Reading Egyptian Environmentalism: The Representation of Rural Life in Abdel Raḥman al-Sharqawi’s Novel Al-Arḍ (1954)

Al-Arḍ is a novel written by the prolific Egyptian writer Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi. The novel is set in the early 1930s and depicts the story of an Egyptian village that suffers under the oppression of a tyrannical regime. Beside the political and social themes tackled in the novel, the text emphasizes the ecological damage arising from corrupt governmental practices and its effect on the inhabitants of the village. An ecocritical reading of the novel brings to light the text’s environmental potentials. The novel challenges the dualistic concept of man versus nature by representing a harmonious ecosystem where the natural world, both human and non-human, interacts with the cultural aspects. Moreover, it tackles the ecofeminist issue of the connection between the domination of nature and the exploitation of women. The aim of the paper is to apply an environmental-literary scholarship to al-Sharqawi’s text to understand the environmental ethics of the Egyptian rural world.