Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Dr Martin Lings (aka Abu Bakr Serageddin), died last week at the age of 98. You may remember that some weeks back, I wrote about a lecture he gave in London, as part of a week devoted to Islam with the aim of explaining the religion to English citizens.
A number of experts on Islam, English and of other nationalities, gave talks dealing with its different aspects. Lings, the author of a number of books on Islam -- his latest, an anthology of Sufi poems, was published by AUC Press-- lectured on the Sufi nature of some characters in Shakespeare's plays.
Martin Lings was one of the lecturers at the Department of English at Fouad I (now Cairo) University. The department was lucky with its array of lecturers and professors who were also well-known writers, novelists, poets and critics.
One of the first heads of the department was Robert Graves, the English poet, novelist and critic who came to Cairo in 1926 with his partner, the American poet Laura Riding. His novels include Goodbye to All That, I Claudius, Claudius the God, The Golden Fleece and others.
Graves was followed by Bonamy Dubree who was a critic and admirer of TS Eliot. In his biography, Chronicle of Wasted Time, Malcom Muggeridge describes a lecture Dubree gave on Eliot's The Waste Land, documenting the first time Eliot was ever introduced to an Egyptian public.
Then came Scaife, who, apart from his fame as a writer, was an accomplished actor. I remember watching him play the leading role in Tobias and the Angel at the Royal Opera House. When I joined the department in 1939, he was still its head, shortly to be followed by Brynn Davies. Davies was a charming, thickly bearded Welshman who introduced an annual sonnet competition. I feel proud to say that I won the first prize for four successive years, the duration of the study course.
But leading writers were not the monopoly of department heads. We had two known poets, Terence Tiller and Bernard Spencer, whose fascination with Egypt inspired a number of their poems. I remember two poems by Spencer, Yachts and the Nile and Egyptian Delta.
Then there was Mr Spiers, tall and handsome, who used to teach us the Romantics. His soft voice reading Byron or Shelley used almost to lull us into a kind of drowsiness that carried us to great emotional heights. His wife Ruth translated the German Rainer Maria Rilke and published a collection with the Renaissance bookshop.
I remember Mrs Spiers giving a recital of Rilke's poetry in the department's largest amphitheatre, delivering it in German and English.
And we had David Abercrombie teaching us criticism. He was the son of Lacelles the author of Principles of Criticism. After leaving Cairo, David became chair professor of language at Leeds University and he supervised a number of Egyptian post-graduate students.
Robin Fedden was another writer who lectured us on English life and thought. He fell under the spell of Egypt and published Egypt, the Land of the Valley, estimated by many to be the most sympathetic account of the country.
Another famous writer who lectured in the department was PE Newby whose trilogy was all about Egypt: Picnic to Sakkara, Revolution and Roses and A Guest and His Going. After leaving Egypt he published in 1977 his novel Kifi which he presented to me when I visited him in April 1981 in his home at Chalfont St.
It was a delightful encounter that I will likely never forget.
The death of Dr Martin Lings has evoked a string of memories, which go to show the calibre of the lecturers and professors who taught us literature and the English language.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/747/cu3.htm