Returning to ‘Nature’: Jurjy Zaydan and Sabri Musa’s Imagination of Future Egypt

Abstract

This study investigates the link between futurism and the environment from a historical perspective by studying how the future of ‘nature’ is imagined in two Egyptian speculative texts written during the 20th century, specifically, an essay entitled ‘Baʿd miʾat sana’ (‘One Hundred Years After’) written by the Lebanese writer and intellectual Jurjy Zaydan in 1900 and the novel as-Sayyid min Haql al-Sabanikh (The Gentleman from the Spinach Field), published by the writer and journalist Sabri Musa in 1987. Although written more than 80 years apart, both texts speculate what Egypt will be like in the future, and both anticipate a ‘return to nature’ (al-rujūʿ ila al-tabiʿa). Borrowing insights from Middle Eastern environmental history and utopian-dystopian literary studies, the study places the texts within a larger speculative literary trend in the Arab region and elsewhere that interlaces with changing notions of environmental futures. Besides, it interprets the futuristic imagination of the two authors in light of the environmental and urban transformations occurring in Egypt during the 20th century. The comparative analysis of the two texts shows that while Zaydan anticipated a utopian future world where humans could rule and exploit ‘nature’ to progress towards a better future, thus reproducing in large part a colonial environmental imaginary, Musa’s dystopian vision is based on a conception of the human than does more harm than good to ‘nature’, and on the belief that ‘nature’ could eventually revolt against human control.