East vs West: Identity & Conflict

In 1966 — one year before the June defeat — Tayeb Salih published Season of Migration to the North. A reader who opens the novel today finds more than the story of a Sudanese man in London: they find a complete archive of a question that has haunted the Arabic novel in different forms for an entire century — “Who are we in relation to the West?”

But there is another question, less visible and more interesting: why were the writers who tried to answer this question honestly — Arab and global alike — mostly people who lived on the edge? People who stood in a place between two places, who belonged to one culture in body and another in mind, history, or exile?

Part One: The Question That Does Not End

There is a subtle but essential difference between “real engagement with the Other” and “being dazzled by the Other.” Real engagement assumes you are standing on ground, looking at the other side from a position of self-awareness. Being dazzled assumes you are looking at the Other from a position of inner weakness and emptiness — and the Other’s presence fills the gap you feel inside.

The modern Arabic novel spreads across this entire spectrum. Some of it is skillful dazzlement — describing the West with admiration that hides an implicit embarrassment about the self. Some of it is firm rejection — describing the West with aversion that hides a fear of temptation. But the best of it — and the least common — stands before the question with open eyes: not wanting to dissolve into the Other and not wanting to close itself off. It wants to understand.

The difference between the Arabic novel and some of its global counterparts is that this question in Arabic literature is not academic — it is intimate and painful. Because the West was not simply “a different culture” for the Arab writer. It was also the colonizer, the shifting ally, the marketplace, the standard, and the mirror all at once. This complexity is what makes the Arabic novel on this subject unlike any other literature that deals with East-West tension.

Part Two: The Defeat of 1967 — The Earthquake That Changed Everything

No Arabic novel dealing with identity and civilizational conflict can be read without acknowledging the fundamental shift caused by the June 1967 defeat.

Before 1967, the question of identity in the Arabic novel was raised from a position of relative calm: Arab unity was a possible dream, the Renaissance was a project in progress, and the future looked better than the present. The novels of al-Hakim, Idris, and al-Manfaluti thought of the “civilizational shock” as a transitional phase, not a dark endpoint.

After 1967, the equation flipped. The swift and crushing defeat at the hands of a modern state with Western backing revealed to many Arab intellectuals that the problem was not in politics but in the deep foundations of culture and identity. Here the discussion slid from “how do we rise?” to “do we carry the seeds of a renaissance at all?” — and that is a far harsher question.

The novels written by the post-1967 generation carry this wound in their language before their themes. Even when history is not mentioned directly, you feel its weight in the sentences, in the hero’s hesitation, in his inability to make a decision or complete a project. Sonallah Ibrahim in The Committee draws a character who presents himself to an undefined institution, in an endless interview, without a clear identity — a perfect metaphor for what happened to the Arab intellectual after the defeat. Jamal al-Ghitani retreats to the language of the Mamluks to say what cannot be said about the present. Khaled Khalifa traces how accumulated defeat turns into hatred of both self and other at the same time.

The Arabic novel after 1967 stopped asking “how do we see the West?” and began asking “how do we see ourselves in the light of what happened?” This is a fundamental shift from a question of positioning to a question of existence.

Part Three: Patterns of Conflict in the Arabic Novel

When we look at Arabic novels that engaged seriously with the East-West binary, we find three main patterns that do not cancel each other out but sometimes overlap within a single work:

The wounded rejection: The protagonist collides with the West and returns carrying a wound that never heals. Mustafa Saeed in Tayeb Salih’s novel is its most complete model — a man who opened the West and was opened by the West, and neither emerged intact. The wound here is not only from outside but from within an identity that was not ready for the confrontation.

The failed integration: The protagonist wants both worlds and finds neither. He does not return to himself and does not dissolve into the Other. He is “suspended” in the middle. A Bird from the East by al-Hakim and The Latin Quarter by Idris both present a young man who tries Paris and discovers that Western freedom does not answer the deep questions of the Eastern spirit — but he cannot return with the same innocence either.

The transcendence: The rarest and most mature pattern. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in The Search for Walid Masoud presents intellectual characters who treat the West as a tool, not a destination — they take its cognitive instruments and remain themselves. Abd al-Rahman Munif in Cities of Salt transcends the binary from a different angle: he does not ask “how do we deal with the West?” but “what is oil doing to us?” — which is the more accurate question, and one that brings the self closer to confronting itself.

Part Four: Those Who Dissolved the Binary — Voices from the Edge

The observation that cannot be ignored when we look at the novelists — Arab and global — who successfully moved beyond the East-West binary is that most of them lived, in some way, on the edge. They were not in the calm center of a single culture but in the turbulent zone between two or more. And this turbulence — rather than paralyzing them — produced a rare double awareness.

Nadine Gordimer (South Africa, 1923–2014) — an exceptional case in literary history: a white woman in an apartheid state who chose to stand with Nelson Mandela and the Black resistance. She was inside the system by her skin and outside it by her conscience. This chronic internal conflict is what gave her the depth to write about separation and discrimination in ways that neither comfortable white writers nor enraged Black writers could fully reach. Gordimer was not “a white person showing solidarity” in the superficial sense — she was someone who lived the contradiction in her own body and turned it into literature.

Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia/France, 1929–2023) — a Czech writing in French, who fled communism and never found himself fully at home in Western democracy either. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) does not ask “which is better — the socialist East or the liberal West?” It asks: “why is ideological weight itself deadly regardless of its direction?” Kundera refused to confine literature to the battles of the Cold War in order to focus on the existential — the fate of the individual before history regardless of the labels attached. This position can only come from someone who is not at rest inside a single culture.

Salman Rushdie (India/Britain, 1947) — an Indian Muslim who grew up in Bombay and studied at Cambridge, living a life pulled by three identities. Midnight’s Children (1981) is the masterpiece of “hybridity” — the idea that later became an academic term: identity is never pure, it is always a tangled mixture. Rushdie’s characters live in “in-between spaces” where no East is clean and no West is clean, but a continuous interweaving creates a new, turbulent, and living global identity. This vision can only be born in someone who lived the contradiction, not just studied it.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria, 1977) — Nigerian-born, educated in America, living between both countries. Her famous concept of “the danger of the single story” is exactly what she experienced personally: the African reduced to one image in the Western eye. Americanah (2013) does not speak about Africa as a “victim” facing a wealthy West. It traces how race and class operate in both directions — and how African identity sometimes discovers itself in American exile more than it does at home. This is a vision that can only come from someone who made the crossing.

Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, 1952) — writing from a city that is itself an “edge” par excellence: Istanbul, which stands on the Bosphorus Strait between Europe and Asia. Pamuk does not take sides in his novels — neither for Europe nor for the East. He searches instead for the shared “sorrow” and for how minarets and Western modernity can coexist inside a single soul without inevitable war. Snow (2002) is this same tension embodied in a poet-man who returns from German exile to the remote Turkish city of Kars and finds himself between secularists and Islamists arguing, belonging fully to neither.

Kazuo Ishiguro (Japan/Britain, 1954) — born in Nagasaki, raised in England from the age of five. He writes in English but about Japanese-human themes: memory, duty, regret. The Remains of the Day (1989) is about a British butler who re-reads his past — but the way the protagonist suppresses his emotions recalls Japanese restraint more than English reserve. Ishiguro writes in the “distance” between two cultures, and this distance produces a universally human literature precisely because it serves no single culture’s ideology.

Amin Maalouf (Lebanon/France, 1949) — a Lebanese Christian who writes in French, who left Beirut because of the Civil War and never returned. In the Name of Identity (1998) — a work of thought rather than fiction — poses the central question directly: why do people insist on a single exclusive identity when every person is in reality “multiple identities”? Maalouf strongly rejects narrow belonging and sees in the shared Mediterranean history — Arab, Greek, Phoenician, Roman, Ottoman — a model of enriching accumulation rather than inevitable conflict.

Part Five: Is the Edge a Condition of Wisdom?

We arrive at the question that makes this observation more than a list of names: is living “on the edge” what allowed these writers to move beyond the binary? And does this mean that someone living in the calm center of a single culture is condemned to a binary vision?

The honest answer: yes, partly — but not necessarily.

Gordimer was white in an apartheid system — and this daily existential conflict transformed her into a voice that sees what neither the comfortable white writer nor the enraged Black writer can fully see. Rushdie was an Indian Muslim at Cambridge — and this triple belonging allowed him to see every identity from outside itself. Kundera was a Czech leftist who fled to capitalist Paris — and this crossing allowed him to criticize both camps from the bitter position of someone who had experienced both.

But — and this qualification matters — there were novelists who did not live on the “edge” geographically or culturally and arrived at the same awareness. Tolstoy was a Russian who lived in his estate and yet managed to transcend the civilization-versus-primitivism binary with a comprehensive human vision. Dostoevsky explored the depths of the human soul regardless of its geographical location. Mahfouz rarely left Cairo, yet he saw in its alleyways every great human contradiction.

What all of these writers share — those from the edge and those from the deep center — is one thing: the personal experience of contradiction. Whether geographical (between two cultures), social (between two classes), historical (between two eras), or psychological (between what a person believes and what they live). Whoever has not experienced contradiction from the inside — and this does not necessarily mean suffering, but it does mean a sharp awareness of non-uniformity — tends to see the world in lines sharper than they actually are.

This explains a striking pattern in world literature: the voices that most called for understanding, tolerance, and multiple identities were almost always voices that had been tested harshly, not voices that were comfortable.

The Palestinian cause alone produced two opposite but complementary responses: Edward Said, who transformed his pain into a critical theory of cultural domination, and Mahmoud Darwish, who transformed the same pain into poetry that speaks to all of humanity. Both lived “the edge,” but in different ways. What unites them is that the experience of the edge did not make them narrow — it made them deeper.

Part Six: After the Binary — Where Has Arabic Literature Arrived?

Does the East-West binary still occupy contemporary Arabic fiction with the same intensity? The answer: it has transformed more than it has ended.

The generation of novelists who began writing in the 1990s and beyond found more urgent internal conflicts before them: the religious versus the secular, the traditional versus the modern, narrow national identity versus broader Arab belonging. In Praise of Hatred by Khalifa takes place entirely inside Arab society — yet it contains every contradiction of the great binary in miniature. Frankenstein in Baghdad by Saadawi asks: what happens when a culture is destroyed from within? — and the answer does not need the West as a character on stage.

Perhaps this is the real maturity: that the Arabic novel poses questions of identity and existence without making the West a necessary presence in every frame. Not because it is not influential — it very much is — but because the real question has become internal first and external second. Who am I? Not “who am I in relation to the West?”

Arab novelists in exile — Hassan Blasim in Finland, Sinan Antoon between Baghdad and New York, Rabee Jaber between Lebanon and Europe — produce a literature that is “edge-like” in a different sense: not between East and West in the grand civilizational meaning, but between the memory of a place and the presence in another place. This is a new kind of edge that produces a new kind of awareness.

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Next in the series: Edge Literature: Prisons and Exile — when writing becomes an act of resistance: from Ghassan Kanafani to Sinan Antoon.

References

1. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies, Heinemann, 1969.
2. Tawfiq al-Hakim, A Bird from the East, trans. R. Bayly Winder, E.J. Brill, 1966.
3. Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity, trans. Barbara Bray, Penguin, 2000.
4. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Jonathan Cape, 1981.
5. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim, Harper and Row, 1984.
6. Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. Maureen Freely, Knopf, 2004.
7. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, Knopf, 2013.
8. Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist, Jonathan Cape, 1974.
9. (See our article: Orientalism’s Mirror: Said and Translation)
10. (See our article: The 100 Arab Novelists Guide)