الملك أوديب

الملك أوديب (King Oedipus, 1949) is one of Tawfiq al-Hakim's major verse dramas, an Arabic reworking of the Greek tragedy of Oedipus. One of the pioneers of modern Arabic theatre, al-Hakim takes Sophocles' story of the king who unknowingly fulfills a terrible prophecy and reshapes it for a very different intellectual world.

Where the Greek original stages a struggle between man and the gods, al-Hakim's play turns inward and philosophical, foregrounding the conflict between truth and reality and drawing in questions of reason and revelation more familiar to an Arab and Islamic sensibility. His Oedipus is preoccupied less with public catastrophe than with the intimate ties of family and the limits of human knowledge.

In his substantial preface, al-Hakim reflects on the challenge of adapting a foundational Western myth for Arabic drama. The result is a landmark of twentieth-century Arabic theatre and a thoughtful meditation on fate, doubt, and the search for meaning.