The half-century from the end of the First World War to the Arab defeat of 1967 is the central modernist period of Arabic literature. The novel matures in the hands of Naguib Mahfouz; the modern Arabic theatre is invented by Tawfiq al-Hakim; free-verse poetry breaks open under al-Sayyab, al-Mala'ika, and Adonis; the short story becomes a major form under Yusuf Idris and his contemporaries.
The political backdrop is the long withdrawal of European colonial control — the British from Egypt, the French from Syria, Lebanon, and the Maghreb — and the rise of pan-Arabism, Nasserism, and the Ba'th. The Palestinian Nakba of 1948 supplies the literature with a wound it has never finished addressing.
The period closes with the catastrophe of June 1967, when the rapid Arab military defeat by Israel discredited the post-independence political order in the eyes of much of the literary class and produced an explicit break in literary sensibility — the so-called jil al-naksa, the "generation of the setback".
