Abstract :
Ainsi, tous les grands romans « dénoncent le principe de la fiction, qui les a nourris. Ils sʹavancent vers une référence dans le monde réel qui est leur terminus ad quem ».2
The ‘Mirror of an Era’ is the title we chose for this essay on two common-axised, time-paralleled and inter-complementary works of Arab literature: Mir’āt al-‘ālam (Mirror of the World) and Fatra min az-zaman (A Lapse of Time), written by two Muwayliīs, Ibrāhīm (the father) and Muammad (the son), respectively.
Both works are classified as a modern genre of maqāma for the 19th century. They are tied together by their central themes and traverse theses, revolving around ‘the destiny of the East in confronting the West during the 19th century’. Moreover, they jointly contributed to the narrative evolution of this genre and to its progressive transition towards a novel structure. Differences between both works did not make them distant from one another. On the contrary, they brought them closer and made them complementary, as if they were two different sides of the same coin. In this sense they are a ‘two tier chronicle of a society: terrestrial and celestial’. These elements have prompted a comparative study of the narrative structure of both works, coupled with a research into the maqāma evolution, which resulted from them.
The approach used by the two Muwayliīs was a considerable contribution not only to literature innovation but also to a modern way of thinking. Indeed, they made of the modern maqāma of the 19th century a space in which to build an ideology via the doxa used in the texts, so as to make a collective representation of the world and their contemporary societies.
Each with his own style, the two authors created imaginary events to simulate the real world. Their ultimate objective was to make the Umma aware of its internal conditions and external circumstances, including the influence of western civilization. This ideological stance, expressed in a literary language, was a precise reflection of the authorsʹ efforts and experiences within the framework of the Naha movement, mid-way between traditionalism and modernism.
Both works were written during almost the same period of time, between 1898 and 1903. They first appeared as series of articles in Mibā al-sharq (The Torch of the East), the newspaper founded and directed by Ibrāhīm. The weekly publication of these articles was in itself an innovation in written Arab literary prose. These instalments were none other than integrated ‘chapters of a novel’, something that did not exist previously in Arabic literature. The tool for this innovation was a newspaper. Hence, Ibrāhīm created in the Arab world a contact point between literature, novelistic narrative and journalistic discourse, with a view to serving mainly the cause of the Muslim Arab and Muslim communities and their modernization.
The works of these two authors were half-way between an imaginary world depicted through the fiction of their maqāma about world societies and the real world depicted in a ‘journalistic discourse about the same societies’. This is how the two authors conceived their Naha action in terms of concepts, objectives and implementation. As a result, they modernized the way of writing literary fiction and transformed it into a vehicle for conveying their modern ideas.
