Pan Arabism and the Question of Palestine: A Reading of Yasmine Zahran's A Beggar at Damascus Gate

The narrative of Yasmine Zahran's novel, A Beggar at Damascus Gate, situates the political ideology of Nasser's pan Arab project as a cultural construct. It reveals the Palestinian history as seen from the different ideological perspectives of the two protagonists. I dwell into the ideas of pan Arabism and why for Rayya, the female protagonist of the novel, Palestine's fortune is inextricably linked with the pan Arab movement. The narrative tries to give two vantage points of looking at the question of Palestine-one of a Palestinian revolutionary and the other of a British spy. It tries to promote the idea that the solution to the question is embedded within the ideological cooperation between them, while the hurt of history makes it seemingly impossible to bridge the differences.