The result is a retooled modernist literature that stresses the ideological preconditions for renewal in a new notion of human dignity. Hassan Daoud's 1983 Binayat Mathilde (The House of Mathilde), Hoda Barakat's 1990 Hajar al-dahik (The Stone of Laughter), and Rashid al-Daif's 1995 'Azizi al-sayyid Kawabata (Dear Mr Kawabata) show how violence and coercion infuse the city and humiliate the self during war. Human dignity emerges in these novels only as a longed-for memory or vision of what was or ought to be. In Arabic literature nothing is more redolent of memory and longing than the medieval literary motif of "stopping before the ruins" (wuquf 'ala al-atlal), to remember former people and places. Hilary Kilpatrick's pioneering work has revealed how the motif can be reappropriated to probe "deeper layers of consciousness," and is "connected with the role of memory in literature today as a device for structuring experience."

This essay argues that the Lebanese war novel has also quietly incorporated "stopping before the ruins" into a modernist idiom. This is not simply to state that the abandoned campsite has now become the burned-out home and that the ex-lover has become one's family, neighbors or associates. In these novels the ruins motif sets in motion the mental processes that condition the conviction that human life is possessed of innate dignity regardless of how history and war may compromise it. I argue in a final section of this essay that this socio-literary practice corresponds closely to Julia Kristeva's account of psychosexual trauma in her theory of infantile abjection.

In a corresponding fashion, in Soviet historiography the study of the reformist movement of the early twentieth century in the Caucasus and Central Asia was generally treated as an isolated, self-contained movement, confined within the geographic borders of Baku, Tbilisi, and Bukhara, or at most within the southern region of the czarist empire, Turkistan. The occasional reference to the cross-regional dimension of these reform movements, if ever, was merely to its association with the political reforms exercised during the same period by the Russians or Tatars in different parts of the czarist empire. Here, too, what has been largely overlooked is the bond between the reform movements in the Caucasus and Central Asia and the corresponding movements in neighboring countries, namely, Iran, Afghanistan, India, or the Ottoman Empire.

In this study, I examine the impact that the Iranian constitutional revolution had on the reformist movement of the early twentieth century in the Caucasus and Central Asia and Afghanistan. Further, I sketch the Indian connection that made such an impact possible. My observation in this study is derived from highlighting historical examples at specific moments, rather than adopting a checklist approach, and covering as many spaces as possible over a certain period of time.