, ,

On the Field of Arabic Studies

On the Field of Arabic Studies

Jonas Elbousty with Roger Allen

Translator-scholar Jonas Elbousty talks with Roger Allen about his journey in the field of Arabic Studies.

Jonas Elbousty:  What first sparked your interest in your field of study?

Roger Allen: I grew up in the city of Bristol in England and went to private schools there. From the age of about 13, I was identified as someone who would want to study languages, and especially the Classical languages, Greek and Latin. I learned to read texts and translate English prose and poetic texts into those two languages—in the case of poetry, Greek iambics and Latin hexameters and pentameters.  I was admitted to Lincoln College, Oxford, to continue those studies, but it only took about one term for me to realize that I did not wish to continue studying much the same materials as I had been doing for several years.  I have to admit that, as I searched for some other field of study, Arabic appeared right “out of the blue.”  I knew nothing about the language or the regions where it is spoken. Beyond the learning process that ensued, it was the arrival at Oxford of Muhammad Mustafa Badawi that really sparked my interest in the field of modern Arabic literature studies—essentially a new field in the 1960s.

JE: Can you describe the journey that led you to become an expert in your area of research?

RA: As I noted above, my decision to start Arabic studies was essentially a random choice, but the teachers with whom I studies at Oxford—A.F.L. Beeston, Albert Hourani, and Mustafa Badawi—were each inspirational in their own way. Once again, having obtained a B.A. in Arabic Studies in 1965, it was entirely at random that I was encouraged to apply for graduate study—something that had never even occurred to me as the first member of my family ever to go to university. If the fact that I won a doctoral government fellowship was not amazing enough, then the suggestion that I conduct research in Egypt was even more so. When my parents watched me take off for Cairo from Heathrow Airport in August 1966, neither they nor I had any idea what the future would hold. That time in Cairo was, of course, transformative, not only for the people I met (many of them curious about the interest of a young British scholar in modern Egyptian literature) but also because my researches in the newspaper archive of the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub) provided me with plentiful material for my D.Phil thesis presented in 1968—the first thesis on modern Arabic literature in the history of Oxford University. It was also because the fields for research in Egypt now expanded between the traditional emphases on ancient and medieval Egypt to the modern period—with all the potential controversial political and social implications.

Totally fortuitous also was my arrival at the University of Pennsylvania in August 1968, filling the newly advertised position in modern Arabic literature (although, as it soon emerged, Albert Hourani, one of my Oxford mentors, had close connections with the faculty in Philadelphia). It is from those beginnings in the late 1960s that my 50-year career has developed, on the local, national, and international levels.

Ever since I started teaching. doing research, and translating, I have been incredibly fortunate in my colleagues, both locally and beyond, and in my students. Early in my career, I was asked to serve in the university’s central administration, and, just nine years after my arrival in the United States, I was chosen as president of the Arabic Teachers Association.  Foreign-language teaching was to be a major part of the my career from the outset, and it assumed major proportions when in, 1986, I was asked to serve as National Trainer for Testers in Proficiency in Arabic by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), a post that I held until 2002 and which led me to offer workshops across the United States, as well as in Europe and Egypt.

In the research realm, I was lucky to obtain grants to continue my work on the early phases in the development of modern Egyptian literature, and that concentration would continue for many decades. In the 1990s and 2000s, I was privileged to work closely with Gaber Asfour and his Al-Maglis al-A`la li-al-Thaqafa, which held a number of conferences on literature and translation.  He eventually commissioned me to prepare for publication the complete works of both Al-Muwaylihi, who had been the topic of my DPhil dissertation at Oxford. My research interests expanded into a focus on the development of the Arabic novel, resulting in a book on the subject in 1982, but initially my focus was mostly on the central regions of the Arabic-speaking world.  It was during the 1990s and 2000s that my regional interests expanded, to include most notably the output of Maghrebi authors (although I’ll confess at the same time that Gulf authors were not part of my purview, a feature that has now been gradually changing on the larger scale). As part of this broader scene in literary scholarship, I have been privileged to serve on the publication boards of several journals, thus providing me with the welcome opportunity to learn about and read up on the research activities of my colleagues in the field.

Translation was a central part of my concerns and interests from the start, namely my Oxford dissertation.  That emphasis only increased when I started teaching and had to provide material for an undergraduate course on modern Arabic literature.  Since those early days, translation of Arabic fiction into English has paralleled my research on Arabic literature as primary focuses of my academic activities and publications.  In addition to the large number of works that I have translated as individual projects, I have also worked with colleagues in a number of different formats and configurations. Two projects stand out for me in this context.  The first is PROTA, the project for translating Arabic, founded by Salma Khadra al-Jayyusi, the Palestinian poet and critic, which fostered a number of translation projects published by Columbia University Press and other presses and that provided teachers of modern Arabic literature with a wide variety of texts for use in comparative literature classes.  The second project involved my European connections, Mémoires de la Mediterranée, and it brought together translators working in at least six different languages with the author of a work of Arabic literature—writ large.

Toward the end of my lengthy career, in 2009, I was elected president of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association (and I believe that I remain the only literature scholar to have held that position), and at the time of my retirement in 2011, I had been serving as chair of my department at the University of Pennsylvania for six years, the very same department to which I had come from England some 43 years earlier! As I reflect on all those years, I am aware that I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to so many colleagues, friends, and, yes, students who helped foster and maintain the atmosphere within which it was possible to build and develop a career.

JE: You wrote:

I will admit, a product of the stage that I myself have by now reached in my own career—one that permits me to look back over more than forty years of reading works of Arabic fiction. It thus places me not merely in a somewhat ancient generation but also among the very first pioneers specializing in what was then (the early 1960s) a radically new and somewhat disparaged field—that of “modern Arabic literature studies.” I was and am, in fact, the first Oxford graduate student to obtain a doctorate degree in that subject (1968). That’s not to say, of course, that modern Arabic texts were not taught at Oxford before that decade, but merely to note that they were considered a “special subject,” something that you might dabble in if you so desired, but only after you had studied the texts of the major canon (or, at least, the Oxonian version thereof).

How was the Arabic studies field back in the 1960s? What are the emerging trends or exciting developments in your field of study?

RA: When I began my career in the 1960s, the primary focus of research in the literary field was based on the philological tradition of Semitic Studies and its interest in what might be termed the “pre-modern” period (however that was to be defined). To use terms that were developed as part of the processes of change in literature studies in the second half of the 20th century, the approach was more “diachronic” than “synchronic.”  Authors and texts were to be discovered, transcribed, edited, and published, and then placed into a historical framework, one that tended to focus on periods and other external factors rather than the theoretically based analysis of genres. The increased attention to the more “synchronic” analysis of works of Arabic literature (from all historical periods) was to be part of the general movement in literature studies (and comparative literature studies in particular) that developed in the latter half of the 20th century (the application of the Parry-Lord theory to pre-Islamic poetry being just one example).  When I began to express my interest in the study of modern Arabic literature, it was still regarded at Oxford as a “special subject.”

In 1972, the newly established MESA (1967) convened a conference at Stanford to discuss “the state of the art” in Middle East Studies, the title of the book published in 1976 (edited by Leonard Binder) that brought the proceedings together.  Even though I had only been in the United States for four years, I was asked to chair the “literature” segment. With my colleagues William Hanaway and Walter Andrews, I found myself asked to identify the “parameters” of our discipline, and I can now reflect on the fact that the discussions that we had at that conference helped us identify and develop the theoretical modes of analysis that were to be and become a central part of the development of the field of comparative (world) literature studies and to which the study of Arabic literary genres has gradually become attached. An immediate consequence of the conference and its findings was that the three of us decided to establish a new journal, Edebiyat, that was published as an independent entity for several years before being integrated into the Journal of Arabic Literature.

 JE: What were some of the challenges you faced while pursuing your academic career?

RA: As I look back, the biggest challenge that I faced was in the realm of language instruction. It was in 1980 that, as a result of a damning report on the nation’s “language readiness,” the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) received two federal grants: one to run a series of workshops that would teach academics how to perform the government agencies’ oral proficiency interview (OPI), and a second project to prepare a set of “ACTFL Guidelines” that would detail for each of the four language skills the various expectations at different levels.  The University of Pennsylvania’s French program decided to participate in the first project, and I agreed to add the Arabic program to it.  I was trained as an OPI tester in 1984, and also agreed to start the process of preparing specific ACTFL Guidelines for Arabic.  Given the prominence that both projects gave to communicative competence (as opposed to textual competence), the case of Arabic, with its standard language and wide variety of regional dialects, presented a major problem. The first version of the ACTFL Arabic Guidelines was published in 1984, and it was just one of a number of publications that I composed on the subject.  It was in 1986 that ACTFL asked me to become the first ACTFL Trainer of Testers for Arabic, and in that role I conducted OPI workshops across the United States, as well as in Europe and Egypt.

Compared with the many challenges to language instruction that the “proficiency movement” brought with it—a move, for example, toward communicative competence as a primary instructional goal as opposed to textual competence—my research activities in the literary realm have proceeded over the decades without the need to face any major challenges.

JE: Who or what has had the most significant influence on your academic journey?

RA: Three names: Badawi, Hourani, Naff.  Mustafa (“Mo”) Badawi, who was appointed at Oxford in 1963-4, was my supervisor, mentor, and inspiration. He encouraged me to go to Cairo to do research, introduced me to his friends—such as Louis Awad, the renowned journalist, and Magdi Wahba, under-secretary at the Ministry of Culture—and steered me through the doctoral degree program at Oxford, leading to my DPhil in 1968.  A constant source of support for myself and many other students of modern Arabic literature at Oxford and elsewhere, he later wrote a glowing review of my book, Introduction to Arabic Literature (Journal of Islamic Studies) 14: 1 (2003), and, shortly before his death in 2012, wrote an essay for one of the three volumes of my own festschrift. Albert Hourani was a major figure in Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford, teaching courses in pre-modern and modern history and chairing the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College. He was a constant source of support as I was undertaking my research, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, contacted one of his former students, Thomas Naff, who had been appointed Director of the newly established Near East Center at the University of Pennsylvania (1967). Tom came over to Oxford to interview both myself and Brian Spooner, the anthropologist, and recommended both of us for positions that we duly accepted in 1968. Over the ensuing decades, Tom was to be a constant source of support for modern studies of all kinds, and it was, of course, the greatest of pleasures when Albert Hourani accepted his offer to come to the University of Pennsylvania as a Visiting Professor.

JE: What advice would you give to someone starting out in academia today?

RA: If their interest is in the study of literature, I would emphasize the need to acquire the necessary communicative competence in Arabic alongside what is obviously a need for a high level of textual skill in reading, comprehension, and interpretation.  Those requirements will also require familiarity with developments in literary theory as applied to the various literary genres.  Within the current context, a general acquaintance with the Arabic-speaking world in all its breadth will be desirable, although I’ll be the first to admit that it is probably not feasible or desirable at this point to try to “cover” the entire region.  Alongside a general familiarity with the region in all its diversity, more focused research will now tend to concentrate more on specific theoretical and critical approaches and particular historical or regional concentrations.  As part of all that, I would recommend that periods of study abroad should be an integral part of any educational sequence.

JE: Looking back, would you have chosen any different paths in your academic life?

RA: It was when I was either 13 or 14 that the question arose as to whether I should pursue a program  involving the study of languages or should rather embark on a difficult career with the intention of becoming a professional musician. I have never regretted choosing the former path, but have been equally gratified by pursing a career as what I would call a “semi-professional” musician alongside my academic career—that of organist-choirmaster in Oxford, Cairo, and now in Philadelphia where, after 26 years as director of music at a parish on the UPenn campus, I am still assistant organist at my current suburban parish in Philadelphia.

In June 2011, Roger Allen retired from his position as the Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also served as Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations. He served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) for the year 2009-2010. He is Honorary President of the Banipal Trust and Sub-editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam 3rd edition for modern Arabic literature. He is a 2020 winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Shaikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding (Qatar). Among his numerous published studies on Arabic literature are: The Arabic Novel: an historical and critical introduction (2nd edition 1995, 2nd Arabic edition 1998), and The Arabic Literary Heritage in 1998 (and in abbreviated paperback form in 2000, as Introduction to Arabic Literature; Arabic translation, Cairo, 2003). He has also translated several fictional works by modern Arab writers.

Jonas Elbousty is an academic, writer, literary critic, and translator. He teaches in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. He is the author or co-author of ten books, including Exploring Contemporary Arabic Novels for Advanced Students of Arabic: Voices from the Arab Gulf Countries (Routledge, 2026), Nasr Sami, Uprooting: Dog and Cat Pizza Chapters, Futures: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab Theater (53rd State Press), Faces (Georgetown University Press, 2024), Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives (Routledge, 2024), The Screams of War (Seagull Books 2024), Tales of Tangier (Yale University Press 2023), Aswat Mu’asira: Short Stories (Georgetown University Press 2023), Media Arabic (Routledge 2021), Arabic Literary Reader (Routledge 2014), Vitality and Dynamism: Interstitial Dialogues of Language, Politics, and Religion in Morocco’s Literary Tradition (Leiden University Press 2014). His work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, ArabLit, ArabLit Quarterly, Asheville Poetry Review, Banipal, Prospectus, Sekka, Journal of North African Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Literature, Journal of New Jersey Poets, World Literature Today,  The Markaz Review, among other publications.