Reflection of Socio-Political Realities in Jurji Zaydan's novel ‘Abbasa Sister of Harun’

Abstract

Jurji Zaydan is a well-known Arab educator who wrote in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is the founder of ‘Al-Hilal’ magazine.
It was his historical novels that made Zaydan famous as a writer. The description of the early Abbasids in Arabic prose is reflected in his historical novels.
Eighteen historical and four romance novelsrelated to the history of caliphate, in the pages of of which the most global events and stories of the period are reflected and are true page-turner, have not been involved in a comprehensive study of history or art.
Therefore, we have taken Zaydan's novel ‘Abbasa Sister of Harun’ about the period of the early Abbasid rule as the main object of our research. This novel is dedicated to the coverage of the main events in the life of the palace during the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786-809), the fifth caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, who became famous in the East as the protagonist of the fairy tales ‘A Thousand and One Nights’.
The work is the second historical novel by Zaydan dedicated to the Abbasid caliphate. The main characters of the novel, namely, the caliph Harun al-Rashid, his wife Zibayda, his son Amin, his vizier Jafar Barmaki, his sister Abbasa, poet Abu al-Atahi and others are well-known historical figures.
Thus, all this information successfully contains the historical environment and socio-political realities in Baghdad, the political and cultural cradle of the Arab East in the 8th-9th centuries. It should be noted that the depiction of that period in ‘Abbasa Sister of Harun’ with reference to real historical figures behind the artistic plot and images once again emphasized the uniqueness of the work of Jurji Zaydan. For this reason, the work is only a work of art to the taste of the reader, and for many years has been a desktbook of historians.