Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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The effect of World War II on cultural life in Egypt was similar to what happened after World War I. In both situations Egyptian writers became introverted. But whereas in the years following World War I our writers were preoccupied with their own lives, in the aftermath of World War II they tended to reach back to the Arab past, and tried to resurrect, as it were, its heroes.

But in so doing, the writers did not forego the Western genres, and in many cases were successful in forging an amalgam of Arab canonical themes and Western culture. This can be demonstrated through the works of Taha Hussein, Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad, Tawfiq Al-Hakim and Ibrahim Abdel-Qadir Al-Mazni.

Al-Aqqad, for one, produced his series of "Geniuses" of Islam, and from the early 1940s started publishing biographies of figures such as the Prophet Mohamed and Caliph Omar. As for Mohamed Hussein Heikal, he wrote about the Muslim Caliphs, having already written about the Prophet. Tawfiq Al-Hakim, likewise, made his contribution to this growing body of Islamic literature. Islamic and Arabic studies increased after World War II.

How, then, to interpret this phenomenon? One can argue that the phenomenon attests to the birth throes of a new nation, edging closer to decolonisation and recognising its Islamic and Arab heritage after it had been almost lost in the maze of Western culture. The tendency to turn to figures from the nation's past and to put them forward as icons for emulation is hardly new. But the question is which past? Whereas during the 1920s writers were asking whether we are Ancient Egyptian or Arab, they had now reached the conclusion that Egypt is part of an Arab nation strongly bound by language, religion, history and destiny.

But this feeling of Arab belonging was still challenged in certain areas. First there was the question of language, and this bifurcated into two questions: whether colloquial or classical Arabic should be used in writing, and whether Arabic be transcribed in Latin letters, after the fashion of Ataturk's Turkey. The proponents of colloquial defended it as the language of the people which they use in their everyday life. The supporters of classical Arabic based their argument on the fact that it was the language of the Qur'an and all other Arab countries. This debate, it should be added, continues to resurface from time to time.

The issue of the use of Latin letters is now dead and gone, but it would be interesting to recall the supporting argument. The champion of that theory was Abdel-Aziz Fahmi who, in a report submitted in 1944 to the Academy of Arabic Language, held forth on the difficulty of the Arabic alphabet. He then turned to the Turkish experiment and asserted that the use of Latin letters had proved successful in facilitating the learning of Turkish.

One of the important features of cultural life after World War II was the contribution of university professors of philosophy. Two schools of thought emerged at the time. The first traced Islamic philosophy to pure Islamic origins, refuting the idea that it was derivative of Greek philosophy. The second fully embraced existential philosophy.

The first school was headed by Sheikh Mustafa Abdel-Razek who in 1944 published his book Tamhid li Tarikh Al-Falsafa Al-Islamiyya (Preliminaries to the History of Islamic Philosophy). In his book the author tries to be neutral, and discusses the claim of Western researchers that there are foreign elements in Islamic philosophy, then comes to the conclusion that Islam has its own distinctive philosophy. As to the second school, this is the subject of a future column.