Munif was born in 1933 in
Amman, Jordan, to a
Nejdi merchant family. His grandmother was
Iraqi. His
Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman describes his upbringing there. In 1952, he moved to
Baghdad to study law and later moved to
Cairo. He received a law degree from the
Sorbonne and a PhD in oil economics from the
University of Belgrade's
Faculty of Economics. He later returned to Iraq to work in the oil ministry and became a member of the
Ba'ath Party. During this time he edited an industry journal called
al-Naft wa al-Tanmiya "Petroleum and Development". He began writing in the 1970s after he left his job with the Iraqi ministry, quit the Ba'ath party, and moved to
Damascus, Syria, removing himself from a regime he opposed. He quickly became known for his scathing parodies of Middle Eastern elites, especially those of Saudi Arabia, a country which banned many of his books and stripped him of his Saudi citizenship. He used his knowledge of the oil industry to full effect, criticizing the businessmen who ran it and the politicians they served. Munif was the author of fifteen novels. The
Cities of Salt quintet followed the evolution of the
Arabian Peninsula as its traditional
Bedouin culture was transformed by the oil boom. The novels portray the history of a broad region, evoking comparisons to
William Faulkner's
Yoknapatawpha County. The quintet begins with
Mudun al-Milh (مدن الملح,
Cities of Salt, 1984), depicting the desert oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun as it is transformed and destroyed by the arrival of Western oilmen, a story similar to that of the disrupted village of
Chinua Achebe's
Things Fall Apart. Much as Achebe described the effects of the arrival of powerful missionaries on a traditional African village, so Munif chronicles the economic, social, and psychological effects of the promise of immeasurable wealth drawn from the deserts of nomad and oasis communities. The quintet continues with
Al-ukhdud (1985;
The Trench),
Taqasim al-layl wa-al-nahar (1989;
Variations on Night and Day),
Al-munbatt (1989;
The Uprooted), and
Badiyat al zulumat (1989;
The Desert of Darkness).
Daniel Burt ranked the quintet as the 71st greatest novel of all time. The last two novels in the series have not been translated into English. In a doctoral study conducted at the University of Oxford, Suja Sawafta argues that Abdulrahman Munif was and remains the only modern Arab novelist to bridge a discursive gap between the literature and culture of the Arab Mediterranean and the Arab Gulf states, owing to his upbringing and intellectual formation in the Levant, his Saudi- Iraqi familial roots, and his work as an oil specialist in Syria and Iraq. His first novel to appear in English was
Endings. The translator claimed it was the first Saudi Arabian novel to be translated into English, and hailed its innovative portrayal of rural life and environmental challenges in an Arabic genre which had, until then, focused mostly on urban, middle-class experiences. While he was one of the fiercest critics of
Saddam Hussein and his regime, he was utterly opposed to the
American invasion of Iraq and spent the last two years of his life working on non-fiction projects to oppose what he saw as renewed
imperialism. He died in Damascus at the age of 70, of kidney and heart failure. ==Bibliography==