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Up until quite recently, the few Western scholars who studied Arabic theatre approached it, not surprisingly, from a point of view that bears a strong colonialist imprint. Their almost universal assumption was that whatever significant drama exists or has existed in the Arab world resulted from that world gradually becoming aware of and learning to imitate European models. Even Arabic scholars who studied the drama of their own countries on the whole accepted this view. M. M. Badawi's Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt, the standard English work on this subject, opens with the statement: "It is an established fact that modern Arabic drama was borrowed from the West independently by Marum al-Naqqash in the Lebanon in 1847 and by Ya'qub Sannu in Egypt in 1870."1
The recent pioneering work of Shmuel Moreh and Philip Sadgrove at the end of the twentieth century complicated, but did not essentially alter this traditional view. They discovered an Arabic play published in Algiers in 1847,2 created not as a pale imitation of European models, but drawing directly upon the still living tradition of dramatic storytelling that dates back to the tenth century.3 Still, this play was apparently an isolated experiment, and a tradition of modern Western theatre was not developed in North Africa until the early twentieth century under the influence of visiting Egyptian troupes, whose own modern tradition was that of a theatre essentially based on European sources and techniques.
This Egyptian theatre was a direct descendent of the late nineteenth-century European- oriented experiments of al-Naqqash and Sannu. The indigenous folk and popular theatre traditions, falling outside the tradition of European literary theatre and essentially free of its influence, were long ignored both by Arabic theatre practitioners and historians of Arabic theatre. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, a number of the leading dramatists of the Arab world began to look toward indigenous performance traditions for inspiration and as a counter-balance to the previous, almost total dependence upon European models. Such an approach was proposed by Tawfiq al-Hakim, the leading dramatist of the Arab world, in the preface to his best-known play, Ya Tali al-Shajara (The Tree Climber), published in 1962, which called for a "popular, nonrealistic theatre."4
Al-Hakim's suggestions were picked up and elaborated by the best-known...