What do you know about how people live in Cairo or Beirut or Riyadh? What bearing does such information have upon your life? There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need? The ways that people think and work and suffer and fall in love and make enemies and sometimes make revolutions is the stuff of novels, and Arabic novels, while not yet lining the shelves of the local bookstore, have been increasingly available in English translation, offering a marvellous array of answers to questions we did not know we wanted to ask. On such subjects as: the nature of the clientele of the elegantly crumbling pre-Islamist bars in downtown Cairo, straight and gay (“The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany); what it felt like to live through the massacre in the Shatila refugee camp, in 1982, and how some of the people who still live there have been managing since (“Gate of the Sun,” by Elias Khoury); the optimal tactics that a good Saudi girl should use to avoid being married off, which appear to require that she study either medicine or dentistry (“Girls of Riyadh,” by the twenty-something Rajaa Alsanea, who has herself completed an advanced degree in endodontics). There is clearly insight as well as information in these books. And then, considering the reduced size and the volatility of the world we share, we might recall the essential lesson of a very old Arabic book that everyone knows, “The Thousand and One Nights”—that stories can have the power to save your life.

Our long history of indifference has made it difficult, down the years, to come by stories of Arab life that do not involve genies or magic lamps. True, the novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Arabic literature; poetry, an ancient art, has traditionally held wider prestige. The exciting new storytelling form, barely a century old, was adapted from the European novels that European armies brought in their wake: Napoleon’s troops were in Cairo for three years, but, thanks to Egypt’s Paris-worshipping nineteenth-century khedives, Balzac and Zola stayed for good. The form developed sporadically in the first half of the last century, and no more than three or four Arabic novels appeared in English before the mid-fifties. After the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, in 1988, there was a significant surge of interest—Mahfouz himself finally got an American commercial publisher—but the burden of bringing Arabic books to English readers still falls mainly on devoted translators, and on the small and heroic presses that have performed this service from the start. Their joint efforts have rarely mattered more. The Arab reading public, although avid for all sorts of fiction, in a plethora of newspapers and cheap feuilletons, has (for evident economic reasons) not fully embraced the novel as a published book. Few Arabic novels sell enough copies to earn their authors anything like a living income; even Mahfouz kept a civil-service job until he was sixty. Today, the most sophisticated literary public is under siege. “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads” is a saying that prevailed in what now seems a dream of literary possibility, free of stifling fundamentalism, civic chaos, and bombs.

Lately, there has been a concerted effort by forces of intercultural good will, Arab and otherwise, to bring newer Arabic literary works to our attention, with annual prizes—culminating in the so-called Arabic Booker Prize, established in 2007, in Abu Dhabi—whose principal aim is to secure international (but primarily English-language) publication. From the fifties through the seventies, the United States pursued a far more extensive project: the Franklin Book Programs translated and distributed American books in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and not only textbooks and dictionaries but “Little Women,” “Ethan Frome,” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”—books meant to promote “the Western ideals of the dignity and freedom of individual men” and to “minimize the difficulty of Arab-Western collaboration.” These days, the privately sponsored Global Americana Institute is attempting to renew this sort of literary diplomacy, starting with the publication of selected essays by Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. Yet, if the goal is collaboration, isn’t it as important to listen as to speak? There is little danger of encountering anything like official propaganda, since the Arab novelist stands, almost by definition—as a thinker, as a conduit of intellectual life—in opposition to the retrogressive forces in the modern Arab state.

Six years after winning the Nobel Prize, Mahfouz, aged eighty-two, was knifed in the neck by a religious zealot carrying out a fatwa issued by an Islamic cleric outraged by one of the books the Nobel committee had cited. (Mahfouz survived, and lived for twelve more years, although he temporarily lost the use of his right hand and had to relearn how to write.* The cleric is currently serving a life sentence in the United States, for his part in a conspiracy to bomb the United Nations and other New York monuments.) Nothing so grave has happened to Alaa Al Aswany, whose “Yacoubian Building,” a skillful page-turner with a winning cast of characters, takes on the subjects of class oppression, government corruption, torture in prison, the rise of fundamentalism, and the Egyptian state’s propensity to push even profoundly decent but poor young men to religious extremism and, ultimately, to killing.

Published in 2002, by a private Cairo firm—there being no way to get such a manuscript through the state’s official publishing house—“The Yacoubian Building” quickly became one of the biggest best-sellers that the Arab world has ever seen. In Humphrey Davies’s smooth English translation (Harper Perennial; $13.95), it has been an astonishingly big seller here, too, and the book has appeared in more than twenty other languages around the globe. Al Aswany believes that his international fame has kept him safe, although he has frequently been accused in the state-run media of the crime of “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad,” and the public discussions that he used to host at a Cairo café were shut down by the police. (He quickly relocated the discussions elsewhere.)

Even Rajaa Alsanea’s breezy “Sex and the City” takeoff, “Girls of Riyadh,” was initially banned in the author’s native Saudi Arabia, apparently for suggesting that upper-class Saudi girls might wish to escape their luxurious designer cages. The details of life within the cage have riveted non-Saudi readers, and have made the suitably hip and chirpy English translation—by the estimable Marilyn Booth, in conjunction with the author—another rare example of the Arabic novel as American best-seller. In this tight-locked cultural milieu, college girls who defy the Religious Police by wearing red on Valentine’s Day take on the sheen of political subversives.

But what about literature? Is it possible for anything like the grandly traditional novel of character development and moral nuance to emerge from societies in extremis, from writers routinely constrained or assailed? A critic reviewing Orwell’s “1984” complained that it might be truth, but it wasn’t fiction. We have, of course, come to see the novel as a form with many variant possibilities. Mahfouz, who spun complex social tales out of the apparently unquenchable vivacity of Cairo life, was able to reanimate the models of Balzac and Zola, but more recent Arab writers tend, understandably, toward Kafka or García Márquez. It should be no surprise that the prison novel has become a major Arabic genre; the icy emptiness of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag has been replaced, in the literature of duress, with Arab writers’ crowded and sweltering cells. How could traditional fiction comprehend this reality? Whether any book will outlast its moment is impossible to say, but what follows is an account of some novels that are worth reading now, and that may prove to be worth reading even when newspapers divert our attention to wars and prisons somewhere else.

Iraq is clearly not an easy place to write a novel these days. Even the brave young blogger known as Riverbend, the author of two published collections titled “Baghdad Burning,” fled with her family to Syria in the fall of 2007, and was last heard from as she rediscovered the pleasures of walking without continuously looking behind her. The American occupation has been the subject of a number of documentary films—more documentaries have been made about Iraq than about any other active conflict, thanks to the light weight and low cost of video cameras—but the care and cogitation required for a novel (never mind the publishers and bookstores) appear to have been most obtainable among members of the far-flung Iraqi diaspora, free in foreign lands to publish works that have often been simmering for years.

Mahmoud Saeed’s “Saddam City” (translated by Ahmad Sadri; Saqi Books; $12.95) was written in the early nineteen-eighties, soon after the author was released from the last of six terms of incarceration under Saddam Hussein. Saeed left Iraq in 1985, and managed to publish his book in Syria, albeit with two chapters destroyed, in the mid-nineties. Since 1999, he has lived in the United States, and for the past few years has taught Arabic literature and calligraphy in Chicago. He is in his seventies now, with a substantial and award-winning body of work in Arabic behind him. “Saddam City,” published at last in English in 2004, is based on what he saw in jail—the original Arabic title is literally “I Am the One Who Saw”—which he recorded, he says, “so that it would remain for future generations.”

For all the horror it details, this is a startlingly warm and humane book. Saeed, despite the incitements of his subject, does not aspire to the Kafkaesque—Kafka, it must be admitted, is among the most impossible of authors to emulate, along with García Márquez—but maintains a specificity of place and history (this happened in Basra, that happened in Mosul) and of the individuals who inhabit them. Set mostly in the run-up to the Iran-Iraq War, in the late nineteen-seventies, this slender novel tells of a mild-mannered Basra schoolteacher who, although cautiously apolitical, is whisked off one day for “a simple interrogation.” His subsequent experience in six levels of hell—six prisons in all—is exactingly described, but the long ordeal is mitigated, both for him and for the reader, by a dose of bitter humor, a share of personal good will, and the mutual trust that he discovers among the prisoners, a trust long since forfeited in the larger prison of the informer-ridden society outside.

Saeed’s style is plain and direct, without literary pretensions, but with a tone of emotional delicacy that is as odd in the circumstances as it is touching: treated with courtesy by a single officer, after much cruelty, the prisoner refrains from asking questions about his arrest, because “I did not want to appear to be exploiting his kindness.” Some references to unfamiliar figures and events benefit from the book’s tidy footnotes. And although Sadri’s rendering begins stiffly, it soon becomes rhythmically fluent, and one’s sense of reading a translation fades away.

Resilience against all odds appears to be characteristic of Saeed: the same force rises to a point of madcap buoyancy in “The Soldier and the Pigs,” one of four Saeed stories available from Amazon.com, in uneven English, for forty-nine cents each. (A writer new to the country must try to make his work known any way he can.) In this riotously original little tale of a soldier’s plight among not only pigs but many, many frogs, also set during the Iran-Iraq War, we catch another glimpse of a writer with the power to translate foreign histories into stories that we can make our own.

Sinan Antoon’s “I’jaam” (City Lights; $11.95) is in many ways about translation, and although it is also an Iraqi prison novel set in the era of Saddam, it is hard to imagine a treatment of that terrible subject more different from Saeed’s. Antoon is Baghdad-born, in his early forties, and he left Iraq after the first Gulf War, in 1991; he has a doctorate in Arabic literature from Harvard. “I’jaam,” his first novel, was published in Beirut in 2004, and, impeccably translated by the author and Rebecca C. Johnson, appeared in English in 2007. Antoon, who currently teaches at New York University, has never been in prison. His brief novel is a self-consciously literary work, complete with references to Orwell and an epigraph from Akhmatova, and is alert to the uses of language, in a closed political society, for both indoctrination and rebellion.

The title refers to the practice of adding dots—diacritical marks—to various letters of the Arabic alphabet, some of which are indistinguishable without these marks in place. An undotted sequence of letters may signify a number of different words; the correct translation can be determined only by context. The story’s intriguing premise is that a handwritten, undotted manuscript has been found in a file in Baghdad’s Interior Ministry, and a functionary assigned to add the necessary dots and make a transcription: the resulting manuscript forms the body of the book. The text turns out to be the work of a university student whose gift for political mockery got him sent to prison, where he wrote the manuscript—leaving out the dots to avoid further incrimination. Its uncertain readings cause the scribe to offer footnotes to such perplexing references as “the Ministry of Rupture and Inflammation” (“Could this be the Ministry of Culture and Information?”) and to such obvious errors as occur in the well-known song lyric that details how the nation’s leader moves from house to house and “fucks us into bed.” (“Note: the original lyrics read ‘tucks.’ ”)

The student’s (and the author’s) delight in word games brightens the narrative but does not overwhelm it. At times, the prison almost disappears, as the student seeks refuge in his memories of soccer games, of campus romance, even of the mandatory political demonstrations in support of the person identified only as the Leader. Nevertheless, darkness closes in: the formerly dauntless young man, an aspiring poet, is raped by a prison guard and increasingly breaks down. In his delirium, his fantasies are alluringly, if postmodernly, alphabetical:

The laughter rose and the dots fell, one after the other. The letters that take no dots began to pick them up from the ground and put them in their buttonholes or on their heads, or to stand on them and look at themselves in the mirror. One began to fight with the others, and stole their dots. The sin stole shin’s dots and then raised its fingers to its lips, with a loud “Shhhh!” The mim lay down on his stomach and raised his head to swallow the two dots he had picked up off the ground. A lustful laughter swelled up, and the letters danced together, coupling in forbidden positions.

Still, the core of the experience is meant to be horribly real. Antoon has said that he required years to approach the harsher aspects of the story, implying that he feared seeming presumptuous in claiming experience not his own. What, after all, is the relevance of fact to fiction in a book like this? Should it be different from any other type of novel? There is surely a relationship between the density of detail in Saeed’s book and his experience, as against Antoon’s more formally focussed, internally preoccupied tone. Or is this to confound truth with style? When reality is framed and shaped by imagination—in novels, as opposed to memoirs or histories—all the truth that we can vouch for is emotional and intellectual, and on the page.

“Politics and the novel are an indivisible case,” the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani wrote. But even Kanafani, who also worked as a newspaperman and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, expressed the modern writer’s absolute faith in the primacy of art. “My political position springs from my being a novelist,” he explained. “I started writing the story of my Palestinian life before I found a clear political position or joined any organization.” Born under the British Mandate, in Acre, in 1936, he was initially educated in French missionary schools, and—a fitting irony for a writer who all but invented a new national literature—he had to improve his Arabic later on. He was twelve years old when Israel was founded, in 1948, and he and his family ended up in a refugee camp in Damascus. He worked as a teacher, first in the camp and then in Kuwait for several years, before moving to Beirut to begin his association with a new political magazine and a newly stirring Palestinian consciousness. There, in 1962, aged twenty-six and in hiding for want of a passport, he wrote “Men in the Sun” (Lynne Rienner; $12.95), a novella about three Palestinian refugees who pay a smuggler to take them across a swath of the Iraqi desert to Kuwait: a work as searing as the relentless desert sun that blinds and burns the men, a work in which politics and art cannot be told apart.

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“Men in the Sun” is a classic of Palestinian writing, and mentioning it among recent Arabic books is a bit like mentioning a work by Hemingway in a discussion of up-and-coming Americans, except that Kanafani remains almost entirely unknown to English readers. A few of the stories that round out the present volume are polemical and coarsely melodramatic; Kanafani was nothing if not a man with a mission. But “Men in the Sun” is, on the simplest level, a gripping tale that unfolds with Hitchcockian suspense as the reader is reduced to fearfully counting the minutes on the smuggler’s wristwatch. The prose is lean, swift, and—in Hilary Kilpatrick’s translation—filled with phrases of startling rightness: “The lorry, a small world, black as night, made its way across the desert like a heavy drop of oil on a burning sheet of tin”; or, even better, “The speedometer leapt forward like a white dog tied to a tent peg.” The realistic intensity of Kanafani’s world tends to conceal his stylistic ambitions: the intricacy with which he weaves together past and present, fact and delusion, and the alternating voices of his characters, each of whom is drawn with the rapid assurance of a charcoal sketch. But on a deeper level Kanafani’s work is about the desperation that drove these men to such lengths to regain work and dignity; it is about the longing—just emerging in the Palestinian public voice—for the moist earth and the olive trees of the villages left behind in 1948. Most painfully, it is about the awakening of self-recrimination for acquiescence in the loss, as in the thoughts of an old man who has been living “like a beggar” and decides to risk the journey: