People of the Cave

Author's name: Tawfiq Al-Hakim

"The People of the Cave" was the first "artistic" play inspired by religious stories in dramatic drama. In it, Tawfiq al-Hakim addressed the issue of time and its meaning in relation to humans and civilizations, posing his timeless philosophical question: Is it possible for man to resist time with all its implications, its wildness, its dominance, and its determined path? With it, dramatic literature entered the public consciousness as a branch of Arabic literature. Concerning this, the great writer Bahaa Taher said: "The People of the Cave was the introduction of an entire generation to dramatic art. A generation that learned about drama through reading before experiencing it on stage. In the 1940s and early 1950s, theatrical life had no real existence. These beautiful pieces of literature ignited our imagination as sublime examples of a lost art." Al-Hakim says of his play: "I said in this play that these People of the Cave are saints, yes, but they should not live with us. We should place them in a respected cave that we sanctify and to which we make pilgrimages, but we cannot leave them to corrupt the present. I imagine the People of the Cave, having been left living in the present after an absence of more than three hundred years, each of them will of course try to return to his old craft and his old ideas.