The People of the Cave

"People of the Cave" was the first "artistic" play inspired by religious stories in dramatic theater, in which Tawfiq al-Hakim addressed the problematic of time and its meaning in relation to humans and civilizations, and posed his eternal philosophical question: Is it possible for humans to resist time with all its repercussions, its frenzy, dominance, and predetermined course? Through it, dramatic literature entered the circle of public awareness as a branch of Arabic literature. And in this, the great writer Bahaa Taher said: "People of the Cave" was an entry for an entire generation into the art of drama. A generation that knew drama through reading before experiencing it on the theater stage. In the 1940s and early 1950s, there was no real theatrical life. These beautiful literary pieces ignited our imagination as noble models of a lost art." And Hakim says about his play: "I said in this play that these People of the Cave are saints, indeed, but they should not live with us. We should place them in a respectful cave that we venerate and to which we make pilgrimage, but we cannot leave them to corrupt the present. I imagine the People of the Cave, having left them to live in the present after more than three hundred years of absence, each of them, of course, would try to return to his old craft and his ancient ideas."