Tayyib Saleh's Novel: 'Urs al-Zein/ The Wedding of Zein: The Wedding of Compromise between Traditionalism and Modernism

Abstract

Despite the fact that more than four decades have passed since Tayib Saleh's novel al-Zain's Wedding was published, it is still demands exploratory and profound reading and re-reading from time to time. Such readings should not be satisfied with search for immediate meanings, but the meanings of meanings, which are likely to hide new invisible and interesting  ideas that hint to the reader that that the novel is a glowing text that deserves more than one fruitful enlightening reading.

Al-Zain's Wedding constitutes a stepping stone and the beginning of the journey inside the Sudanese entity through yearning to achieve reconciliation between original traditionalism and the cultural spiritual heritage that it carries through its folds and modernism that carries openness, development and modernity.

While al-Zai's Wedding is considered the beginning of the journey inside, the novel of Season of Immigration to the North is the journey outside the Sudanese identity and the description of the contact with the other, who is different. It represents a meeting between the Oriental culture and the Western culture there in its original pace, and the return to homeland.

Al-Zain's Wedding was published before Season of Immigration to the North, and in this way, Tayib Saleh gave answer to one of the questions that was posed to him. He said: "But I started Season of Immigration from where al-Zain's Wedding ended.

It seems that the author tries to make a compromise between some people who still raise the slogan of "the Present of the Past," from which they cannot get rid, and others, who raise the slogan of the "Present of the Present." It is an attempt to re-conciliate between tradition and modernism. Actually, the author has succeeded in achieving such reconciliation in his novel.