Much older than we think. This is how Arab writers participated in the emergence of the art of the novel

The academic tradition has maintained a treatment of the history of the novel since its European inception, with Don Quixote in 1605 or in the early eighteenth century with the Italian word novella, which was used to describe long stories in the Middle Ages, although earlier forms of the novel existed.

An early tracing of the history of the novel and ancient works, which did not receive the title of "novel" despite being a long and anecdotal prose narrative describing fictional or factual characters and events, reveals much about the contributions of Arabic literature to the world, especially in the art of the novel along with Latin or ancient Greek, Japanese and even ancient Chinese literatures.

The classical academic tradition of the study of novel literature holds that fictional prose narrative has evolved since the eighteenth century, particularly since the Victorian era, to gradually replace poetry and drama and become increasingly popular for its treatment of middle-class stories and characters.

The novels focus on the development of the character more than the plot because of the role of the novel in the study of the human soul regardless of its type.

The Arabic
NovelThe Arab philosopher and physician Ibn Tufail al-Andalusi (1100-1185 AD) wrote his fictional novel of a philosophical nature, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which he used high symbolism of the protagonist based on a series of writers of the same story, including the philosopher Ibn Sina and Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi.

Ibn al-Tufail wrote his novel in the context of the controversy over the role of philosophy in Islamic thought, which philosophers fought with the great mystic Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, and his philosophical allegorical novel had a great impact on world literature, and enjoyed wide spread in Europe after its translation into English at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Imaginary drawing of Robinson Crusoe (websites)

Although the English novelist Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is thought to have borrowed the idea of the novel from Ibn al-Tufail (died at the end of the 12th century), the Arab philosopher Malik Bennabi in his book The Problem of Ideas in the Islamic World compared the stories of Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe by the English novelist.

Bennabi pointed out that the English novelist's novel revolves around the sensory and material worlds only and there is no reference to what is beyond the material world, and that the story of Robinson Crusoe was preoccupied with the requirements of eating, sleeping and manufactured materials, while Hayy bin Yaqzan in Ibn al-Tufail's novel was busy searching for the truth of existence and contemplating about death, life and the existence of the Creator.

The Arab physician Ibn al-Nafis wrote "Al-Risala al-Kamiliyya", which is an early philosophical novel and embodies a kind of interaction with the story of Ibn al-Tufail, mixing it with his medical knowledge with elements of science fiction, and using it as a kind of pilgrimage and response to the "belief in cramming bodies", a philosophical topic that sparked a long debate among Muslim philosophers and theologians, including Ibn Sina and Al-Ghazali.

The Arabs knew fiction literature from early times, and ancient manuscripts preserved literary works such as "One Thousand and One Nights", "The Biography of Saif bin Dhi Yazan", "The Biography of Antarah", "Kalila and Dimna" and others.

European and Asian
works Early works of fiction prose – ancient novels – include works in Latin, such as The Adventures of the Satricon, which was described as the first Roman novel (circa 150 AD) without necessarily belonging to the modern novelist and literary form, while Daphnis in the late second century AD in ancient Greece wrote a true "novelist" story, while Sanskrit novels from the fourth or fifth century AD and Japanese novels were known in the eleventh century in conjunction with Ibn Tufail's famous novelist, followed by Catalan and Chinese novels of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Márquez is a model of magical realism (Al Jazeera)

The Japanese tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century, was known as the first novel in the known sense of the novel, and is more than three-quarters of a million words, and was divided by the Japanese writer Murasaki Shikibo into 54 chapters dealing with Genji's love stories, during which she paid attention to the fine details, character, and relationships between the heroes.

The urbanization and spread of printed books in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) in China led to the development of oral storytelling into fiction by the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).

Parallel European developments occurred only after Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1439, and the emergence of the publishing industry over the course of a century allowed similar opportunities according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, as the invention of printing immediately created a new market for entertainment and relatively cheap knowledge at the time.

The modern novel Since the end of the eighteenth century AD, the modern
novel has witnessed several transformations associated with major intellectual changes in the West, due to the growth of the middle class, the availability of more free time to read books and the availability of money.

Public interest in the human character led to the growing popularity of biography, memoirs and novels.

While the first half of the nineteenth century was influenced by Romantic philosophy and the focus became on nature and imagination and transcending nature rather than thought and emotion, the advent of industrialization in the nineteenth century led to a trend towards writing depicting realism, novels began to depict characters that were not entirely good or bad, rejecting idealism and previous romanticism, and realism quickly evolved into a naturalist vision that depicted more harsh conditions and pessimistic characters who became powerless because of their environment.

The twentieth century is divided into two phases of literature: modern literature (1900–1945) and contemporary literature (1945–present) also referred to as postmodernism, and the novels of this era reflected great events such as the Great Depression, World War II, Hiroshima, the Cold War, and communism.

The novel's modernist realism paved the way for the emergence of postmodern surrealist novels that incorporate magical realism such as Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and the graphic novel.