The Road Not Taken: Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusseini and His Chickens · 259notion allows for reforming efforts to act upon the creatures and change
them for the better, by peeling off the corrupt layers of materialism and
bringing them back to their original purity.
But the question that besets Kanazi’s thorough interpretation is “Why
then did so many construe this story as centered on the Palestinian ques-
tion?” Kanazi’s answer is that this is a mistaken interpretation, initiated
by the preface to the book, written by the eminent Egyptian intellectual
writer and scholar Ṭāhā Ḥussein.^13 And truly enough, Ḥussein did intro-
duce the hen several times in his preface as a Palestinian hen: “We read
[al-Ḥusseini’s] rendering [of the hen’s memoirs] and shared with the Hen
of Palestine her feelings of sadness and happiness, and of joy and pain,”
writes Ṭāhā Ḥussein. And he adds: “She finds—as every Arab from the
people of Palestine and indeed from the whole Arab Middle East finds—
universal justice, the nobility of Arabism, and [the Arabs’] right for mod-
ern glory that is not surpassed by their glory of olden times.”^14
These were not incidental words. The Palestinian interpretation had
been very much on Ṭāhā Ḥussein’s mind since he first read Memoirs, al-
though not necessarily connected to the lofty emotions he expressed in his
preface: as was mentioned in an article and an interview with al-Ḥusseini
by Meir Abul ̔afiya, published in Moznaim in 1988, Ṭāhā Ḥussein (who
at the time was one of the editors of the Iqra ̓ series) initially rejected
al-Ḥusseini’s manuscript because of what he called its “political orien-
tation.”^15 It was only with the help of the Jerusalemite professor David
Hirsch Banett’s endorsement that the manuscript was finally accepted.^16
However, Kanazi’s explanation of the source of the mistaken Palestinian
interpretation only adds complexity to the problem, since now it includes
a sharp intellectual mind as Ṭāhā Ḥussein’s among the mistaken readers
of the novella. Throughout the debate, spanning decades and involving
an ever larger circle of readers, critics, and scholars, both Arabs and Jews,
another question arose: that of the author’s place in the interpretation of
his oeuvre. George Kanazi assigned it a privileged place, while others
objected to this supremacy of the author’s standing.
The circle grows now even further, as I add my own voice to the de-
bate—something I should have done years ago, in the 1980s, after my in-
terview with the author. There are several theoretical points that have to
be added here: one is that by accepting Kanazi’s didactic, utopian inter-
pretation of the novella, I do not find the Palestinian interpretation to be
invalidated: one does not cancel out the other. A literary work of art can