Reading Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥīʹs Description of Paris: A Modern Egyptian Glimpse of the West at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Following a well-known trend in the Arab Naha, al-Muwayliī gives the impression to be somewhat open-minded toward Western civilisation. According to that reading, most of the critics have always found it difficult to justify the inclusion in the adīth Ibn Hishām of the second, and allegedly less interesting, journey to Paris. On the contrary, the often neglected ‘tale of Parisian disenchantmentʹ appears as something of a meaningful corrective, as if al-Muwayliī wanted to comment on the way that the West was represented in Egyptian minds. Reading such a critical picture of the entire western way of life, can we take for granted that European patterns of the novel offer acceptable criteria for al-Muwayliī s work? Rather, one could argue that the adīth was a very short-lived experiment which could have lead to a different future for modern Arabic fiction.