The Call of the Curlew by Taha Hussein

The Call of the Curlew by Taha Hussein

Taha Hussein’s The Call of the Curlew (1950), written by the towering Egyptian novelist (1889–1973), stands as one of the most important works of realist fiction in modern Arabic literature—and among the most controversial and heartbreaking.

Set within a profoundly tragic framework, the novel explores themes of social justice, class struggle, the violation of human dignity, the revenge of the oppressed woman, and the generational clash between authoritarian tradition and emerging humanist values.

It delivers a sharp critique of rural Egyptian society in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly the exploitation of peasants by feudal landlords and the abuse of women’s rights.

Setting and Characters

Place: A traditional Egyptian village, representing the stratified rural, agrarian society.

Time: Not explicitly dated, but clearly situated in the first half of the twentieth century, amid the lingering structures of feudalism and British colonial influence.

Main Characters:

Amna: The tragic heroine. A beautiful, poor village girl with a kind heart and strong will, yet trapped by the cruelty of society and the tyranny of power. She embodies the eternal victim and squandered dignity.
Hussein (Amna’s brother): Educated in Cairo, he returns home carrying new ideas of freedom, justice, and human dignity. He is both the main narrator and the voice of reason, modernity, and rebellion.
Sayed Abdel-Tawab: The wealthy landowner, master of the village, and embodiment of unchecked authority. Arrogant, ruthless, and morally bankrupt, he pursues his desires without restraint.
Amna’s father: Weak and submissive, crushed by poverty and fearful dependence on the landlord. He represents the helplessness of the peasantry.
Amna’s mother: A silent witness to the looming danger around her daughter, powerless to act except through tears. She embodies the suffering of motherhood under oppression.
Mohsen (Abdel-Tawab’s son): Educated and sensitive but timid, torn between his feelings for Amna and his fear of his father. He represents the tormented conscience unable, at first, to confront injustice.
Nafisa (Abdel-Tawab’s wife): Trapped in a gilded cage, she lives in wealth but in constant humiliation, another casualty of patriarchal corruption.

Plot Overview

Hussein returns from Cairo to find his family living in abject poverty and cowering before the landlord, Sayed Abdel-Tawab. Soon, Abdel-Tawab begins to pursue Amna openly, exploiting her father’s weakness and her family’s destitution. Despite Hussein’s protests, the father submits in silence, terrified of losing the only livelihood he has.

The tragedy reaches its breaking point when Abdel-Tawab rapes Amna in his mansion. The violation shatters her spirit and marks the irreversible turning point of the novel. Back home, silence reigns—a silence heavy with shame, grief, and unspoken rage. The victim, not the perpetrator, bears the burden of dishonor.

Hussein, enraged, confronts Abdel-Tawab, only to be humiliated and cast aside by the landlord’s guards. The imbalance of power between the individual and the feudal order becomes brutally clear.

Amna withdraws into herself, rejecting even the prospect of marriage to Mohsen, despite his genuine affection. To her, he represents not himself but the name of his father and the corrupt system he belongs to. When Mohsen pleads with his father for permission to marry Amna, Abdel-Tawab mocks him and refuses, insisting Amna is nothing more than a plaything.

Crushed and pursued from every side—by her abuser, by a society that blames her, and by her family’s impotence—Amna runs away.

Hussein desperately searches for her, guided by the haunting call of the curlew echoing in the night, a bird long associated with her sorrow. He finds her at a well outside the village.

In the novel’s most devastating scene, Amna throws herself into the water, ending her life. Her suicide becomes both an act of despair and a scream of protest. Her “prayer”—the call of the curlew—lingers as an eternal cry against injustice.

Hussein, shattered, seeks vengeance. He ambushes Abdel-Tawab in the desert and kills him. Arrested and tried, Hussein defends his act as a desperate attempt to restore his sister’s stolen dignity. At first, neither the court nor the villagers acknowledge the justice of his cause.

Then Mohsen, in a decisive act of moral courage, testifies—not against Hussein, but against his father. He reveals the truth of Abdel-Tawab’s crimes and validates Hussein’s motives. His testimony represents the triumph of conscience over blind loyalty and corrupt tradition.

Though Hussein is still condemned by the law, the novel closes with a sense of moral redemption. The truth has been spoken, silence broken, and Abdel-Tawab’s corruption exposed. Amna’s death and Hussein’s vengeance together form the “call of the curlew,” a haunting reminder of suffering, protest, and the eternal struggle for justice.

Themes and Symbols

Class Struggle and Social Injustice: The novel portrays the brutal domination of peasants by landlords, exposing not only economic exploitation but also moral and physical violations.
Women’s Oppression and Resistance: Amna embodies the oppressed woman whose body and dignity are treated as property. Her refusal of marriage and her final act of suicide are desperate forms of revenge.
Silence and Social Complicity: The father’s silence, the mother’s silence, the neighbors’ silence—all sustain the landlord’s tyranny. The novel condemns this silence as a foundation of oppression.
Generational Conflict: Hussein and Mohsen represent a new generation yearning for justice, struggling against the cowardice and submissiveness of the older order.
Human Dignity: The central theme. Amna’s violation is a violation of human worth itself; Hussein’s vengeance and Mohsen’s testimony are attempts to reclaim it.
Law vs. Morality: The novel exposes the rift between legal justice and moral justice, highlighting the inadequacy of the law in confronting entrenched power.

Symbols:

The Curlew: Its mournful cry becomes the eternal echo of Amna’s spirit and a symbol of unending protest.
The Well: A place of despair and purification, where Amna ends her suffering.
The Desert: Where Abdel-Tawab meets his end—isolated, stripped of power, and judged outside the corrupt structures of society.
The Mansion: Symbol of wealth and corruption, power without conscience.

Style and Structure

Hussein employs a realist style, depicting rural Egypt with unsparing detail. The novel’s classical tragic structure pits the heroine against overwhelming forces—patriarchy, feudalism, and poverty—ending in her destruction, yet offering catharsis through protest and exposure of injustice.

Narration shifts between an omniscient voice and Hussein’s first-person account, intensifying the emotional resonance. Dialogue is vivid, capturing the social positions and emotions of each character: the landlord’s arrogance, the father’s helplessness, the mother’s grief, Hussein’s rage, and Mohsen’s inner conflict.

The novel also functions as a historical allegory, echoing Egypt’s pre-1952 conditions under feudal landlords and foreign domination, and as a cry for social and political change.

Legacy and Enduring Message

The Call of the Curlew is not merely the tragic story of a violated girl who takes her own life. It is a social, psychological, and artistic indictment of oppression in all its forms. It exposes:

The exploitation of the weak by the powerful.
The degradation of human dignity, especially women’s.
The complicity of silence and fear.
Society’s tendency to stigmatize the victim rather than the perpetrator.
The gap between rigid law and true justice.

Amna’s death is not only a tragedy but also a rupture in the cycle of silence. Hussein’s vengeance and Mohsen’s testimony awaken a dormant conscience.

The call of the curlew remains—a mournful reminder that oppression breeds pain, pain breeds protest, and protest, no matter how desperate, may one day give rise to justice.

Hussein’s novel endures as a painful yet necessary masterpiece, striking chords of dignity, injustice, and the eternal human struggle for freedom and justice. The curlew’s cry still echoes for every reader—a summons to awaken the conscience.

For the original summary in Arabic