Ishaq Musa al-Husayni
Memoirs of a Hen: A Present-Day Palestinian Fable
Trans. and introd. by George J. Kanazi
Toronto: York Press, 1999. Pp. 71. $15.95
Reviewed by Issa J. Boullata

Written in Arabic in 1940, this fable was published in Cairo in 1943, having been rejected earlier as showing “political tendencies.” Dr. Taha Husayn (1889-1973), the editor of the Iqra’ series in which the fable was eventually published, changed his mind after reading a letter in support of it sent to him by Professor D. Baneth of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Husayn even wrote an introduction to it without the author’s prior knowledge and he interpreted the fable politically, albeit in an oblique manner. He considered the hen in it to be a wise Palestinian hen who loved good, hated evil, and aspired to live in peace with its neighbors according to rules of social and international justice, thereby implying that it was very much like Palestinians and all Arabs in their national aspirations and in their struggle against Jewish Zionist designs on Palestine.

Ever since its publication, this book by the Palestinian writer Ishaq Musa al-Husayni (1904-1990) has been viewed by most critics in light of the political conflict of Jews and Arabs over Palestine, despite its author’s repeated assertions that it has nothing to do with that. Some Arab nationalists have even considered it as a book presenting a defeatist attitude, since the hen in the fable does not rise to fight for its rights against the intruding chickens who take over its household.

Professor George J. Kanazi, a Palestinian teaching Arabic literature at the University of Haifa, has ably translated this fable into English, and in his introduction to the translation, as in two earlier studies of his, he tries to offer a new understanding of the book. Whether his interpretation will change the general view of critics on this fable is too early to tell, but he has made credible efforts in this direction, confirming al-Husayni’s well-established reputation as a literary scholar and critic, and also as an Arab thinker and cultural critic who has over twenty books and dozens of articles to his name on Arabic language and literature, and on Islamic thought and civilization.

Kanazi places al-Husayni’s Memoirs of a Hen within the genre of utopian writing. He studies the whole text of the fable to outline its utopian vision, and he does not, like some critics, emphasize some parts in support of a political interpretation to the neglect of other substantial passages. He makes a commendable attempt to show that the thrust of the fable as a whole is to construct a rational theory of an ideal society and a utopian world order, in which individuals live by noble principles and communities abide by just and peaceful prescriptions, the expected result being everlasting human happiness and civilized life for as long as everyone clings to the basics of the theory. Memoirs of a Hen can thus be seen as a modern Palestinian contribution to a long tradition of utopian writing on the world of perfection, including Plato’s Republic; the millennial and messianic literature of Jews, Christians, and Muslims; Islamic philosophical works like al-Farabi’s al-Madina al-Fadila and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan; and Romantic musings of writers like Rousseau, Blake, and Gibran.

Kanazi is to be congratulated on opening a new horizon of understanding for readers of al-Husayni’s only work of fiction and on rendering it into English with superb aplomb.