Issue No. 600
Culture
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22 - 28 August 2002 Issue No. 600 Culture |
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Plain Talk
In an essay titled Man and Society in Egypt Mohamed Shafiq Ghorbal asks a seemingly perennial question: "Does the individual exist for the society or society for the individual?"
Ghorbal believes that as a social animal man cannot achieve the full spiritual potential of his nature except by going outside himself and entering into relations with other spiritual beings. Seeking God, he further argues, is in essence a social act.
At the basis of Egyptian life, he goes on, are certain physical factors which have been operating with perfect regularity at least within the comparatively brief span of known history. The succession of seasons and their variations, the heat and the humidity, the direction and the speed of the wind, the rise and fall of the river, the regularity of all these phenomena might be described as near perfect.
Man's toil in such an environment must perforce be regular. But it has also to be constant, continuous and in accordance with the regulations of a centralised public system. Any cessation in the toil -- any neglect, any individual whim -- spells ruin. Thus, Ghorbal argues, we are justified in saying that the Egypt which the Egyptians have founded exacts from them her price and imposes on them a way of life. So masterful has Egypt been in dictating to her rulers the methods by which they must make the best use of her that a survey of the acts of, say, a Mamluke sultan or a Roman proconsul might also serve to describe the acts of a Ptolemy.
It is evident, the words are still Ghorbal's, that the physical and human environment of Egypt bred good, steady workers rather than strongly differentiated individuals. The Egyptian of history is a man passionately attached to his village and field in the countryside or to his street and quarter in the city. He would slave at his business or land, and not even misfortune or natural disaster would drive him away. To the villager throughout history the desert has been barren, a place of death and the abode of nomadic marauders. His back is turned to it. And for both villager and townsman the "golden age" is in neither the past nor the present, but lies some time ahead in the future.
It cannot be in the past and it cannot be in the present, for it has always seemed that most of the good things in life are the exclusive preserve of a tiny minority. Ghorbal then goes on to quote his professor, Arnold Toynbee, as saying that "during the last five or six thousand years the masters of civilisations have robbed their slaves of their share of the fruits of society's corporate labours as cold- bloodedly as we rob bees of their honey."
This applies to the Pharaohs. When the god king surveyed his land of Egypt and saw that it was flourishing, he yielded to the illusion that he, and he alone, was its creator. He proclaimed "I am Your Lord the Highest." The peasantry degenerated into an agrarian proletariat. Egyptian society displayed a rigidity, a conventionality and a barrenness of inspiration which is in sharp contrast to the creative energy that informed that same society's epic birth and growth.
Ghorbal then goes on to explain the changes Christianity and Islam brought, and continues his analysis of the legacy of the past by identifying the four important changes wrought on this inheritance in the 19th century. Then, a secularised version of the rights of man became recurrent, together with the widespread belief that salvation must be attained through economic and social changes and a conviction in the efficacy of perfect institutions.
Such, then, is Ghorbal's enduring analysis of the development of Egyptian institutions and the ways in which they have impacted on the character of Egyptian individuals and Egyptian society in general. It is an analysis that is even more relevant today as we embark on the 21st century.
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