Abstract
In his 1987 novel al-Sayyid min Ḥaql al-Sabinākh [“The Gentleman from the Spinach Field”], Ṣabri Mūsā provides us with what appears to be a classic plot of utopian literature: the one person who isn’t satisfied with a society that provides them with all the comforts of life save the freedom to make their own choices. The protagonist in his future utopia under domes in an Earth wrecked by environmental catastrophe is carefully constructed to appeal to the sensibilities of Mūsā’s readers: the gentleman’s experiences and the reactions of the benevolent totalitarians that run his society make it easy for modern readers in bureaucratic surveillance societies to sympathize with his desire to return to nature. At the end of the text, however, Mūsā inverts our expectations and shows us how the protagonist is wrong and the totalitarians correct. This serves as an estrangement of the desire of many of his fellow Egyptians and Arabs, when confronted with the hostile environment of Western global capital, to desire a retreat into the past; on the contrary, the text argues, the only way to not be swallowed whole is to embrace the future, even if it means abandoning the old ways.
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Notes
- 1.
“Hūmū,” in Arabic characters. The word is largely meaningless in Arabic: it is not a standard first name and would only be understood to mean “human” by those educated in the West or in westernized schools.
- 2.
“Brūf,” in Arabic characters. This word would be rather more familiar to Mūsā’s audience than Homo.
- 3.
Both Khiḍr and Barbaro, who uses Khiḍr as a source, make the claim that Gentleman takes place on another planet, not Earth, arguing that when Homo’s friend describes the orbital elements of their planet, this means that the planet is not Earth. Yet David clearly calls the world al-kura al-’arḍiya, “the earthly sphere,” and the distance and speed of the planet in its orbit are the same as Earth’s (Mūsā, p. 118).
- 4.
Once a year, there is a “Day of Historical Food,” when people can apply in advance for ingredients and recipes; Homo and his wife are unusual in that they have actually done this. They discuss at one point their plan, now shelved by the controversy over Homo’s transgressions, to make a dessert called “the imam is eating his fingers”; this is the sole direct mention of anything religious in the text.
- 5.
The backstory for the apocalypse isn’t nearly as detailed in the quite long Gentleman as it is in the much shorter Man Below Zero; we know that there was a “First Electronic War” at some point near the end of the twentieth century, and that this war was nuclear. Yet no specifics of how the war began, who fought in it or who “won,” or how the war led to environmental toxicity, are provided.
- 6.
The animals are no longer eaten not because people have become vegetarian due to ethical changes, but rather because they all went extinct in the cataclysm.
- 7.
“Death and birth,” in Arabic.
- 8.
ma‘mūra, literally “filled” in the ordinary, non-food meaning of the word.
- 9.
sayyid, the same word glossed as “gentleman” in the book’s title. It means “master,” and is the direct equivalent of English “mister.” Cowan, pp. 513–514.
- 10.
Prof is a former member; he renounced his position in order to advocate for his ideals from without rather than within.
- 11.
That is, despotism and kleptocracy, wherein an urban clique appropriates resources from self-sufficient villages, without providing meaningful services to those villages. Jameson, a longtime Marxist, uses the term freely, though it is one of Marx’s more disputed concepts.
- 12.
This is not a secret Homo has discovered, but rather a well-publicized program.
- 13.
Here, clearly not the religious sciences. Again, there is only one direct mention of religion in the text, and it is the name of a dessert.
- 14.
Mūsā provides no details as to where or what these space colonies might be. Much later in the text, another delegate says that various teams of explorers are returning from journeys of 100 years or more, so we may presume these are interstellar colonies, but we have no further information.
- 15.
Or cognitive, within the context of the history the novel provides.
- 16.
Our world is your world, as with most good SF.
- 17.
In Arabic, “the jewel.”
- 18.
“Dāfīd” in Arabic characters, not its Arabic equivalent Dāwūd. Both Gentleman and Man Below Zero take care to note that the centuries after the apocalypse have transformed humanity from many different ethnic groups into one undifferentiated mass, and that religion has disappeared, as well. This is part of the estrangement function of both texts: it is less likely to lead to strongly negative reactions among readers because it essentially “patches” the text.
- 19.
Even at this point in the text, we have been given no reason to question their sincerity, if perhaps not their methods.
- 20.
Pregnancy and childbirth in general, not childbearing without medical intervention, as the translation might imply.
- 21.
Egypt itself had no leadership elections between 1950 and 2005, when Hosni Mubarak had himself “elected” with 89% of only 30% turnout in a vote widely denounced as corrupt, though there were no electronic voting machines involved, as is the case in the USA.
- 22.
The process of vote counting is not mentioned, but there are video feeds to other large auditoria, where the people at least appear to be deciding for themselves.
- 23.
The text does not give specific numbers, but it’s clear that a supermajority choose the niẓām’s plan.
- 24.
If we accept “Prof” as a name.
- 25.
His wife begs him to stay, but when he’s resolute, she takes up with David instead. Homo has no problem with this.
- 26.
Jameson is clear from the start that he’s writing about Western fiction from a Western perspective; I am not critiquing his work here so much as extrapolating from it.
- 27.
There’s nothing that clearly suggests this in the text, but taking Hugh Howey’s Wool (2011) into account, we might speculate whether the niẓām has in fact deliberately sabotaged the airships in a similar manner and for the same reasons that the authorities in Wool sabotage the pressure suits of those who venture forth from the silo (Howey, pp. 186–188).
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Campbell, I. (2018). “Utopia” as a Critique of Utopia in Ṣabrī Mūsā’s The Gentleman from the Spinach Field. In: Arabic Science Fiction. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91433-6_7
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