia
in Arabic are invited to consider, for example, the prologue to Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, here in the original Middle English:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendered is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
So priketh hem nature in hir corages,
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,
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To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;

And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
For an educated native speaker of English, comfortable with literature

and synonyms, this isn’t especially difficult to read; a poorly educated
person, however, would likely find this frustrating and be disinclined to
continue reading. Now imagine that all formal discourse were in Middle
English, but that students were compelled to learn this dialect in school,
so while people would see it every time they open a newspaper or news
website, it’s still not their natural mode of speech. Now imagine a novel
about travel to other star systems, or artificial intelligence, or advanced
technology, written in this archaic-sounding language. This use of fuṣḥā
alienates the reader of ASF in a manner difficult for those who do not
speak (or read) Arabic to fully comprehend. As I undertake the con-
struction of a theoretical apparatus through which to examine ASF, the
tension between possible futures and archaic language will inform my
analysis.
The advent of first text messaging, then the Internet, has done a great
deal to render the various colloquial dialects into written languages,
often haphazardly and with comparatively little standardization in the
initial periods. It’s now quite possible to read graphic novels and even
popular literature in colloquial Arabic, and it’s commonplace to see
billboards and other forms of advertisement in dialect. Serious litera-
ture, however, remains in fuṣḥā, though sometimes dialogue is at least
partially rendered in colloquial Arabic. For example, ’Aḥmad Sa‘dāwi’s
Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), which won the 2014 International
Prize for Arabic Fiction—and was the first SF novel to win what is often
called the Arab Booker Prize—uses fuṣḥā for narration, but all of its dia-
logue is in the dialect of central Iraq. The decision for a writer of ASF
whether and when to use fuṣḥā is fraught with consequences: their nar-
ration, and especially their dialogue will sound more authentic in col-
loquial Arabic, but they risk losing the possibility of an international
audience. Somewhat more subtly, they will lose the linkage to the history
of Arabic literature, including the texts that critics have identified as pre-
cursors of ASF. Nearly all ASF novels of the formative period use fuṣḥā
exclusively, even when transcribing dialogue, which is where fuṣḥā seems

most artificial.2
Western Criticism of Arabic SF

Only in 2000 does the first English language examination of ASF appear,
in which Reuven Snir states that ASF has been hitherto largely ignored
by both Arabic and Western critics because it does not, in general, fit
into the canonically “serious” genres of literature. Snir cites critic Pierre
Cachia, who argues that Arab intellectual élites have a self-conscious pro-
gram of Westernization and modernization, with large doses of nation-
alism and more recently socialism; they choose as canonically “serious”
literature only those genres (poetry and high-culture literary fiction)
that do not cast doubt upon these ideals (Cachia, pp. 177–178). Snir
argues that the concern of élite intellectuals for maintaining this program
of modernization creates a division of the genre into works published
purely for entertainment or for financial gain and those intended as seri-
ous social criticism, with a clear critical bias toward the latter.
Ada Barbaro examines general works on modern Arabic literature and
finds a dearth of consideration of SF (Barbaro, p. 71). She also provides
other reasons for the slow acceptance of SF by critics. One is the notion
of ’adab, which from MSA is usually translated as “literature,” but which
has a host of other connotations clear to native speakers but usually lost
in translation. The word implies a notion of erudition or etiquette and
is sometimes translated as “belles-lettres”: works of ’adab usually “are
based on encyclopaedic and didactic purposes, although their approach
is non-technical” (Ashtiany, p. 25). This didacticism extends, for Barbaro
and others, to the social, intellectual and moral levels. Since popular
SF is much more intended to entertain than to enlighten, it cannot fall
under this rubric and isn’t considered ’adab, and therefore, doesn’t gain
the attention of critics of “serious” literature. Snir shows how one of
the methods by which SF gradually gained this attention was through
attracting notice as children’s literature. Maḥmūd Muḥammad ’Aḥmad
2 There are certain exceptions: most Egyptian SF novels use the colloquial verb rāḥa for
“to go” in place of its formal equivalent dhahaba. More than 99% of the text of these nov-
els, however, is in fuṣḥā.
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Rifā‘i’s story Safīnat al-Faḍā’ al-Ghāmiḍa [“The Mysterious Spaceship,”

1990] was awarded a prize for children’s literature by the Egyptian gov-
ernment. Its status as children’s literature enabled it to be seen as didac-
tic, in that it informed children about aspects of the cosmos, and thus
allowed critics to see it as something closer to ’adab than mere popular
literature (Snir, pp. 272–273).
Time and Space in ASF

Barbaro’s monograph on ASF includes many chapters of close readings
of novels through her own critical framework, which centers on time and
space:
The transposition of the chronotope, conceived by Bakhtin, the conflu-

ence across spatial and temporal coordinates, typical of any narrative acts,
inside of an SF text… upset the reader’s normal reference points. Still,
a sort of narrative pact is inscribed between reader and writer, probably
signed thanks to whatever “scientific” development more or less likely that
is linked to SF: from the moment from which we are ready to read these
works, and therefore willing to allow ourselves to be led into unexplored
territory, across improbable temporal segments, finding in these writings
the possibility, finally, to challenge the limits of Time and Space. (Barbaro,
pp. 167–168)3
She argues that there are two primary means by which ASF addresses
time: the quest for immortality and the conquest of the future. In
structuring her argument, she makes use of the multiple Arabic words
that denote “time,” as well as a strand of Islamic philosophy; this last
is embodied in the works of Pakistani theologian Muḥammad Iqbāl.
Barbaro reads Alessandro Bausini’s critique of Iqbāl as arguing that Iqbāl’s
thought seems to argue that any attempt to surpass the limits of serial
time is rendered blasphemous because of a general conflation of time and
the divine (Barbaro, p. 146). Bausani himself states the problem as:
…if the time vibration which is within the very heart of Eternity results in
the creative production of ever new worlds and spiritual realities reaching
3 Bakhtin’s work on chronotopes is very popular among Arab critics of modern Arabic
literature.
out for the future, how can this agree with the spiritual fixity of a religion
that was revealed definitely once and for all? (Bausani, p. 166)
Gerhard Böwering, another of Barbaro’s sources, argues that time in

Islam in general, not just in Iqbāl’s writings, manifests in the Sufi con-
cept of a parabola stretching from the day of creation to that of final
judgment, in the vast contrast between an ephemeral human life and the
eternity of god, and in the strictly regulated hours and lunar months of
the Islamic calendar (Böwering, pp. 60–64). For Barbaro, Islam’s fixity
upon a certain concept of time faces a particular challenge from SF, par-
tially because SF’s concepts of time and narrative are “profoundly rooted
in [SF] production in English”:
The Arabic writer poses a challenge to Time that branches off in two direc-
tions: a projection toward the future and another addressed to the final
result of the battle against static Time; that is, the victory over death and
the achievement of eternal life. (Barbaro, p. 147)
She proceeds to organize a table of ASF novels and to demonstrate that

most of them take place in specific future time periods; this specificity
is the root of the challenge posed by ASF. Her argument isn’t clearly
stated, but we can infer from her examples that the trope of extrapolat-
ing present technological events into the future, so common in Western
SF, presents a double challenge to the dominant paradigm in Arabic. In
the first sense, this trope comes from outside Arabic culture and doesn’t
always fit well with the general historical experience in the Arab world
of long, slow decline leading to stagnation, then colonization. But the
greater challenge is the second one: Barbaro’s reading of time in Islam
implies a notion of the future as already written, or at any rate in the
hands of the divine, thus placing cognitive extrapolation in much more
direct conflict with Arabic culture than it does in the West, where it arose
in a time period characterized by rapid technological expansion and
(as yet) unproblematic notions of “progress.” This is for Barbaro espe-
cially true in works of ASF addressing immortality, because it infringes
rather more directly on the divine prerogative: “The pursuit of eternal
life, which SF protagonists tend [to pursue], may seem bold, if not blas-
phemous, from certain [Qur’ānic] verses: to challenge Time, in this case,
could mean to launch a provocation right at God” (Barbaro, p. 152).
Her argument is based on the much more explicit formulation of bodily
84 I. CAMPBELL
resurrection in the Islamic traditions than in Christianity. She argues that

as a means of circumventing what could be seen as a direct challenge,
ASF writers reframe the transcendence of time:
Rather, their mission becomes a struggle against Time, the expression of a

discomfort of the modern [hu]man, a feverish desire for invincibility inspired
by scientific progress, or perpetual fear of the individual before the transience
of earthly life and its perpetual becoming. Eternal life, with its positive and
negative aspects, is sometimes only a promise, others a frantic race, still oth-
ers effectively reached by means of space in Arabic SF. (Barbaro, p. 153)
Regrettably, she doesn’t go into much detail on the last clause in her
statement and provides no meaningful examples of how a tempo-
ral struggle becomes a spatial one. She continues with an analysis of
Muḥammad ‘Azīz Laḥbābi’s ’Iksīr al-Ḥayāt [“The Elixir of Life,” 1974] a
text I’ve addressed in previous work as a cognitive estrangement of class
inequality in Morocco: the invention of an immortality elixir exacerbates
this inequality (Campbell 2015, pp. 49–50). Barbaro points out that the
protagonist’s father rejects the elixir because it only benefits the rich; but
if we read more closely the manner in which he rejects it, we can see still
more clearly the challenge she argues ASF poses:
I’d like to die, like my fathers and grandfathers died, and to be buried in a
grave, and for people to forget me once the earth covers me. “This guy’s
gone; he’ll get what he earned”… God didn’t intend for Muslims to live
forever. (Laḥbābi, pp. 20–22)
While Barbaro’s argument about time does apply generally to ASF, it

begins to verge on Orientalism. There are indeed cultural differences
that make those aspects of SF, an imported discourse, that deal with time
more problematic in Arab societies than they would be in the West. But
at the same time, this argument presupposes that effectively all Arab read-
ers will be locked in this traditional, and not incidentally timeless, mind-
set. Her argument is more solid in the earliest periods of ASF: as mass
media, popular literature, Western film, etc. place SF tropes and mindsets
more firmly in the consciousness of Arabic readers, the extent to which
extrapolation of the future, or time travel, or the quest for immortality,
present a paradigmatic challenge to Arabic culture(s) diminishes.
With respect to space, Barbaro divides ASF production into celestial
and terrestrial spaces: “…beyond both, in the non-places located on this
planet as on others, on imaginary or real planets, utopia, the non-place

par excellence, finds its happy ambience, often convergent with the neg-
ative vision of the future that is dystopia” (Barbaro, p. 158). She again
assembles a table of works of ASF, differentiating between those where
space comes to humankind and those where humans go to space. In
either case, the differences between aliens and humans serve as a means
of social commentary in a manner that would be evident to scholars of
Western SF well-read in the particulars of cognitive estrangement. For
example, Yūsuf al-Sibā‘i’s Lasta Waḥdaka [“You Are Not Alone,” 1976]
presents us with a landing on a Mars inhabited by sentient trees, about
which she argues:
al-Sibā‘i exploits this original interpretation of Martian civilization in order

to illuminate the egoism and and presumption of humans: this last, in fact,
will try to transform the trees into human beings, in an arrogant belief
in superiority. From a successful experiment, however, the first problems
begin to arise, because they trigger previously unknown feelings of hostility
and rivalry capable of undermining the social order. (Barbaro, p. 162)
She argues that many works of ASF center on the city, whether on Earth
or another world. The organization of the city serves as a framework
for utopias that estrange human nature or society. This presents less of
a challenge to Arabic societies than do temporal narratives, not only
because these narratives do not infringe upon religious prerogatives, but
also because of the link between these narratives and the well-established
tradition of narratives of the ideal city within Arabic literature.
Barbaro’s insights and framework are useful and valuable, and I will
continue to explore them and to enable them to inform our examination
of ASF texts in the following chapters. At the same time, however, I will
develop more complex and multifaceted apparatus through which we can
analyze these texts. I will begin by considering what Arab critics of ASF
have had to say about it in Arabic; from this, I will extrapolate a more
general framework.
Arabic Criticism of ASF

Barbaro argues that as with Western SF, there was a gap of a couple of
decades between authors’ publishing works of ASF and critics’ recogniz-
ing these works as legitimate literature. In the case of ASF, while authors
86 I. CAMPBELL
began to publish in the 1960s, critics in general did not begin to address
SF until the 1990s, with two significant exceptions. ‘Iṣām Bahā writes
in 1982 about SF that it’s popular literature, not serious: it “stems from
firm or imaginary scientific truths in order to reveal an unknown aspect
of existence, or to describe human life in the near or far future” (Bahā,
p. 57).4 He posits SF as a Western, imported genre that seeks to call
into question the satisfaction generated by material progress that does
not address human values. In his formulation, the more society becomes
mechanized and planned, the more these human values are likely to fade;
SF registers the human condition and makes the case for human values in
the face of these developments. He argues that SF can:
…be an expression of humankind’s place with respect to the stunning

scientific development of the modern age. It first expressed the spirit of
adventure, daring and the aspiration for hope for the future and for the
new worlds whose horizons humankind is exploring. Then, it stopped at
its hesitation between the absolute desire for liberation and its instinc-
tive fear of loss in the infinite. Then, it also stopped for a long time and
profoundly at the human dilemma [ma’ziq] between science’s promise of
absolute material happiness and the alienation of individual personal free-
dom and its dislocation of human and spiritual values. (Bahā, p. 59)
This isn’t precisely cognitive estrangement—though Bahā is quick

to point out that much SF in both the Western and Arabic traditions
is more fanciful than cognitive—but it does verge upon it to a certain
extent. The “axial goal” of SF for Bahā is nubū’a, “divination,” or some-
thing closer to “prophecy,” in the religious sense: words from its root
n-b-’ sound very like words from n-b-w, the root for al-nabī, the word
for “prophet” used to describe the line of prophets in the Islamic tra-
dition ending with Muḥammad. He’s using the word here to denote
“predicting the future,” from the moon landing5 to “the absence of val-
ues in the great industrial, scientifically advanced societies.” This may
appear to be a naïve view on the consequences of technological devel-
opment, given that the history of Western SF is replete with examples
4 He is writing in an issue of Fuṣūl dedicated to the art of storytelling within the novel.
5 His initial example is Johannes Kepler’s Somnium [“The Dream,” 1634], which
describes a voyage to the moon and clearly falls within the precursor texts for some Western
definitions of SF.
of technologically advanced societies with a great concern for values, or

with different values; most of these are estrangement s of the confronta-
tion between contemporary values and technological development. The
ma’ziq, more literally a “strait” or narrow pass (Cowan, p. 17), might
seem to be a false dichotomy: material progress and personal freedom
may not seem to necessarily eliminate or dislocate values.
Taking into account the religious dimension of al-nubū’a, his point
becomes more defensible. Since technological development in Arabic
societies has for centuries now come from without rather than within,
it is fundamentally disruptive to the traditional values of Arabic socie-
ties in a manner different from its impact on Western societies, not only
because development was created and sustained by Western values, but
also and more importantly, because Westernized modernity provides
a compelling alternative to a traditional society that was and is held up
as the end state of divine development. It must be kept in mind that in
the very diverse sects of Islam,6 Muḥammad is consistently framed as
the last of the prophets. He directly ruled the city now called Madīna
from 622 to 630 CE, laying down a code of laws and behavior found in
both the Qur’ān and the Ḥadīth; this community has been viewed as the
model society ever since. In the postcolonial period,7 tension has mani-
fested between this model community and the real-world alternative(s)
provided by technological and social development. Westerners don’t
have the example of the divinely inspired model community in the past;
to understand the role of SF in Arabic literature and society, this tension
needs to be kept in mind. To Bahā, SF engages in nubū’a, which not
only has a mystical dimension but is also pronounced almost exactly like
nubūwa, divine prophethood—and the time for this sort of prophecy is
long in the past.
Madḥat al-Jiyār discusses SF in the context of modernity in a 1984
article on the subject. Specifically, Jiyār discusses literary modernity,
defined in the article as:
6 It should be noted that “Arabic” and “Islamic” are not synonymous. About 20% of
Arabs are not Muslim, and only about 20% of Muslims are Arab. Bahā, however, is clearly
arguing from the majority-Muslim Arab perspective, as are most literary critics writing in
Arabic.
7 By which I mean the period that began with colonization: in Arabic literature and
history, this is generally held to begin with Napoleon’s landing in Egypt with troops and
scholars at the very end of the eighteenth century.
88 I. CAMPBELL
based on an awareness of the needs of aesthetic reality, and working on

two intertwined levels: the relative, linked to current reality, and the abso-
lute, that abridges the elements and characteristics of the literary genre, in
order to reflect its absolute essence… [literary] modernity, at its most pro-
found, is an awareness of the literariness of literature. (Jiyār, p. 180)8
Each age, for Jiyār, produces its own literary modernity. In the case of
the current age, dominated by large-scale changes wrought by techno-
logical development, literature about these developments becomes that
mode. The role of the mubdi‘, the innovator or creator, is to create or
renew the form that best suits its time in order to create a literary expe-
rience. Truly modern literature needs to create an experience, through
form and content, and also to generate a new frame of mind; moreo-
ver, it contains the foundation,’irhāṣ, of the future of the literary genre,
“whether through a human problematic or a social one” (Jiyār, p. 181).9
Jiyār uses as his source for this formulation of literary modernity in the
last decades of the twentieth century Alain Robbe-Grillet, whom he
cites in translation: the nouveau roman “tries to collect all the internal
descriptions of things, and their internal spirit; in this way, the word is a
trap the writer creates to seize existence, and to then deliver it to society”
(Jiyār, p. 181).
This is as close as Jiyār comes to Suvin’s theory of cognitive estrange-
ment, but while the previous paragraphs emphasize the role of the
cognitive, this citation leaves out anything approaching the critical func-
tion of estrangement. The function of SF for him is to help us under-
stand new scientific developments, or to show up our weakness in face
of these developments. Its main goal is to engage in tanabbu’, a word
whose primary meaning is “prediction,” but which has multiple glosses,
including “divination,” but also “prophecy”: it is cognate to Bahā’s
nubū’a and comes from the same n-b-’ root. Tanabbu’ generally means
something closer to “news-gathering,” but it has the implication of
divination—just as mubdi‘ for “innovator” also has a touch of “heretic.”10
8 He is writing in an issue of Fuṣūl dedicated to the question of literary modernity.

9 The word ’irhāṣ can mean “foundation” or “harbinger”; the context provides little clue
as to which one Jiyār intends.
10 The word for “innovation”, bid‘a, also means “heresy”. The link between the two
is that the normal bounds have been exceeded; the link between “news-gathering” and
“prophecy” is more evident (see Cowan, pp. 56–57 and 1100–1105).
The rest of Jiyār’s argument about SF is that it fits the definition of lit-
erary modernity, because in helping us to understand scientific develop-
ment, it “reads” these developments and from them creates new worlds:
it is thereby a new literary form not because of its formal qualities but
rather this function of world creation as a means of understanding. He
continues with an extended reading of Ṣabrī Mūsā’s al-Rajul min Ḥaql
al-Sabinākh [“The Gentleman from the Spinach Field,” 1987], in which
he does touch upon something close to cognitive estrangement,11 but
coloring his argument and his reading is a religious or mystical viewpoint,
one in which SF’s ability to deliver us news from a future touches upon
the sphere of the prophets, and in which creating a literary work risks
approbation.
Not all Arab critics or criticism of SF are focused on its potentially
blasphemous aspects: there are plenty of Arabs, especially in literature
and academia, for whom modernity, and technological and social devel-
opment are desirable outcomes held back by traditional values. Bahā
himself says that SF “can express the contradictory feelings of humanity
in the fact of its awesome productions” (Bahā, p. 59), which is a much
more neutral formulation of the genre. This statement is used in sup-
port of his argument that while ASF is popular literature, often with
poor characterization because those characters are being used to frame
an argument or statement about the role of technology in society, serious
literary critics ought to refrain from dismissing it. Nevertheless, the ten-
sion between material happiness brought about by technology and tradi-
tional values exists in the background of SF and SF criticism in Arabic to
an extent that it simply doesn’t in the West; this needs to be accounted
for in any theoretical framework for understanding ASF. As an exam-
ple, a work of Western SF depicting a society where people change sex
due to their monthly cycle, or who cheerfully change sex whenever the
fancy takes them, can estrange traditional notions of gender and create
tension by calling into question the link between sex and gender in the
first case and sex and genetics in the second. But that same tension has
an additional, faint, hint of transgression against divine authority when
it manifests in ASF, because Arabic societies both have a shorter history
of separating the divine from the secular and because sex and gender
roles are clearly laid out in scripture and the long-ago model community
11 We will examine Mūsā’s novel in Chapter 7.

90 I. CAMPBELL
in Madīna.12 Most Western stereotypes about women’s roles in Arabic

societies are incorrect, problematic or highly exaggerated, but at a gen-
eral background level, the tension generated by estranging gender roles is
much more directly confrontational in ASF than its Western counterpart.
Hereditary Memory and Flattened Characters

Muḥammad Najīb al-Talāwi published the first book-length study of ASF
in 1990. His central argument is that SF is indeed a valid literary genre
in Arabic, but that it’s an immature one, both because of the lack of sci-
entific and technological progress created by Arabs in the twentieth cen-
tury and because writers have so far failed to create innovations in the
form or narrative of their works consonant with the novel technological
or speculative content of these works. SF, for Talāwi, is a means of show-
ing through fiction a scientific development foremost, and secondarily,
the potential effect of this development on humankind. The estrange-
ment function of SF, wherein the development is used as a distorted mir-
ror through which to view humankind, is notably absent from Talāwi’s
analysis: the book’s bibliography contains many references to compendia
of SF stories, but none to works of SF theory. He’s much more con-
cerned with the development of artistic form.
Nevertheless, the monograph contains a number of insights that will
prove useful. Foremost among these is Talawi’s contention that Arab
literature is suffused with al-dhākira al-warāthiya, literally “hereditary
memory,” but used here to denote an obsession with the glorious past
of Arabic societies. The locus of progress in Arab societies lies in the past,
not the future. Taking Muṣṭafā Maḥmūd’s al-‘Ankabūt [“The Spider,”
1965] as his example, Talāwi writes:
It is the Arab mentality [‘aqliya, from “reason” or “intellect”], that still

glorifies the past, and still preserves what’s left of stopping by [to ponder]
the ruins, as a sincere attempt to reconcile its existence with this age where
things change quickly around it. If we confront this clinging to the past
12 For an examination of gender roles and misogyny and their codification in jurispru-
dence at the expense of the spirit of the original community, Fatima Mernissi’s 1991 The
Veil and the Male Elite (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley) is an indispensable resource, espe-
cially given her use of traditional Islamic scholarship to bolster her critique.
with what happens in Western13 stories, we find that the authors made
their protagonists positive [murḍiya], so the psychological focus on arriv-
ing at al-dhākira al-warāthiya wasn’t a genuine desire—as we see in The
Spider—but rather a means to treat a positive state, because the Western
desire to hold onto the past is much lower than that of seeking the future.
The opposite is true from the Arab perspective. (Talāwi, p. 13)
Talawi frames this glorification as the past not as a sentimental practice,

but rather a rational mindset: there are many synonyms in Arabic for
“mind” or “mentality,” but choosing al-‘aqliya makes it clear that this
practice is one that comes about through conscious thought (Cowan,
pp. 737–738).14 Pondering the ruins or leftovers, usually of an abandoned
campsite, is one of the most durable tropes in classical Arabic poetry: it
denotes the passage of time, lost love or the general decline of virtue or
prosperity (Irwin 2001, pp. 3–12). In Talāwi’s case, it also refers to the
long, slow decline and stagnation of scientific progress that character-
izes the Arab world well into the twentieth century: he’s connecting SF
to a traditional mentality as well as a traditional form in Arabic literature.
Western protagonists are murḍiya, which I’ve glossed here as “positive”
but has the connotation of “generating satisfaction or approval” (Cowan,
pp. 398–399). In light of the argument Talāwi is engaged in immediately
preceding this citation, what he means by murḍiya is that these protag-
onists and the state they find themselves in are devoid of inner conflicts:
they’re focused on the adventure in the story instead of their conflict with
their own society.
‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Ibrāhīm, writing in the introduction to Talāwi’s mon-
ograph, helps to clarify what Talāwi means here. He argues that in “pure
stories, specifically traditional stories,” by which he means literary fic-
tion, the “characters shape reality in their features.” The inner conflicts
of these characters are intended by the author, whom he calls “the art-
ist,” to reflect the larger societal conflicts that literary fiction is intended
to illuminate. Characters in SF, by contrast have been “flattened”
[musaṭṭaḥ],15 not, he assures us, because SF is non-serious literature, but
13 Hesays “European”.
14 SeeCampbell 2017, pp. 46–47, for a longer discussion of the implications of using
words derived from this root.
15 This could also be glossed as “rendered superficial” (Cowan, p. 477).
92 I. CAMPBELL
rather because the purpose of SF is not to reveal inner conflicts. Instead,

the characters have been flattened because they are “merely a means to
expose the scientific adventure” (Talāwi, p. 8). Talāwi himself says of the
subject:
The reader in most SF stories will observe that the characters of the story
or novel are flattened, because they’re merely human types with unclear
characteristics and not distinctive. ’Aḥmad is ‘Alī; they’re A or B; [the
authors] have erased the inner characteristics. The psychological anatomy
of the characters has been negated, and their outer description reduced;
they’ve become merely human types, under the pressure of scientific devel-
opment and technological advancement that has transformed humankind
into mechanism and objectification. (Talāwi, p. 8)
This view almost contradicts what Ibrāhīm argues, yet it uses the same
vocabulary. For Ibrāhīm, characters are flattened so as not to get in the
way of the adventure that scientific development generates; for Talāwi,
the flattening is a social or psychological consequence of that develop-
ment. It’s undeniable that Western SF, especially in its early iterations,
is full of flattened characters who might as well be named A and B and
whose sole purpose is to advance the plot. This statement is used in sup-
port of his argument that while ASF is popular literature, often with poor
characterization because those characters are being used to frame an
argument or statement about the role of technology in society, serious
literary critics ought to refrain from dismissing it.
Yet Ibrāhīm’s argument has an additional layer to it with which critics
of Western SF may be unfamiliar. When he compares characters in ASF
to those in Arabic literary fiction, he implies that characters in the lat-
ter group have psychological depth and internal conflicts; however, for
Western readers of Arabic literary fiction, one of the most salient features
of the discourse is the flatness of the characters. There are plenty of coun-
terexamples, but in a very broadly general sense, modern Arabic literary
fiction is concerned with characters that shape reality in their features and
in doing so illuminate larger societal conflicts. Imagine a field with psy-
chologically realistic individual humans at one pole and flat human types
at the other: the median work of Arabic literary fiction is rather closer to
the second pole than is the median work of Western literary fiction.
Again in a very broad general sense, Arabic literary fiction is more
likely to work from the allegorical mode than is its Western counterpart.
This is often a consequence of the lack of legal guarantees of freedom

of expression in these societies, whereas a Western writer wishing to cri-
tique the system or its leaders can simply publish an essay, Arab writers
can and often have ended up in prison or worse for making a direct or
even implied critique of their societies or leaders. Most recently, Egyptian
writer ’Aḥmad Nāji, whose 2014 graphic novel Istikhdām al-Ḥayāt [“The
Use of Life”], which passed through censorship before publication, was
convicted and imprisoned for a public morals offence when a reader
complained about the novel’s sexual content, which is extremely tame
by Western standards.16 In order to cloak a critique in a layer of plau-
sible deniability sufficient to deter the censors of despotic or paranoid
regimes, writers tell a story that astute readers accustomed to life under
censorship can read in parallel and understand the allegory the story
makes to their own society. Because of this parallel reading, the charac-
ters often come off as “flattened,” because they’re intended not so much
to represent psychologically realistic individual humans as demographic
groups within the society being critiqued. The greater extent of the
trend toward allegory and estrangement within Arabic fiction in general
must be taken into account in any apparatus through which to ASF is
examined.
If Talāwi’s argument and Ibrāhīm’s summary thereof are correct, we
may expect to find in ASF especially flattened characters, both because
Arabic fiction already tends to flatten characters and because flatten-
ing either allows a focus on the adventure, in Ibrāhīm’s formation, or
because flattening is a necessary consequence of scientific and technolog-
ical development, as Talāwi argues. It is Talāwi’s contention that leads
to further consequences for the examination of ASF. To Western critics,
the contention may seem counterintuitive or at least questionable: there
are as many examples in Western SF of scientific development leading to
greater progress in, or freer expression of, human values as there are of
the inverse. Yet there’s a logic behind the contention that bears exami-
nation. Many works of Arabic culture place the loci of both human val-
ues and scientific development in the past. Scientific development almost
inevitably brings with it a conflict with the traditional values seen as par-
adigmatic. This is the source of what Talāwi argues is flattening caused
16 Nāji was a vocal critic of the Egyptian government; this was likely the real cause of his
imprisonment. See the PEN Foundation’s justification for giving him an award: https://
pen.org/advocacy-case/ahmed-naji/.
94 I. CAMPBELL
by science: it’s not that science doesn’t allow for greater expression of
humanity so much as that it provides a compelling alternative model to
these traditional values. We can take the conflict between the traditional
roles of the model community and the possibilities granted by technol-
ogy, and add to these the larger epistemological conflict between divine
revelation as the source of social policy and community relations as well
as the potential of the scientific method and scientific instruments to call
into question that divine revelation.
Moreover, because technological progress in the twentieth cen-
tury comes from outside Arab society and is thus inherently destabiliz-
ing, Arab SF writers, for Talāwi, cope with this by engaging in one or
both of two strategies. The first is to link scientific development back
to the sources examined in the previous chapter: ‘ajā’ib literature, the
1001 Nights, etc. For Talāwi, this is problematic, because most of those
sources are unscientific fantasy: using them as direct precursors within
their own works rather than as a general backdrop transforms SF into
fantasy and serves to render science less destabilizing to Arabic societies,
thereby blunting its power. The second strategy is to ensure that the
novum is negated by the end of the work whatever scientific or technical
innovation the work may contain that has an effect on human values will
somehow vanish, enabling the traditional order to be restored. In Nihād
Sharīf’s The Conqueror of Time [1972], the novum is cryogenics, and
the story ends with an explosion burying the mad scientist’s lab under
a mountainside, leaving its narrator with a compelling story but no evi-
dence to back it up. In Maḥmūd’s The Spider, the novum is a serum that
enables people to relive past lives, and the story ends with the scientist
and narrator dead, the serum used up and its recipe lost. In Moroccan
novelist ’Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Salām al-Baqqāli’s al-Ṭufān al-‘Azraq [“The
Blue Flood,” 1976], the novum is artificial intelligence, and the story
ends with the AI destroyed and the narrator in an insane asylum, again
with a compelling story but no evidence to back it up.
This very common trope in early ASF is, for Ibrāhīm, analogous to
developments at the beginning of the twentieth century when the Arabic
novel as a work of literary fiction began to develop. He points out the
extent to which these early novels portrayed protagonists educated in
the West who return to their native countries and challenge traditional
social mores based around religion—Talāwi’s “human values,” based to a
large extent on religion—but who give up, or disappear, or return to the
West by the end of the novel. The protagonist of Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s Mawsim
al-Hijra ’ilā al-Shamāl [1966, “Season of Migration to the North,”
1969], for example, finds the conflict between his Western liberal educa-
tion and the Sudanese culture to which he returns so irreconcilable that
he throws himself into the Nile at the end of the book, letting the waters
take him where they might. In ASF, the conflict is between Western
science and traditional Arabic culture based on religion, with its model
community in the past. Both Talāwi and Ibrāhīm describe this removal
of the novum and restoration of traditional values as ‘amaliyat al-tarqī‘,
a “patching operation,” where tarqī‘ is the word used to denote sewing
a patch on a garment (Cowan, pp. 410–411). The metaphor is evident:
science has rent the fabric—the text, if you will—of society, so the hole
must be patched in order to retain the appearance of continuity or lest
things tear even further. Tarqī‘ applies to many of the ASF novels we
will examine here, especially in the earlier works. How authors choose
to “patch” their worlds will lead us to insights about the status of sci-
ence and technology, and the liberal social values often believed to be
associated with science and technology, in the environment of the novel’s
publication.
While an Arab critic such as Talāwi is free to make a statement like
“the Arab mentality glorifies the past,” every effort must be made to
avoid Orientalism in the construction of a theoretical apparatus through
which to examine ASF. That is, we must avoid the tendency to set up
Western SF, or Western literature or culture, as having certain charac-
teristics and ASF, or Arabic literature or culture, as having the diamet-
ric opposites. If I, as a Western critic of ASF, were to make a statement
like “the Arab mentality glorifies the past,” it would generate at least
two profoundly problematic consequences. First, it tends to subsume all
Arabs under this description: anyone who locates progress in the future
can either be dismissed as unrepresentative or claimed to be subject to
deconstruction: they are in fact using that future as a means to glorify
the past. It’s a straitjacket: even a phrase such as “the Arab mentality” is
fraught with potential implications, first among which is to imply that all
Arab writers, critics and ordinary citizens possess the same mentality—
which would be problematic even if the qualities ascribed to that men-
tality were uniformly positive, which they clearly are not here. Secondly,
to form a binary opposition between Arabs and the West is to argue
implicitly that since all Arabs glorify the past, Westerners, by contrast, all
96 I. CAMPBELL
look to the future. This is both objectively untrue,17 and also permits
Westerners to posit themselves as superior, in such a way as to provide a
certain insulation from direct criticism.
Edward Said writes about how nineteenth-century Europeans looked
at the Arab world as decadent, or poetic, or steeped in religion; this had
the twin effects of negating those aspects of the Arab world that didn’t
fit those descriptors, and also, and more importantly, showed by contrast
Europe as progressive, rational and scientific (Said, pp. 22–24). Arabic
critics of SF such as Talāwi make some of these judgments about their
own culture and literature, and while these judgments can serve as valu-
able tools in constructing our theoretical apparatus, care must be taken
in the use of these tools. To say that Arabic literature has flattened char-
acters and uses allegory makes it sound as if Western literature (always)
has psychologically realistic characters and works more directly. We can,
however, make a carefully qualified statement that in general, Arabic lit-
erature tends more toward allegory and flattened characters than its
Western counterpart. To say that Western SF locates scientific progress
in the future and ASF in the past, requires the clarification that both dis-
courses are very broad and diverse: while the median work in each dis-
course occupies a separate—sometimes widely separate—locus in a given
field, the discourses as a whole overlap significantly and in no way are
polar opposites. It is evident that nearly all scientific and technological
progress in the Arab world over the last several centuries has come from
without; nevertheless, Arabs have taken those technologies and in many
ways made them their own. Talāwi published his monograph a genera-
tion ago: since then, Arabs have taken the Western technologies of text
messaging and the Internet and used them to transform their colloquial
tongues into written languages capable of supporting literature.18 There
are plenty of Arabs whose mentality is modern and who want to discard
most of the past and look toward the future, and plenty of Westerners
who want to repeal the twentieth century. There are plenty of secular
Arabs, too. We can cite Arab critics who make sweeping judgments, but
we must take care not to do it ourselves—or at the very least, we must
carefully qualify these judgments.
17 Consider, because we must, “Make America Great Again”.

18 More accurately, these technologies greatly accelerated a process that had already
begun.
Mythmaking, Prediction and Guidance

Muḥammad ‘Azzām published his monograph on ASF in 1994. Long
ago, he argues, mythmakers were the ones to explain the world; then lit-
erature faded as science provided better explanations, until science began
to inspire literature. He defines SF as:
a type of reconciliation/peacemaking [muṣalāḥa] between literature and

science, or at least combining and creating concordance between them. In
the first period, scientists [‘ulamā’] inspired writers, then surpassed them;
in the following period, writers panted/gasped behind the discoveries and
inventions of scientists. (‘Azzām, p. 10)19
While this is an interesting encapsulation of the development of SF,

‘Azzām doesn’t take into account writers’ inspiring scientists in the mod-
ern era.20 Furthermore, he doesn’t do much with his idea of reconcil-
iation, muddying the waters by going on to formulate the relationship
between writers and scientists as one of competition more than coop-
eration. For ‘Azzām, SF has two primary functions: to solve problems
by placing thought in the service of humankind, primarily by calling out
repression and exploitation through the depiction of societies devoid
of these ills; and to predict human developments by extrapolating from
current technology. This prediction is framed as predicting scientific and
industrial production, not the human consequences thereof: he writes
about nuclear weapons, the moon landing and lasers, but purely as tech-
nologies anticipated by writers (‘Azzām, pp. 11–13). He’s quite willing
to say that SF inspires people, but the critical function of estrangement
is entirely missing from his argument. His language also touches on reli-
gion in a manner similar to Bahā and Jiyār, in that he consistently talks
about scientists using the word ‘ulamā’, which here is clearly intended
to mean “scientists,” but will always already have the connotation of reli-
gious scholars, as well. He uses the word tanabbu’, the same word Jiyār
uses, for “prediction,” again shading his argument about science with
religious terminology.
19 He notes that many authors of proto-SF, especially in the Western tradition, were
themselves scientists.
20 For example, the development of the modern waterbed after its description in several
of Heinlein’s novels, or Elon Musk’s naming his SpaceX ships after spaceships from the
“Culture” novels.
98 I. CAMPBELL
‘Azzām traces the roots of SF in Arabic, first examining the same

group of classical and medieval texts that addressed through Barbaro’s
chronology. He’s much freer about what constitutes “cognitive” than
might be expected from a critic working from the framework of Western
SF. The magic lamps and flying carpets of the 1001 Nights, for exam-
ple, ‘Azzām claims as precursors of modern inventions, without focus-
ing on the complications and caveats that might be found in other works
(‘Azzām, pp. 24–25). Most of the rest of the book consists of chapters
with a set topic, a long recitation of facts on that topic, then a list of
works of both Western and ASF addressing that topic. The lists of
sources are quite useful for readers looking for SF on a particular topic,
but ‘Azzām only very rarely goes beyond the level of plot summary.
When he does engage in analysis, it generally takes the form of reading
a given work as an allegory, but in a very abstract sense: for example, he
spends four pages detailing the plot of Syrian writer Ṭālib ‘Umrān’s novel
al-‘Ābirūn Khalfa al-Shams [“Those Who Pass Behind the Sun,” 1979],
before contenting himself with the argument that ‘Umrān is giving a les-
son “on love and devotion when he compares the two societies: Earth’s
society led by selfishness into destruction, and [the other], that lives a
life of love, science, cooperation and organization, eternally” (‘Azzām,
p. 87). He does not explain what the consequences of this second socie-
ty’s focus on love might be, nor does he ever approach the idea that the
second society estranges the first.
In 2001, Mahā Maẓlūm Khiḍr published her monograph, taken from
her doctoral dissertation, on Egyptian SF. Its approach is significantly
more scholarly than ‘Azzām’s. After a brief examination of the develop-
ment of Egyptian SF, she turns first to the role of the narrator and of nar-
rative theory in early Egyptian SF, then to dialogue, then to chronotopes,
and finally to the scientific context of SF novels and its consequences for
Egyptian literature and society. She divides the history of Egyptian SF
into four periods: classical Greek and early Christian utopias and fan-
tastic voyages; classical Arab/Islamic texts such as al-Ma‘arri’s Epistle of
Forgiveness and Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān; Western texts from the
Renaissance such as More’s Utopia all the way to nineteenth-century
proto-SF, such as Verne and Wells; and modern Arabic literature. This
last period has two concurrent traditions: modern Egyptian literary fic-
tion dating from the early twentieth century and modern ASF, which
dates from the mid-1960s. With respect to the second of these peri-
ods, Khiḍr adds to what will become Barbaro’s chronology by pointing
out the extent to which the translation movement in the early decades
of the ‘Abbasid caliphate brought Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Sanskrit
texts into Arabic and thence to wider circulation, laying the founda-
tions for the tremendous scientific development of the next few centuries
(Gutas, pp. 2–3). Khiḍr argues that the translators were well aware that
the works they were translating also passed on the scientific heritage of
Babylon, Assyria, India, and ancient Egypt, and made efforts to clarify as
well as translate. This and the ensuing scientific development enabled the
European Renaissance to start from a much more advanced point than it
otherwise might have (Khiḍr, pp. 14–15).21
With respect to Egyptian literature, Khiḍr argues that the Egyptian
literary novel in the first half of the twentieth century developed in
response to profound shocks over the course of the preceding century;
though she does not enumerate these shocks, she’s clearly referring to
the reassertion of foreign dominance over Egypt after a brief period of
independence in the mid-nineteenth century after the Ottomans lost
control of the country. The new rulers, the British, were much more
culturally foreign than the Ottomans had been, and the Egyptians con-
tinued to resist occupation and domination; for Khiḍr, this leads to a
flowering of historical novels and of novels that depict the ongoing cul-
tural conflict. By the second half of the twentieth century, with Egypt
now independent, the threat from outside had become less political than
technological:
Modern humankind felt in the second half of this twentieth century an

intense need for a new novelistic world, and a new mode to cope with
the astonishing scientific developments. The modern SF novel coped with
some of the former directions, but it was from the beginning a fantasy
novel that depicts what could not be imagined before, and in doing so
granted to the imagination the opportunity to free itself from the chains
of reality binding it; and in doing so, to answer what would happen if we
imagined it? (Khiḍr, p. 23)
It should be noted that she casts SF as fāntāziyā, “fantasy,” depicting

what could not be imagined before. This more or less completely side-
steps the standard Western approach to SF as cognitively based and
21 See, e.g., Saliba, pp. 193–232, for an extended discussion of the Arab/Muslim influ-
ence on Copernicus.
100 I. CAMPBELL
extrapolated from current scientific developments. Her next statement

gives us at least a reasonable approximation of estrangement, though the
aspect of estrangement relating to social criticism is missing. She later
precises her definition of SF as a type of story that “contains some scien-
tific elements that share in the manufacture of the narrative background
of the tale… distinguished in that they have a vision, and that there’s
tanabbu’ to it” (Khiḍr, p. 31). The idea that SF does more than just tell
a story is clear, but let us bracket for a moment the use of tanabbu’, and
its relationship to estrangement, as we trace the rest of Khiḍr’s definition
of SF.
After differentiating among myth, fantasy and science using language
shared by the other critics we’ve examined, she uses three other critics’
definitions to construct her own. First among these is Majdi Wahba, who
argues that SF:
…treats in a fictional manner humankind’s response to each advance in sci-

ence and technology. This genre counts as a sort of adventure story, except
its events usually revolve around the far future or planets other than the
Earth. It embodies humankind’s hopes in the probabilities of the existence
of life on other planets… This genre of stories has the power to be a mask
for political satire in one aspect and for the contemplation of the secrets of
life and spiritual concerns on the other. (Khiḍr, p. 35)22
This last is much closer to something like estrangement, wherein the SF

narrative simultaneously works as an adventure story driven by science
and as a commentary on contemporary society. As noted above, in Arab
societies almost entirely lacking in protections for freedom of expression,
the use of allegory in literature as a means of masking political satire or
social commentary is so widespread as to be the norm. And while there’s
no shortage of Western SF addressing spiritual concerns, we see here
again the greater overlap of SF and religion/spirituality implied by the
use of nubū’a/nubūwa and tanabbu’ by Arab critics.
Khiḍr moves directly and without analysis from this quotation to her
next, from Yūsuf al-Shārūni, who argues that SF:
is a genre based on reconciling [stories of] imagination and those based on

the foundations of experience and of exploring reality… These open the
22 The original quotation is from Wahba, p. 51.

door to tanabbu’ of the potential perils of the future on one hand, and its
tremendous [hā’ila] possibilities on the other. (Khiḍr, p. 35)23
Again, there is a lack of concern for the cognitive: al-Shārūni, like other
Arab critics, takes the khayāl in al-khayāl al-‘ilmi perhaps more literally
than the original translation intended. There’s a touch of estrangement,
though not much more, in predicting the potential perils and possibili-
ties of the future. More interesting is the use of hā’ila to describe these
possibilities, as the word can be glossed as “enormous” or “extraordi-
nary” but also “dreadful” or “horrible”: the word comes from one of
the many roots for “fear” (Cowan, p. 1038). The impact of science and
technology is mostly disruptive, and the future to be feared.
Next in Khiḍr’s sources comes Nabīl Rāghib, for whom SF:
…confirms the influence that scientific development practices on literary

forms. It isn’t enough that the novelist pours its scientific content into a
novelistic mold, in order for it to become an SF novel; rather, the existence
of an organic relationship between form and content is necessary. (Khiḍr,
p. 36)24
Arab critics in general tend to have more concern for formal qualities and
formalism in literature than do their Western counterparts, for a num-
ber of reasons, including the relative paucity of Western works of literary
criticism and theory translated into Arabic. This gives those works that
have been translated, most notably those of Bakhtin and Todorov and
other formalists, something of a disproportionate influence over Arab
critics. Dovetailing with this is the status of the novel as an imported
genre that developed under specific conditions in Britain relating to
industrialization and the development of a middle class. The Moroccan
critic Abdallah Laroui, among others, has addressed how these con-
ditions simply didn’t pertain to the Arab world in the early decades of
the Arab novel. Laroui’s central thesis is that there won’t be an authen-
tically Arab novel so long as Arab writers merely copy the outer forms
of the Western novel: only once writers make formal innovations that
authentically express the political, social and economic conditions of
the contemporary Arab world(s) will the novel truly become Arabic
23 The original quotation is from Shārūni, p. 162.

24 The original quotation is from Rāghib, p. 61.
102 I. CAMPBELL
(Laroui, pp. 192–193). It should also be noted that Rāghib’s definition

adds an extra burden to SF: the overwhelming majority of Western SF—
even those works most concerned with cognitive estrangement—adhere
to fairly standard novelistic and short story forms.25
Khiḍr uses these definitions, in tandem with the idea of SF as the lit-
erary genre where dreams become reality, as the jumping-off point for
her own definition, wherein she differentiates SF from fantasy. SF, she
argues, is derived from fantasy in that both use “imaginative/fictional
elements” [‘anāṣīr khayāliya] in order to depict a world, but fantasy both
makes use of older forms and mythological characters and also “depicts
[tūhim] a rendezvous with a reality whose extraordinary imaginative/
fictional [khayāliya] eventsare an evocation of the mode of the past”
(Khiḍr, p. 38). The word tūhim has a strong connotation of illusion,
delusion, or deception (Cowan, pp. 1103–1104). SF, by comparison,
“can sometimes be a futuristic novel based on confirmed truth, or some-
times one imagined from an unknown aspect of existence or life” (Khiḍr,
p. 38). We’ve approached estrangement above, and now we’ve come
close to cognitive, especially given her differentiation of SF from fantasy.
She continues to refine the qualities of SF:
Its characters are in name only, or numbers, incompletely formed in mind

and body. They translate/move [tanqul] the [text’s/author’s] comprehen-
sive message—narrated, for the most part—to an imagined future or past
age and to a fictional place. Its events are thrilling and exciting and induce
us to think about the results of this codified fiction, which is used to pres-
ent futuristic solutions to what life must be like in the shadow of rapid
technological advancement. (Khiḍr, pp. 40–41)
We return to flattened characters and the purpose of the novel as the

translation of a message. This last might be considered a bit behind the
curve in terms of Western literary criticism, which in the current century
is more likely to posit the text as an object in itself and ignore or down-
play the author’s intent, but the history of Western SF is sufficiently full
of novels that are thinly-disguised messages as to render this conclusion
relatively unproblematic. But the estrangement function of SF is less
present here: Khiḍr is willing to acknowledge that SF can mask a political
25 For all that, for example, Neuromancer does so much to estrange the notions of intelli-
gence and humanity, it’s at its root a fairly standard noir detective story.
critique, but to her, as with the other critics we’ve examined, it’s more a
means of predicting the future than it is of critiquing the present:
A futuristic imagination will be seen through the SF novel, one that will
save humankind much experiment and error and adjust [humankind’s]
intellectual and conscious path and lead it to innovate and to navigate in
everything that’s new. The SF novel is a translation of a human reality and
a hope for a new reality. (Khiḍr, p. 38)
For Khiḍr, as for other Arab critics, SF is about prediction and guidance:
it addresses the future rather than estranging the present.
Cognition and Estrangement in ASF

In 2007, the influential literary journal Fuṣūl published an issue dedi-
cated to ASF. The issue contains eight different perspectives on the
genre, some of which begin to integrate the theories of Western SF into
their analyses. Most of these perspectives are general reviews of the func-
tion of SF, its history in its Western and Arabic manifestations, or brief
examinations of how a particular work fits into the genre. Most conform
to the theories we’ve seen above: for example, Nāṣir al-’Anṣāri writes in
the foreword that “science is a two-edged weapon that can damage as
well as benefit, and destroy as well as build; these issues are what SF writ-
ers speak about” (’Ansāri, p. 7). This point of view, that the purpose of
SF is tanabbu’ or prediction of the dehumanizing effects of science that
accompany its benefits, is prevalent throughout the various articles. A
significant exception is the work of Muḥammad al-Kardi, who translates
and annotates an article from Irène Langlet’s book on poetics in SF, in
which Suvin’s theory of cognitive estrangement is addressed (al-Kardi,
p. 21). The article is more a survey of different SF tropes than a seri-
ous analysis of any given work, though he does link each trope to the
estrangement function. While much of the analysis in the Fuṣūl issue
either restates the theories of the critics examined above or takes a top-
level approach to the history and development of ASF, the mere presence
of the genre in such a prestigious journal can be taken as a sign that ASF
has moved from genre fiction to canonical literary fiction, a distinction
rather more important in Arabic literature then and now.
Finally, let us turn to ‘Iṣām ‘Asāqala, who in 2011 published his full-
length monograph on the construction of characters in ASF. His work
104 I. CAMPBELL
takes into account most prevailing Western theories on SF and intro-

duces a much higher level of theoretical complexity and sophistication
to his analysis of works of ASF than we have seen in the efforts of other
Arab critics. ‘Asāqala is focused on character and its role in ASF, but he
constructs his thesis through an understanding of the function of SF:
It [al-khayāl al-‘ilmi] is a new type of literature, which grew up in the

nineteenth century, then stood out and flourished in its first period at the
hands of two of its pioneers, [Verne and Wells]. SF addresses events that
have not happened [’aḥdāth lam taḥduth] in our real and familiar world;
rather it depends upon scientific [‘ilmi] or technological invention, or has
imagined [takhayyala] scientific or technological invention. SF depends
upon the imagining of scientific inventions and developments in the
future, especially in that they deal with space, or time travel, and life on
other planets, and the encounter with strange beings. SF also addresses
imaginary catastrophes in the future that take place as a result of imaginary
scientific and technological discoveries. SF is a means of thinking about
what might be: it depends, fundamentally, on its construction upon science
and technology…
At the same time, this literary genre deals with many of the problems of
human society, expressing that which is important to people [nās], their
hopes, their fears about the unknown future, their dreams and their
desires. It expresses the past, present and future of each people [sha‘b]…
It has a high artistic and literary value [qīma], just like other literary gen-
res that belong to canonical literature, and it’s worthy of importance and
criticism… [because] SF is a means of thinking that will help humanity in
solving many of its problems. (‘Asāqala, pp. 11–13)
The definition is a bit circular, especially in Arabic with the consistent

pairing of “fiction” [khayāl] with “to imagine” [takhayyala]; however, it
does begin to hint at the estrangement function that ‘Asāqala will later
integrate into his understanding of ASF. Mostly, however, it focuses on
what we have seen in earlier works of criticism in Arabic: because the
estrangement function is always already present in Arabic literary fic-
tion, in order to explain ASF as a separate genre, it becomes necessary to
define it in other ways, specifically the prediction of the consequences of
scientific developments—though it should be noted that ‘Asāqala does
not use the word tanabbu’ in constructing his definition. That effec-
tively all of these developments come from without is emphasized by his
translation into English in his text of the term al-safar ‘abr al-’azmina,
“travel across times,” as “time travel.” He brings together this Arabic
understanding of SF as predictive with the more general understanding
of Arabic literature as presenting problems and their solutions in the
real world, in order to make the case that ASF is a subgenre of canonical
literature,26 which like “time travel” he also translates into English in the
text.
He also downplays the threat posed by SF to the Arab world in two
rather different ways. He uses the term “events that have not hap-
pened” along with repeating khayāl and takhayyala and its participle
mutakhayyal, “imaginary/imagined,” both of the latter of which have a
stronger connotation of fantasy or delusion (Cowan, p. 310), in order
to emphasize that the developments posited by ASF remain fictional:
these are hypothetical developments, “what ifs” that serve as thought
experiments, rather than actual events or even simple extrapolations. To
remind readers that much of ASF addresses developments that conform
to Freedman’s understanding of SF as focused on that which is cogni-
tively plausible within the world of the text—i.e., and not necessarily in
the real world— is to in a sense reduce the threat posed by science that
mostly comes from without. ‘Asāqala also broadens the effective audi-
ence of SF beyond the Arab and Western worlds by moving from SF
addressing the hopes, dreams and fears of people, nās, a neutral word
for “people,” to expressing the past, present, and future of every peo-
ple. Here, he uses the word sha‘b, which might be better rendered into
English as “folk”: it has a strong connotation of ordinary or common
people, especially people with a common linguistic or ethnic or tribal
background. SF, through his vocabulary choices, belongs to canonical
Arabic literature because of its function; also, it’s not imposed in a one-
way fashion upon the Arab world by the West, but is rather a genre that
can help every folk or tribe or group solve their problems.
This attempt to frame ASF as both useful and in conformity with
canonical Arab literature is important for him, as ‘Asāqala argues that
cultural foundations in the Arab world, the sort that express and create
received opinions about the worthiness of works or genres—and which
unlike in the West are usually quasi-official—are generally hostile to SF:
26 In Arabic, he says al-’adab al-rasmi, “official” or “formal” literature.

106 I. CAMPBELL
These foundations have sometimes considered SF to be a messenger of

what can be described as aggressive culture, or have considered it to be
one of the images of cultural aggression [al-ghazw al-thaqāfi]: its goal,
according to what they say, is to wreck the fundamental elements of the
Islamic nation/community [’umma] and for Western culture to have con-
trol over Arabic, because [SF] is merely works devoid of value, belonging
to popular literature [al-’adab al-sha‘bi] or [genres such as] the mys-
tery novel… Likewise, these writings are described as if they do not ana-
lyze human behavior, don’t include wisdom or plot, and are written for
the sake of entertainment, provocation, or commercial profit and nothing
more. (‘Asāqala, p. 14)
It is essential to keep in mind when examining ASF that Arabic literature,

even canonical literature, has very little profit motive. Writers of canon-
ical Arabic literature typically do not write literature for a living: even
Nobel laureate Mahfouz worked as a civil servant throughout his most
productive period. ‘Asāqala is taking a genre, SF, that does not fit into
the mold of canonical Arabic literature and trying to show that it does,
or should; this is why he undertakes this argument. In the West, readers
are accustomed to authors’ writing what sells, and, though it has been
a long and rough road, to genre fiction such as SF and mystery as seri-
ous literature worthy of study and discourse. ‘Asāqala is directly address-
ing the factors within Arab culture that block ASF from consideration by
other critics.
Just as importantly, he addresses the argument that Western genres,
like Western technology, represent a threat to the community, ’umma,
something of a loaded word in this context because of its root in the
original Islamic community that still serves as the model in so much of
Arab culture. The ’umma was what came together in Mecca and Madīna
in the seventh century: people renounced their identity as members of a
particular sha‘b in order to become part of the ’umma. ‘Asāqala doesn’t
name or cite these foundations, but the phrase “cultural aggression,”
which he parenthetically glosses in English in his text, is not uncom-
mon in the response of certain Arab politicians and intellectuals to
various manifestations of Western culture. The word ghazw, here trans-
lated as “aggression,” originally means “raid, foray, incursion,” for the
purposes of conquest or plunder: the phrase is rather stronger in Arabic
than in English translation (Cowan, p. 788). And while it’s indeed true
that Western imperial powers did exactly this to the entire Arab world,
going so far as to arbitrarily draw the borders of what would become
the modern nation-states (and in doing so, erasing the borders of the
Ottoman provinces that had comprised the area for centuries), it’s
another thing entirely to argue that Arab writers adopting the motifs,
themes and functions of SF and making them their own is a continu-
ation of this process. By arguing for the literary validity of ASF, he’s
arguing against the received idea that because SF is originally a Western
discourse, it thereby represents a threat to Arab or Muslim cultural
autonomy.
‘Asāqala surveys the various meanings and etymology of “character”
in English and its Arabic equivalent al-shakhṣiya, before tracing differ-
ent concepts of character through history: Greek medicine centering on
bodily humors, physical typology, Freud and Jung. All of this is in ser-
vice of his larger argument that “character is that which distinguishes one
person from another of a similar type” (‘Asāqala, pp. 21–24). He places
Henry James and E. M. Forster in dialogue with each other over the
distinction between psychologically realistic characters and “flattened,”
musaṭṭaḥ, characters: the first kind operate as part of an author’s use of
the novel as a means of social criticism, while the second are used when
a novel concentrates on events rather than people. He is the first among
the Arab critics who use musaṭṭaḥ to mention that the idea of flattened
characters originates with Forster, and is therefore, itself a borrowed
trope (‘Asāqala, pp. 37–40). Once ‘Asāqala begins to talk about how
character functions in SF, he returns to terms used by his predecessors.
First, he refines his definition of SF:
The important thing about SF is that it predicts [yatanabba’] technological

changes. [Asimov] says that SF addresses the works of scientists [‘ulamā’]
in the future: it’s a literary genre that addresses the reaction of humankind
to development and progress on the level of science and technology. There
are those who see that SF is fiction that portrays scientific discoveries and
developments in the shaping of the elements of its plot and background,
especially when it’s a work of fiction based on the prediction [tanabbu’] of
scientific developments in the future. Yet there are other researchers who
see that SF stories are constructed around the human being and its prob-
lems, with the attempts to create appropriate solutions to these problems.
(‘Asāqala, p. 82)
Once again, we can see the relative sophistication of ‘Asāqala’s approach,

in that he makes greater use of the existing Western discourse on SF
as part of his perspective on ASF than do previous critics. At the same
108 I. CAMPBELL
time that he’s beginning to show that SF can direct itself to the human
condition, however, he also maintains the use of some of the language
we’ve seen before: tanabbu’ and its verbal form yatanabba’, along with
‘ulamā’, all of which have a slight flavor of religious discourse to them.
Whether this is conformity with extant discourse or a desire to reassure
readers of the Arabness of ASF is unclear, but ‘Asāqala will take his con-
struction around the human being several steps further by dovetailing it
with more work by Western theorists, specifically Suvin, who:
…sees that SF is a literary genre that in its prerequisites and preconditions

is devoted to the objective of the existence of knowledge and estrangement
[ightirāb] and their interaction. Among its fundamental formal tools is the
existence of the fictional framework that substitutes for the author’s exper-
imental environment. [Adam] Roberts says that cognition here pushes us
to experiment, and we understand and realize each strange [gharīb] view-
point each SF book, film or story presents to us. As for estrangement,27
it’s that which exiles [yugharrib] us from the quotidian and familiar…
[according to Brecht] it seeks to reveal that which is beneath the surface.
(‘Asāqala, p. 84)
This is a decent gloss of Suvin; later, ‘Asāqala will add in Roberts, as well
as Damon Knight, Damien Broderick, Norman Spinrad, and others to
his understanding of the theory of cognitive estrangement. The Arabic
text, however, adds another layer of meaning not evident in translation.
It may by now be apparent even to readers unfamiliar with Arabic that
the words ightirāb for “estrangement,” gharīb for “strange,” and yughar-
rib for “exiles” are cognate: they share the gh-r-b root for “strange” or
“foreign.” The gh-r-b root, however, originally means “to leave, depart,”
whence it receives its other meaning: the sunset, and thus the west. The
setting of the sun is ghurūb, and the fourth of the five daily prayers, the
one performed just after sunset, is maghrib, which is also the Arabic
name for Morocco—“the sunset place.” The word for “west,” whether
in the literal sense of the cardinal direction or the complex of cultures, is
gharb (Cowan, pp. 783–785).28 It is a common point of interest for first-
year students of Arabic that strange things come from the West.
27 At this point, he glosses ightirāb, usually “alienation”, as “estrangement” in English.

28 Cf.,Laroui’s novel al-Ghurba [“Exile,” 1971]: it is not incidental that the protagonist
has exiled himself to Europe.
Because of this linguistic coincidence, ‘Asāqala has to fight something

of an uphill battle: not only is he introducing theory so unfamiliar as to
require constant gloss into English, but the words used to describe that
very theory always already have the implication of coming from abroad,
from the same West that ‘Asāqala says others have accused of cultural
aggression in bringing SF to the Arab world. He is in effect engaging in
a kind of theoretical aggression, one that is only visible in Arabic, which
is why he’s compelled to explain what he means at greater length, argu-
ing that ASF is increasingly popular because it:
…expands upon social and economic relationships. SF portrays humanistic

experiments upon a society subject to severe economic, social and tech-
nological laws… Science itself is subject to bureaucracy and to controlling
groups; this in turn encouraged the creation of inhuman and improper
[ghayr shar‘iya] works in order to control knowledge… what distinguishes
this literary genre, especially in the twentieth century, is the absence of
character… Character was the focus of the bourgeois novel, when the
individual was the primary subject and the focal point of liberationist ide-
ology, when machines and capitalist ideas were still elementary and not
controlling… the expansion of social and economic transformations… has
made the class of writers and intellectuals doubt the independence of the
individual, and this is what they reflect in their writings; characters have
appeared who are subject to the plot and other elements… From this, the
SF novel has presented… the problem of splintering and of ruin of char-
acter in modern society… The received idea that humanity is the focus of
creation, distinctive and independent—the idea that existed at the heart
of Western literature from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the
twentieth—has been annihilated in SF. (‘Asāqala, pp. 88–90)
‘Asāqala continues from here with a description of robots, androids and

AIs, in support of his larger point that the alienation function of ASF is
intended to estrange not the economic or social or philosophical issues
that plague Arab societies, but rather the increasing dependence of those
societies upon technologies that, like the word for “estrangement” itself,
come from the West. The quest for knowledge is not only inhuman but
improper, ghayr shar‘iya, where shar‘iya, “legitimate, proper,” is cognate
to sharī‘a, “sharia,” the body of Islamic law derived from scripture and
centuries of juridical precedents.
If we return to the previous citation, we can see why ‘Asāqala frames
his argument in terms that imply a threat from the West: he will then
110 I. CAMPBELL
argue that ASF does estrange Arab societies via cognitive means, but
that what’s being estranged is less the conditions of contemporary Arab
societies than the extent to which those societies have already become
subject to a cognition and its effects that have already alienated Arabs
by rendering them subject to the (presumed) inhumanity of technology.
This argument may seem problematic, because not only is it trivial to
enumerate examples of Western SF that estrange Western societies’ sac-
rifice of the human at the altar of technological advancement, but it’s
also simple to find examples where technology enhances the humanness
of humanity. In Arab societies, however, where the collective memory
of the distant past—its ideal community, and the domination in science
and technology that characterized a period lasting many centuries—is
still very strong, the array of new technologies, the machines that can be
purchased but not produced, and the Internet with its delivery of infor-
mation outside traditional means of control, ‘Asāqala’s understanding of
SF as it pertains to ASF makes much more sense. Twenty-first century
technology is a clear and present threat to the hegemony of certain ideas
within Arab societies, most notably that of the place of humanity at the
center of creation, and this threat cannot be dismissed, nor can it be
claimed as a good thing in that it will liberate Arabs from too tight a
hold on an obsolete past, without losing much of what can be learned
from ASF.
Even in ASF, as in the close readings of novels that will make up the
remainder of this study, there are plenty of counterexamples to ‘Asāqala’s
theory. There are humans whose humanity is enhanced by technol-
ogy; there are humans struggling against technology; and most impor-
tantly, there are technologies working to liberate humans from too tight
a hold on an obsolete past. Yes, ‘Asāqala is correct: ASF makes use of
“flattened” characters as a means of estranging the effects of technology
upon a society where that technology is an import from without rather
than a development from within. At the same time, however, he does not
address an equally salient point: ASF also estranges the desire to respond
to the imposition from without of new technologies by retreating from
them, painting them as ghayr shar‘iya or making a reactionary turn to
the past, whether this be explicitly religious or simply a reassertion of tra-
ditional values. Throughout the remainder of the study, I will refer to
what I will call “double estrangement” as one of the dominant tropes
in ASF: not only does it engage in the estrangement of its own socie-
ties by means more or less familiar to scholars of Western SF, but it also
estranges its own societies’ reaction to technology, especially insofar as

that reaction denies or defers the human consequences (good or ill) of
technology or tries to combat it by means of reactionary ideas or policies.
Toward a Theory of ASF

Let us recapitulate what Arab critics have taught us about ASF and enu-
merate its features. Modern Arabic societies have few if any legal or insti-
tutional protections for freedom of speech or expression. Westerners can
publicly critique their government or society directly without much fear;
but this isn’t the case at all in the Arab world, where such a critique can
and often does have ruinous consequences. Western authors needn’t
wrap their critique in a fictional or allegorical narrative in order to main-
tain plausible deniability. Arab authors generally don’t have this freedom,
so Arab readers are more accustomed to reading a text as simultaneously
both a story and a commentary or critique of their regime or society.
The allegorical mode common to most works of literary fiction in Arabic
is always already a form of estrangement, so there’s a real extent to which
saying “SF works via cognitive estrangement” is only relevant to Arab
critics insofar as “cognitive” needs a gloss.
Since estrangement is already present, critics seek another perspective
to match with the scientific/cognitive aspects of ASF; hence, we have
“prediction” for effectively all of these critics as well as “guidance” in
Khiḍr’s formulation. Of course ASF estranges, because Arabic literature
in general does. But ASF also shows the consequences of the adoption
of advanced science and technology on Arab societies—and we need to
keep in mind that for several centuries now, effectively all advanced sci-
ence and technology has been imported, usually from the West. Scientific
and technological development has been organic to the West, but (as
with the novel itself) it comes from without, and thus nearly always
conflicts with, or at least upsets, the cultural dynamics of those socie-
ties. Often, this disruption can be productive, as with the messaging and
Internet technology that has helped to cause such growth in the use of
the colloquial dialects as written languages. In other instances, the rela-
tionship between established culture and new technologies can be more
problematic, especially when technology is accompanied by social mores
that are both alien to and based on different preconceptions than those
native to Arab societies. ASF, then, can take on this predictive value:
how will Arab societies change to accommodate the adoption of new,
112 I. CAMPBELL
generally Western, science, and technology? How can they change in

such a manner as to retain whatever might be said to be authentically
Arab about them? How will these technologies change in order to inte-
grate into Arab society?
If we were to draw a very abstract graph of scientific and technical
development in the West, we would see a parabolic curve, starting from a
low point around 400 CE, perhaps even declining a bit over the ensuing
couple of centuries, then increasing at an increasingly rapid rate through
the present moment and beyond. Most of the development in the
Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance stemmed from knowledge
adopted from the Arab/Muslim world, often by means of the same sort
of translation and dissemination whereby the Arabs and Muslims under
the ‘Abbasid caliphate adopted Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian
knowledge. By the seventeenth century, the drivers of scientific and
technological development had shifted to Western Europe; from then,
progress has only increased.29 There’s little to suggest that this rate of
scientific and technological development will reverse itself or even slow.
Western SF, therefore, considers this rapid change a natural feature of
Western societies: it’s not a threat from without that needs to be inte-
grated into the culture nor contained via tarqī‘ or “patching” within a
novel. Cognitively plausible future development can therefore be used
to estrange the present because this development can be easily perceived
as a plausible extrapolation of that present: while a given novum may
require some background, rendering exponential scientific progress in
itself plausible does not require any real labor within the text.
The same graph for the Arab world would look rather different:
beginning around 700 CE, progress would rise quickly and continue to
rise even more quickly until sometime around the year 1100, when its
rate of increase would begin to decline. During the eighth century, the
gradual uptake of knowledge from other cultures during the ’Umayyad
caliphate (661–750 CE) became state policy under the early ‘Abbasids;
from there, Muslims writing in Arabic undertook their own scientific and
technical development, leading the world for centuries. Development
continued, though perhaps at a reduced pace, well into the sixteenth
century—but, crucially, most of this development took place outside
29 By the middle of the twentieth century, East Asia had also become a locus for develop-
ment—and, not incidentally, for SF.

the Arab part of the Muslim world: Persia, Muslim India, and Ottoman
Turkey. Outside of Egypt, what we would consider the Arab world today
became and remained a backwater. By the seventeenth century, devel-
opment had largely stagnated throughout and remained effectively nil
until the mid-nineteenth century, whereupon European technologies
such as military tactics and the printing press began to be adopted. So
while scientific and technological development in the Arab world once
again began to accelerate, this development, like SF and like the novel
as a genre, came from without—and again crucially, it came with differ-
ent cultural preconceptions and was and is often accompanied by social
mores that pose a challenge to traditional societies. In the present day,
the rate of development is again increasing rapidly, but while Arab scien-
tists and entrepreneurs have begun to contribute to that development,
most of it still comes from the West or from East or South Asia.30
Given these conditions, we can see how ASF that extrapolates future
development needs to situate that development within Arabic societies.
How it does so will depend on the specific work, but broadly speaking,
we can identify four primary tropes, of which a given work may make
use of more than one: (1) linking development to the long and glori-
ous tradition of scientific and technical development during the classical
and medieval periods; (2) setting new development off within the text
by treating it as an anomaly, then engaging in tarqī‘ in order to keep it
safely within the confines of the text; (3) having the scientist(s) trained
in the West and either living in the West or back in their home country,
generally with the intent to reform or enlighten their homeland; and
(4) having the West destroyed or seriously reduced by a catastrophe such
as nuclear war, leaving the Arab world free to take the lead in science and
technology. Dealing with the social or moral consequences of technolog-
ical development is rather more complex, sometimes elided, and makes
use of measures often idiosyncratic to each work: the most common are
to contain social change via tarqī‘, or to simply ignore the social or moral
consequences. Let us then put our framework in a shorter and more
manageable form:
30 One salient example of Arab contribution to twenty-first-century technological devel-
opment is the Sarahah app, which enables its users to receive anonymous messages from
anyone who knows their Sarahah username. Sarahah was invented by a Saudi Arabian man;
ṣarāḥa is the Arabic word for “candor”.
114 I. CAMPBELL
• No matter how futuristic a given work may be, it will always

already reference the past, due to its language: writing in fuṣḥā,
formal Arabic, places the work in tension between possible futures,
estranged present and the enduring influence of the distant past.
• Again no matter how futuristic a work may be, the material and
social progress wrought by scientific and technological development
will also place it in tension with the past: to estrange the present
via the future will implicitly also compare it to an ideal community
located far in the past, and with the conservative social values that
still dominate the present. New social and moral values will likely
come from without, and thereby will increase this tension. This is
especially true in the case of religious values, given the generally
close relationship between SF and secularism in the West.
• Given that for effectively the entirety of the modern period, scien-
tific and technological development has come from outside Arab
societies, works will undertake one or more of the strategies enu-
merated above in order to render cognitive not merely the novum
itself, but also the very existence of advanced science and technol-
ogy within an Arab society.
• Given the tendency within Arabic literary fiction to operate in the
allegorical mode, due in many respects to the lack of formal pro-
tections for freedom of expression within Arab societies, ASF often
operates in a mode I will call double estrangement: along with its
surface narrative, it also contains a level of political or social critique
and another level where it examines the slow speed or lack of sci-
entific/technological development or social/moral change within
contemporary societies.
• We may expect to find “flattened” characters, not only because ASF,
like Arabic literature more generally, often operates in the allegorical
mode, but because some works also address the problem of tech-
nological development coming from without by imputing to such
development the power to dehumanize.
• As a means of keeping the novum of a text safely contained, ASF
will often engage in tarqī‘, just as the initial generation of Arabic
literary fiction did. This “patching” will make use of a number of
devices, from coincidence to cataclysm, to ensure that society at
the end of the work remains insulated from the dangers posed by a
technological or moral threat.
• Finally, ASF has the function of tanabbu’, prediction or divination.

This can be understood as a means of both estranging the present
and reconciling the tension created by science and technology as,
for now, Western imports, as well as a means of linking advanced
technology to dehumanization.
Again, we must take every care to not engage in Orientalism: we are

not conceiving of ASF as diametrically opposed to its Western counter-
part, nor should we use this framework to then argue that Western SF,
for example, uses only psychologically deep characters. These two dis-
courses are in no way diametrically opposed: rather, while their fields
overlap, on any given axis (direct v. allegorical, deep v. flat, etc.) the
median work in each discourse occupies a different position on a spec-
trum. As time passes and ASF matures, we may expect to see certain
changes, especially with respect to the siting of technological or social
development within a given work. With the rapid adoption of modern
technology, especially after the advent of the Internet, we may expect to
see technological progress seen as less of an imposition from outside and
therefore less generative of tension within the text. Whether this is also
true for liberal social mores is what our extended readings of ASF novels
in the following chapters are intended to explore.
With respect to postcolonial theory, specifically the notions of hybridity
and ambivalence, how they structure the identity of a postcolonial subject
and how they enable critique of imperial forms, I will defer structuring
a framework until I have engaged in close readings of selected novels of
early ASF. As Lazarus argues, readings of postcolonial literature have for
the most part restricted themselves to a narrow corpus of works, mostly
in English and mostly formulating identity as a process of alterity. The
body of work we will examine is in Arabic and mostly critiques authori-
tarianism and traditional values within its own culture(s); such alterity as is
involved in structuring identity most often takes the form of narrators or
characters exhibiting something akin to ambivalence or hybridity in their
perspectives on science or modernity. At the risk of spoiling our readings,
what we will find is that the empire does write back, but almost entirely
to itself. To the extent that these novels formulate a critique of imperial-
ism, they’re more likely to find fault with their own societies for adopting
only some of its forms; their attempts to advocate for or restore cultural
authenticity are almost entirely in the service of the science and technol-
ogy of which the Arabic-speaking world was long ago the driver.
116 I. CAMPBELL
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Criticism and Theory of Arabic SF: Science Fiction in "Arabic"

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CHAPTER 4

Criticism and Theory of Arabic SF

As we saw in Chapter 2, Western SF has a robust and extensive body

Science Fiction in “Arabic”

© The Author(s) 2018 77

1 The S and the H are pronounced as separate letters, not a blend.

Egyptians, in Haeri’s experience, don’t view MSA as either a modern

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;

For an educated native speaker of English, comfortable with literature

exclusively, even when transcribing dialogue, which is where fuṣḥā seems

Western Criticism of Arabic SF

Rifā‘i’s story Safīnat al-Faḍā’ al-Ghāmiḍa [“The Mysterious Spaceship,”

Time and Space in ASF

The transposition of the chronotope, conceived by Bakhtin, the conflu-

Gerhard Böwering, another of Barbaro’s sources, argues that time in

She proceeds to organize a table of ASF novels and to demonstrate that

resurrection in the Islamic traditions than in Christianity. She argues that

Rather, their mission becomes a struggle against Time, the expression of a

While Barbaro’s argument about time does apply generally to ASF, it

planet as on others, on imaginary or real planets, utopia, the non-place

al-Sibā‘i exploits this original interpretation of Martian civilization in order

Arabic Criticism of ASF

…be an expression of humankind’s place with respect to the stunning

This isn’t precisely cognitive estrangement—though Bahā is quick

of technologically advanced societies with a great concern for values, or

based on an awareness of the needs of aesthetic reality, and working on

8 He is writing in an issue of Fuṣūl dedicated to the question of literary modernity.

11 We will examine Mūsā’s novel in Chapter 7.

in Madīna.12 Most Western stereotypes about women’s roles in Arabic

Hereditary Memory and Flattened Characters

It is the Arab mentality [‘aqliya, from “reason” or “intellect”], that still

Talawi frames this glorification as the past not as a sentimental practice,

rather because the purpose of SF is not to reveal inner conflicts. Instead,

This is often a consequence of the lack of legal guarantees of freedom

17 Consider, because we must, “Make America Great Again”.

Mythmaking, Prediction and Guidance

a type of reconciliation/peacemaking [muṣalāḥa] between literature and

While this is an interesting encapsulation of the development of SF,

‘Azzām traces the roots of SF in Arabic, first examining the same

Modern humankind felt in the second half of this twentieth century an

It should be noted that she casts SF as fāntāziyā, “fantasy,” depicting

extrapolated from current scientific developments. Her next statement

…treats in a fictional manner humankind’s response to each advance in sci-

This last is much closer to something like estrangement, wherein the SF

is a genre based on reconciling [stories of] imagination and those based on

22 The original quotation is from Wahba, p. 51.

…confirms the influence that scientific development practices on literary

23 The original quotation is from Shārūni, p. 162.

(Laroui, pp. 192–193). It should also be noted that Rāghib’s definition

Its characters are in name only, or numbers, incompletely formed in mind

We return to flattened characters and the purpose of the novel as the

Cognition and Estrangement in ASF

takes into account most prevailing Western theories on SF and intro-

It [al-khayāl al-‘ilmi] is a new type of literature, which grew up in the

The definition is a bit circular, especially in Arabic with the consistent

26 In Arabic, he says al-’adab al-rasmi, “official” or “formal” literature.

These foundations have sometimes considered SF to be a messenger of

It is essential to keep in mind when examining ASF that Arabic literature,

The important thing about SF is that it predicts [yatanabba’] technological

Once again, we can see the relative sophistication of ‘Asāqala’s approach,

…sees that SF is a literary genre that in its prerequisites and preconditions

27 At this point, he glosses ightirāb, usually “alienation”, as “estrangement” in English.

CHAPTER 4

Criticism and Theory of Arabic SF

Science Fiction in “Arabic”

Western Criticism of Arabic SF

Time and Space in ASF

Arabic Criticism of ASF

Hereditary Memory and Flattened Characters

Mythmaking, Prediction and Guidance

Cognition and Estrangement in ASF

Toward a Theory of ASF