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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Professor Vérité
"When I think of the Department of English at Ain Shams University," writes Awny Fayez Cassis in his introduction to this expansive display of scholarship, "the image of its founding father comes immediately to mind: the benign, smiling, suave and unruffled Dr Louis. Like a patriarch who embodies the traditional virtues, Dr Louis earned the unstinted admiration and respect of his colleagues and students. An inordinate cigarette smoker, he always spoke with a moral authority seldom equalled, and his heart-warming sincerity almost always disarmed his critics."
Beyond the editor's foreword and one other introductory piece, however, there is not much sign of Louis Morcos (1909-1996) in the four sections that make up the book, though his beloved shadow, so aptly described by Cassis, seems to hang over the entire compendium. According to Mary Massoud, at least, the "four sections of the book reflect the regions of Professor Morcos's cultural interests, while the wide variety of topics reflect the catholicity of his experience." Respectively, these sections are, "Egypt and the Arab World", "England", "Ireland" and "The USA and Other Countries". Together they make up an interesting, unexpected but above all mutually reinforcing four-sided structure, which offers further proof of the idea that culture is a universal area of human endeavour which transcends historical and geographical boundaries.
The articles that comprise this critical tetralogy and are here published in book form for the first time, were not written specifically in memory of the distinguished scholar. As is often the way with Festschrifts and memorial volumes of various kinds, constraints of time and academic discretion tend to reduce the opportunity for the kind of true one-on-one intellectual dialogue which is the profoundest form of remembrance, as well as the most honest variant of flattery -- where they do not eliminate them altogether.
However, the academic rigour of the contributions and the light they throw on their various subjects do in this case constitute an admirably rounded answer to Morcos's call for "vérité", as Suzanne Metry puts it in her inimitable French. "They called him 'Professor Vérité', for his motto was truth," she tells us. Of how many people could so much be said? And so it seems fitting that the contributors should deal with their subjects in an unmistakable Vérité fashion, even when the ultimate truth of the matter they are investigating may still, somehow, elude them. Whether or not they sound the depths, they certainly cover the waterfront, as their subjects range from Tawfik El-Hakim's The People of the Cave (a benchmark not only in El-Hakim's career, but also in the history of Arabic drama), to a new reading of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the fiction of John Updike and even Somali poetry.
