NEOCLASSICISM 52('To Fazzan'), the miseries of widows whose husbands had been pressed into
the army by the Ottoman viceregents and lost their lives fighting in Ottoman
wars, in Greece, or Russia (The Soldier's Widow'). He welcomed in many
optimistic poems the declaration of the Constitution in 1908, and later re-
corded his disappointment on account of the Turkish ill-treatment of the free
Arabs: some of his best political poetry, in fact, occurs in a long poem in which
he mourns the death of a number of free Syrians who were beheaded by Jamal
Pacha because of their political activities.^71 Zahawi's attitude to British
occupation was not unequivocal. He even wrote poetry in praise of the British,
even after the Iraqi revolt in 1920. This was rather unfortunate since it laid
him open to the charge of lack of patriotism or nationalist sympathy. Recently
the motives behind his political criticism have become the subject of great
controversy among scholars.^72 But it can be maintained that later in his life
Zahawi's interest in political themes gave place to a preoccupation with
,. sophic and metaphysical meditations, although it cannot be said that he
ever entirely lost his interest in the social questions of his community.
Zahawi's poetry dealing with social themes is not all of one kind. There is
the type of poem in which the poet directly preaches, arraigning in general
terms the shortcomings of Arab or oriental society compared with that of the
West, its ignorance and superstition, its stifling and meaningless conventions,
its outworn habits and customs and its grossly unequal distribution of wealth.
More interestingly he sometimes resorts to the form of verse narrative, of
which he grew fond early in his career and which was not altogether new in
Arabic poetry, but had been largely confined to the context of amatory verse.
The use of narrative verse with social themes is, in fact, one of the new literary
phenomena of the Nahda period, although Zahawi was by no means the first
or the only poet to employ it: other Arabic poets, including Iraqis like Rusafi,
also used it to express their views on social matters. But it must be noted that
Zahawi resorted to verse narrative so often that it can be regarded as one of
the peculiarities of his style. His method is simply to narrate a story with a
sad end, giving in broad outline a situation which underlines a particular
social disease or a problem, for instance, the injustice of the government and
its inhuman treatment of the innocents ('To Fazzan'), or lack of security,
peace and order ('The Murder of Laila and Rabi"), or the lack of respect for
women's rights as shown in men marrying women for their wealth and
divorcing them after squandering their money ('Salma, the Divorced Woman')
or in forcing young women to marry old men, thereby driving some of them
in desperation to commit suicide ('Asma"),^73 and so on. Although the style
of the narrative is often racy and the situation is created with a few bold
strokes, the characters generally remain wooden puppets, lifeless symbols