Abstract
Politics and literature have always been intertwined in the Arab context. This study re-examines that relationship at scale through a computational analysis of political figures in modern Arabic fiction. Drawing on a curated corpus of 100 novels authored by writers from 19 Arab countries, the study applies named entity recognition and semantic classification to extract and analyse references to real political PERSON entities. The dataset includes 170 distinct political figures across 1,282 mentions, revealing a highly concentrated pattern of literary political memory where a small cluster of leaders accounts for a disproportionate share of references. Grounded in theories of cultural memory and banal nationalism, the study argues that political figures in modern Arabic fiction function as patterned mnemonic devices that structure collective memory and reproduce political meaning within everyday narrative discourse. Close readings of Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler references in the data further highlight how individual figures condense broader ideological formations. This study demonstrates that such political figures reflect the selective structure of literary political memory in the modern Arabic novel, including temporal preferences, transnational symbolic references, and gender asymmetry. The study contributes to Arabic literary studies by showing how corpus-based analysis can move beyond descriptive mapping to illuminate the ideological organisation of political memory in narrative form.