258 · Hanita Brand
their use of imagery and expressive language. These passages appear
when twice the hen falls in love: first with her new husband in her new
chicken coop, and later on with the leader of the young generation.
As was pointed out and elaborated by Professor George Kanazi, the
utopian nature of Memoirs is quite clear. Kanazi mentions that they con-
tinue a genre extant in Arabic and world literature since classical times.
He summarizes the principles proposed in the book as the basis of the
desired character as follows: love, rejection of materialism, active imple-
mentation of principles, rejection of the use of force, preference of the
general interest, and a new hierarchy of values upon which everyone
is to be measured for their worth, at the top of which are creatures who
possess reason, ethics, and radiation.^10 However, Kanazi thinks all these
characteristics are based on a dichotomy of good and evil as the one prof-
fered by Muḥammad Bahnassī’s understanding of the term fiṭra (“innate
character”) as elaborated in his book Al-Islām wa-naz ̔at al-fiṭra. Accord-
ing to this dichotomy, “God created His creation divided into two parts:
the first are the people of happiness, whom He prepared for the good
life, thus easing that person’s road to all that is good... and the second
are the people of misery and mischief, for whom He eased the road to
hardships, i.e., prepared them for evil, by entering it into their hearts,
tongues, and limbs.”^11 Kanazi states that “there is no need to discuss this
matter further, other than saying that the hen herself—author of these
memoirs—entertains these ideas, as she believes most creatures tend to
evil rather than to good,” adding that “the wise hen belongs to the first
category of Creation, the people of happiness.”^12 This assessment is not
born by the text, as there are actually no creatures belonging to this first
category, that of the happy creatures, other than the hen herself. Even
kind and positive creatures, such as some of the hen’s friends and the
entire younger generation that she educates, are flawed to some extent.
Additionally, Memoirs usually does not adopt such a rigid, almost Mani-
chean dichotomy as described by Bahnassī in his book, but a rather more
relaxed, ameliorative approach, whereby characters are not preordained,
or doomed to exist within their prescribed category, but rather are subject
to reforming efforts. A more suitable interpretative grid is needed here.
As will be explained below, such a grid is provided by the Romantic no-
tion of fiṭra, seen as the natural disposition, the basic nature of human
beings that is inherently good before it is changed by modern society and
molded into a more sophisticated and materialistic constitution. Such a