Bibliographic record
Abstract
The contemporary Egyptian novel owes its existence to two literary sources: traditional narratives that were created in Egypt in nineteenth century by theologians, linguists, intellectuals, and poets and are related to old Arabic literary forms such as qasas and maqamah; and flawed translations, defective adaptations, and slavish imitations of European novels and romances that were done by a group of (mostly Christian) writers/translators who immigrated to Egypt from Lebanon and Syria in second half of nineteenth century. Authors of traditional narratives did not pay much attention to either plot or characters. Instead, they dealt mainly with cultural, political, historical, and philosophical questions, clung to conventional issues and conservative topics, and used a highly ornamental and rhetorical prose (which relied greatly on internal or end rhyme and is known as saj'). In contrast, writers/translators used a much simpler style and were more interested in narrating suspenseful events, placing dramatic characters at center of their works, and dealing with themes and motifs that were unfamiliar to their Muslim compatriots, such as free love, adultery, and women's emancipation. It is obvious from their writings that first group was mainly interested in educating and enlightening their readers, while second group was aiming primarily at entertaining their readers and capturing mass market. We shall start this review by looking closely at some of those traditional narratives and underlining their most striking intrinsic and extrinsic qualities. We shall also examine some of popular translations/adaptations and draw attention to their characteristics. At top of list of traditional works one finds Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz (1834) and Waqa'i' Tilmak (1867) by Rifa'ah Rafi' al-Tahtawi, 'Alam al-Din (1883) by 'Ali Mubarak, Hadith 'Isa ibn Hisham (1905) by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Layali Satih (1909) by Hafiz Ibrahim, and historical tales `Adhra' al-Hind (1897), Ladyas (1899), Dall wa Tayman (1899), and Waraqit al-As (1914) by Ahmad Shawqi. Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz (The Purification of Gold in a Summary Presentation of Paris) by Rifa'ah Rafi' al-Tahtawi (1801-1873) depicts educational journey of a young Egyptian man to Paris that lasted five years. After explaining reasons behind protagonist's voyage to Paris, which he regards as the capital of European culture (1) but also as the center of nihilism and pertinacity, (2) author comments on both Arabic and European cultures, and includes a considerable amount of scientific information and statistical data about Paris, its people, and its institutions. After dealing with protagonist's aspirations, author describes many intellectual and cultural obstacles he had to overcome before finishing his studies in Paris and returning home to Egypt. The theme of a young man leaving his country, facing different cultural and ideological challenges, and coming to terms with positive and negative aspects of another civilization was introduced here for first time into modern Arabic literature, and for later generations of Arab writers, this theme would prove to be most fertile. (3) Also, besides being important cultural document, Takhlis al-Ibriz is earliest bildungsroman in Egyptian literature. In addition to narrating an amusing story which depicts unusual journey, (4) author deals with protagonist's inner self and reflects upon his most intimate feelings and aspirations during his attempt to reach intellectual ideal and achieve a high educational level. Al-Tahtawi's next work, Waqa'i' Tilmak (The Battles of Telemachus), which is a free translation of Francois Fenelon's novel Telemaque (1699), is worth mentioning only because author criticizes despotic Khedive 'Abbas and his corrupt regime in a veiled manner, thus introducing roman a clef for first time into Arabic literature. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".