 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Living on the edge
Youssef RakhaTHE DEATH of literary critic, writer and university professor Shukri Ayyad in the small hours of Saturday morning marks the end not only of an extraordinary life devoted to literature and learning, but also of a whole cultural era -- that of the second-generation pioneers of the modern literary renaissance -- and of a unique and admirable sensibility.
Ayyad combined an open-minded awareness of the literary and artistic achievements of the West with a profound and enlightened understanding of the Arabic literary heritage as well as the depths and breadths of Islamic thought. And though his principal contribution was to literary criticism, the handful of creative works he left behind make of him a figure to be reckoned.
"In his creative works Shukri Ayyad erected a new construction in our literary world," wrote the late critic Ali El-Ra'i. "He liberated the old narratives of their interminable complications, and shunned the system whereby their unfolding was ceaseless and inorganic ... turning them into integrated literary creations, new in both form and content, even though his works preserved all the beauty of style that we encounter in the old narratives."
Born in 1921 in the Delta village of Kafr Shanwan, Menoufiya, Shukri Mohamed Ayyad studied Arabic literature at Fouad Al-Awal (now Cairo) University, earning his Masters degree in 1948, and completing his Ph.D., a study of the earliest Arabic translation of Aristotle's Poetics and an investigation into the subsequent influence of this most seminal of European critical texts on Arabic literature, in 1953.
Shukri Mohamed AyyadHe had studied under two of the period's most eminent men of letters, Taha Hussein and Sheikh Amin El-Khouli, and in the mid-1940s started publishing articles and stories in the daily Al-Masri, earning, along with first-generation short-story writers like Saad Mikawi, Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi and Fathi Ghanim, the laudatory acknowledgement of a number of well-established literary critics of the period. Ayyad, however, eschewed the limelight, withdrawing from the public arena, and instead devoted himself to studying Ancient Greek in order to complete his Ph.D.
From the early 1950s to the late 1970s Ayyad worked successfully as a lecturer, researcher and critic, occupying a number of high-ranking cultural and literary positions during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among other things he was dean of the Theatre Institute, head of the Arabic Literature Department and vice-dean of the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, and cultural attaché at the Egyptian Embassy in Brazil, all of which, as writer Ragaa El-Naqqash points out in the Al-Ahram obituary (published on Sunday, 25 July) he treated with a noted degree of circumspection, consistently avoiding the intrigues of power and ardently shunning all forms of self-advertisement. In his own phrase -- also the title of his autobiography -- he preferred Al-Aish ala Al-Hafa (Living on the Edge).
In this autobiography Ayyad wrote: "The point of all this is to say that living on the edge -- whether that is the edge of poverty, of sickness, or of madness or the numerous other afflictions which resemble them is not necessarily dangerous to the self, given that the human being is able to preserve his balance. Thereafter comes the role of knowledge and culture in forming one's mind and taste. And my biography in these two fields is similar to my occupational biography. From the day I gained consciousness I have always tried to be in control of my affairs, and to earn what I could by my own effort."
