Like most Arab playwrights, Tewfiq al-Hakim was influenced most by French literature, especially by the works of Marivaux and de Musset, both playwrights of extremely refined sensibility.

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Texts used in this course:
1.M.M.Badawi, Editor; Arabic Writing Today: The Drama. (Princeton, New Jersey: Arabic Research Center in Egypt. 1977)

2. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Roger Allen, eds.: Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology (Indiana Series in Arab and Islamic Studies) 1995 (9780253209733):

3. THEATER THREE (No. 6. Spring 1989) there are a number of essays on the drama of the Arab World.

Tewfiq al-Hakim (October 9, 1898 - July 26 , 1987)

Tewfiq al-Hakim is considered both the founder of modern Egyptian drama and the man who gave to the drama the same prestige in the Arab world that the other, and formerly 'higher' literary forms enjoyed. Though he has written novels and short stories and poems his reputation as a man of letters rests upon his plays: and this reverses the usual relation between the literary forms in the Arab world where the writers establish their reputations in the other forms and write drama "on the side".

2. Like many Arab playwrights, Tewfiq al-Hakim was influenced most by French literature, especially by the works of Marivaux and de Musset, both playwrights of refined sensibility. Much of that sensibility is reflected in THE SULTAN'S DILEMMA. Marivaux and de Musset are not obvious theatrical poets, as, say, Racine, Corneille or Moliere are: in fact, de Musset's plays were not written for performance - though they are successfully revived today. We are finding out how fine they can be as theatrical experiences.

At the time Tewfiq al-Hakim started writing (1919) drama in Europe was undergoing an anti-realist phase among intellectuals: the phase of Maerterlinck, the increasing influence of Strindberg's Dream Plays, Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and the intellectual conundrums of Pirandello (an influence, along with Absurdist sources, on The Tree Climber, The Fate Of A Cockroach and other plays)

This was the period that saw the anti-Realist dramaturgy of Bertolt Brecht and the Epic Theater. This might account for a very striking aspect of Arab drama - at least the selection we are looking at: its relative indifference to psychological depth or plausibility, to subjective experience. Our volume has some very striking plays: The Song of Death, The Storm, The Key, The Newcomer (a finely sinister absurdist drama) and the astonishing and completely unique The Hunchback Sparrow (I've read nothing like it before).

Though the plays are very different from each other, they are also similar in their indifference to the 'realism of motivation', to psychological plausibility, that we find in most American and British drama or even in T.V. commercials! The language situation in the Arab world worked against establishing meticulous realism. The everyday, colloquial Arabic of local speech the language of personal and emotional life, was used for farces and popular melodramas that were not considered worth publishing. Serious plays were written in the more remote language derived from classical Arabic. A typical case is that of the dramatist Mahmoud Taymour, who wrote his realistic comedies in colloquial Arabic for performance, but when he came to publish them, rewrote them in classical Arabic.

Tawfiq al-Hakim wrote in both classical and colloquial Arabic. My guess is that in The Song of Death the Son, Ilwan, would speak the educated and classical Arabic of the University in Cairo, while the other characters, who stayed in the village, would speak in a local and colloquial idiom.
The Song Of Death, with The Storm, is probably the most realistic play in the volume. Tawfiq al-Hakim's other play in this volume, The Sultan's Dilemma is almost certain to be written in classical Arabic, to suit its lofty and remote setting and theme.

When al-Hakim started writing plays, the theater was held in such low esteem that he wrote under an assumed name, so as not to cause shame to his family. His second play was an attack upon the feminist movement in Egypt, parodying a book by a feminist writer, Qasim Amin. (He was to repent and write a pro-feminist play later.)

3. This tells us a lot: that the intellectual life of Egypt, as elsewhere in the Arab world, was being affected by political movements, such as feminism and socialism, taking place in Europe. That is, not only does the art form, drama, come from the outside, but so do many of the subjects of Arab drama. A problem for Arab dramatists is to establish their own individual 'voice' against the onslaught, now massive, of the Western media. They are very conscious of that and have tried to create this unique Arab voice for drama as, e.g. Irish writers tried to create a uniquely Irish drama, or African and Carribean writers have tried to identify their own dramatic-theatric sensibility.

Another problem for al-Hakim and other Arab dramatists, is that of earning a living by writing drama in such an uncertain theatrical environment: when the censor can forbid the performance of a play the night before opening, when even sympathetic theatre managers cannot keep risking their livelihoods on controversial writers.

al-Hakim and others have had to take up a profession and also to write articles to earn money. And if it is difficult for al-Hakim, who is the most respected dramatist in Egypt, it is far more so for much bolder and more controversial writers, like Mikhail Romane (THE NEWCOMER) or, in Syria, Mohamed Maghout, THE HUNCHBACK SPARROW..

For example, Mikhail Romane has continually been hounded by the authorities and the censor. One sympathetic reviewer has said that Mikhail Romane is not only the most angry of writers: all performances of his plays create anger, either with him or against him. Only a few of his plays have been performed or published.

That is why it is so difficult to get a good idea of what talent there is in Arab drama: the indications are that there is a lot and that we are being prevented from looking at some of the best: and that these offer an idea of the theater quite unlike our own Western ideas. There has been the same situation in Latin America and in Eastern Europe.

Why I find The Hunchback Sparrow so exciting is that I cannot imagine it being written by anyone outside Arab culture: its blend of extraordinary poetry and grim fantasy are unlike anything in Western drama.

4. THE SONG OF DEATH
This play is part of a collection of plays by Tewfiq al-Hakim dealing with social questions. (Cf. Theater Three pp. 26-28) One of the plays is a somewhat pro-feminist one in which the heroine breaks with the traditional form of arranged marriages to get the man of her own choice. Another play takes a far more conservative stand, when a woman member of Parliament, facing a conflict between her career and her marriage, abandons her career. Again, feminism is a hot issue in Egypt (Anwar Sadat's wife is a prominent feminist). Other plays deal with such problems of Egyptian life and political corruption, bureaucracy and its inefficiencies, and so on.

THE SONG OF DEATH is recognized as the most successful of these short social plays, and it manages to create much the same stark, rural tragedy that Lorca created out of Spanish traditions: in Blood Wedding, Yerma or The House of Barnada Alba.

In Tawfiq al-Hakim's play, however, it is not only the tragic implications of the Vendetta convention that creates the action, but the challenge of a wholly new view of life that the son, Ilwan, brings from a 'modern' and urban Cairo. So this is a clash of the Old vs. the New, the Country vs. the City, the Family vs. Social Law
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In Western drama we are most aware of this vendetta ethic in the story of Orestes, and it would be interesting to compare the plot of THE SONG OF DEATH to that of Sophocles' ELECTRA. Ilwan can be seen as a disenchanted Orestes: his implacable mother is a version of Elektra.

Ilwan, who so misunderstands his own, traditional culture, stands for modern progress, for enlightenment and a form of justice which, as in The Oresteia, (The Eumenides) is removed from the responsibility of the family and given to the civic community,

The play condenses a major cultural conflict in Egyptain experience. It is not a clash of Good vs. Evil, or even Right vs. Wrong, but of the new world vs. the old. In other plays, Tawfiq al-Hakim has criticized that new world order of Egypt: its bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, and cosmopolitan follies and sometimes he defends the traditional, conservative way of life; or at least laughs at the pretensions of modernity.

But in this play we are also see the value within the modern tendencies of Egypt and the deadly effects of the older, traditional way of life. The play is most likely taken from an actual episode, (as was Lorca's Blood Wedding, by the way, from an incident that Lorca read about in a newspaper.) Tawfiq al-Hakim had been a public prosecutor in rural Egypt and must have found himself up against the deep-rooted traditionalism, going back thousands of years, of Egyptian village life.

The play is built upon a set of oppositions that encapsule the attempted evolution from tribal to Civic life. There are three tragic characters, ILWAN, attempting to bring his home village ito the new order of modern, cosmopolitan Cairo, ASAKIR and SIMEIDA brought up in the old Vendettan tradition who simply cannot envisage any other way of life. Family honor is the supreme value, the value of a 'shame' culture, where loss of respect in the village and family is the ultimate misfortune. This is a 'Mediterranean' Old Testament and middle-eastern concept of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth". ASAKIR like ELECTRA, has waited for years for the one murderous action that will restore honor to the family and avenge her husband's death.

The play is built on the clash of two projects. ASAKIR wishes ILWAN to be an Orestes, an avenger of family Honor. She had planned for ILWAN to become a butcher in Cairo and so learn better how to kill effectively, BUT ILWAN, brought up and educated in Cairo, has turned to religion and law, in other words, to universal values. He is typical of the idealistic young students in Cairo and Alexandria in the 1950's who overthrew King Farouk and later supported Gamel Abdel Nasser and his Socialist ideology, ILWAN, as the son who escaped the village, believes in brotherhood, not vengeance. He utterly fails to fathom his mother's traditional values.

Simeida is the 'Son' who stayed and he also is a tragic figure. His future is entirely destroyed by ASAKIR (he is certain to be punished, perhaps executed, for the murder) so that he is an example of a lost generation denied the chance of the enlightenment of the new ideology of the state and of the City. In SIMEIDA we see the relentless pendulum logic of the tribal vendetta law.

ASAKIR, blind to anything but her unyielding passion for vengeance, destroys her own family, (ILWAN and SIMEIDA), more effectively than her supposed enemy, Suweilam Tahawi, ever could have done. She has wiped out the new generation of menfolk so the family line has come to an end. She is 'tragic' rather than hateful because, like Sophokles' Elektra, she is true to the the logic of the tradition that created her. Her seventeen years of constancy to her one project of vengeance is as 'heroic' as Elektra's, suffering humiliation, as she sees it, from her enemies, in order to safely raise her avenger. (It is most likely that Tewfiq al-Hakim, who studied Greek drama was deliberately using the ORESTES story as well as an actual happening).

p.81 "Simeida, are you a man?"

This is ASAKIR'S trump card. Her definition of a 'man' is tribal and it is conflict with the 'brotherhood' of ILWAN. This clash between tribalism and civic law is enlarged, in the Arab world, also into the (now lost) cause of Pan-Arabism, and into the various communities of Islam and of Christianity.

Islam, like Christianity and early Judaism, is a "conversion religion" (as Malcolm X discovered on his visit to MECCA) which welcomes all races and so embraces all humanity. Therefore, it cannot be limited to the tribe or the village, race or nation. Ideally, it would seek the same 'Religious Commonwealth" that the medieval Christian Church once sought before the advent of Nationalism in 15th. century Europe

The early Islamic world was a community, ruled from a single city (Baghdad, then Damascus, then Cairo, then Istanbul). So the Arab imagination can consist in the form of a series of ever widening circles:

Family-tribe-village-nation(all religions)-Arab peoples-Muslims - people of the Book, humanity at large.

An educated cosmopolitan, like al-Hakim and most Arab dramatists and theatre folk, is impelled along this ideological trajectory, from 'local' to universal. In the next play of al-Hakim's we will be reading we will find him dramatizing his universal philosophy where, though using an Arabic setting, he dramatizes a situation he believes belongs to the human race itself.

THE SULTAN'S DILEMMA
The play, THE SULTAN'S DILEMMA, follows another Arabic tradition: to write about the modern world in the guise of returning to the past, to an 'Arabian Nights' (aka 'One Thousand And One Nights' = 'Alf leila wa leila') fantasy world, as also in THE WINES OF BABYLON and THE KING IS THE KING. Tewfiq al Hakim uses the One Thousand and One Nights device as a way of presenting a morality play about the preference for the Law over the use of Power (the Sword). The play is set in the medieval past but its moral is addressed to the modern world which al Hakim saw as caught in a dilemma of having to choose between international law and the use of naked force. It was written not long after the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel. However, the relevance of the play to the modern situation seems somewhat remote.

Other Arab dramatists have used the One Thousand and One Nights setting as a way of indirectly criticizing their own governments and authorities. This has always been a kind of subterfuge of writers who face persecution and imprisonment. The East European writers, like Mrozek or Havel, constructed enigmatic parables which audiences were meant to read between the lines.. Farouk Khorshid in The Wines of Babylon (written in 1967 after the destruction of the Arab forces in the 6-day war) uses the Arabian Nights setting as a way of attacking the corruption of the Egyptian authorities who have given in to the influence of Western Capitalism. The play pretends to be a tour though the exotic Arab past but actually is a dissection of modern Egyptian corruption, of the way in which this corruption has allowed incompetents to take hold of power. In The King is the King Sa'dallah Wannus uses a more elaborate framing device to create a satire on political authority.

Tewfiq al-Hakim, however, is not being satirical or subversive: he has chosen his 'One Thousand And One Nights' setting as a way of 'distancing' and 'universalizing' his theme. He draws attention to this Orientalizing setting by at one point having the Sultan commend that his role with the Courtesan is the reverse of that between the Sultan and Scheherezade.

The play was written while al-Hakim was in Paris, as an Egyptian representative of the United Nations - the widest 'universalist' ideology of all. THE SULTAN'S DILEMMA is a parable about the preference of the LAW over the SWORD (or military power) - a wider version of the conflict in THE SONG OF DEATH. In THE SONG OF DEATH the young man, ILWAN, also had tried to bring "an alternative way" to the traditional, vendetta culture of the village, and had been sacrificed for his idea.

ILWAN's mother had represented what the JUSTICE (CADI) and VIZIER represent in t hisplay - the old traditional Law and the power of the Sword to kill. al-Hakim's Preface to the play expresses his real concern that in our nuclear age we might turn disastrously to the Sword. But this play is not a tragedy but a 'philosophical comedy' in which the tragic reality can be transcended for a 'parable of Reason', somewhat like Lessing's NATHAN THE WISE. It creates a Utopia that transcends
everyday reality.

The play is an example of what he calls his "theater of the mind" rather than a theater of the stage. These plays for the theater of the mind tend to be abstract, intellectual, remote, without very invidual characterization, subtext or psychology. THE SULTAN'S DILEMMA, though somewhat repetitive and 'static' proved a popular and critical success when it was staged. And al-Hakim has a good dramatic sense: of framing the philosophic center of the play, the COURTESAN and the SULTAN, in a surrounding comedy of engaging social portraits.

He cleverly gives each of the three acts of the play its major focus of suspense: ACT ONE, after the comedy of the Condemned Man and the Executioner and of the Courtesan's delaying of the MUEZZIN'S announcing the dawn, we come to the first revelation: that the SULTAN, the mightiest man in the realm, is a slave, leading to the suspense: will the Sultan allow himself to be put up for a slave auction? Act Two builds up the suspense of the citizens awaiting the auction, the auction itself, and the shock that the buyer is the COURTESAN. Again, the SULTAN must make a decision: will he accept the legality of the sale or will he resort to power and destroy the COURTESAN?

ACT THREE again cleverly opens with the eager CROWD wondering what the SULTAN and the COURTESAN are up to, and waiting to see if and how the COURTESAN will free (manumitt) the SULTAN. The surprise of this act is that the COURTESAN turns out to be an intellectual more interested in learned discourse than in sex. Again, we have the comedy of the MUEZZIN, this time not having to delay the Dawn but to hurry it forward. It is extremely genial and civilized comedy.

7. As a parable in dramatic form, the play tends to be remote, non-realistic and to idealize the characters. However, one of the things that might seem preposterous to you actually is based on truth: the leaders of the Arab empire were chosen from slaves, from "Mamlukes' who showed they were especially gifted. This was to prevent dynastic rivalries which could put incompetent rulers on the throne. So the situation of the play, that the Sultan was a slave chosen by a previous Sultan who himself had been a manumitted slave who, however, had forgotten to 'free' his successor, is logically plausible.

SCENE The Scene could be any Arab capital: Baghad, Damascus, Cairo at a time when the empire was menaced by the Mongols. The fact that the Sultan is a Mameluk would suggest a date of about 1350 when Cairo was the capital of a brilliant and extensive empire, and when Catholic Europe had not yet emerged as a major civilization. The scene of the play is simplified to a City Square, where the people can gather and comment on events; and the Courtesan's House where the dilemma is resolved.

The characters are either essential elements of the dilemma or spectators and commentators.

VIZIER = Power of the sword
(CADI) = Law's absolute demands
SULTAN Power/Victim who must choose between the two.

CONDEMNED MAN represents the cause of the dilemma.
THE COURTESAN - helps resolve the dilema

The other characters form a comic frame round the central dilemma: The Condemned Man and Slave Owner sets the problem in motion. The Executioner who is the physical embodiment of the VIZIER'S rule of the Sword and who has tried to silence the Condemned Man by ordering his execution; the Wine Merchant and the Shoe Maker (the Choric commoners), and the MUEZZIN who is to usher in the fateful two dawns of decision. The Crowd as Chorus 'amplifies' these characters reactions to the central situation.

8. The play's structure is very controlled: We get to the Central action only through the frame of the subordinate drama of the Condemned Man, Executioner, Muezzin, Wine Merchant and Shoemaker. This frame holds for all three acts, even to the comic repetition of the Muezzin's predicament: first to keep the dawn back, then to hurry it along.

The purpose of keeping this frame is to let the central drama reverberate through a community and to provide a more down-to-earth human dimension to the rather rarefied central action.

9. It is the purpose of a parable to highlight the argument, not to interest us too much in the individual psychology of the characters, so there is absolutely no subtext to the play. To highlight the argument the predicament is driven to an extreme of absurdity that could not happen in 'real life'.
Does the emphasis on the argument hurt the dramatic emphasis of the play? Does the interest of the plot obscure the argument? Or does the play achieve a happy balance between drama and argument?

10. THE ARGUMENT
It is not at all evident that al-Hakim's concerns about the use of force in a nuclear age come across at all in the play. The Arabian Nights distancing and disguise is too effectively 'charming', so that the story is more entertaining than instructive.

11. THE STORY AND ARGUMENT COMBINED
The leading characters are the SULTAN and the COURTESAN, that is, the putative social outcast and the very center of social Power. Their 'high level liaison' is played off against the 'power politics' of the Vizier (who advocates the Sword) and the legal rigidities of the Judge, or Cadi, who insists on the absolute sanctity of the Law. These four characters carry the ethical argument of the play: whether the Law should be set aside when it proves inconvenient for Power.

The 'United Nations' aspect of this, I suppose, is whether powerful nations, like the United States, should abide by International Law when it proves inconvenient. (The United States, like Israel, has given a pretty clear answer - "Not on your life!") This high argument is played out onstage before the crowd and a group of individual spectators and their mundane curiosity, speculations and lack of comprehension:
the Muezzin, the Executioner the Condemned Man, the Wine Merchant and Shoe Maker. These, I suppose, in the wider (U.N.) argument stand for the "people of the world".

The Muezzin, who is first made to delay the arrival of the dawn in Act One and then to hurry it up in Act Three, and the Executioner, are also, I think, very effective comic presences who show how even Time and Death are in the service of Power. In this manner it is almost a 'Hollywood' plot for character actors, first the 'low' character actors: (Executioner, Muezzin, Wine Merchant, Shoemaker) then the sumptuously dressed dignitaries (Vizier and Justice),and finally the glamorous and noble pair at the center of the story, the COURTESAN and the SULTAN.

The moral of the fable is a blandly happy celebration of exalted virtues remote from the actual difficulties of power and politics in real life. In this it is similar to Lessing's play, NATHAN THE WISE.

METHOD OF THE PLAY
al-Hakim is very effective in the way he maintains dramatic momentum for an argument that is somewhat abstract. The opening dialogue between the EXECUTIONER and the CONDEMNED MAN is good comedy - their polite and decorous conversation over the appalling situation of beheading at dawn, the hilarious reversal of roles where it is the EXECUTIONER who feels depressed and resentful towards his victim, the EXECUTIONER'S overriding desire to be begged by the CONDEMNED MAN to sing his own composition, ¨The Flower and the Gardener' (pp.98-99), his insistence that the request be absolutely sincere (100), torturing the CONDEMNED MAN into repeating the request in ever more fervent and ardent terms (101) and the CONDEMNED MAN'S hilarious attempt at a passionate appeal, than, finally, the song itself which turns out to be a very grim version of the CONDEMNED MAN'S condition at the hands of the EXECUTIONER.

There follows the plot of the courtesan to save the condemned man by entertaining the MUEZZIN and delaying the dawn. All the time, we are kept in suspense as to what it was that condemned the MAN to death: what was the utterance that must not again be spoken?: and we do not learn this until we have two impressively costumed processions: first the VIZIER and his guards, then the SULTAN and the CHIEF JUSTICE.

It is only when we see the SULTAN in all his glory, surrounded by his ministers, that we discover he was once bought and sold as a slave by the CONDEMNED MAN and that he is still a slave. The seemingly leisurely approach to this revelation is good dramatic writing: we are allowed to see a whole society, from highest to lowest, gradually caught up in the central event: and from now on, all the actions that develops from this will be similarly framed, taking place in public, before the excited and involved community.

This prevents the discussion between the SULTAN (Power) the VIZIER (Force) and the JUSTICE (the Law) from being dry and abstract. The logic that leads the JUSTICE to the conclusion that the SULTAN, the ruler of the empire, must sell himself off to whoever will buy him, is wonderfully absurd and could only exist in a parable-like, non-realistic format. When the SULTAN chooses the Law, we think the solution will be easy: someone will buy him, then release him and be rewarded.

ACT TWO, therefore, must not only keep up the atmosphere of social comedy and suspense but it must contain some huge surprise and reversal. Once again, the comedy and suspense is built up through the crowd that has come to watch the auction: the "uses' the Wine Merchant and Shoemaker imagine they might make of the SULTAN if they bought him, the little child who wants his mother to buy the SULTAN as if he were a new plaything, the re-appearance of MUEZZIN, EXECUTIONER, and CONDEMNED MAN (now as slave AUCTIONEER). It is clever dramatic structuring, using the same figures but in new ways, instead of having to bring on new characters for the new situation.

pp. 138-=This is true, above all, in the Auction Scene. An auction scene, with different bidders, is suspenseful in itself (like trial scenes). Al-HAkim makes it even more so by having the highest bidding being done by an unknown man who turns out to be working for a mystery client. Further suspense. Especially when the unknown man will not divulge the identity of his client, is forced into a collision with the authorities, is threatened with torture, and is only saved when (GASP!) it turns out that it is the COURTESAN who is the client! (145).

This another example of al-Hakim's excellent 'working' of his dramatis personae: no-one new comes into the play: the surprise comes from someone we already know and could not have suspected. So that the whole drama is being evolved through the same ensemble of characters: a sophisticated technique in playwriting: it is the familiar that proves to be surprising. After the COURTESAN has purchased the SULTAN there is further suspense as to whether she will agree to free him later. The Act ends with the potentially 'scandalous' situation of the SULTAN, purchased by a prostitute and spending the night with her. And, again, the SULTAN insists on obeying the logic of the situation and submitting to her.

In ACTE THREE once again opens with the framing crowd, the SHOEMAKER and WINE MERCHANT and the dignitaries gathered round the extraordinary situation. THE EXECUTIONER re-appears, this time to prepare to execute the COURTESAN if the MUEZZIN should announce the dawn and the SULTAN is not released.

When the play shifts to the interior of the COURTESAN'S house, instead of the erotic situation we, with the crowd in the play, anticipate, we are treated to a very high-minded discourse as each character, the SULTAN and the COURTESAN reveals absolute nobility of mind.

When we return to the crowd and the authorities VIZIER, JUSTICE, EXECUTIONER, we find they have fallen into the trap that al-Hakim saved us from falling into: that the SULTAN is spending a night as a prisoner in a bawdy house (173) and must be rescued to save the dignity of the state. There is a recapitulation of the comedy about the dawn, this time it is hurried forward to midnight by the poor bewildered MUEZZIN, thereby astonishing and angering the crowd.

It is into this comic confusion that the COURTESAN and the SULTAN now appear, calm, reasonable, dignified, representing the triumph of reason over all forms of coercion and force. The SULTAN refuses to accept the trick about hurrying forward the dawn but the COURTESAN releases him, recognizing, like him, the rights of "law and principle" al-Hakim, then, creates a comic parable of confusion to dispel confusion and to proclaim the pre-eminence of reason, law and principle. Like many of the stories in ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS it draws a 'moral' for ordinary life from the extraordinary fictional events.

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