Al-Ba'th (The Resurrection) Novel

Al-Ba'th (The Resurrection) Novel is a Saudi novel written by the author Mohammed Ali Maghribi in 1948. It explores multiple aspects of social life, most notably work and marriage, as well as differences in cultural environments. It is based on a narrative approach and is considered one of the earliest Saudi novels that laid the foundations for the beginnings of this literary genre.

The novel revolves around the tale of the protagonist, Osama, who suffers from an illness. He travels to India seeking treatment and meets the nurse responsible for him at the hospital, named “Kitty.” A romantic relationship develops between them, prompting him to promise her marriage. After three years; the duration of his treatment, he returns to his city, Jeddah, having regained his health.

Osama’s life changes after achieving consecutive successes in his field of work, becoming one of the city’s merchants, to the extent that he established several charitable projects in health and education. However, the most notable event is when, after a long time, he coincidentally meets “Kitty,” the love from his treatment journey, during Hajj and marries her. The novel ends happily, much like local popular stories that relied on happy endings as the conclusion of their narrative.

The novel is based on absolute narration across various topics, with nothing in the novel’s plot tying them together aside from continuous storytelling. The protagonist conducts several dialogues with a secondary character named Abdulqahhar, discussing classism, colonialism, politics, social and religious conditions, and even economics.

Critics believe that the novel’s dialogues are merely ideas deeply rooted in the author’s mind, conveyed directly through the characters’ words. Moreover, the narrator dominates the dialogue to an excessive degree, thus curtailing the roles of the novel’s characters, whose share of the dialogue is comparatively less. This observation was recorded as a criticism of the novel.

The novel presented certain visions that were ahead of its time, to the extent that readers may feel some of these predictions materialized years after the novel was written. The author had a forward-looking perspective, such as the large-scale entry of foreign workers into the labor market.

The novel contains a technical flaw in its narrative flow, as the narrator tells the story; however, the main character’s description does not align with the novel’s events. There is a noticeable discrepancy between the description, the event, and the character, which critics have deemed detrimental to the novel, and to which the author did not pay attention.

Critics noted that al-Ba'th Novel noticeably lacks an artistic plot, which caused the novel’s events to lose their coherence. This is what the author hinted at when he wrote that he apologizes for any disjointedness in the novel “if found,” attributing it, according to him, to the fact that it “was written at different times.” Regarding the difference in style, Maghribi justified it as stemming from “the difference in thinking while writing and composing.”