Although alas, Ghali wrote it in English. I would also dearly like to include Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, as it’s the sort of book I love so much you might reasonably expect to find it underneath my pillow. How could I possibly slight Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North? Mohammad Choukri’s For Bread Alone? No excuse, except that the list is a personal one. Like any personal list, mine fails in some significant way. There are a few lists of the best Arabic novels: The Arab Writers’ Union put together a top 105 for the twentieth century, and fourteen authors, journalists, scholars, and translators put together their “5 to read before you die” lists back in 2010. If we narrow the pool to novels, it makes the job appear slightly less foolish. To weigh the literary craftsmanship of al-Mutanabbi (915-965) against the observations of Ibn Battutta (1304-1377), the stagings of Tawfik al-Hakim (1898 – 1987) and Saadallah Wannous (1941-1997), the poetic mastery of Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), or the flowering of the Thousand and One Nights is a fool’s task. Arabic literature is immense in its scope.
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