Tawfiq al-Hakim

Tawfiq al-Hakim was sent to Paris in the mid-1920s to study law, and returned to Egypt with a head full of Pirandello, Maeterlinck, and the Comédie-Française. The Arabic theatre he found at home was a music-hall affair of farce and melodrama; he set out, almost single-handedly, to invent a modern Arabic literary drama on the European model and largely succeeded.

His play Ahl al-Kahf (People of the Cave, 1933), drawn from the Qur'anic story of the Seven Sleepers, is generally credited as the first serious modern Arabic play. He went on to write more than seventy plays — historical (Shahrazad), philosophical (Pygmalion, his own version), absurdist (Ya Tali‘ al-Shajara, "O Tree Climber"), and political (Al-Sultan al-Ha'ir, "The Sultan's Dilemma").

As a novelist he is best remembered for two books. Awdat al-Ruh (Return of the Spirit, 1933) is a roman-fleuve of Cairo middle-class life under the Wafd that profoundly influenced the young Naguib Mahfouz. Yawmiyyat Na'ib fi al-Aryaf (Diary of a Country Prosecutor, 1937) is a savage comic novella drawn from his own time as a public prosecutor in the Egyptian Delta — a precursor to satire of bureaucratic absurdism a generation before Catch-22.

Al-Hakim later became infamous in Egyptian intellectual life for Awdat al-Wa'i (Return of Consciousness, 1974), an essay that attacked the legacy of Nasser shortly after the President's death — a position that lost him much of his standing on the Arab left but which has aged better than the criticism that greeted it. He died in Cairo in 1987 at eighty-eight.