Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
The issues that beset each era may be different on the surface. Yet beneath that veneer of difference, they often remain the same -- even as their expression, and the manner in which they are treated, assume correspondingly different guises through the years.
In Egypt during the 1920s, when the nationalist movement made self examination rife among the intelligentsia, the questions were particularly pressing. Who are we? The trailblazers of the revolution wondered. To which civilisation do present-day Egyptians belong? Ancient Egyptian or Arab? Salama Moussa and other secularists insisted on the former rather than the latter, and in this contention he was supported by leading writers like Mohamed Hussein Heikal and Tawfik El-Hakim.
Papyrus Stories, a popular book published at that time, sought out the union between ancient and modern, concluding, disappointingly, that since ancient times change had affected the system of government, the religious creed and even the language spoken, among many basic tenets of life, thus irrevocably separating modern Egypt from its ancient counterpart. Other writers, like Ahmed Hassan El-Zayat, went even further, asserting the Arab origins of modern Egypt. "Two or three writers have become famous for advocating the idea of going back to Ancient Egyptian roots," he wrote furiously. "As a result there is, in Arab countries like Iraq and Syria, the disgraceful feeling that Egypt, the leading Arab nation, has replaced its minarets with obelisks, its mosques and churches with temples, and its scientists with high priests."
Several other arguments flared up in the context of national renaissance. They concerned poetry, among other cultural topics. Writers like Abdel-Rahman Shukri, Abbas El-Aqqad and Ibrahim El- Mazni attacked traditional poetry, calling for liberation from the ancient fetters of versification. Others insisted on just such fetters, without which, they insisted, Arabic poetry would lose any sense of identity. Similarly, regarding the state of culture, traditionalists called for preserving existing legacies while modernists embraced European thought. Secularisation battled on and on with a form of fundamentalism.
In the end Taha Hussein and El-Aqqad introduced a kind of compromise, contributing articles to newspapers and magazines which were later published in book form. Going through these books today, one cannot fail to see the emergence of an amalgam of European culture and traditional, Arab and Muslim, thought. Following a chapter on Homer, Shakespeare or Shelly, there would be one on the great pre-Islamic poet Emri' Al-Qais, on Jalaleddin Al-Rumi or the Abbasid Al- Mutanabi. Hussein, for one, applied Western methodology to the classical Arabic canon. His controversial book on pre- Islamic poetry, published in 1923, thus threw much pre- Islamic writing into refreshing relief.
Such literary and cultural battles took place on the pages of specialist magazines, which contributed to the 1920s and 1930s being a period of extraordinary mental activity. It was an age of self examination, of scepticism and rationality, and it reflected not only an advanced level of freedom of expression but a true attempt at self examination. Yet many of the questions to which it gave rise persist, in however different a form, to this day. First and foremost among these, perhaps, is whether Egyptians should relate to Arabs or to ancient civilisation, and whether the risk of secularism, which has become synonymous with globalisation, justifies a blind return to the most basic tenets of Islam.
Indeed it is the question of identity that has haunted Egyptian intellectuals since the dawn of 20th century, and will continue to do so to the present day. And whether it takes the form of literary arguments on the pages of magazines or live debates on satellite television, it has the same relevance. It is in this context that one makes the claim that, notwithstanding the apparent difference between the 1920s and the present, an issue like cultural identity -- which could assume two distinct guises -- at bottom preoccupies the active intellectuals of both eras.
