Out of Egypt
Hassan, Ihab
I hab Hassan is a distinguished liter- 1 ary critic of American and comparative literature at the Milwaukee campus of the University of Wisconsin. Born in Egypt in 1925, he thought or spoke, until...
...How much more American can he now be...
...And what, precisely, does he like about it...
...Yes, I had read the boys' books Deerslayer, Tom Sawyer, Atala, but had never really believed that modern America could be anything but a romance of Europe, El Dorado civilized...
...His parents would hear none Of it, so instead he enrolled in the Engineering School of the University of Cairo...
...except for athletics, there was no place for the university population to develop a sense of community...
...They do, however, reveal much about a reticent, almost painfully discreet academic...
...A quarter of a century later, he is "at home" in Milwaukee...
...What is more to the point, they address in a deeply personal way some of the central issues of the post-colonial era...
...With the flicker of a smile, he received the bouquet, said, "Mutashakereen" (we thank you), and passed on...
...OUT OF EGYPT: SCENES AND ARGUMENTS OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Ihab Hassan/Southern Illinois University Press/$15.95 Mark Falcoff ne would have expected Hassan, Mark Falcoff is resident fellow at the having lived for so many years in American Enterprise Institute...
...The story of the royal family," he writes, "encapsulates that of Egypt itself: prodigal, corrupt, cruel sometimes, flashing in rare moments of splendor...
...They could have flushed us out easily with their cudgels and canes...
...This is, of course, as a practical matter a technical impossibility for all but a few, which goes a long way towards explaining the recurrent instability in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East...
...Shortly thereafter, Hassan won a scholarship to the United States, and left, never to return—never, indeed, intending to do so...
...Prewar Egypt has disappeared forever, a victim of decolonization and a spurious "Arab Socialism," which now in turn is threatened by Muslim fundamentalism...
...We can be glad that Ihab Hassan managed to be one of them...
...Thus Out of Egypt is at once a contribution to belles-lettres, sociology, and historical commentary—all in hardly more than a hundred pages...
...In the case of one occupation of a building, he writes, our families fretted...
...Yet, knowing Conrad, I now imagined myself, like Marlowe, pushing into the heart of darkness...
...The description of university life will do for any "developing" country (mercifully, Hassan himself always uses the quotation marks...
...Had Britain brought illiteracy and disease to Egypt in the first place...
...the United States, to say a bit more 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 about this country...
...I had entered America, it seems, from its secret, gloomy underside...
...Who makes imperialism possible...
...One did not need to ascend to the top of the social pyramid to observe this: Hassan's father was a lawyer who eventually became a governor of several provinces under the fraudulent monarchy of King Fuad, and therefore a member of the professional upper-middle class...
...The one point that hovers over this book—at least for this reader—is that there can be no Third World without a First, indeed, the very ideas of human dignity, "liberation," nationalism, are and must remain Western, even when used against the West by others, or even by the West against itself...
...And how odd...
...Indeed," he acutely observes, "the notorious student riots of Egypt may have been sparked less by political events than the need of fervent youths to meet one another in common hope...
...Somehow, I managed to bow from my small height—I had- rehearsed this with my mother endlessly—bow without sweeping the ground with white roses...
...Instead, he found, sailing up the Mississippi, hidden luxuriance and menace...
...Though Hassan has no illusions about the ancien regime, he manages to evoke it with charm and nostalgia...
...And how healthy, free, or affluent are Egyptians thirty years after liberation...
...small wonder that when the nationalist banners they waved as students became the standards of a new state, so many emigrated, or wished to...
...The principal theme of this book is one which most Western liberals who speak so wistfully about the "Third World" cannot even grasp—namely, that most intellectuals and people of "modern" outlook in such countries are trapped in a cosmopolitan no-man's-land...
...While his parents could never enter the British clubs in Cairo, they lived at a certain level of comfort and refinement...
...but too many students there came from "good families," and the governor of Giza counselled restraint...
...H ere is his description of the arrival of a royal party to one of the provincial capitals where his father served as governor: King Fuad came up the Nile in his brilliant white yacht El Mahroussa (The Protected One...
...Finally, the portly king, clad in a tight pearl-grey redingote, stepped down at the gangplank on small, elegant feet...
...Just why is not explained...
...there were few opportunities for extra-curricular activity...
...Somewhere along the way he shifted his focus of academic interests, achieved an astounding mastery of English, and became an American citizen...
...Mounted police, their lances trimmed with green and white streamers, lined the embankment, while their officers pranced their horses back and forth, swords at rest, glinting in the sun...
...They lived thereafter, as he says, "in reduced circumstances," though not, it would seem, unbearably so...
...I like even its cold climate—let others seek the Sun Belt...
...The quality of instruction was indifferent...
...It is also an utterly delightful read...
...They made a few "concessions," rescinded them quietly later...
...The two sentiments—the nationalist effervescence combined with a strong will to exile—so neatly coupled, so inextricably linked, one following the other without even a pause, without embarrassment or selfconsciousness—does this not suggest how thin is the veneer of "nationalism" of Third World countries, the same phantasm we are constantly urged to take seriously, to conciliate, even to appease...
...el bolice [the police] lolled outside, yawning beneath their steel helmets...
...Time took their side, entropy ours...
...One can imagine many of his closest American colleagues and friends learning of these episodes from his past only by reading them here...
...In some ways, this made them foreigners in their own country...
...As he wryly observes, had he done so he might have ended up in Nasser's Free Officer Movement, or in a Sinai grave in 1947...
...When he finished high school he wanted to enter the Royal Military School (Egypt's Sandhurst), his only dream—as that of all his class and generation—to expel the British from Egypt...
...Suddenly, after weeks of timorous expectation, I found myself standing on the pier, free and unburdened, alone...
...We came out on the third day, claiming nasr (victory...
...He has had two American wives, fathered an American son with the first of them, and has never returned to the land of his birth...
...A country younger than Egypt, but also older, claiming the precedence of a primeval jungle over the most archaic temple...
...Out of Egypt now reveals the man behind them...
...Headed by my father, the reception party stood nervously waiting on a pier swatched with vast oriental carpets while the ship churned the muddy water, nosing into place...
...This was certainly the case in pre-Nasser Egypt, where the language of the cultured classes was French, and the tastes and life-styles evocative of Southern or even Central Europe...
...Here I was on my own at last...
...in 1946 he left his native country on a scholarship to study electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania...
...Of course, Hassan does not say this, since he is no V. S. Naipaul, but then he is not Edward Said either...
...Did it impose poverty on the fellah for millennia...
...Although the ship which bore him here in 1946 was originally scheduled to dock in New York, bad weather forced it to divert course to New Orleans...
...I like this spacious Midwestern city," he writes, "except in the reluctant spring...
...And then he adds, "In my day, nothing flashed brighter than the `King's Crimson,' a vibrant orange-red paint that marked the royal fleet of Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs, beforewhich Cairo traffic opened like the Red Sea...
...Those in the "developing" countries (which, as Hassan quite rightly says, are not developing at all) who take seriously the promise of modern liberal civilization have no choice but to quit their countries and move to its genuine locus...
...His Radical Innocence and The Literature of Silence are familiar to all serious students of literature...
...As the subtitle indicates, this is not really an autobiography, but rather a series of sketches and reflections...
...In a whisper, I welcomed the king to Sohag [the town...
...he asks doubtfully...
...They accepted European domination of their country as in some ways regrettable, but saw no reason not to enjoy its better aspects...
...I felt now, exhilaration contending with dread, that I had come to a land more extravagant than any of my recent dreams...
...What there is, however, is highly evocative...
...Born in Egypt in 1925, he thought or spoke, until well into his adolescence, in either Arabic or French...
...I felt a quiet push at my back, and walked up to him, beribboned bouquet in my hand and rubber in my knees...
...The air was humid as I had never known it in Egypt, the sky low...
...Shortly after that Hassan's father fell afoul of the ascendant party in the palace, and was dismissed from royal service...
...the deans chafed...
...The next morning, brass bands struck up as the yacht began to dock...
...I like its candid cityscape, spare population, fitful lake, forever changing colors from tan to blue-green through a spectrum of fluid shades...
...The ship glowed at night like a floating galaxy, outshining the spangled, colored bulbs and floodlights on each shore...
...Where would the brightest young men and women of two-thirds of the countries around the globe be without a West, and particularly a United States, to resent, envy, fear, and ultimately to join or hope to join...
...their friends were not merely Egyptian, but French, Italian, Greek...
...By that time Hassan was entering school in Cairo, and subject to all of the ideological trends which swept Egypt towards the end of the Second World War...
...These blacks spoke English, a kind of English, wore European trousers, shirts, hats...
...I had not sailed farther up the Nile than Abu Simbel, and so never felt the wild pulse of Africa...
...Blacks began to appear in curious skiffs around Old Abe...
Vol. 20 • October 1987 • No. 10
