Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

The salient characteristic of intellectual life in Egypt in the inter-war period was diversity. The cultural scene reflected a genuine desire on the part of intellectuals to forge what could be regarded as Egyptian cultural, social and political foundations. The raging debates of the time were hosted, among others, by such journals as Al-Siyasa Al-Osbou'iyya (Weekly Politics), edited by Mohamed Hussein Heikal, Al-Magalla Al-Gadida (The New Magazine), edited by Salama Moussa, Al-Risala (The Message), edited by Ahmed Hassan Al-Zayat, and Al-Thaqafa (Culture), edited by Ahmed Amin.

I shall focus on one among the many debates about Egyptian identity, literary criticism, and poetry. This is the debate between Taha Hussein and Tawfiq Al-Hakim, negotiating contrasting perceptions of cultural identity. Al-Hakim first broaches the importance of delineating Egyptian thought as the necessary groundwork for any future cultural project. Tellingly, the three cultures he is keen on discussing are the ancient Egyptian, the Arab and the Greek. He dwells on the question why Greek statues are often nude, while Egyptian ones tend to be covered. For him, this indicates that Egypt's tendency is towards the spiritual, in contrast to the Greeks' logical turn of mind. El-Hakim then takes his argument further to compare the Greeks and the Arabs, and find similarities between them. All Arab and Greek thought and art reflect the pleasure of the senses and matter. It is impossible, he says, to find in the whole of Arab civilisation any tendency towards the soul and the spirit, in the same sense as in India and Egypt. He then comes to the conclusion that the Egyptians and the Arabs are antithetical. Egypt, he says, is "the soul, solitude, settlement, and construction; the Arabs are matter, movement, instability and ornamentation."

Taha Hussein responded to Al-Hakim's argument by claiming that the Egyptian spirit should not be separated from either the Arab or the Greek. He then asks "of what does the spirit in Egypt consist? It consists of three elements, the first we inherited from the ancient Egyptians, the second is the Arab origin which comes to us from language, religion and civilisation, and the third is the foreign origin which has always influenced Egyptian life and will continue to do so. It has been acquired through Egypt's long history of contact with the civilised nations of both east and west in ancient times." That influence, he goes on, came from the Greeks, the Romans and the Phoenicians in ancient times, from the Arabs, the Turks and the Franks in the Middle Ages, and in the modern period from Europe and America.

The debate between Al-Hakim and Taha Hussein was followed by others, one of the most important debates centring on the place of the old and the new in literature. There were two camps, one of a group of writers who concentrated on style at the expense of content, the other giving precedence to content. These camps were led, respectively, by Mustafa Sadek Al-Rafi'i and Salama Moussa.

Moussa attacked writers whom he accused of slighting all but exquisite metaphors and beautiful figures of speech. "If one of them wishes to write a book," claims Moussa, "he would not give any care to the subject he is writing about but aims only at embellishing his style with the use of a number of elegant expressions. In Egypt and Syria there is a class of writers who have eyes in the back of their heads: they only see the past." And so he goes on, to be answered by the proponents of the old. But this I can keep for my next column.