Part I
Historians of the Middle East generally agree that the period between World War II (1939–45) and the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of dispossession and displacement that accompanied the first Arab-Israeli war (1947–49) as well as the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948, are appropriate boundaries within which to locate a structural and ideological shift in the Arab world. Albert Hourani made the case that World War II signaled the demise of the first phase of the Nahda, the Arab literary, cultural, and intellectual renaissance. Scholars quibble with his specific periodization, of course. The most skeptical interpretation would be that the liberal age was never all that liberal.1 By contrast, the liberal Egyptian political scientist and pro-democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim argues that this period “came to an end after the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1948 war and the subsequent rise of military regimes across the Arab world.”2 One iteration of a nostalgic liberal narrative of the postwar period runs as follows: “The chief transformation that has taken place in the Arab Middle East and North Africa since the Second World War – the transformation of the élite from an élite of ideas to an élite of power – has its source in the withdrawal of European civilization from world leadership.”3
On the other hand, a case could be made for following the currents of liberalism in the Arab world as they flowed through the mid-twentieth century and even beyond, an argument in favor of continuity rather than rupture. The puzzle for Middle East intellectual historians remains whether “the liberal age” is a suitable term in the first place; whether the liberal age was extinguished through generational changeover or as a consequence of a punctuated rupture; whether the liberal age contained the seeds of its own dissolution into illiberalism, that is, whether the seeds of Arab authoritarianism and illiberalism were contained within the experience of Arab Enlightenment itself; whether the liberal age in the Arab world has come to an end, or even started yet.
Scholars continue to explore the ways in which the Nahda has left a mark on the history of the modern Middle East. Rather than periodizing modern Arab intellectual history in terms of rigid beginning and end points, it is salutary to consider the grey zones of transition. To the extent that the Nahda came to an end, many would argue that it was a contested and partial process, as traditions and threads of the Nahda project survived into the twentieth century and beyond. The complicated relationship between continuities and ruptures of the liberal tradition as it traveled to and developed from within the modern Arab world requires careful historicization.4 Even more substantial challenges to the narrative of “liberalism” and “the liberal age” have come from postcolonial critics who insist that liberalism should not only be understood as a political philosophy or a phase in the history of political thought, but rather that liberalism stands for an epistemic moment that fundamentally structures the discursive possibilities of the political, identity formation, and the production of culture. But how, then, are historians to understand and talk about the “ends” of the liberal age? Was it seamlessly followed and replaced by an illiberal nightmare, some kind of totalitarian age, as a spate of commentary proclaims? Was the emergence of pro-fascist parties in the Arab world at that time only a symptom of a wider national socialist tendency permeating the age of liberation? Or has a certain kind of historical myopia prevented us from seeing broader fields of political, religious and intellectual life that co-existed and even cross-pollinated during this tumultuous period?
In the first of this volume, Yoav Di-Capua analyzes an established cadre of bourgeois intellectuals in Egypt (the udabaʾ [s. adib]) at the moment of their fall. Skillfully dissecting the various positions taken by Egyptian critic and luminary intellectual Taha Husayn as he was buffeted by new political currents such as existentialism and other rising intellectual movements, including socialist realism and Islamic modernism, Di-Capua thinks through the legacies of the Nahda as living entities rather than fossilized relics. If Hourani had emphasized the importance of generations and generational transformation in his understanding of the modern Arab world, Di-Capua tracks a further changing of the intellectual guard, across and beyond the threshold of the liberal age. At the apogee of their influence, this generation of intellectuals (the classical udabaʾ) stared down a moment of openness, possibility, and danger.
During the long twentieth century, the Arab world lived through massive political, social, and military upheavals. If World War I marked a moment of regional disarray, as Ottoman rule melted in the cauldron of global conflict and gave way to ascendant European colonial powers, those living in the region were violently confronted with the abject disunity that characterized the Arab world at the time during the 1940s and in the aftermath of World War II. The defeat of several Arab armies in the Palestine War of 1947–1949 and the concomitant dispossession of the Palestinians at the hands of Zionist-cum-Israeli military forces constituted a national and international trauma that came to be known as the Nakba (catastrophe). If soul-searching and despair were some available responses to the Nakba, political radicalization and new kinds of organizing and imagination were others. In her chapter, Orit Bashkin reconsiders the signal importance of Palestinian writer and political activist Emile Habibi within the larger context of Palestinian politics and Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine/Israel during the first decade or so following the first Arab-Israeli war. Habibi is considered in relation to Iraqi Jewish Communist writers such as Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael, who straddled the linguistic-cum-cultural divide between Arabic and Hebrew. By viewing Palestinian and Iraqi Jewish writers within the same literary, cultural, and intellectual frame, Bashkin builds on other critical scholarship in order to re-draw the boundaries of conflict and communication in Palestine/Israel.5
The defeat and humiliation of disorganized and ill-equipped Arab forces in the Palestine War had other meaningful consequences. Some of the most important ideological and political formations of the mid-twentieth century Arab world – Nasserism, pan-Arab nationalism, Baʿthism – were forged in the crucible of the Palestine catastrophe. The Arab world witnessed an unprecedented upsurge of political effervescence and trans-local organization.
Although legacies of European domination would remain, decolonization in all its forms during the 1950s marked the beginning of the end of violent French and British colonialism in Africa and Asia. In turn, this complex set of processes heralded a fundamental transformation of global political thought and intellectual life. Of course, international movements of political and cultural solidarity could travel in multiple directions. As Abdel Razzaq Takriti points out in his chapter, Arab nationalist radicalism could spring from the most unlikely of sources, including Kuwait and other Gulf monarchies. In Takriti’s chapter on the political education of the Kuwaiti Arab nationalist Ahmad al-Khatib, Kuwait City appears in a whole new light, as a revolutionary hub where the Palestinian struggle radicalized politics in the Gulf, and contributed to the emergence of the Dhofar revolution in Oman. Here there arises another problem for Middle East historians and cultural critics of the Middle East concerning the nature of the modern intellectual field itself: what are its spatial or geographical boundaries? How should historians conceptualize and place those diasporic Arab intellectuals who crossed borders and influenced a variety of Arab intellectual fields. Ahmad al-Khatib is one such figure. Born in Kuwait at a time when the Gulf was a peripheral, even dispensable part of the Arab world, al-Khatib ultimately blossomed into an influential figure in the Movement of Arab Nationalists, one of the most radical and anti-authoritarian pan-Arab movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
The vexatious relationships between intellectuals and despotic regimes in the Arab world created tensions that continue to define the experience of many Arab activists and revolutionaries but also writers, poets, and cultural producers. Indeed, the relationship between the intellectual and the state in the Middle East became only more complicated amid the manifold passages to modernity in the Arab world. Rather than rehash stale modernity debates in the Middle East and beyond, the contributors to this section argue collectively that it would be more fruitful to engage with specific moments of modern Arab literary and intellectual history. For example, rather than fading into obscurity amid the onrush of modernity, poetry retained a central place in the intellectual pantheon of the Arab world. In his chapter, Robyn Creswell looks at the problematic of modernism and modernist poetry as a lens through which to explore the transformation of modern Arab intellectual culture during the mid- to late twentieth century. Creswell takes one of the Arab world’s most important poets of the mid- to late twentieth century, ʿAli Saʿid Ahmad, better known by his pen name, Adonis, as his object of analysis. Here modern Arabic poetry and the practices of translation are integrated into the intellectual field in order to show how Adonis’s generation of modernist thought championed individual creativity as the nemesis of political collectivities. Creswell reminds us, “Arabic poetic modernism offers neither a flight from the past, nor a flight into the past; neither a mimicry of Western models, nor a mimicry of classical techniques. Rather, what Arabic modernism offers is a series of imaginary, or formal solutions to the crisis of modernity.”6 To that end, the final chapter of this section considers the extent to which Arabic poetic modernism is a cultural practice that is self-reflective about its own implication in the construction and definition of a space of what Creswell refers to as “aesthetic autonomy.”7 Just as important, we must also think about the extent to which late modernism as an institution was a global phenomenon, one that inspired and linked far-flung places and cultures.
1For two vastly differing perspectives on this point, see Ajami (1998); Massad (2007).
2Ibrahim (2003: 9).
3Sharabi (1965: 486).
4See Hanssen and Weiss (2016b).
5Hochberg (2007); Levy (2014). For a trenchant historical overview of the literary and intellectual field in twentieth-century Israel, see Sand (1997).
6Creswell (2010: 878).
7Ibid. 880, 884–91. Analogous forces were at work in the field of prose writing. See, for example, Jacquemond (2003; 2008); Firat (2010).
2
Yoav Di-Capua*
University of Texas, Austin
In February 1954, Taha Husayn published a routine piece of literary criticism in the Egyptian daily al-Jumhuriya. His topic of choice was “The Form of Literature,” a subject that usually elicited little public interest and was ostensibly guaranteed to not stir up any meaningful debate. In this concise piece, Husayn called for the creation of works of art with high aesthetic value, suggesting that beauty (jamal) alone should be the primary purpose of art and the main standard for its evaluation.1 While there would seem at first glance to be nothing controversial in this modest proposition, Husayn’s arcane literary request was, in fact, designed to “pick up a fight” with a younger class of writers. And indeed, almost immediately, it unleashed a storm in literary circles, one that would pit a young generation of writers against the established intellectual class of the udabaʾ (s. adib).
What was the debate about? In a nutshell, most young writers correctly understood Taha Husayn’s piece as an offensive move in the ensuing battle over the shape and role of culture, and especially of literature, in the post-colonial era. In more specific terms, the debate revolved around the desired relationship between writers, writing, and society. Over the next few years, literary disagreements turned into a full-fledged political onslaught against the udabaʾ that led to their gradual marginalization, indeed, ultimately to their “fall.”
During the 1950s, the cultural assumptions of figures such as Taha Husayn, ʿAbbas Mahmud al-ʿAqqad, and Tawfiq al-Hakim – to name a few luminaries – had come under constant attack. It was a battle they would lose. Though this clash started in Egypt, the emerging rift was not an exclusive Egyptian cultural concern but a broader Arab one. Rather than functioning as passive receivers of Egyptian intellectual wisdom, the burgeoning Lebanese, Syrian, and Iraqi intelligentsias took an active position that sought to politicize culture in the service of decolonization. Indeed, from a cultural standpoint, decolonization was a transregional Arab affair.
The actors in this drama – their positions, dynamics, and institutions – are the subject of this chapter. Following the lead of the critical contribution of Albert Hourani, I argue that within the broader course of modern Arab thought, the gradual “fall of the udabaʾ” during the 1950s marks the actual end of an entire nahdawi cycle that started after World War I. In its place, the young participants in the cultural battles of the time established a new post-colonial culture in the period from 1939 to 1967. While this argument is by no means original, the precise intellectual dynamics and mechanisms of the era have not yet been subjected to a detailed and comprehensive study. This lack of attention is the result of a more fundamental problem; namely an imbalanced historiographical focus on the post-1967 period accompanied by a set of incorrect assumptions about the era that preceded it.
Such studies on the postwar era tell us that Arab nationalism and Arab secularism were defeated in 1967 and, in turn, gave rise to Islamic alternatives, mostly to fundamentalism.2 In Arab historiography, the pre-1967 era has been extensively debated and, mostly, condemned.3 However, it seems that the basic question of what, exactly, was defeated in 1967 has not yet been answered in a satisfying manner. Given the fact that 1967 marked a clear setback, indeed a defeat, for the post-colonial intelligentsia, one is pressed to ask a few critical questions: Were their designs for a new era superficial? Was their relationship with the state self-destructive? Did they consider religion an obstacle? Was their transnational cultural vision inapplicable to an essentially parochial society? Were they deserted by their international partners and if so, why? Was a new form of Western domination responsible for their defeat? Undoubtedly, there is ample historiographical room for an intellectual history of 1967.
Given the fact that this era was tied to global processes of decolonization, Third-Worldism, and cultural post-coloniality, it is first critical to ask what was particularly post-colonial about the Arab world during this period. Was it the proud political resistance that Pan-Arabism put in Suez in 1956? Was it the quest for Cold War neutrality, the subsequent schemes for regional political unity, or the experimentation with socialism? In other words, was the post-colonial moment in the Arab world primarily a political phenomenon? The obvious answer to this question is no. Scores of studies on literature (yet not so much on pure thought and the sociology of knowledge) uncover a rich intellectual terrain in which Arab existential dilemmas, as well as various schemes for cultural regeneration, are passionately considered.4 This textual evidence raises further questions about the conceptual language through which intellectuals articulated and pursued their goals and about their standing in the actual cultural arena as opposed to the secluded domains of the text alone. Of equal importance, was post-colonial Arab culture a derivative framework determined by ready-made notions imported from elsewhere? Did European norms underline the new Arab designs and if so, how? Put differently, were Arab critics and writers engaged in mimicry and emulation or were they “original”? All of these questions are highly relevant for the understanding of the prewar era and the question of what was defeated in 1967.
Attempting to fill a modest lacuna within this larger historiographical gap, I suggest that the process by which the intellectual change of guard took place illustrates how new intellectual authority was constructed, how the cultural field was re-organized, how the intellectual province of Beirut challenged the cultural center of Cairo and, ultimately, how all of this was shaped by the transnational context of decolonization, Third-Worldism, and post-coloniality. Thus, whether up-and-coming intellectuals brought their ideas from Paris, bringing with them a new existentialist commitment (iltizam), or from Moscow, waving the banner of Socialist Realism, their object was to forge a new post-colonial Arab culture. It so happened that in order to advance this project, they first needed to attack their predecessors. Here is how they did it and, concomitantly, how post-colonial Arab culture looks from within.
* * * * * * * * *
The classic tale of the Nahda as a progressive liberal march towards human betterment, as narrated, for instance, by Albert Hourani, basically ends with Taha Husayn’s cultural vision.5 It is a vision that Husayn published in 1938 in Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr (The Future of Culture in Egypt), a seminal call for cultural renewal. The book was published in a moment of great optimism when, following the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement and the 1937 Montreux Convention, it was expected that Egypt would finally win full independence. Though for a brief moment it seemed that the post-colonial era had begun in earnest, things took a different turn, and decolonization lingered for at least another decade until the end of World War II. In the meantime, however, a new intellectual generation had emerged, and when it came to post-colonial life, they had different sensitivities, different politics, different sources of intellectual inspiration, and different solutions. They also had a taste for radicalism.6
Taha Husayn was well aware of the new circumstances. And even though, by the early 1940s, the post-colonial concerns of Egypt, the Arabs, and the rest of the colonial world were not yet fully theorized, they were, nonetheless, very visible. First, and most urgently, were the profound levels of social inequality due to poverty, ignorance, and disease. This was not merely an economic problem of wealth distribution, but a political and cultural issue that Egyptians did their best to comprehend.7 Second, most Arab states still struggled with political liberation and, in one way or another, submission to Europe’s imperial calculations. Third, there was the lingering impact of colonial culture which had resulted in cultural disorientation, yielding the quest for one’s authentic cultural stance. This third element was perhaps the most elusive, subjective, and difficult issue to entertain. Indeed, as we shall see, during the 1950s, it was this cultural domain that young intellectuals focused their attention on and sought to radically redesign.
Husayn was genuinely troubled by the post-colonial problematic. Right after World War II he published al-Muʿadhdhabun fi al-Ard (The Wretched of the Earth), a socially conscious work of fiction that had to be published in Lebanon due to government censorship.8 Yet, social awareness aside, Husayn approached the era of decolonization from the problematic standpoint of the French Enlightenment and the classic assumptions of nineteenth-century Liberalism. Simplifying the paradoxes of the Egyptian cultural domain, he famously argued that Egyptians are culturally European and that Europe’s historical experience is universal and hence globally valid. In other words, in place of a comprehensive cultural reconsideration, he espoused the opposite: a deepening of the impact of colonial Enlightenment. Committed to this cause, the object of the Egyptian subject was to become the “European other.” Consequently, Taha Husayn’s notion of cultural self-criticism was inevitably reduced to a calculation about what should be done in order to become European. Critical chapters in Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr follow this logic.9 Despite the many differences between the udabaʾ, a similar variety of post-colonial critique was espoused by members of this intellectual class: the early writing of Salama Musa about the Nahda as European Enlightenment serves as one example, and there are many others.10 Another problem that was going to trouble the new crop of post-colonial intellectuals was that Taha Husayn’s vision was narrowly Egyptian. Husayn had little to say about the Arab world; indeed, he seems to have subscribed to the classic post–World War I assumption that the Egyptian udabaʾ write, and the rest of the Arabs read.
Even during “Liberation Holiday,” which commemorated the six-month anniversary of the July Revolution, Husayn still believed that a heavy dose of Enlightenment to the masses, a self-imposed mission civilisatrice, was the only cure.11 This attempt to infuse the meaning of “liberation” with Enlightenment values came at a time when Marxist-Leninist and étatist thought spread as an obvious alternative to this vision. As Pierre Cachia put it, Taha Husayn was “dedicated to the spread of enlightenment to the masses and convinced that when this was done the masses would inevitably be one with it.”12 Indeed, regardless of the political mood, Husayn was committed to the idea that against the backdrop of a democratic political marketplace, the three key issues of the post-colonial era would resolve themselves without recourse to a revolutionary phase. This belief was a political mainstay of pre–World War II Egyptian culture and the major Egyptian cultural journals of the time, such as al-Thaqafa and al-Risala in Egypt and the Lebanese al-Adib, unambiguously propagated this message.
What happened to Taha Husayn’s vision after World War II? Since Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr was only an abstract cultural plan, in 1945, when the struggle of post-independence Egypt had begun in earnest, Husayn established al-Katib al-Misri (The Egyptian Writer), a journal and a publishing house which translated classics by foreign writers such as André Gide and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Al-Katib al-Misri was one of the first postwar journals with a clear intention to actualize, repackage, and make relevant again his vision of Enlightenment for all. In contrast with the ideologically driven approach of the young generation, al-Katib al-Misri was decidedly un-ideological. Cognizant of the rise of “ideologies” (Marxist, socialist, and communist), Husayn’s new journal made a Herculean effort to offset, derail, or, at the very least, postpone the drive of new writers to ideologize and thus politicize culture.
* * * * * * * * *
As one of the foremost late architects and standard-bearers of post–World War I nahdawi culture, Taha Husayn was quick to discern and evaluate the appeal of intellectual trends. Finely attuned to France’s intellectual scene, he knew something about Sartre’s revolutionary ideas and even supervised graduate work on the topic.13 Philosophy aside, Sartre’s groundbreaking journal Les temps modernes posed a direct threat to Husayn’s bourgeois cultural vision of “art for art’s sake.” Especially menacing were a series of articles on the purpose of literature which Sartre later published as Qu’est-ce que la littérature? With a clear sense of urgency, as soon as they were published Husayn’s al-Katib al-Misri took issue with them.
Husayn’s understanding of Sartre was sound. In his reckoning, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? sought to critically reformulate the relationship between the writer and society. It argued that since writing is a consequential form of acting/being, intellectuals should assume responsibility for their work and its surrounding circumstances. This call for responsibility cum professional action was conjoined with Sartre’s concept of commitment (engagement), which, almost overnight, became a key concept of existentialism. In dealing with the enormous potential appeal of engagement to the young Arab generation, Husayn argued that, historically speaking, writers had always had more options to choose from than the alleged Sartrean dualities of engaged/progressive versus detached/reactionary. He also argued that engagement was a specific response to the unique European realities of the 1930s and to the much-regretted passivity of Sartre’s generation prior to the war. Since these European circumstances had no parallel in the Middle East, Sartre’s notion of commitment could not be applied to the region.14
After some more reading, Husayn attacked the three main concerns of Qu’est-ce que la littérature?: What do we write, why do we write, and to whom do we write. Given the transformation of the Arab literary scene during this era and the emergence of new writers, these were timely questions. In his lengthy meditation on these concerns, Husayn invoked his generation’s notion of “art for art’s sake.” Lastly, not losing focus on his mission to discredit engaged literature, Husayn criticized Sartre’s unfortunate exclusion of poetry and the visual arts from the rank and file of engaged arts.15
Though Husayn’s insight that commitment was a cultural time bomb was prophetic, not all members of his generation saw Sartre’s existentialism in the same light. Salama Musa, a Fabian ideologue who was no stranger to the prison cell, embraced Sartre.16 ʿAbbas Mahmud Al-ʿAqqad, another pillar of Arab letters, rejected existentialism’s radical individualism, commended it for protecting freedom, and reminded his readers that beyond Sartre and commitment existentialism is a substantial and complex philosophical tradition.17 Somewhat ironically, in warning the young of the dangers of commitment, Taha Husayn gave this burgeoning intellectual movement its Arabic name: iltizam. Sadly, due to the 1948 War in Palestine, Husayn’s Jewish publishers, the Harari Brothers, closed down al-Katib al-Misri. With the closure of this unique platform, room became available for more radical alternatives.18
Up-and-coming Arab intellectuals in Paris were wholly taken by Sartre and his notion of commitment. One of them, Suhayl Idris, was committed to bring Sartre back home. Idris, an emerging literary critic and novelist from Beirut, was one of those young Arab intellectuals who studied in Paris, experienced existentialism as a secular religion of café intellectuals, and believed that Sartre held the philosophical, moral, and political keys to a new era. As the creed of large segments of the post–World War II French intelligentsia, existentialism dominated the theater, literature, philosophy, and journalistic writing of the time. It was simply impossible to ignore and thus influenced the many indigenous intellectuals who came from the struggling French colonies.19 Deeply influenced by Sartre’s existential freedom and the idea of “words as action,” Suhayl Idris wrote a classic Sartrean novel that would become an Arab best seller, al-Hayy al-Latini (The Latin Quarter). Yet, beyond literature per se, Idris’s main preoccupation was to bring Les temps modernes to the Arab world and employ it as a vehicle towards full cultural transformation.
Indeed, in 1952, Suhayl Idris wrote to his friend, the Egyptian literary critic Anwar al-Maʿddawi about his new agenda: “we are aiming for literature which is called ‘iltizam’ or ‘indiwa’” (e.g. committed literature).20 A year later, after returning to Beirut, the first issue of al-Adab was out. Its bold mission statement reads like the creed of an entire generation:
The present situation of Arab countries makes it imperative for every citizen, each in his own field, to mobilize all his efforts for the express object of liberating the homeland, raising its political, social and intellectual level. In order that literature may be truthful it is essential that it should not be isolated from the society in which it exists … The kind of literature which this Review calls for and encourages is the literature of commitment (iltizam) which issues from Arab society and pours back into it … It is the conviction of this Review that literature is an intellectual activity directed to a great and noble end, which is that of effective literature that interacts with society: it influences society just as much as it is influenced by it … The main aim of this Review is to provide a platform for those fully conscious writers who live the experience of their age and who could be regarded its witness. In reflecting the needs of Arab society and in expressing its preoccupations they pave the way for the reformers to put things right with all effective means available.21
A near copy of Sartre’s agenda for Les temps modernes, al-Adab’s message spread in the Arab world with an incredible speed. Its premise was that, due to colonialism, Arab culture was in a state of deep crisis and intellectuals could change that situation through the writing of new literature.22
Al-Adab’s frame of identification was a kind of cultural Pan-Arab nationalism that spoke of a unified post-colonial Arab culture.23 True to its vision, it hosted literary critics from across the region; supported the Free Verse Movement of Nazik al-Malaʾika, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and others; published political analysis from Syria and Lebanon; and a circulated a healthy dosage of Sartrean existentialism from the growing community of Arab existentialists.24 Most writers were new to the Arab literary scene. In no time at all, by the mid-1950s, al-Adab emerged as the most dynamic and influential cultural venue, a bastion of the post-colonial intelligentsia. Its official creed was iltizam and it was militant in politicizing the process of post-colonial cultural change. At the same time, however, al-Adab was decidedly un-Marxist and the concept of iltizam was not yet incorporated by Marxists.25 Much to Suhayl Idris’s dismay, that was about to change.26
* * * * * * * * *
Philosopher Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim and Mathematician ʿAbd al-ʿAzim Anis were two rising intellectuals who, though not trained as literary critics, decided to become critics. Both were Egyptian professors of the Marxist left who pursued standard university careers. Of a different background, the Lebanese Husayn Muruwwa came from a devout Shiʿi family in Jabal Amil and traveled to Najaf in order to be trained as a mujtahid. While in Najaf, he was taken by the nahdawi writings of the Egyptian udabaʾ and became a “liberal,” that is, a devout reader (and later a writer) of Arabic Enlightenment texts. He then moved to Baghdad where, in the context of the fierce political struggles of the late 1940s, he converted to Marxism-Leninism. Given the socio-economic and political conditions of Iraq, he felt the need to make sense of a reality that made no sense at all.27 And Marxism-Leninism made everything connect. Indeed, for an entire generation of Iraqis Marxism-Leninism made much more sense than Taha Husayn’s free-floating Enlightenment creed.
Though Muruwwa was not a literary critic, after World War II all three intellectuals identified literary criticism as a medium through which they could address the pressing concerns of their generation. And even though the two Egyptian academics and Muruwwa had never heard of each other, their unexpected meeting in Beirut in 1954 yielded what is arguably one of the most important books on post-colonial Arab culture. Granted, it was neither a balanced scholarly work nor a levelheaded articulation of their generation’s concerns. Instead, it was an attack, personal as well as generational, on Taha Husayn and his class of intellectual mandarins.
The book originated, in fact, when Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim came across Taha Husayn’s supposedly mundane piece on “The Form of Literature” in al-Jumhuriya. Since Husayn’s article challenged the young generation who had begun experimenting with alternative approaches to literary form (shakl) and content (madmun), al-ʿAlim took it as an attribute of an entire cultural approach, which he wished to destroy, and as a symbol for a generational rift. In response, he and ʿAbd al-ʿAzim Anis began writing a series of aggressive articles in the daily al-Misri. Husayn replied saying that al-ʿAlim and Anis were ignorant and superficial and, despite repeated readings of their article, remained incomprehensible.28
This counter-attack only strengthened their resolve and a year later the two authors published Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya (On Egyptian Culture). Inspired by Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and, especially, by Ralph Fox’s The Novel and the People, two books that attacked bourgeois realism, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya was a direct response – indeed a refutation – of Taha Husayn’s 1938 Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr (The Future of Culture in Egypt).29 In order to better understand what the book was about and how it functioned as a refutation of Taha Husayn, a few words are in order about its making.
It so happened that in late 1954, shortly before their book was ready for publication, al-ʿAlim and Anis fell victim to Nasser’s purge of Egypt’s academic system. In search of income, Anis took a teaching position in Beirut. A foreigner in an unfamiliar city, he made new friends in communist circles and soon met the energetic “red mujtahid” Muruwwa. After being deported from Baghdad for subversive politics, Muruwwa was living and working in Beirut. As a devout communist intellectual in 1954 he had attended the Second Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow. Muruwwa and Anis had much in common. Anis thought of Egyptian literature as a venue to critique the state of culture in Egypt. Muruwwa was enchanted by the promise of Soviet-style Socialist Realism and the need to destroy the old intelligentsia. Fully inspired by his experience in Moscow, he saw Socialist Realism as a new post-colonial aesthetic that had the potential to revolutionize Arab literature and culture.30
It was a meeting of the minds, one that provoked the Lebanese Communist Party, that sponsored Muruwwa’s trip to Moscow, to suggest publishing Fi -l-Thaqafa al-Misriya in Beirut rather than in Cairo.31 Muhammd Dakrub from the communist magazine al-Tariq took care of that business.32 Undoubtedly, the intellectual openness of Beirut made it a much better place to undertake such an enterprise than Cairo with its growing state-lead dogmatism. The two Egyptian thinkers asked Muruwwa, as an emerging theorist of Socialist Realism, to write the preface to Fi-l-Thaqafa al-Misriya.33 They were very pleased with how his contribution furthered their agenda.34
What was the agenda?35 In brief, the axiom was that given the fact that “the troops of colonialism” are still at work in Egypt, there was an urgent need to purge culture.36 Taha Husayn and Tawfiq al-Hakim, two of the leading representatives of established culture, were singled out as bearers and propagators of colonial cultural assumptions. As al-ʿAlim and Anis put it, by submerging himself in the universal culture of Europe, Taha Husayn failed to account for the uniqueness of “our” culture and could only vaguely state that “Egypt has its own special expressive and intellectual schools.”37 The specific characteristics of Egypt, they contended, could not be found in Enlightenment thinking’s universalism but in its unique social realities. “If culture reflects the workings of social reality,” they wrote, “and if our social reality is struggling toward liberation, then we need to define the meaning of Egyptian culture from within this social reality.”38 In other words, in contrast with the alleged universal culture of colonial Enlightenment and its Eurocentric modern ethos, the authors believed that “culture is not founded on one firm basis but is the result of a multi-factored and interactive operation by society at large.”39 In Egypt as well as elsewhere in the Arab world, young writers were eager to reinvent this culture. As Iraqi poet ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati succinctly put it: “The search for poetic form which did not exist in our old poetry … brought us to discover the wretched reality in which the masses live.”40 By way of addressing this regional problem, they hoped to create a new Arab subject.
Making their case specific, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriya also described Taha Husayn and his class as disconnected “Ivory Tower” intellectuals removed from the social struggles of ordinary people. In particular, the book argued that both structurally and stylistically their literature is interested mostly in “art for its own sake” and thus perpetuates the gap between the elite and the people.41 In place of this literature, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriya called for Realism as a tool for committed literature (adab multazim) in the service of the people.42 Their exemplar for “right” literature was ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s, al-Ard (The Land). In such literature, the social content reflects the commitment (iltizam) of the writer to social change. It was indeed an excellent example of Socialist Realist literature that aimed to change society rather than function for its own aesthetic sake, as a pleasure maker. The problem was that there were not many books like it.
Interestingly, in their polemical treatise al-ʿAlim and Anis made a deliberate attempt to appropriate iltizam from Idris’s al-Adab and incorporate it into their Marxist schema. They did so by discrediting Existentialism as a foul project of radical individualism which “denies the objective (social) truth of human reality.”43 Thereafter, one can find two competing notions of iltizam. The first “belonged” to Suhayl Idris and al-Adab and the second to Marxists. Idris was unhappy with this development and with al-ʿAlim, who until that point had written in al-Adab but then left it for Beirut’s al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya.44 This intellectual appropriation and the break that followed, however, could not hide the fact that the theoretical parameters of al-ʿAlim’s new Realism were vague. It was quite unclear how exactly one would go about applying this realism, as both writers had weak training in literary criticism. For the time being, they left it as an open question. Indeed, for now, their task was not to delve into the technicalities of literary criticism (a task which they happily left for Muruwwa) but to open a front with the udabaʾ and make it personal, so to speak.
By far the best articulation of the book’s intentions was Muruwwa’s preface which, ultimately, set the tone for much of what was about to happen in Arab letters during these tumultuous years. Muruwwa wrote of a new post-colonial Arab situation which was prevalent not only in Egypt, but everywhere in the Middle East. According to him, this situation necessitated a new culture and a new generation that would be willing to destroy “old” culture. He saw much promise in a book that called for a new relationship between writers and reality and expected that writers would become actively involved in “accurate” depiction of this reality and would also commit themselves to its transformation. He believed that Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya was the first step in launching an objective scientific process of cultural change.45 This effort is an example of the unique nature of post-colonial Arab culture, which sought to change public culture by creating a new form of literary criticism which was essentially political.
By 1955 all three men, Muruwwa, al-ʿAlim, and Anis, had emerged as literary/cultural critics.46 Their book could be credited with pioneering post-colonial Marxist literary criticism which, in the next two decades, would become an influential field.47 Yet, there was much work ahead. Though their book was very successful in singling out individuals and literary problems, intellectually speaking, its narrow Egyptian focus and its incoherent method of Realism called for further work.48 The task of elaborating a more systematic introduction to Realism along credible socialist lines fell to Muruwwa.
* * * * * * * * *
By all accounts, especially his own, Husayn Muruwwa’s short trip to Moscow to attend the Second Congress of Soviet Writers in 1954 was transformative in the sense that he discovered the potential of Socialist Realism to usher in a new era in Arabic literature, culture, and life.49 Proceeding with caution, however, Muruwwa stated that “There is no intention to simply ‘import’ the meaning of Socialist Realism to Arabic literature.”50 Instead of wholesale application, the idea was to identify the unique circumstances of the Arab world and thus to follow the method of various Soviet peoples, which enabled “scientifically applied Socialist Realism” in accordance with their own cultural peculiarities.
Rising to the challenge, Muruwwa’s 1956 book, Qadaya Adabiyya, was a careful blueprint of why and how to apply Socialist Realism in the Arab world. A decade later he published another, more complete, literary agenda entitled Dirasat Naqdiyya fi Dawʾ al-Manhaj al-Waqiʿi. Both books established him as the most systematic Arab theorist of Socialist Realism. He now talked about his approach to literature in terms of a methodology (manhaj) of total critique, a form of philosophy for life that illuminates “the most important issues of the era … whether they were intellectual, social or political.51
Taking his statement of purpose in Fi al-thaqafa al-misriyya to the next theoretical level, Muruwwa began his new book along more explicitly polarizing lines. “It is the nature of the ‘new,’” he writes, “to wish, from deep inside, to eliminate ‘old’ ideas, values and meaning which belong to an era whose social progressive moment is gone. And it is in the nature of the ‘old’ not to leave the field to the ‘new’ without firm resistance.”52 The necessity to define, locate, and then eliminate the “old” is derived from Muruwwa’s dissatisfaction with how cultural and political power is divided. In search of a political and cultural revolution, the elimination of the “old” would inevitably make space for “new social groups,” which would then usher in a better phase of historical development.53
According to Muruwwa, literature was the linchpin of an ongoing effort to claim culture as a revolutionary political space through “literary battles” (maʿarik adabiyya), a notion that during this era became extremely popular in Arab letters.54 With this militant mentality in mind, the dividing line that Muruwwa charted was clear: While the old guard “reactionary” udabaʾ such as Taha Husayn, Tawfiq al-Hakim and, to a lesser degree, al-ʿAqqad insisted that “politics corrupt literature,” and hence called for a separation of writers, literature “and arts as a whole from the general affairs of life,” the “Progressive” Socialist Realist generation insisted on “art for society’s sake,” thus politicizing the text.55 This act of total politicization was another characteristic of the post-colonial era that sought to replace the allegedly neutral, yet in actuality Eurocentric and equally political, critique of the udabaʾ.
By insisting that writers “define the social position of literary works” he asked to distinguish “progressive” from “reactionary” writers.”56 But he also took time to define these differences philosophically. According to Muruwwa, “reactionary” writers draw on an idealist philosophy in which individual reason and consciousness constitute the first line of existence from which everything else is derived. That which is external to the individual, including society and economy, is relegated to a marginal level with minimal historical agency.57 On the other side of this philosophical divide are the materialists. According to them, individual actions and thoughts are projected unto the world which, in turn, renders them meaningful (makes them be). The material world, therefore, enables the thoughts of the self and should hence be the focus of all intellectual efforts.58 With a clear line separating the two camps, Muruwwa maintained that the inevitable outcome of idealist-inspired art is self-referential art. Divorced from reality, this art emerges exclusively from within the self, reflects mere individual experiences and, ultimately, is directed back at the selfish concern of the individual.59
With this philosophical division in mind, Muruwwa offered to rethink the position of the literary critic vis-à-vis literature. Unlike the literary criticism of the time, which was politically free-floating and lacked clear methodology, Muruwwa called upon the critic to become a revolutionary fighter (munadil) enrolled in the ranks of the avant-garde. As his friend and colleague Mahdi ʿAmil argued, “A critic without a (political) position (mawqiʿ) is a critic without methodology” and hence without social utility.60 Therefore practically speaking, the task of the “progressive” literary critic is to comb through the text and determine the degree to which materiality and the social position are articulated in a satisfactory fashion. By this time there was already an acknowledged international pool of progressive writers who could serve as role models such as Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca, Aragon, and Nazim Hikmet.61 Once the position of the writer and the critic was redefined, the udabaʾ clearly emerged as a group of detached “ivory tower” writers, a category to which some of their youngest followers, such as Naguib Mahfouz, were also consigned.62
By the time Muruwwa was done elaborating his vision, militancy was in the air: “we call to fight the (reactionary) benighted Adab which propagates desperation and pessimism. This literature, which aspires to rule over people by promising a better tomorrow, instead turned its oppression and pessimism into a “philosophy” and the future into a sealed wall.”63 These were harsh words, which brought several members of the udabaʾ to react defensively to the combined trends of Socialist Realism and iltizam.
* * * * * * * * *
For a heavyweight intellectual like Taha Husayn, who had courageously endured the scandals and political pressures of the 1920s and 1930s, post–World War II cultural debates should have been easy to navigate. Yet, this time, all signs showed that Husayn was growing tired, and perhaps even disillusioned. That much became obvious in April 1955. Four months earlier Suhayl Idris invited Husayn to publicly debate the question “For whom does the intellectual write: the elite or the people?” Husayn accepted, and arrived in Beirut for a famous debate with literary critic Raʾif Khuri.64 It was yet another round in the ongoing conversation about iltizam and Socialist Realism as “literature for life.” Two lectures were planned for the debate: Husayn delivered “The Man of Letters Writes to the Elite”; Khuri lectured on “The Man of Letters Writes to the Masses.” These opposing visions clearly summarized the cultural tensions of the last decade.
Khuri lectured first. He was polite yet polemical: “Dear Doctor, to whom do we write? To the people or to the elite? … According to you, you write for the elite.”65 In the spirit of the times, Khuri invoked a theory of literature that takes the people as its subject, emerges from life-oriented popular dynamism and returns to inform and nourish it.66 While Khuri did not call explicitly for the strict application of Soviet style realism, he, nonetheless, embraced Stalin’s mechanistic 1934 idea that “writers are the engineers of the human soul.”67 He was careful enough to qualify this statement saying that as long as writers do not follow blindly what had already been engineered for them by the state and the party, they would benefit society as a whole. “This is the free socialism that I believe in,” he concluded, and this was his vision for Arab writers.68
When his turn came to talk about “The Man of Letters Writes for the Elite,” Husayn immediately said that he is “neither committed to defend the elite nor the people.” “I simply received an invitation from Suhayl Idris … who asked me to talk about writing to the elite.”69 Indeed, the provocative title of Husayn’s lecture was given by Idris himself, who sought to dramatize the event and the ensuing publication in al-Adab. “As much as I am concerned,” Husayn declared, “the entire debate is artificial and baseless … as in anything I had ever written I never applied ‘elite’ or ‘people’ as literary parameters. [All] I understand is literature and readers who read this literature.”70 In fact, he added, “I do not believe at all in this debate.”71 Why not? Because, he said, “it is all politics.”72
Yet, a debate is a debate. Not to be undone, Husayn also took a polemical approach: “Did Sophocles write on behalf of a political party?”73 Homer too wrote poetry to the elite few but “who does not read Homer now?”74 What about medieval Islamic praise poetry (madh), is this political?75 As far as he was concerned, the literature of commitment was nothing but a “literature of propaganda.”76 Raising the painstaking issue of language accessibility, he said that those who truly want to write to the masses should do so in their colloquial language (ʿamiyya) and not in the standard literary Arabic (fusha), which the masses do not understand.77 This was a strong point as, in reality, much of what the new generation was writing was entirely inaccessible to the colloquial-speaking masses.
Pleasantries aside (and there many of those formalities), the two writers and their respective generations shared very little. In hindsight, this debate marked the inevitable inability of the udabaʾ to continue their role as prime shapers of public culture. There were many other indications of this state of affairs, for instance, the 1953 closure of two leading nahdawi journals, al-Risala and al-Thaqafa. As al-Risala’s editor, Hasan al-Zayyat, sadly admitted that this was the end of an era.78 In fact, even before his arrival to the debate, Taha Husayn already noted that Beirut was emerging as the capital of Arab thought, at the expense of Cairo.79 That same year, committed writers had established the Arab Writers Union. Though outside the purview of this work, the first two Congresses of the Union (1954, 1956) marked a shifting of the literary center from Cairo to Beirut as well as the emergence of a hegemonic form of committed literature. As one of the organizers noted, Taha Husayn, arriving at the Second Congress in Bludan, Syria, seemed hopelessly out of place.80
On the whole, the udabaʾ confronted this onslaught as individuals and not as a group. Al-ʿAqqad, who was not at the center of this debate, argued that he “does not debate communists” and thus excused himself from this exchange.81 Salama Musa and Muhammad Husayn Haykal were too old and sick to engage. They soon passed away. Tawfiq al-Hakim, who was the main subject of criticism and still the most active adib, took it quite personally. He responded by publishing al-Taʿadduliyya: Madhhabi fi al-Haya wa-l-Fann (The Equilibrium: My Creed in Life and Art) in which he called for a dialectical and hence inclusive process of cultural change. “[My usage of] the word equilibrium should not be taken here literarily to mean balance, symmetry or even moderation and intermediateness,” he wrote. “[Instead], in this book, equilibrium means the movement of both acceptance and opposition to another [human] undertaking.82 His call went unanswered.
In 1963, al-Hakim made a more deliberate attempt to engage and published al-Taʿm li-Kull Fam (Food for Every Mouth). This play addressed the classic Third-World topic of world hunger and unequal distribution of wealth between the “North” and the “South.” Here he was publishing an involved, if not “committed,” play about an acute world problem. Yet, committed writers were not impressed. Muruwwa, for instance, wrote that this play was a transparent response to the accusation that he was a disconnected “Ivory Tower” reader.83 It was another example of the existing gap between writers of different generations.
* * * * * * * * *
The debates, exchanges, and positions that are discussed here serve as a gateway to the process by which the udabaʾ gradually lost their intellectual monopoly to a new circle of intellectuals. Though incomplete, this historical episode illustrates how the new generation created an entire vocabulary whose immediate sources of inspiration arrived from Paris and Moscow. Yet, it was not simply Socialist Realism and iltizam which marginalized the udabaʾ, but the timing of their arrival to the region and the radical fashion in which they were put to work; namely, decolonization and the rise of Thirdworldism.
Though the battle over the future of Arab culture had multiple cultural and political manifestations, intellectuals narrowed it down to three simple questions: What do we write, why do we write, and to whom do we write? In doing so they defined literature as the arena in which cultural decolonization efforts would take place and literary criticism as the means with which they would purge their culture from colonial effects. Their goal was to extract meaning vertically; that is, from the social bottom upwards. Ironically, however, by the early 1960s it appears that there were far more existentialist and socialist literary critics than actual writers. This inversion also speaks of the fact that, in less than a decade, both trends proliferated to such a hegemonic level that they began developing their own dogmas and orthodoxies.84
As in other instances of radical historical transformation, the struggle over decolonization reopened the question of how to establish one’s intellectual authority. For the most part, the new intelligentsia was largely outside the purview of state institutions which included universities and professional associations. Instead, the intellectual turn of the 1950s was informally organized around journals, newspapers, and cafés and, more formally, around Communist political circles and their parties. In this constellation, authority was based on quality of writing and mind, erudition, and, especially, practical as well as theoretical commitment to autonomous politics. Due to this quasi-independent position, in 1962 Egyptian state functionaries expressed concern over what they called the “crisis of the intellectuals.”85 That is, the tendency of post-colonial intellectuals to distance themselves from, or at least to be wary of, the state.86
Granted, Husayn Muruwwa, Mamud Amin al-ʿAlim, ʿAbd al-ʿAzim Anis, and Suhayl Idris belonged to the first generation of post-colonial Arab intellectuals who had to address the semi-colonial legacy of the Nahda and its leading intellectuals, namely: cultural schizophrenia and the loss of authenticity, lack of social justice, quest for physical liberation, and a longing for basic human dignity. Approaching this challenge from a transnational standpoint, they sought to arrange their existence as they wished, on their own particular terms. Though to one degree or another they all held what could be described as conflicting nationalist agendas, they nonetheless had a holistic cultural vision that practically rearranged the classic intellectual division of labor in which Egyptians write, Lebanese print, and Iraqis read.87 That was another side effect of the gradual fall of the udabaʾ.
Beyond the specifics of the case described here, the clear generational fault line between the udabaʾ and their rebelling disciples provides an opening – however limited – into seeing what happened “inside” post-colonial Arab culture. This generational difference manifested itself in concrete cultural terms such as opposing concepts, language and, more broadly, a diverse sense as well as purpose of culture. In this new reality, not merely was the literary field re-arranged but public presence as such was also re-arranged, with very specific implications for the political arena. All along, as a new generation of intellectuals began to blur the lines between politics and culture by describing themselves as “committed.” They saw no contradiction between the multiple intellectual and political projects they had endorsed and the general framework of Pan-Arabism that functioned as a form of political theology. Yet, notwithstanding the reach of Pan Arabism, the substantive intellectual context of this era was transnational and thus globally oriented.
With the transnational nature of Arab thought in mind, it is utterly futile to search for an enduring intellectual integrity in the course of such exchanges. Indeed, it is an unfortunate feature of current literature on decolonization that if it addresses intellectual exchange at all, it does so under the framework of incomplete and unsatisfactory “borrowing” and “application” of European ideas to Third-World realities.88 If evaluated against the original notion of Sartrean commitment and Soviet Realism, the respective Arab traditions might indeed be condemned as a “poor application” that were philosophically as well as aesthetically eclectic and, therefore, politically obsolete.89 The reality was that, though not always successful in meeting its own ends, Arab thinkers creatively reinvented, reformulated, and domesticated existentialism and Socialist Realism so they could confront the formidable challenge of decolonizing their culture from a collective, transnational perspective rather than from a solitary, autochthonous standpoint.
Sadly, by 1967, many members of this class had experienced intellectual life as a process that involved alienation, suppression, statelessness, besiegement, material poverty, and disillusionment with the political process. An intellectual history that would take their story from 1939, where Albert Hourani left off, to the war itself and slightly beyond that, is likely to shed new light on the important question of what, exactly, was defeated in 1967.
*A modified version of this chapter was published as “The Intellectual Revolt of the 1950s and the “Fall of the Udabāʾ,” in Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s, ed. Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil together with Yvonne Albers (Wiesbaden: Reichart Verlag, 2015), 89–104.
1“Surat al-Adab,” the original al-Jumhuriya article, was republished in Husayn (1977: 72–89).
2Ajami (1981); Kepel (2002); Dawisha (2003).
3For a summary of the post-1967 debates, see Kassab (2009: 48–115).
4See, for instance, Musawi (2003).
5Hourani (1983)[1962]), chapter 8. Other narratives of formative Arab thought include ʿAwad (1980); ʿAbd al-Malik (1983).
6Christoph Schumann (2001) had characterized them as a “generation of broad expectations.”
7Meijer (2002); Johnson (2004).
8Husayn (1951); Koplewitz (2001: 122).
9Husayn (1938: 1:30–39, 45–70, 71–124; 2:263–74, 496–501).
10For one of the early examples of a ubiquitous trope, see Musa (1993).
11Al-Ahram, January 23, 1953, 13.
12Cachia (1990: 18–19).
13Husayn was the dissertation adviser of ʿAbd al-Rahman Badawi, the leading Arab philosopher of existentialism. See Badawi (2000: 1:155, 178–79).
14Taha Husayn, “al-Adab bayna al-ittisal wa-l-infisal,” al-Katib al-Misri, August 1946, 373–88.
15For reasons that had to do with philosophy of language and representation Sartre excluded poetry (as well as other non-representational arts like music) from the list of committed modes of expression. Though he later reversed his position, Arab critics of all stripes found the exclusion of poetry –historically a major form of committed expression in Islamic culture – incomprehensible. Anwar al-Maʿaddawi and ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati were among those who objected to Sartre. Al-Maʿddawi, “al-Adab al-multazim,” al-Adab, February 1953, 14–15; al-Bayati (1968: 37); Barrada (2003: 37).
16Salama Musa saw Sartre’s commitment as a model for intellectual action which he himself practiced throughout his life. His systematic criticism of the monarchy landed him in jail. Musa (1966: 271–80).
17Al-ʿAqqad (1968: 141–55). See a reprint of two essays from the late 1940s in al-ʿAqqad (1966: 15–33).
18On the magazine as a platform for cosmopolitan Enlightenment see Micklethwait (2011: 155–92). For the Harari Brothers, the Jewish publisher of al-Katib al-Misri, see Beinin (1998: 247).
19For more on the influence of Paris on Suhayl Idris and his generation, see Di-Capua (2012).
20ʿAtiya (1988: 231–32).
21Translated by Mustafa Badawi in Badawi (1972: 868). See also: “Risalat al-adab,” al-Adab, January 1953, 1–2.
22“Mihnat al-adab,” al-Adab, April 1953, 70–71; “Shakawa al-adab al-ʿarabi al-hadith,” al-Adab May 1953, 1–5; “Azmat al-majallat al-adabiyya fi al-ʿalam al-ʿarabi,” al-Adab October 1953, 12–16; Raja al-Naqqash, “Fi azmat al-naqd al-ʿarabi al-muʿasir,” al-Adab November 1954, 8–10, 63–66.
23It is important to emphasize that al-Adab was not simply a pan-Arab Nasserist platform and that its cultural vision preceded Nasserism.
24For instance: “Muhimmat al-adab wa-wajib al-adib,” al-Adab, January 1953, 74; Raʾif Khuri, “al-Adab: naqid al-dawla,” al-Adab, March 1953, 5–7; Suhayl Idris, “Shakawa al-adab al-ʿarabi al-hadith,” al-Adab, May 1953, 1–9; Suhayl Idris, “al-Naqd aladhi nurid,” al-Adab, August 1953, 1–2. For a self-promoting article on al-Adab’s own achievements see “al-Adab fi ʿamiha al-thani,” al_Adab, January 1954, 1; ʿAli Badur, “Fi risalat al-adab,” al-Adab, May 1954, 54–55.
25For the efforts of committed existentialists to distinguish themselves from Marxists, see Anwar al-Maʿaddawi, “al-Adab al-Multazim,” al-Adab, February 1953, 12.
26For the history of iltizam, see Klemm (2000); and Di-Capua (2012). See, also, Klemm (1998).
27For a sketch of Muruwwa’s life as he narrated it to Lebanese poet ʿAbbas Baydun, see al-Safir, September 18–24, 1985, 10.
28Husayn, “Yunani fa la yaqraʾ.” In Husayn (1977: 90–107).
29Fathi (2002: 90–91).
30For Muruwwa’s account of his time in Moscow see Muruwwa (1956: 66–85).
31Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim met Muruwwa for the first time only in 1956 during the inaugural meeting of the Arab Writers Association in Bludan, Syria. Al-ʿAlim, “Husayn Muruwwa fi rihlatihi al-thalath,” in N.A. (1997: 38).
32Fathi (2002: 90–91).
33For the Lebanese involvement in the publication process, see al-ʿAlim and Anis (1989: 15–34).
34See a letter from Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim to Muhammad Dakrub thanking Muruwwa and others for their critical contribution in Dakrub (1981: 153–54).
35On Socialist Realism in the Egyptian literary context, see Selim (2004: 139–51).
36Al-ʿAlim and Anis (1989: 20).
37Ibid. 19.
38Ibid. 21.
39Ibid. 19.
40Al-Bayati (1968: 20).
41Al-ʿAlim and Anis (1989: 49–51, 95–104)
42Ibid. 17–18.
43Ibid. 67; see. also, 63–70.
44Al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya was envisioned by the Lebanese Communist Party in 1952 and edited by Muruwwa and Dakrub. It would become a revolutionary literary platform that brings together Egyptians, Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese writers. Dakrub (1997: 110–11).
45Al-ʿAlim and Anis (1989: 5–15).
46Typically, unlike the udabaʾ and their official affiliation with the state through political parties, academic institutions, and state bureaucracy, the post-colonial generation supported themselves in teaching and journalism jobs and, as much as they could, sought to be independent of the state.
47It later served as an inspiration for a similar book about Syria: Sulayman and Yasin (1974).
48In his preface Muruwwa alluded to both of these problems. Al-ʿAlim and Anis (1989: 5–15).
49Al-Safir, September 18–24, 1985, 10.
50After all, much of the discussion in Moscow dealt with the USSR’s own cultural diversity and how to adjust Socialist Realism to the cultural specificity of each of the Soviet nations. Muruwwa (1956: 87, 102).
51Muruwwa (1965: 5).
52Muruwwa (1956: 5).
53Ibid.
54See, for instance, ibid. 6–7; al-ʿAlim (1970); ʿAbdallah (1974).
55Muruwwa (1956: 6–7).
56Ibid. 31.
57Ibid. 17–18.
58Ibid. 18–19.
59Ibid. 17–18. The division of reality to material entities (the economy) versus idealist entities (mental forces, i.e., minds and their states) and the question of the relationship between them is a fundamental problem in the philosophy of metaphysics which, for his own reasons, Muruwwa followed selectively.
60ʿAmil (1988: 14–15).
61Muruwwa (1956: 35).
62Ibid. 37.
63Ibid. 40.
64ʿArab and al-Shalaq (2007: 1:266); “Al-Adab wa-l-haya,” al-Adab, May 1955, 1.
65Raʾif Khuri, “al-Adib yaktubu li-l-kafa,” al-Adab, May 1955, 2.
66Ibid. 5.
67Ibid. 8.
68Ibid.
69Taha Husayn, “al-Adib yaktabu li-l-khassa,” al-Adab, May 1955, 9.
70Ibid.
71Ibid. 12.
72Ibid. 9.
73Ibid. 10.
74Ibid. 13.
75Ibid. 11.
76Ibid. 14.
77Ibid. 16.
78The editor Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat announced the closing and al-Adab registered it as an end of an era. Al-Adab, April 1953, 70–71. See also “Maʿarik al-adab wa-l-haya,” al-Adab, February 1954, 70.
79“Al-Zaʿama al-adabiyya bayna Bayrut wa-l-Qahira,” al-Adab, February 1954, 69–70.
80Mina (1988). The full history of Arab literary criticism is yet to be written the following describe some of the aesthetics and personal shifts during the 1950s. Meanwhile, see Semah (1974); Cachia (1992).
81Quoted in Fathi (2002: 90).
82Al-Hakim (1955: 121).
83Muruwwa (1965: 33).
84For a critical reassessment of iltizam, see Barrada (2003).
85Abdel-Malek (1968: 189–221).
86In both Egypt and Iraq differences with the state took a violent turn. In Iraq, a significant number of Marxist-leaning intellectuals have been murdered and in Egypt Marxist intellectuals were systematically imprisoned and tortured.
87For the debate in Egypt about Cairo’s intellectual leadership vis-à-vis other Arab capitals, see “al-Zaʿama al-adabiyya bayna Bayrut wa-l-Qahira.”
88On this problem and on that of the limitation of “reception studies” in literature and science, see Elshakry (2008); Elshakry (2007).
89For the many methodological challenges of “traveling ideas,” see Said (1983); Said (2000a). See, too, the contributions by Hosam Aboul-ela and Fadi Bardawil in this volume.