14 - 20 December 2000
Issue No.512
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512 |
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To the Don with love
Reading Egypt: Literature, History and Culture, John Rodenbeck ed.,Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000. pp314
In addition to generously giving out plane tickets, mobiles and nights in five-star hotels to guests invited to its 40th anniversary reception, the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press, to celebrate its 40th birthday, has added Reading Egypt: Literature, History and Culture to its list of publications. The brainchild of AUC Press director, Mark Linz, this book is an anthology of parts of AUC Press publications compiled by John Rodenbeck, professor of English and Comparative Literature, who was approached by the press to put the volume together. Reading Egypt may thus be dealt with not only as a book in its own right, but also as an item with explicit publicity aims on the part of its publisher.
AUC Press was founded in 1960 "to fulfil an aim that from any publisher's point of view could only have been regarded," writes Rodenbeck in his introduction, "as wildly unorthodox, even quixotic: the publication of a single title," Creswell's A Bibliography of the Arts, Architecture and Crafts of Islam. AUC Press, however like AUC itself, has long since abandoned its quirky, Don Quixotic character and has become a high-profile institution. The AUC Press, the jacket of Reading Egypt tells us, "now has over 300 quality academic and general book titles in print [ ...] a wide range of [...] books on modern Egypt and the Middle East, as well as a variety of Arabic literature in English translation, notably the works of Egypt's Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz." Furthermore, the introduction to the book states, AUC Press "has now become [...] the foremost publisher in the world of titles in English dealing with the Arab Middle East, especially with Egypt."
But what -- one is entitled to ask -- is meant by the "foremost publisher in the world of titles in English"? That it publishes the most titles? The "best" books on Egypt and on the region at large, books "better" than those published in English by university presses in Europe, the US and elsewhere? That it publishes the most "seminal" or "influential"? According to whom and to what criteria? Undoubtedly the AUC Press is, as Mursi Saad El-Din writes in his foreword to this book, "more than just a publishing house. It is [...] a cultural institution that has greatly contributed to the advancement of learning." The pernickety among us, however, those who do not take things on gentlemanly trust, will ask that adjectives like "leading" and "foremost" be supported and explained by stats and facts.
When taken too far publicity can become self-subverting. I was looking forward to attending Rodenbeck's reading of passages from Reading Egypt at AUC Press's 40th birthday party. As a former student of his for whom, like for many others, Dr Rodenbeck's voice reading, say, passages from Wordsworth's Prelude, Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Frost's "Directive" was a truly moving experience, one that would remain etched in the memory, inextricably tied to one's love of literature, I took my seat in happy anticipation of what would take place. Publicity paraphernalia -- glaring lights needed for video cameras manned by incessantly moving people "covering" the event -- all but covered Rodenbeck and seriously distracted from his eloquent voice. All this moving around when a distinguished member of a university community is at a podium reading was, to an old-fashioned member of the audience, simply bad manners. S/he obviously neglected to note that this dawsha was in the name of the best of (publicity-oriented) intentions.
Rodenbeck's quietly self-effacing introduction to the volume is far removed from the hoo-ha spirit of publicity. It contents itself with providing an account of AUC Press's "modest beginnings" and with letting the reader know the modest scope and intention of the three sections ("Arabic Literature," "The City of Cairo" and "Egypt Past and Present," respectively) of the volume. Its aim is "not to represent [the] history [of AUC Press's evolution]," let alone that of its subject matter, Egypt, "but to underline what have emerged as the Press's particular strengths, while offering serious readers texts they can get their teeth into." One would have liked to see more of the editor in his introduction, especially since he himself is a knowledgeable authority on the two main strands that make up the book: AUC Press and Egypt.
How an Egyptian obelisk came to reside in a European metropolis: The machinery for placing Cleopatra's Needle in position on the Thames Embankment, the Graphic, June 1, 1878
(From An Egyptian Panorama, edited by Nicholas Warner, Zeitouna Press)
No apology is needed to justify omissions -- like, for example, Youssef Idris from the literature section, Nasser's Egypt from the "Egypt Past and Present" section. After all, a celebratory anthology like that of AUC Press should not be dealt with as an ideological statement about the canon or as a (re)writing of history, contrary to what those who occupy themselves with re-presenting representations of their own post-colonial condition might argue. Still, it would have been interesting for the reader to get a glimpse in the introduction of what must have been the excruciatingly difficult and challenging task that faced the editor when choosing what (not) to include.
The "Arabic Literature" section comprises mainly Mahfouz in his more mystical and Poesque/Kafkaesque moments and Taha Hussein awakening to his secular, non-Azharite modern self. "The Egypt Past and Present" section -- which, more accurately, could have been titled Egypt Ancient and Modern-though-Mostly-Pre-20th-Century (interestingly, the "medieval, Islamic" past of Egypt makes its appearance in the section entitled "The City of Cairo") -- is the one that offers the most texts that "serious" readers "can get their teeth into." Whether it is the condition of my teeth or my expectations of this type of anthology is for the dentist to tell: I tended to prefer the less academic and specialised pieces in this section, such as Lise Manniche's on the significance of perfume in Ancient Egypt, Habachi's account of how an Egyptian obelisk came to reside in Paris's Place de la Concorde, Ahmed Fakhry's homely, conversational narrative about how camels made a difference to his desert trips, and Richard Hoath's "Egyptian Fauna in Winter."
That strange and elusive creature called "the general reader" -- to whom an anthology such as this one is presumably marketed -- is hardly likely to be entertained by extracts from such serious scholarly tomes as Kenneth Cuno's The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740-1858 or Enid Hill's "Courts and the Administration of Justice in the Modern Era," an article from The State and Its Servants: Administration in Egypt from Ottoman Times to the Present edited by Nelly Hanna. These, after all, were not written with a hedonistic consumer out for a quick fix of readerly pleasure in mind -- the kind who would buy this anthology rather than the books from which the extracts came.
The middle section of Reading Egypt, that on "The City of Cairo," also spreads its net across a broad field of discourse, democratically allowing diverse registers happily to coexist in the same space. As an erstwhile student of Islamic art and architecture, I was pleased by the inclusion of two pieces (addressed to the specialised reader) on restoration projects. Yet, though it is true that what is "good" for one's mind does not always fulfil the purpose of immediate gratification or "fun" (as many a budding philosopher bored to tears by Aristotle's Metaphysics can tell you), the general reader cannot be faulted for finding the piece on the mashhad al-Juyushi too technical to enjoy. Information -- historical, political, aesthetic, topographical -- can be fun: Wladyslaw Kubiak on Al-Fustat, for example, or André Raymond on the role of guilds and ethnic communities in the administration of Ottoman Cairo and Sonallah Ibrahim autobiographically on the edges of modern Cairo were all a pleasure to read. Neil MacKenzie's piece on Ayyubid Cairo would have been better served had it been accompanied by maps charting Cairo's topographic evolution.
The parts I enjoyed reading most, or more precisely, rereading, from this second section of the book were those extracted from Desmond Stewart's Great Cairo: Mother of the World, Max Rodenbeck's Cairo: The City Victorious and Cynthia Myntti's Paris along the Nile: Architecture in Cairo from the Belle Epoque. These are AUC Press publications from which I have derived much pleasure and -- give or take a few moments of mismatched readerly-writerly subjectivities and biases -- knowledge. They are books that, in addition to owning, I have given as gifts to friends for wedding anniversaries, birthdays, and Christmas.
Peace on earth and good will to all men. Publicity (inevitable and inescapable) aside, Reading Egypt -- though not flawless (those with proof-reader's eyes will find enough typos over which to gloat, and, on a more serious note, the provision of information about the anthologised authors would have been a good idea) -- should be viewed in the spirit of a gift received and perhaps given, or, as a preparatory step towards a gift, a sampler from which to choose the books to be bought, given and received, read and enjoyed.
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