Aliens in This World

Conventional wisdom apparently holds that Zeinab 1914, a novel by an Egyptian man named Mohammed Hussayn Haykal which was published in 1914 in Cairo, was the first novel written in Arabic.

However, at least 13 earlier novels written in Arabic have been found. Mostly written by women. (Heh!) The earliest, Husn Alawqab (The Best Results), was written by a Lebanese woman, Zeinab Fawaz, and published in Cairo in 1899.

Many of the others were written by Lebanese Catholic women, and serialized in New York’s Al-Huda newspaper. Labiba Sawayya wrote one called Hasna’ Salunik, which I can’t find anything more about. Afifa Karam (aka Mrs. Afifa Hanna, or Mrs. Afifa Karam John) wrote Badia and Fouad, published in 1906. In the context of a shipboard romance on a boat sailing from Lebanon to New York, it apparently examines all sorts of concerns of women and immigrants.

Afifa Karam herself apparently gained some literary notice as a writer of several novels, reporter, magazine owner/editor, and translator. She’s mentioned in the old Catholic Encyclopedia, has her bio mentioned here, and had a very nice obituary in her retirement town, Shreveport, Louisiana.

It sounds as though we have some hidden treasures of our Catholic and immigrant heritage which we might like to explore. So if anybody out there knows Arabic and needs a subject for his or her thesis….

Beyond that, UD points out that there are tons of early American Catholic novels which were serialized in the various ethnic or religious newspapers and magazines. Kathy Shaidle has a point about the sometimes-excessive American and Canadian Catholic love for Chesterton and Belloc and Lewis and Sayers and Tolkien. But we don’t have a lot of alternatives to them in accessible form, now, do we?

Well, maybe a few, as this article points out. And a few folks who are famous writers who are from Catholic backgrounds, or became Catholic. But I sure didn’t learn about those folks’ Catholic connection in English class, did you?
So the thing to do is to find out which books are Catholic literature that you didn’t know were, and which forgotten books are “lost classics”, and then let people know about both categories. I don’t know that there are a lot of lost literary gems there, but… there’s something to be said for actually getting to read anything that’s decent American Catholic fiction. A little comfort read, a little potboiler… yeah, I could go for that.