World Literature, Contrapuntal Literature May Hawas

رحلة ابن جبير 260).

144^ As this seems to be an intellectual preoccupation in many of Ghosh’s works, he is directly questioned about it in an interview.

CC: [I]n the title of The Shadow Lines, you give us this great term, borrowed from Conrad, which is used to question the artificial boundaries that divide disciplines from each other, or nations from each other. Is this something you think about a lot?

AG: I do think about it a lot. But there again it’s partly just a result of being an Indian from the particular intellectual moment I found myself in. Because disciplinary boundaries never had for us the kind of absoluteness they have in the West. So I think you’ll see it’s not just me; many Indians who’ve done really interesting work over the last 15 or 20 years have similarly combined completely different things. Like Subaltern Studies, which is partly anthropology, partly history, and out of that you get something really rich and interesting. I mean I don’t always understand what Gayatri or Homi Bhabha are saying [laughs], but you get the sense that they’re coming out of that same tradition. A lot of these people are people of my generation: we belong to a moment when those disciplinary boundaries weren’t really set. We were just trying to talk about the world as we saw it. Some people did this through history, some through criticism, and for me it was through the novel, because for me there’s nothing so interesting as the novel. In my view the novel is the most interesting form because nowhere else, not in history, not in anthropology, are people at the centre, individual people” (Chambers 34).

145^ This has in modern times brought up disciplinary questions when trying to differentiate between, for example, mediaeval works of geography, history and travel literature. The first two were differentiated by name but used the same empirical methods and aesthetic criteria and so often overlapped, while ‘literature’ in its modern sense is a relatively recent construction. Most writers acknowledge a ‘generic difference’ but offer only tentative and impressionistic ways of distinguishing these texts, such as al-Muwāfi who suggests a tripartite division into al-jughrafia al-wasfiyya (descriptive geography), al-adab al-jughrāfi (literary geography) and adab al-rihla (travel literature); or Nassār who refers to texts that indulge too often in flights of fantasy as being closer to the qissa (story) and those that adopt a ‘dry scientific’ tone as being geography or urban topography (39). Scholarship from the Maghreb often suggests a formalist way out: Moudden, for example, differentiates between the literature of travel (as a body of texts) and the literariness of texts (through narratology). On the difference between History and adab, see Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period, particularly on how the fields of history and literature first arose and then diverged during the early centuries of Islam.

146^ See Fredrik Barth on political pan-Islamism as a national and transnational movement in relation to early and mid-twentieth century Arab national movements. Fredrik Barth, “Are Islamists Nationalists or Internationalists?”

147^ See, for example, Amitav Ghosh, “The Man Behind the Mosque”. For a further look at the Sanskritic Hinduisation of modern Indian nationalism see Partha Chaterjee, “Claims of the Past”.

148^ On slave and free boys brought up under patronage of rulers as ‘foster children’ in western and southern Iraq in the tenth and eleventh centuries, see Mottahedeh, pp. 82-93.

149^ The Baybars narrative, for example, telling a common slave-to-sultan storyline has been popular in diverse forms for centuries. It is innovatively interweaved in Rabih Alameddine’s novel The Hakawati (2008).

150^

وفيما يذكر أن في الصين ثلاث مائة مدينة كلها عامرة وفيها عدة ملوك لكنهم تحت طاعة البغبوغ والبغبوغ يقال له ملك الملوك...وهو ملك حسن السيرة عادل في رعيته رفيع في همته قادر في سلطانه مصيب في آرائه حازم في اجتهاده شهم في إرادته لطيف في حكمته حليم في حكمه وهاب في عطائه ناظر في الأمور القريبة والبعيدة بصير بالعواقب تصل أمور عبيده المستضعفين إليه من غير منع ولا توسط[.] من ذلك أنه له في قصره مجلساً قد اتقن بنيانه وأحكم سمكه وأبدعت محاسنه له فيه كرسي ذهب يجلس فيه ووزراؤه حوله...فإذا جاء المظلوم بكتاب مظلمته...فيصعد المظلوم...حتى يقف بين يدي الملك...فيمد الملك يده إلى المظلوم ويأخذ بالكتاب منه وينظر فيه ثم يدفعه إلى وزرائه ويحكم له بما يجب الحكم به بما يقتضيه مذهبه وشرعه من غير تسويف ولا تطويل ولا وساطة وزير ولا حاجب ومع ذلك فإنه مجتهد في دينه مقيم لشريعته ديان محافظ كثير الصدقة على الضعفاء[.] ودينه عبادة البدود وبين مذهبه ومذهب الهندية انحراف يسير[.] وأهل الهند والصين كلهم لا ينكرون الخالق ويثبتونه بحكمته وصنعته الأزلية ولا يقولون بالرسل ولا بالكتب وفي كل حال لا يفارقون العدل والإنصاف (نزهة المشتاق 97-98).

151^ This was neither unique to the mediaeval Jews (see Jonathan P. Berkey on the ‘magic’ fountain in the Fatimid madrasa in Cairo), nor to mediaeval peoples, for similar practices remain in the present.

152^ An interesting digression here would be to compare the description of the Multan statue and its town in other chroniclers whether Arabic or otherwise. If the statue was visited for blessings by Muslim traders of the market town, then it might suggest one way into the idea so difficult to popularise in either orthodox Islamic history or the national history of India, that “the Indian nation as a whole might have a claim on the historical legacy of Islam” (Chatterjee “Claims on the Past” 46). Chatterjee adds that “the curious fact is, of course, that this historicist conception of Hindu nationalism has had little problem in claiming for itself the modern heritage of Europe” (46). This is precisely the case in Arabic national history where ideas of ‘European modernity’ is often said to have affected modern Arabic-Islamic reformers but very little is said about the integral ties between India and the Middle East. If the relations between the two regions in classical times must have left traces, in modern times, even thirty years before non-alignment, the mutual resistance against British occupation would give Egypt and India tangible ties of affinity. There seemed nothing strange that Gandhi would visit Saad Zaghloul, the leader of the Egyptian resistance movement, on the former’s visit to Egypt in the 1930s, or that a story would circulate in Egyptian circles in the 1920s to the effect that the British had exiled Saad Zaghloul to Seychelles rather than to Ceylon for fear of the latter’s proximity to India.

153^ “The term [merchant] was generally not used for the keeper of a small shop or a peddler, for a tājir was a substantial man of business who could be assumed to have considerable assets” (Mottahedeh 117).

154^ Originally of ‘Rumi’ (Central Asian/Byzantine) origin, al-Hamawi was bought as a slave by an illiterate merchant who needed a business agent. The merchant sent Yāqūt to learn how to read and write, and commissioned him to perform his business duties, sending him on long journeys. With his elementary education and long travel experience, and being an autodidact of considerable skill, Yāqūt gradually became known as a scholar. He temporarily left his master’s service to work in the book-seller’s market, but finding it much less profitable or satisfactory, he soon returned to his master and the commerce-travel life. After his master died, Yāqūt, using some of the property his master had willed him, started investing on his own behalf, and became a renowned merchant-scholar himself. See introduction to Mu‘jam al buldān [dictionary of places] (7-15).

155^ The Geniza documents show that many trading ships and vessels were owned by people related to or employed by government (which contained most of the lettered elite): the sultan, members of the royal household, local rulers and princes, military commanders, viziers and judges in addition to the well-to-do (Khalilieh 218).

156^ For example, “wealthy young men often gave a greater dignity to their ‘grand tour’ of the Islamic world, or their pilgrimage to Mecca, by studying hadīth on the way” (Mottahedeh 141). A certain type of travelogue specifically listed all the lectures attended by travellers on their route. While not of this type, Ibn Jubayr and Khusraw list at length the lectures they attend as they travel.

157^ Scholarly contexts that were non-religious include Coptic scribes working for Mamluk beys in the eighteenth century and then later under Mohammed Ali (Hanna In Praise of Books 13; 53-54; 107-08).

158^ See on this topic also Bloom’s Paper Before Print on the 8^th-13^th centuries; and Hanna’s In Praise of Books on 16^th-18^th century Cairo.

159^ In addition to contracts, deeds, endowments, etc., Hanna cites the voluminous letters written in sub-standard language by people who had not been college-educated but who could still write.

160^ Hanna emphasises the commonly held view that trade centres are more likely to have a higher literacy rate than other communities and adds that at times of intensive trade the rate of literacy would increase (“Literacy” 183), giving examples from Timbuktoo (eighteenth century) and Cairo (in the twelfth and eighteenth centuries).

161^ See Shawkat M. Toorawa’s Ibn Abi Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture for an illuminating look at reading and writing culture, particularly booksellers and book production, in ninth-century Baghdad. Meanwhile the image of a busy booksellers’ network sustained by schools of calligraphy, coffee houses, storytelling and gossip inspires Rafik Schami’s The Calligrapher’s Secret, (originally written in German), a novel set in 1950s Damascus.

162^ This can be seen in the travel texts where writers, whether they hailed from Tangiers or Khurasan, intentionally and repeatedly cited the same ‘authorities’ for centuries. Ibn Jubayr, for example, whose travelogue is often regarded as a prototype for the pilgrimage account quotes predecessors al-Mas‘udi (d.957) and al-Tabari (d.923), both founding figures of literary geography and history, and both of whom produced their written works based on their travels as proof of scholarship and worldliness. While writing, Ibn Jubayr (who would himself become a ‘founding figure’ of travel literature) engages with a territory, route or itinerary that had been previously mapped for him by predecessors and contemporaries.

163^ El Moudden notes that for centuries when Moroccan pilgrims returned from Hijaz they traditionally found a willing and ready audience among the literate and among the illiterate, many of whom “listened to [the travellers’] long and frequently repeated oral reports” (76).

164^ It is hard to find out with any degree of precision how much of the population in a certain area and time were ‘invested’ in trade, or how much of a start-up was needed, although merchants from the tenth century onwards seem to have been regarded as prosperous. At later times smaller ventures seem to have been common in various areas including Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo and Venice, an argument reiterated by court evidence in Ottoman times. By the seventeenth century in Cairo court records show that investments could be modest or very modest, even representing the entire savings of a minor tradesman and artisan (Hanna In Praise of Books 38).

165^

وأحسن ما يُستعمل...[فوق الإبل] الشقاديف، وهي أشبه المحامل... فيكون الرّاكب فيها مع عديله في كِنّ من لَفْح الهاجِرة ويقعد مستريحاً في وطائه ومتَكئاً ويتناول مع عديله ما يحتاج إليه من زاد وسواه ويطالع متى شاء المطالعة في مصحف أو كتاب. ومن شاء، ممن يستجيز اللعب بالشطرنج، أن يُلاعبَ عَديله (42).

166^ Even though Khusraw becomes a religious scholar of some repute during his lifetime, neither scholars nor chancery clerks were necessarily well-off. Khusraw mentions also in the Safarnameh that he walked for long distances –the cheapest form of travel– and quite often seems to find himself out of funds.

167^ Since travel might take a long time and was often expensive, for it might involve paying for food, clothing, lodging, paper, transport by sea and a mount on land in addition to any incidental expenses, even those who could afford it might have to wait until their money reached them on their travels. Touati tells the variously recorded story of al-Tabari, the great historian and man of letters, who, having started his travels at a very young age, was supported by his parents from whom he would often receive funds forwarded to him at the major stops of his journey. When the money did not reach him in time, al-Tabari had to sell some of the sleeves of his tunic (80). One of those sleeves of course, usually the right one, was often fashioned larger than the other to hold the books that men of letters might carry with them (81). Whatever the initial reason for travel, any traveller might turn to trade to fund his travel expenses en route (Nassār 11). Naseri Khusraw often finds himself in such a situation, and once tells of bearing a letter of credit from someone he had just met in Aswan, Egypt to be furnished with funds from the man’s agent in Jeddah, a debt I assume Khusraw would be expected to repay in the future via similar channels (Safarnameh 135-36). Lunde et al write of Abu Hāmid al-Gharnāti, another great traveller-scholar, who on his travels in Saqsīn (on the Volga) may “like other Muslim travellers” have combined his role as “Muslim consultant” with trade, “for which [the slaves and furs of] Saqsīn and Bulghār offered limitless opportunities” (xxviii).

168^ Since Khusraw mentions that he manages to buy two full smart suits or tunics for thirty dinars in Basra within the same few days then books seem to have been relatively cheaper than other commodities.

169^ Books are listed in a Jewish bride’s dowry in Fatimid Cairo in 1218. Worth a whopping 250 dinars Goitein surmises that she may have acquired them from her father, who was therefore too rich to be a scholar, but may have been a physician or a scholarly physician. See S D Goitein, “Three Trousseaux of Jewish Brides from the Fatimid Period”.

170^ Such as the Baghdadi tailor whom Ibn Fadlan meets working in the court of the Bulgur king.

171^ On the news run in tenth-century Baghdad: “[T]he largest and richest city west of China, rivalled in wealth and size only by Cordoba…was a clearing house for geographic, commercial and political information. News brought by merchants of the opening up of far northern lands to commercial exploitation, along with information about other distant trading partners such as India, China and the Indonesian archipelago, filtered into the works of the geographers, historians and scholars working in Baghdad and regional cultural centres” (Lunde et al xiv).

172^ See Ahmed Taymur for the original Arabic:

اللي تولد في مكة تجيب أخبارها الحجاج (73). ،(359) العرب الرحالة تعرف طريق المية

173^ The analogy between travel, trade and writing, especially in religious, scientific and judicial scholarship was regularly used according to Touata: If travel and its hardship was important as a means of giving value to one’s writings the voyage also served in some sense as currency, a “means of exchange”; and indeed the figure of speech appears to have been common in mediaeval “literate discourse”, where “Muslim scholars often compare ‘knowledge’ with merchandise (bidā‘a), its acquisition to a commercial exchange (tijāra), and its domain to a market (sūq)” (79-80).

174^ It was “a lesson for those who would learn” (عبرة لأولى الأبصار). This poetic formula was often supported by the religious exhortation that the way to understand something about God’s creation is by observation.

175^ As a natural storyteller who is fascinated with faraway lands, the weaver Zaghloul in Antique Land exemplifies this ‘wonder’ at the wide world; and it is to Zaghloul that Ghosh offers an imaginative rendering of how to get from Egypt to India on a donkey, which would actually make a good travel story (172-73).

176^ Qtd. in Toorawa, Ibn Abi Tayfur, p.79

177^ Toorawa remarks in Ibn Abi Tayfur that the tendency of writers to ‘lift’ passages and sections from other books without proper attribution could be seen as an accepted form of ‘raiding’, with such passages accepted as spoils. See also Hussein Nassār who mentions that while there were some travel books (such as those discussed here) which were considered prototypes or more popular ‘source-books’ than others, Arabic writers freely helped themselves from books on geography, history, and even popular tales (76-78). On the “intertextuality” of oral and written sources in manuscript culture, see also Walter J Ong: “Intertextuality refers to a literary and psychological commonplace: a text cannot be created simply out of lived experience....Manuscript culture had taken intertextuality for granted. Still tied to the commonplace tradition of the old oral world, it deliberately created texts out of other texts, borrowing, adapting, sharing the common, originally oral, formulas and themes, even though it worked them up into fresh literary forms impossible without writing” (133).

178^ Prime trickster figure in Asian and Arabic popular tales: referred to among others as Guha, Juha, Hodja and Nasruddin. It is hard to find a standard ‘compilation’ of his tales, or trace in which locale one tale began or ended.

179^ Latin trans. 1671 Philosophus Autodidactus; Eng. trans. The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan: 1686, rpt. 1708; Dutch trans. 1672, rpt. 1701.

180^ Needless to say any view of some 1500 years of literary production around a single axis particularly with a semi-global language like Arabic will sound airy. Yet the rihla-voyage can be considered a specific method of knowledge acquisition (as well as motif, genre, etc.) and Arabic has, relatively, changed only little over centuries of use. Whatever the reason, the understanding of a continuing ‘concept’ of the rihla-voyage seems axiomatic in frequent writings on the subject. In addition to Nassār and Halifi above, El Moudden speaks of the rihla-voyage first serving a sense of community and unity for travellers from the Maghreb during the early centuries of Islam. Regardless of objective, the travelogues then generally flourished across North Africa from 1300-1800, and in Morocco in particular “from the sixteenth century onwards” (69). Husni Mahmūd Hussein describes travel literature as drawing different literary maps, tracing travellers’ footsteps from about the tenth century to the twentieth. Also Fathi A El-Shihibi’s published dissertation approaches the ‘evolution’ of the travel genre as a centuries-long, linked expression of identity in Arabic literature.

181^ See Geoffrey Roper’s biography of al-Shidyaq’s travels and scholarship.

182^ On the use of the maqama tradition in al-Sāq ’ala al-sāq [Leg Over Leg], see Katia Zakharia, “Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, auteur de ‘Maqamat’”. For an examination of the interplay of different ‘genres’ in the work, see Mattityahu Peled, “Al-Saq ’ala al-saq: A Generic Definition”. For an examination of the location of Christian reform within discourses of the modern Arabic Renaissance but which reflects on the genre of al-Sāq, see Nadia Al-Bagdadi, “The Cultural Function of Fiction”.

183^ The entry on ‘gift’ in the Oxford English Dictionary includes: 1.The action of giving or an instance of the same; a bestowal. 2. The giving of gift: gratuitously, for nothing. 3. The power or right of giving. 4. Law: The transference of property in a thing by one person to another, voluntarily and without any valuable consideration. 5. The thing given: a. Something, the possession of which is transferred to another without expectation or receipt of an equivalent; a donation, present. b. Something of value proceeding from a specified source, quasi-personified as a giver. 6. Something given with a corrupting intention; a bribe. The entry on ‘debt’ in the Oxford English Dictionary includes: 1. That which is owed or due; anything (as money, goods, or service) which one person is under obligation to pay or render to another. 2a. A sum of money or a material thing. b. A thing immaterial. c. That which one is bound or ought to do; (one's) duty. 3. Being ‘in debt’: a. Being under obligation to pay or render something, owing something. b. Being under obligation to do something, duty, in duty bound, as is due or right.

184^ To avoid discussing who did what first and where, suffice it to say that Hussein underplays here the early initiatives of the Syro-Lebanese, who in addition to literature were also largely responsible for the first oppositional journalism in the region.

185^ See “al-Adab al-‘arabi bayna amsihi wa-ghadāh” [Arabic Literature Between Past and Future], pp. 393, 410, 414 (twice). Also “al-Adab al-‘arabi wa makānatihi bayna al-adāb al-kubrā al-‘ālamia” [The Position of Arabic Literature among Great World Literatures].

186^ Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fi misr [Future of Culture] (372)

187^ Hussein does not seem to refer overtly to concurrent discussions on ‘comparative literature’ as a distinctive discipline or to generic definitions of ‘literature’, although the topic was well discussed in the Arabic corpus and a deeper contextualisation of Hussein’s work would definitely reap. Some of the best-known comparatists had also visited or worked in Egypt in the early twentieth century. In 1943, for example, Taha Hussein worked with René Etiemble to found the French Department at the University of Alexandria. See Douglas Johnson, “René Etiemble: Leading the Fight Against the Threat of Franglais”. For the spread and institution of Comparative Literature and its key theoretical texts in Arabic, see Ferial Ghazoul’s “Comparative Literature in the Arab World”. For a discussion of critical debates on Arabic literary history vis-à-vis world culture see Nadia Al-Bagdadi’s “Registers of Arabic Literary History” and its significant bibliography; while Michael Allan’s “How Adab Became Literary” compares the perspectives of Jurji Zaydan, H A R Gibb and Edward Said.

188^ “Every Literature worthy of the name takes, gives and receives wealth from every direction. The important thing is for the literature to retain its own character and cultivate its elements” (“al-Adab al-‘arabi bayna amsihi wa ghadāh” [Arabic Literature Between Past and Future] 414).

"فكل أدب خليق بهذا الاسم يأخذ ويعطي ويتلقى الثروة من كل وجه. والمهم أن يحتفظ الأدب بشخصيته ويحرص على مقوماته". "الأدب العربي بين أمسه وغداه" (414).

189^ Who, incidentally, were neither all Arabs nor all Muslims.

190^ Hussein ascribes the transfer of cultures across the Islamic world to the movement of soldiers, slaves, dancers and court entertainers, the institution of local Arab rulers, Arab settlers in foreign lands, , the movement of Arab and non-Arab traders and skilled workers, the travel of religious scholars, as well as the training of non-Arab administrative clerks in the service of the Arab rulers.

191^ In much the same way Jan Pieterse has pointed out that all the “celebrated stations” of European progress, whether of Greece, Rome, Christianity, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment were moments of “cultural mixing” (qtd. in Stam 191).

192^ Much like Pirenne’s argument itself, this ‘traditional’ view of the so-called ‘period of decadence/decline’ has been questioned. See, to name one example, Roger Allen’s Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period. It might also support Hussein’s general argument to note that while the production of literature in Arabic may have ebbed or the cultural scene in Egypt regressed, Arabic literature, like others, never existed in isolation.

193^ Hussein mentions French (religious and secular), Italian, Greek, British, American and German schooling (The Future of Culture in Egypt 23).

194^ See Fi-l shi’r al-jāhili [On Pre-Islamic Poetry], esp. ch. 4, pp. 36-42.

195^ The beginning of this quote is significant. Hussein has been discussing here the conflict in Egypt between supporters (local and foreign) of English and French letters which had made them the two dominant cultures and languages cultivated by Egyptians. Then, according to Hussein, Egyptians started going to Germany and Italy, and the translations into Arabic of “Goethe and Dante…Tolstoy and Dostoevsky” prompts the realisation quoted above. It is notable that Hussein quotes (now nationally-symbolic) authors whose works either clearly engage with the ‘Islamic Orient’ or with the ‘European’ Orient (Russia), thereby pushing, or so it would seem, an adequate response in Arabic letters, and demonstrating in general a continuous process of cultural give-and-take.

196^ The articles in the first issue alone cover topics in Egypt, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the Near East, Asia general, and Japan, as well as general topics.

197^

وستعني هذه المجلة بأن تعرض على الشرقيين آثارهم عرضاً قوامه النقد الخالص للفن والحق. وبأن تعرض عليهم خلاصات حسنة للحركات الأدبية في أوروبا وأمريكا. لن تقصر عنايتها على أدب دون أدب، ولن تؤثر باهتمامها ثقافة دون ثقافة، ولكنها ستفتح الأبواب على مصاريعها للتيارات الأدبية والثقافية من أي وجه تأتي وعن أي شعب تصدر وفي أي لغة تكون. ذلك لأن العلم والفن والأدب أمور تحب لنفسها، وتتلقاها العقول والقلوب كما هي، فتستسيغ منها ما تسيغ، وتنبذ منها ما تنبذ وتنتفع بها على كل حال.

كما أن هذه المجلة لن تؤثر بعنايتها شعباً دون شعب فهي، كذلك لن تؤثر بعناتها فريقاً من أدباء العرب دون فريق، وهي ...تريد أن ترفع الأدب عن هذه الخصومات التي تثيرها منافع الحياة العاملة العاجلة بين الناس ("برنامج" 3).

198^ Ferial Ghazoul’s “The Arabization of Othello” continues this conversation. Starting from Khalil Mutran’s version of the play, Ghazoul examines the interpretation and translation of Othello in the Arab world, cleverly tracing the reactions of key Arab translators to the work, not just to its universal appeal but as a ‘re-appropriation’ of a story with an “indigenous” hero, the ‘moor’ or ‘Arab’ Othello.

199^ A noteworthy example is Gunvor Medjdell’s examination of the “paratextual features” (book format, prefaces, language) of the translations of Taha Hussein’s Days into English (1932), French (1947), Swedish (1956), Norwegian (1973) and English again (1981), and what the translations imply of the political-cultural contexts in which Hussein’s book was read.

200^ Writing in 1956 Pierre Cachia uses the world ‘renovation’ to translate Hussein’s term ‘tajdīd’, rather than ‘innovation’ which he says means ‘jadīd’ (Taha Hussein 88). I see no key difference between Cachia’s two Arabic words although he might possibly be picking up from Hussein’s frequent use in French of the verb ‘rénover’. Thirty years later, in his introduction to an English translation of Hussein’s Days, Cachia describes Hussein’s theory of literature as “Arab modernism [’s]…most appealing formulation; not Innovation but Renovation, the revitalisation of a great cultural heritage by bringing the best odes of Western thinking to bear upon it, and this in emulation of his forefathers who, in the heyday of Islam, had drawn freely on the resources of Greek civilisation” (5). This, however, implies that the disparate peoples brought under Islamic rule considered themselves ‘Arabs’ already united and assimilated under one tight centrally-administrated Arab empire, and were writing ‘Arabic literature’ through a conscious process of ‘borrowing’ from a distinct ‘foreign’ system. I do not think Hussein saw the Islamic ‘empire’ as producing one large national corpus, but perceived the golden age of classical literature as a series of assimilative procedures in which individual authors, forced to work with the same language in order to gain readership and patronage, seized the opportunity of society’s contemporary diversity and their own non-Arab backgrounds to meet the challenges posed by the new Arabic language, (particularly as Hussein emphasised non-Arabs being the first to produce Arabic language grammars and lexicons). I am also not quite satisfied with the choice of the word ‘renovation’ since it limits Hussein’s vision of reform to the idea of a decrepit Arabic letters needing to be ‘fixed’ and ‘mended’ with the ramps and support systems of Western thought, even of course if that is sometimes exactly the meaning Hussein intended, such as when he speaks of the reformation of education systems at Azhar University. In other contexts, however, the meaning is lacking. Indeed, the word ‘revitalise’ (which Cachia uses in the same sentence), or ‘innovate’ seem eminently more suitable. The choice of ‘renovation’ also undermines the strong role of the literary creator as an individual –which was high on Hussein’s critical priorities– and who was expected to bring something of his/her own personality to both translation and text. It neglects to consider that Hussein supported importing what he saw as totally ‘new’ genres to a local literary system, such as modern theatre and epigrams, and that all original literature, not just that written in Arabic, required cultural transfer, such as in Goethe’s innovative Divan, with the prime condition being that such ‘free borrowing’ would be acclimatised to the sensibilities of its native receivers. Finally, I assume in my use of the word ‘innovate’ the premise that Hussein’s entire vision of literature depended on, that ‘nothing comes from nothing’; and any innovation must be a change, sometimes more conscious than otherwise, from a previous condition. Therefore I alternate between ‘innovate’ and ‘renovate’ according to context.

201^ The epigraph to this article is my own translation. Citation refers to the Arabic edition. For other quotes I have stuck to the 1954 English version of Future of Culture.

202^ ) "الأدب هو الأحذ من كل شىء بطرف"Fi-l adab al jāhili [On Pre-Islamic Literature] 21).

203^ As conceived by Hussein and various contemporaries this suggests an interesting understanding of what ‘cosmopolitanism’ may mean in Arabic literature (in addition to current definition(s)), and its development through the subsequent political tides of internationalism in the region.

204^ Cachia has marked more intuitively than most the contradictions between what he calls Hussein’s generalist “arm-chair views” and his specific “reactions to contemporaries and to contemporary situations” (85), giving examples such as: Hussein’s optimistic belief in determinism and inevitable progress of nations and the pessimism evident in his prolonged introspection (84-85); the historical bias with which Hussein analysed major cultural influences on Egyptian literature; his authoritarian, politically-influenced actions as Minister of Education as opposed to his early calls for the liberation of the university and free speech (126-27); and his subjective analyses of texts as opposed to the clinical detachment he called for in studying Arabic letters (Taha Husayn 137-42).

205^ For another piece in English see Hussein’s article in the UNESCO courier, for example, written in 1948 on the occasion of UNESCO’s Third General Conference in Beirut (to discuss, among other things, opening a cultural office in the Middle East). Hussein shows he has both feet firmly planted in the discourse of modern Arab nationalism by referring to the “Arab world” and the “Arab nations”, and the ‘failure’ of the League of Nations, but still has eyes firmly trained on a global vision, writing that the Beirut festival will offer “a cultural and human assembly” which is “not composed of those who represent a particular country or different countries united by common interests and common aims, but is composed of men who represent the cultural circles of all the nations of the world” (3). He expressed hope that UNESCO efforts (as he understood them) would succeed where other similar cultural congresses had failed, because UNESCO did not aim to unite everyone under one nation or create a playground for competing national spokesmen but rather to “unite all humanity” (3). By bridging professionals and laymen, scientists and artists, by bringing together people from all geographical locations and transcending political borders, UNESCO’s endeavour “aids world civilization and progress, giving [people] a scope, depth and universality which they have never known before” (7).

Works Cited

“adab”. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. 2013. Encyclopaedia Britannica