Amid shifting copyright and publishing norms, adaptation and translation of existing works is as contentious an issue today as ever in the literary world. The questions are particularly relevant for the Arabic novel, both for its recent and not-so-recent history.
Many have accused Ahmad Mourad of reproducing characters from Naguib Mahfouz in his novel 1919 (2014), and borrowing from Peter Burger’s New Zealand film The Tattoist (2007) in writing Al-Fil al-Azraq (The Blue Elephant, 2012). There has also been much discussion about the influence of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) on Ahmed Alaidy’s An takun Abbas al-Abd (Being Abbas al-Abd, 2003).
Going back to the late 19th and early 20th century Arab renaissance, critics questioned whether the Arabic novel itself merely mimicked a European genre.
