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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Monthly supplement
Two Moroccan writers set out from Fez and arrived in Paris. But they took two different paths, and speak two different languagesLe Maroc explained
L'Auberge des pauvres, (The Inn of the Poor), Tahar Ben Jelloun, Auberge des pauvres, 1999. pp294A summer to be reckoned with
Mithl Seif lan Yatakarar: Mahkiyyat (Like a Summer Never to be Repeated: Narratives), Mohamed Berrada, Casablanca: Dar Al-Fenac, 1999. pp235
Better than more
Al-Tanwir Al-Za'if (False Enlightenment), Galal Amin, Cairo: Iqraa' series, Dar Al-Maaref, February 1999. pp151The canary sings to himself
Dhalik Al-Janib Al-Akhar (That Other Side), Hassan Soliman, Cairo: General Organisation for Culture Palaces, Aswat Adabiya Series, May 1999. pp195How very high society
The Egyptian Upper Class Between Revolutions: 1919-1952, Magda Baraka, St Antony's Middle East Monographs Series, Ithaca Press, 1998. pp328A movable feast
The Cambridge History of Egypt (2 Vols.), Vol.1 , edited by Carl F. Petry, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp645Terms of conversion
Islam in Britain: 1558-1685, Nabil Matar, Cambridge University Press. 1998. pp297The movement of the waters
As he approaches his eighth decade, José Sarney can look back on a varied and distinguished career. He is best known outside his native Brazil as the first president to lead the country following the overthrow of the military junta in 1985. A lawyer by training, his true vocation however is literature. Unlike those politicians who turn to writing late in life as a distraction or a recreation, Sarney has been making stories since his earliest years. With his novel, O Dono do Mar (The Master of the Sea), his fame as an artist seems set to spread beyond Latin America. A best-seller in the original Portuguese, the work has now been translated into Arabic. Injy El-Kashef spoke to the author while he was in Cairo to launch the book, which she reviews hereGod is here, and the devil with him
Sayed Al-Bihar (O Dono do Mar, The Master of the Sea), José Sarney, Beirut: Dar Al-Farabi, 1999, pp323
At a glance:* Manamat Am Ahmed Assamak (Am Ahmed the Fisherman's Dreams), Khairi Shalabi
* Al-Yahoud fi Misr Al-Mamloukiya (Jews in Mameluke Egypt), Mahasin Mohamed El-Waqqad
* Shahadati lil-Agyal (My Testimony to the Coming Generations), Helmi El-Said
* Hatha Al-Sabbah Al-Gamil (This Beautiful Morning), Mohamed Abul-Ma'ati Abul-Naga
* Khajal Al-Yaquot (The Shyness of Rubies), Amal Moussa
Al-Hilal, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, June 1999
* Complete Poetry, Mohamed Al-Qeissi, Beirut: Arab Institution for Studies and Publishing, 1999.
* Sourat Al-Yahoud fi Al-Adab Al-Injelizi (The Image of Jews in English Literature), Ramsis Awad
Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
Better than more
Reviewed by Nur Elmessiri
Al-Tanwir al-Za'if (False Enlightenment) is a collection of previously published polemical articles and essays by Galal Amin. Together, they form a critique of what Amin, one of Egypt's most prominent and brilliant economists, perceives to be the wholesale and uncritical acceptance by many 20th century and contemporary Egyptian intellectuals and artists of the 18th-century European project of "Enlightenment".
Amin proceeds by, first, examining the central claims of Enlightenment thought and showing how they were the reflection of particular historical circumstances. He then goes on to discuss the unfortunate results of many Egyptian intellectuals' unquestioning acceptance of those claims. The values of the Enlightenment are not, Amin argues, universally valid. Its claims to rationality, objectivity, equality, freedom of expression and tolerance had a limited meaning and a restricted scope of application. The rational individual whose rights were to be safeguarded referred ultimately to members of the European bourgeoisie as they sought to maximise profit and expand markets. The so-called "secularism" of Enlightenment thought, intolerant of religious mysteries, is itself ridden with theological claims. Amin shows, as have many post-enlightenment European thinkers, how the assumptions that human beings can exercise complete control over nature, that they can perfect themselves and that "progress" is inevitable, all the more so if "the hidden hand of the market" is allowed to operate unfettered, together constitute a belief system requiring the same kind of unquestioning faith that traditional religion demands. The values and goals underlying the Enlightenment project were never really embraced as absolute, neither in 18th century Europe nor in the contemporary West, and, Amin argues, they should not be. Limits are not only inevitable, but also necessary for any culture to bear fruit -- all the more so if the seeds of "Enlightenment" are not native to its earth, as in the Arab world.
As a university professor, Amin has a wonderful knack of turning something as abstract as the concept of marginal utility into food for critical thought about reality as lived and experienced. Having had the good fortune as an undergraduate at AUC to take an introductory economics course with the author, I feel entitled to mention this, not just because Amin's book is itself full of autobiographical information -- which, though it sometimes serves to clarify a point, at others obfuscates or is (as in the chapters on Taha Hussein and Youssef Chahine) without any clear purpose -- but also in response to the issue of "sons versus fathers" which comes up several times in the book.
One chapter is devoted to a critique of irreverent attitudes to the "tribal elders" that are famous men of letters and intellectuals. Dwelling on the minor flaws of great thinkers does not necessarily serve the "enlightening" purpose that their often small-minded and petty critics claim to be their motive. Often, Amin argues, the main motive is Oedipal. Though Amin does not use the term Oedipal, he does discuss the issue in terms of sons for the first time seeing their father naked or discovering that their fathers have sexual intercourse. The use of such imagery comes as something of a surprise in a book which considers almost any reference to the conjugal bed in a film to constitute "gratuitous" sex, and which, without naming either novel or novelist, dismisses one writer because his book opens and closes with the protagonist sitting on the toilet -- though those of us who read Sonallah Ibrahim's delightfully witty Zhat, a penetrating exposé of Sadat's open-door policy (infitah) will recognise Amin's allusion.
Unfortunately, Amin provides no concrete examples from the contemporary Egyptian intellectual scene of petty critics (sons) seeking to diminish the stature of intellectual giants (fathers) -- and as a result, the discussion is frustratingly vague. This weakness, which resurfaces at numerous points throughout the book, is due perhaps to the fact that these articles often originated in a polemical debate staged by a particular periodical to be followed by its regular readers. But the reader coming fresh to the book has no access to the original context, and may well be reading the book precisely because s/he missed the articles when they first appeared.
But, let us put frustration aside, and get back to Oedipus. Amin's argument that unmasking and demystification for their own sake can not only become tedious after a while, but can also be counterproductive in the not-necessarily-everywhere-and-for-everyone-old-fashioned quest for truth is a point well-taken. But perhaps the intellectual giants themselves ask for it. Marx, for example, is singled out for Amin's fire, not because Amin is mean-spirited or petty, but because Marx made grand claims about Humanity and History. But would Marx's third-world "sons" therefore be wrong to take issue with the way in which their mentor assimilated non-European cultures (with their alternative, "Asiatic" modes of production) into a Eurocentric grand narrative, thus dismissing as only marginally relevant the forces of history at play back in Asia Town? Surely, it is precisely because Marx's economic and political theories so brilliantly analyse and expose so much, that Marx's blindnesses are experienced as anything from deeply disappointing (for those of us who once considered ourselves his intellectual offspring) to utterly exasperating (for those of us who didn't).
Smith, Malthus, Marx made grand claims. So did Francis Fukuyama. Intellectuals (whether Left or Right, "us" or "them", third world oppressed or Westerners) often do. Amin does. "We have to be able," he writes, "to distinguish between an intellectual or artistic work that truly serves an intellectual awakening and one that gets in its way, between the right to express views, on the one hand, and the right to disgrace and ridicule things sacred. If it is asked: and who will be the arbiter? I say this is precisely the core of the responsibility of an Arab intellectual, who cannot be called an intellectual if he loses the ability to distinguish between the former and the latter " (p 29).
This is a very big claim indeed. As far as I know, theologians and scholars of religion -- people who have devoted their lives to studying sacred texts or emulating the lives of holy people -- are more qualified to discuss, qua sacred, issues concerned with the sacred than are economists or historians of ideas. That is, if by "the sacred" we are referring to the Word of God. If by "the sacred", we simply mean "tradition" or an Arnoldian "the best that has been thought and expressed", why take the word "sacred" in vain and dilute it?
Amin's argument that "Religious versus Heathen/Pagan" is a better and more epistemologically productive distinction than "Secular versus Fundamentalist" is probably guided by the noble aim of widening the grounds of consent among the intellectuals of his society at a historical moment when divisive bickering makes them increasingly likely to lose sight of their common goals. But Amin's decision to cap the chapter in which he makes this argument with the kind of quotation from a religious authority which "enlightened" religious scholars of the Taha Hussein school -- with whom Amin takes considerable issue -- would have used to marginalise the Prophet really does not work. Theology is a complicated, complex field of knowledge -- at least as complicated as economics and literary theory.
The chauvinistic tone that Amin sometimes adopts is perhaps what, as a former student of his, I found most disappointing. Of course, the temptation to play taunting David to the smug Goliath of the nebulous "West" is understandable. Though it might not be strategically productive to hold in parenthesis the fact that "the West" is ridden with divisions and conflicts, and is hence not necessarily one thing, an intellectual can be forgiven for simplifying "the imperial enemy" on the grounds of tactical considerations. But a chauvinistic attitude towards other third world cultures hardly seems proper in a book lamenting the sad state of the contemporary Egyptian intelligentsia. Having begun on a very subtle, convincing and stimulating note, the chapter entitled "False Enlightenment in the Information Revolution" draws to a strikingly heavy-handed end:
"[T]he losses being incurred by Arab culture as a result of the information and communications revolution are probably greater than those being incurred by any other culture exposed to the West's conquest. I do not say this out of patriotic fervour or an exaggerated love of self, but because of my belief that Arab culture could have presented to the world a viable alternative that would have helped the whole world to overcome the dangers that come with the information revolution. This view of mine is based on my belief that Arab culture contains within itself elements that are completely opposed to the four aspects of the information revolution that I consider to be grounds for concern" (pp 96-97). Yet the elements that are then presented to the reader to support this view of Arab-culture-as-saviour-of-the-whole-world are so lacking in substance, so vague and hence so applicable to anything anywhere, that the argument just evaporates under its own lack of weight.
In the introduction, Amin critiques the Eurocentric concept of economic "development" and the unilinear, monolithic view of history it implies. "The catchword 'development', like 'enlightenment', is a beautiful name for something ugly," he writes. "...If in this book I try to show the false facets of the enlightenment slogan, I hope in another book to do the same with the development slogan."
That should be a book worth reading -- and would have been worth the wait. With three books published in 1998, one of which (What had Happened to the Egyptians) receiving the 1999 Cairo Book Fair Award for best work of social history, this collection of articles seems unnecessary. More goods to be quickly produced and consumed, Amin would agree, is not necessarily better. And though it could be argued that a book is not a good but a speech-act, less speech-acting -- if we share Amin's serious reservations about the information and communication revolution's fetishising of quantity -- is often better than more.
