Issue No. 599
Culture
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15 - 21 August 2002 Issue No. 599 Culture |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Plain Talk
I have recently discovered, in my possession, a wealth of rare books and magazines. It was in the process of redecorating my flat that they came to my attention -- old editions of books by scholars such as Arnold Toynbee, Carr, Spengler, Sprott, Renan -- classics that are mostly out of print. But my most rewarding find was a fascinating little booklet that contains the text of 10 talks by the leading Egyptian historian Mohamed Shafik Ghorbal.
I had the good fortune to be his student when I enrolled at the Faculty of Arts, Fouad I (Cairo) University, in 1930. I had joined the department of English Literature, but first- year students were all required to attend lectures on history, geography and philosophy, given by leading authorities such as Ghorbal, Soliman Huzayen and Bayoumi Madkour. It was delightful.
Ghorbal -- incidentally the uncle of Ambassador Ashraf Ghorbal -- studied under Toynbee in London, specialising in modern history. Notwithstanding his duties as professor, he played a major role in establishing both the Cairo Museum of Civilisation and the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies. He is the author, in English, of The Egyptian Quests and The Rise of Mohamed Ali; and his Arabic books include History of Anglo-Egyptian Relations and the Arabic Encyclopaedia. While having none of the breadth of scope and comprehensive penetration of these books, the talks making up the aforementioned booklet -- intriguingly entitled The Making of Egypt, they were delivered in the professor's impeccable English for the Egyptian Broadcasting Corporation -- explain, in simple and flowing manner, the factors that bear on any informed answer to the perennial question of exactly who we are. The vexed issue of Egyptian identity is probed in a number of ways, from a variety of perspectives, from ancient to modern times.
Ghorbal quotes many theorists -- not so much to unequivocally specify what Egyptian identity is as to delineate factors contributing to the formation of that identity. He accepts Herodotus' famous statement, that Egypt is the gift of the Nile, for example, but refuses to restrict the concept of Egyptianness to the modern Egyptian's purest ethnic forbears, defining it, instead, as "the person who so calls himself, and who feels no other attachments however 'foreign' his ancestry..." It is remarkable, Ghorbal insists, that despite an astonishing diversity of origins, the Egyptian outlook on life has lived on.
Ghorbal discusses the common fallacy that maintains that the descendants of ancient Egyptians are more likely to be found in the countryside, because the latter is the least changed section of society or because it formed a refuge for those escaping foreign invasions. The countryside, he points out, is the exact opposite. It provided settlement space for Greek mercenaries, Arab tribesmen and desert nomads. Ghorbal concludes that whoever the earliest Egyptians were, and however altered their ethnic constitution became, the identity of Egypt emerged from the inhabitants of the Nile Valley. Ghorbal examines "the irreducible core of Egyptian culture," noting how that core benefited from the incorporation of elements from successive non-Egyptian migrants. He believes that in Egypt, as elsewhere, it was Christianity and Islam that lay at the core of future freedoms.
Christian Egypt developed a new art, building a national church and shaping, following the Islamic conquest, a linguistic instrument completely new and unique. New horizons opened up with the arrival of Islam since "the culture of Islamic Egypt is the culture of Islam modified to Egyptian conditions." That said, however, he proceeds to pose the question of how exactly the core of Egyptian culture developed following this and subsequent transformations. Unfortunately, the space of this column is too small to fully expound the positions Ghorbal adopts, but the rediscovery of the pamphlet was one of the very few consolations that accompanied the upset of redecorating.
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