Repurposing Romantic Drama in Late-Nineteenth-Century Egypt: Najīb al-Ḥaddād’s Arabizations of Victor Hugo

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, Najīb al-Ḥaddād adapted two dramas by Victor Hugo for The Egyptian Patriotic Troupe. Al-Ḥaddād rewrote Hugo’s Hernani as Ḥamdān, transferring the story from the Spanish court of 1519 to Andalucía under ‘Abd al-Raḥmān II. Les Burgraves became Tha’rāt al-‘arab (Revenge of the Arabs), and transformed from a play about Barbarossa and the Holy Roman Empire into a play about a pre-Islamic Lakhmid king’s struggle to restore unified Arab rule in the Arabian peninsula. I argue that Al-Ḥaddād’s adaptations anachronistically placed modern ideas in the Arab past—characterizing shūrā as the election of leaders, using sha‘b to mean a sovereign people, and calling for Arab cultural unity and revival. Al-Ḥaddād’s adaptations transformed the nationalism of Hugo’s drama into calls for Arab solidarity. In producing these plays, The Egyptian Patriotic Troupe embodied an Arab past overlaid with modern communal identities.