Mahmud al-Masʿadi, by Abdelhadim Azzouz 1994

Al-Masadi challenges both world and Arabic literary studies. His legacy allowed me to explore these challenges and attempt to stretch both fields in ways, which marked my entire literary research. Known for his intriguing style and vision, Mahmud al-Mas’adi (1911-2004) holds a unique position in Arabic literature and in his native Tunisia. I first read him in high school, and then wrote my PhD on his work and life from a comparative perspective before publishing a book and several essays in Arabic and in English on his legacy.  I also had the chance to meet him in person and recording an interview with him.

On this page, you can find my collected works on al-Masʿadi, widely considered to be the foremost Tunisian cultural figure of the 20th Century. Al-Masʿadi’s works have long been hard to classify according to the mainstream conventions of modern Arabic literature and literary criticism. During his lifetime, his work was acclaimed by cultural figures across the world, and lauded by modern Arabic literary figures like al-Tayyib Salih, Taha Husayn and Jamal al-Ghitani. I dedicated my PhD and a book to bringing together the literary, academic and political writing of al-Mas’adi.

My work sets out to explore the apparent contradiction between the literary output of the writer and his work as anti-colonial activists and citizen. Born in 1911 in Tazarkah, a small village in North East Tunisia, he was educated at the iconic al-Sadiqiyya school and in France. It was in the 1930s that Masʿadi’s literary career took off. His most significant fictional texts were all written before 1950. His first novel, Hadatha Abu Hurayra Qal… (Abu Hurayra Told Us That…), explores the world through the eyes of Abu Hurayra, a fictionalised version of the Prophet’s companion; in the text, Abu Hurayrah is on a journey in which his experiences are revealed through individual “hadiths” or narratives, borrowing the term that is used to describe the sayings of the Prophet and his Companions. You can read my translation of his Hadith al-Tin (the clay) here. The text molds together aspects of classical heritage (setting, character, discourse type, language, reference, Sufism) with European forms and largely secular ideas. Controversial from inception, the book received considerable criticism, and struggled to get published at all; in the 1940s, al-Masʿadi was able to publish short sections of the book, but it was not until 1973, when he was in charge of the Ministry of Culture in Tunisia, that he felt able to publish the entire work. My view is that this text is better placed within intersections between Sufism, adab and Nietzschean philosophy.

Al-Masʿadi’s reputation, however, largely rests on his play, al-Sudd (The Dam) (1955), which stages the conflict between a strong-willed man (Ghaylan) and a vengeful, controlling Goddess (Sahabba’) for the control of village. The play confronts head on, and like no other, the interplay between Greek tragic thought and Islamic conceptions of fate. Critical of the Goddess’s religion, Ghaylan believes that man’s will, creativity and power are being held back by the ritualistic conventions of Sahabba’’s religion. Ghaylan embarks upon the building of a dam to irrigate the land and create a prosperous life for his people. Over the course of the book, the dam becomes the central motif around which the conflicts of ideology take place. Al-Sudd received considerable praise both in Tunisia and abroad, with Taha Husayn hailing it as heralding in a new genre (the symbolic story) into Arabic letters. Yet, for me, the originality of this work becomes more apparent when placed within wider cultural and literary contexts. Here flows Greek tragic thought, Quranic understanding of human will, Islamic philosophy, modern Western drama.. The chapter “The allure of the sublime in my book, mentioned above has more on this. I have also translated and analysed Husayn’s review of Masʿadi’s novel, and Masʿadi’s response to the review, which you can download here. Al-Sudd has now been translated into German and French. In Tunisia, the play was added to the national educational curriculum, assuring it a central role in the Tunisian literary imagination.

Masʿadi’s other major literary achievement, Mawlid al-Nisyan (The Genesis of Oblivion) (1945) follows Ranjahan seducing the (supposedly) wise physician, Madyan, who is seeking to find a cure for humanity’s oblivion against the force of Time. Abandoning his partner and the hospice they run together, Madyan follows Ranjahan on a quest of self-discovery. Reaching the end of their journey, Ranjahan unmasks her true nature and, at the gate of Salhawah, named after a plant that brings nisyan (oblivion) and salwa (consolation), Ranjahan bursts out laughing, breaks apart and disappears. Madyan, though realising that the quest has all been a comic play, is not dissuaded. Finally finding the medicine he was looking for, Madyan tries it and experiences a moment of Timelessness, only to realise that Time cannot be forgotten, or obliterated, and that the body was nothing more than transitory, mortal flesh. It echoes the work of the Egyptian Tawik al-Hakim in important ways.

Reception of these three major literary achievements and other works has tended to be divided between those who find in Masʿadi’s opaque, symbolic and mythical style a reinvention of the Arabic language, a re-purposing of ancient forms to explore modern concerns, and those who criticise his works for their depiction of elite heroes, whose imaginative and imaginary solutions to real-world problems are irreconcilable with reality. Despite this division, al-Mas’adi remains one of the pioneers of modern Arabic literature, and of Tunisian literature in particular. In my view, his works are points of confluence - tarafud - between major European styles and ideologies, Islamic and Arabic heritage and tradition, the modern world, and the ideals of humanist literature. I treat this complexity in my book whose you can access here.

Masʿadi died in 2004 at the age of 93. For an extended biography and analysis of Masʿadi’s, see my entry on al-Mas’adi in Roger Allen (ed.) Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1850-1950; you can download this biographical article here.

Above, you can listen to an interview I conducted with him in 1994, conducted in a mixture of French and Arabic, ten years before the author’s death. In the interview, I asked Masʿadi about his literary influences, his methods, his education and we discussed themes in both al-Sudd and Hadatha Abu Hurayra Qal…. The transcript of the interview can be downloaded here; a translation of the interview into English can be downloaded here.

To better locate al-Masa’di within the wider development of modern Arabic fiction, I argue that it would be useful to assess his path against other writers. One fitting parallel is Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, who, like Masʿadi, also used the formalistic possibilities opened up by bringing the discursive unit of the hadith into modern prose narrative. My essay, which you can download here, compares al-Masʿadi’s use of hadith and maqamah with Muwaylihi’s Hadith ʿIsa ibn Hisham. Al-Masʿadi, on the other hand, uses the same basic discursive unit of text, but functions much more as an exploration of the collective memories accessible through text, through narrative and evocation. Across both texts, there is the central image of resurrection, but where in Hadith, this is treated as a literary device to question the mores and culture of contemporary, in Hadatha, the resurrection serves to question the passage of time, and collapses the past with the present. These two pathways to tradition, which I call mimesis (al-Muwailihi) and evocation (al-Mas’adi), mark two key engagements with turath in literature.

While my main aim was to introduce al-Mas’adi into wider debates about Arabic literature in Anglophone academia, I found it useful to “translate back” some of my findings to an Arabophone audience. I have written on comedy and tragedy in Masʿadi’s works. The first essay, published in 2011 in the journal al-Hayat al-Thaqafiyyah, founded in fact by al-Mas’adi himself, can be downloaded here. The second appeared in 2012 in the book Mahmud al-Masʿadi: mubdi’an wa mufakkiran, and can be downloaded here. It might seem oxymoronic to talk about irony and comedy in Masʿadi. His writing is known as serious and studious, with an opaque and archaic linguistic register, intellectualised explorations of narrative form, and depictions of a grave, tragic world. Yet, as has long been the case in the adab tradition, the jidd (serious) is always counterbalanced by the hazl (light, comic). Al-Mas’adi, in reality and true to fashion, depicts even the most grim of stories - in al-Sudd - through the incredulous eyes of “an intelligent mule”.