By Mursi Saad El-Din In the battle between the old and the new, between the ancients and the moderns, as it were, one can venture to say that it was the new that got the upper hand. This can be clearly seen in the introduction of European literary forms: the novel, the play and the autobiography. Most of the early novels seem to contain strong autobiographical elements, and there were some straight autobiographies. The novels Zeinab by Hussein Heikal, as well as 'Awdat Al-Ruh (Return of the Spirit), Mudhakirrat Na'ib fi 'l-Aryaf (The Diary of a Country Magistrate) and Usfur min Al-Sharq (A Bird from the Orient) by Tawfiq Al-Hakim are, no doubt, autobiographical. On the other hand, we find a number of straightforward autobiographies, among them Al-Ayam (its two volumes translated into English as An Egyptian Childhood and The Stream of Days ) by Taha Hussein, and Zahrat Al-Umr (The Flower of Life), Sign Al-Umr (The Prison of Life), both by Tawfiq Al-Hakim. While space does not allow for a full exploration of the motifs in these texts, one should at least note the reflections on time and temporality in them. If this abiding obsession with time attests to anything, one may venture to say it is the shock of exposure to western modernity and the sense of temporal rupture with the past. This is already clear in Return of Spirit, but it is clearer still in Al-Hakim's Ahl Al-Kahf (People of the Cave, 1933). The story itself derives from the Bible and the Qur'an. Here we have the people of the cave, after a long sleep that carries them away for many decades from the course of events, returning back to life and searching for their ties to it. There is the boy searching for his father, who realizes that he had died a century before, and there is the lover in search for his beloved who meets her granddaughter who resembles her, a resemblance that makes him believe she is his beloved. The granddaughter falls in love with him, but when they discover the truth they become dumbfounded and loves flees. Similar things happen to the rest of the novel's characters, who eventually come to realise the temporal gap that separates them from the present. But it is not only the sense of a temporal gap that bespeaks the shock of medernity in these works. An issue that keeps cropping up in Al-Hakim's works, for example, is man's relationship to science, science being the hallmark of the West. He believes that man should not give full rein to the quest for scientific knowledge. This is, in his opinion, the main difference between the East and the West. The West is too preoccupied with science and things scientific, while the East, if left to its nature, will prefer to turn to issues of conscience. The same motif occurs in Al-Hakim's novel A Bird from the East. "What has science done for us?" asks one of the French characters in the novel, "In what way has it benefited us? The machines have provided us with speed, and what we have benefited from speed? It has resulted in the unemployment of workers and left us with more leisure time which we spend in useless activities." Two texts of the period deserve mention; these are Ibrahim Abdel-Qadir Al-Mazni's Ibrahim Al-Katib (Ibrahim the Writer), and Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad's Sarah. The two novels can be regarded as a development of Heikal's Zeinab in the centrality of the theme of love, and as a fictional translation of Qassim Amin's ideas about the emancipation of women.
