Egypt And The Arab Papers And Beans

...It is almost impossible not to share this feeling once one has seen the immense extent of Egyptian poverty...

...It can be stated without fear of contradiction that the number of Egyptian students or university people who have read Plato or Goethe is indeed exceeding small...

...Let it be noted that such convictions are often very superficial and often do not jibe at all with the variations of Soviet foreign policy...

...His article first appeared in the French journal Preuves, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor and the author...

...This holds even for the students, whose level is very low and who, two years ago, were deprived of leadership by purges...

...Here one can see how precarious is the influence exerted by the intellectuals...

...his broad political culture and independent progressivism have given him high standing among many Egyptian professors and journalists...

...Unlike their predecessors, the representatives of the new intelligentsia are very seldom polyglots...

...Tahseen M. Basheer is an Egyptian journalist now living in the United States...

...The only chance for development the Egyptian intelligentsia has lies in its total atheism...

...The Thousand and One Nights are an exception, of course, but not enough to base a literature on...

...A round No would not be a precise answer...

...One would have found among them—if one had visited Egypt in more serene and democratic epochs —a Georges Henein, a Mounir Hafez, a Magdi Wahba, a Loutfallah Soliman or an All El Chalakini.* • Georges Henein—former member of the French Surrealist movement...

...It would be astonishing if they were not, when you consider that the religious organization of Moslem Brothers still considers elevators and autos instruments of the devil, and rejects all banking as impious in principle...

...The chief characteristic of these new intellectuals is their lack of culture...

...but they did so in French, a language under official ban, characterized as belonging to parasites whose domination the revolution had brought to an end...

...Their literary production is what is most valuable intellectually in contemporary Egypt...

...This is his first appearance in DISSENT.—THE EDITORS Even a few months ago, a foreign intellectual passing through Cairo and interested in meeting the city's intellectuals, would have been introduced to people whom the war at one stroke deprived of all meaning to the country...

...The frightful gap which separates the birth of Islam from the rebirth of contemporary Egypt dooms every velleity of specifically Arabic thought...

...For the petty-bourgeois Moslem intellectuals it was a chance for revenge on the West which did not comprehend their problems, and overwhelmed them with unbearable condescension...

...they forgot, likewise, that cosmopolitanism flourishes only in the shade of powerful empires, and that Islam is essentially xenophobic...

...At the height of the Suez crisis, Siqueiros was granted an interview with the President...

...These two social groups, from which the new intellectuals are recruited, consider all the politics up to the revolution with indifference, or more often with cynicism...

...Some of them expatriated themselves to Europe...

...And Abbas El Accade?* They belong neither to the cosmopolitans under ban nor to the young revolutionaries...

...most keep their sight through life...

...Here a semantic clarification becomes necessary...

...If they collaborate with the government's newspapers, their age keeps them from frenzied passions...

...Rommel is still a hero in Cairo...

...The positions taken by a Francois Mauriac and a Jean-Paul Sartre, the articles in France Observateur and in Les Temps Modernes, strengthened their conviction that they had found a basis for maintaining connections with the West...

...candidate for the Nobel Prize (which he deserves...

...And finally they did not seem to recognize that their metaphysical preoccupations, their literary analyses of dandyism, of Julian the Apostate and of the Sephiroths, when addressed to a largely analphabetic nation (eighty per cent), was a scandalous, if seductive, paradox...

...he is—toutes proportions gardees—a kind of Arabian Bertrand Russell...

...Georges Ketman is a native of Egypt who is now an Israeli citizen...

...They declared themselves for the left...

...1I It may be asked, if no one has replaced this elite, then is Egypt a land without intellectuals...

...Magdi Wahba—wealthy Egyptian...

...The Egyptian intellectual is not yet detached from his ancient condition of scribe and functionary...

...When one knows the links uniting philosophy and sociology to technics one better understands why the Egyptian elite remains vassalized by the West...

...this alone is able to break up the archaic social structure, a vestige of Ottoman domination and a feudal society which until the recent months was, into the bargain, scandalously plutocratic...

...They know perfectly well that by spending millions in Jordan and in the Sudan, and by tying up the whole production of the country and its meager reserves in an exchange for such unproductive goods as weapons, that they shall not have raised the standard of living of the fellaheen and of the urban proletarian...

...The Westerner with even a faulty education probably knows that the inventor of the electronic brain was—if one goes back to the beginning—a tormented religious thinker named Pascal, and that the automobile had been foreseen by Leonardo da Vinci...

...no, Kropotkin is not an exclusively Russian phenomenon...

...He admires the man with a sword—many Egyptians were pro-Nazi at the height of the war and remain so today...

...This explains in large part their social ideas and their attitude to those Egyptians who went to Europe to take the cure, and who were the exploiters of their parents...

...Really, one had to be even blinder than Taha Hussein* to explain only by personal or base reasons the anti-French measures he took well before the Nasser revolution in his capacity as Minister of Public Education...

...These intellectual editors exhibited a marked unconsciousness of class, and of the death-throes of the class to which they belonged...

...Mounir Hafez—a writer who specializes in the study of Moslem and Hindu mysticism...

...To read a lot one must have leisure and money, for in Cairo foreign books often cost twice their original price...

...The force of Communist conviction within the intelligentia springs from their feeling that social reform in Egypt is absolutely necessary...

...Sons of peasants or of poverty-stricken functionaries, they have known what it means to suffer from hunger...

...They came up during the last three or four years, and one had to have a certain naivete not to notice the perspectives which have since opened to them...

...they have read little—bad translations of Dostoievsky and Sartre...

...afternoons in the cafe, hashish and films fill up leisure time...

...The essay is for them a difficult, thankless, and even foreign form of expression...

...Published by a very restricted group, and intended surely for no more than a happy few, these anniversary issues corresponded to no necessity and were addressed to no definite public...

...These sons of Farouk's ambassadors, of big landed proprietors, of Wafdist deputies, of makers of fashionable clothes for the upper classes, declared themselves leftist...

...a Goethian figure, friend of Andre Gide...

...it also holds for the "intelligent" officers...

...Finally, for the Eastern intellectual, culture, in the Occidental sense, is the crowning glory of rich classes whose progress has come to an end...

...One should not be surprised that the most enlightened intellectuals know Gide, Huxley and Faulkner by name only...

...But for the moment, they themselves confuse demagogy with socialism...

...This sympathy for a left which is not Trotskyist but Stalinist, may explain the naive interest with which the sinister Siqueiros, the Mexican painter who failed in an attempt to assassinate Trotsky, was welcomed...

...Even if too much quoted, such works as the Book of Days and The Call of Karawan by Taha Hussein and the Journal of a Country Deputy by Tewfick El Hakim, are unequalled by anything produced by the new generation...

...It is doubtless because he does not want to confuse the masses heated to a boiling point, nor to disconcert a completely new elite which supports his anti-Western politics without reserve, that Nasser has forbidden any allusion in the press to the events that took place in Hungary...

...for the officers, it meant revenge on Great Britain and France, their former rulers, and on Israel which had defied them in 1948...

...Economic matters, the deadly peace and daily life had doused it with cold water...

...Today, it numbers only two or three survivors, individuals who speak Arabic without self-consciousness and whose Communist convictions were able to find some echo, and may again find one, in Egyptian politics...

...what is surprising is that certain Egyptians who claim to be clear-headed have embraced a policy diametrically opposed to that of social reform...

...And Tewfick El Hakim...

...It is true that there are a good many intellectuals who believe that the Nasser regime is transitional, and will be followed sooner or later by an authentically socialist government...

...But they forgot that if the mixed colonies of the sixth century spoke Alexandrian Greek, this was because that language was commonly spoken in the Eastern Mediterranean...

...The review published three issues devoted to commemorations, one to Nietzsche, one to Kafka and the third to Kierkegaard...

...Arabic is a language designed for the meditation and recitation of the Koran...

...some, however, remained in their quite exceptional position until the Suez crisis, in the very geographic and moral region where the East and West faced each other...

...No such capacity is to be discerned in the members of the intelligentsia of Cairo...

...The great weakness of Islam in the modern world lies in its inability to master language and technique...

...war in Indo-China and today calls for the French to quit North Africa, afforded these Mandarins the line they were looking for...

...But Red China was in vogue and the Nasser government was beginning to flirt with the East, so this was of course the right moment to give voice to opinions which at other times, not so far back, would have been rewarded with a prison sentence...

...Compilations" is a euphemism...

...Abbas 'El Accade—essayist and ironic moralist, represents a certain democratic and liberal Egypt fast disappearing...

...the newspaper articles which deal, for instance, with the influence of Western culture on Egyptian students —one of the most difficult subjects a nationalist journalist could treat of, considering his own meager knowledge and the level of his six hundred thousand readers—such articles are seldom more than wearisome collections of commonplaces and anecdotes brought in without relevance...

...Can one consider as literature the notebooks—like da Vinci's— of an Ibn Sina or Avicenna...

...IV It will be noticed that these people belong to "the left...

...Today, even under a regime which asks for their support, they do not earn more than just enough to dine on a tiny bit of meat in a stew, or on beans and salad...

...their main concern is to line up in some faction of the party in power and get better posts...

...Though written independently of each other, and obviously not intended as a debate between the authors, the two articles that follow may be said to represent opposing views of the Egyptian, or Arab, intellectual, Nasser, and so forth...

...Their lack of money is something almost metaphysical...

...Oxford-education...

...They represent neither medieval and poetic Islam nor an Egypt imbued with the spirit of Spartacus...

...for what they want is change, for instance the total secularization of the state, and even the adoption of the Latin alphabet following the example of Turkey...

...a few abridgements have been made...

...And what about Taha Hussein...

...The independent French left recalled to them their first zealous support of Communism, in the days when they learned by heart the words of the "Internationale" and sold rugs and family jewels to buy Marxist books...

...to use an expression of Cossery, they are "the eternally barking dogs in the best of worlds...

...and neither the Sufi texts nor the Koran, which is the principal literary work of Islam, suffice for an intrinsically Eastern evaluation of the problems of the modern world...

...Their unique authority does not come from their situation as "brain workers"—for this category is not much appreciated in the East, where only the poet and the journalist enjoy any prestige—but from the fact that their social condition is the same as that of the greater number of officers in the new regime...

...son of an Egyptian ambassador...

...ism, which hailed the liquidation of th...

...Petersburg claimed to be capable of something more than the assimilation of new ideas developed elsewhere...

...Major literary figure of contemporary Arab letters...

...Atheism is widespread among the young college students and the small bureaucrats, to whom, for good or evil—the latter most often—the years of revolutionary government have given a political consciousness...

...Another reason for the poverty of Egyptian thought lies in the rigidity of the Arabic language...

...These denizens of a new St...

...and in fact, Marx, Lenin and Engels as well as a number of other Communist dialecticians are the regular fare in the discussions and readings of these emancipated individuals...

...There are in Cairo individuals sufficiently like those one generally considers representative of an intelligentsia, and these persons are not cosmopolites without futures...

...Ten to one, they would have been members of minorities, Copts, Jews or Lebanese, in Egypt for less than a century...

...III This lack of real intellectuals is due to the nature of the problems which dominate modern Egypt...

...If they are badly dressed—for the most part in soft colors, the pinkbrowns and dark-greens favored by the Eastern petty-bourgeois of peasant stock—if they do not wear eyeglasses, it is because they are almost all of peasant origin and the eyesight of the Egyptian peasant is quite up to the virulence of the diseases likely to assail him...

...Heedless of the gigantic political and social metamorphosis which had begun right before their eyes, which surely heralded if not their physical extermination then certainly their moral and economic decline, they hoped to perpetuate the Alexandrian elites of twenty centuries ago...

...like the famous ten little Indians, this intelligentsia soon became reduced...

...Loutfallah Soliman—publisher and bookseller...

...Sallow, sunburned or pale, with that weary and ivory-like pallor which is seen in the East, they, or the majority of them, would have spoken an exquisite French (taught by the Jesuit fathers of Faggalah) or a remarkably Oxfordian English (acquired, no doubt, in the black province of Assiout from British governesses...

...The blaze had been superficial...

...the poets of Islam are only lyrical sensualists...

...culture is the banner carried by those who "do not participate...

...The principal resource of these people, almost as barren of culture as they are lacking in money, is to make translations and compilations for townspeople and provincials, who are in the throes of social anxiety...

...the right word is "plagiarism...

...It is true that, except for those we cited above, plus Cossery, none of the talents which developed in this hot-house atmosphere (where the most inspired wrote revolutionary verses or went to prison with equal zeal) survived the break-up of this circle...

...Thus, the work of Ahmed Auda, entitled Al Cyn al Chaabia, which means "The China of the People," is little more than that...

...Later, a periodical appearing only occasionally, and entitled From the Sands, tried to connect the survivors of the former epoch and certain western philosophers, Jean Grenier, Jean Wahl, Henri Michau, and Ponge for instance...

...Between the camel and the cadillac there is a distance which the Egyptian is simply too ignorant to cross...

...It must be admitted, however, that such a way of life was led by a very few...

...Translated by LIONEL ABEL • Tewfick El Hakim —novelist and dramatist...

...the trend of revolutionary Egyptian politics made it necessary for them to choose between Egypt and the West...

...Proclaiming in his constitution that Egypt is a Moslem state, and thus showing scorn for the three million Copts who still consider themselves the original in• habitants of the land, Nasser linked himself to the Azhar...

...for the Levantine intellectuals, it was a question of revenge on a West which had not assimilated them...

...particularly interested in the status of religious minorities in the Orient...

...they stand for an Egypt which is still present in its patience, its finesse and humor...

...The poverty of this language which, moreover, is most imprecise, as are all languages forged by poets and preachers, is maintained by the intransigence of the Azhar, the religious university and the Sorbonne of all Islam, toward any projected reform...

...they have suffered from hunger...

...now these Egyptians have little leisure and almost no money...

...One would have found them up on international politics, readers of Foreign Affairs or Botteghe Oscure, people who had assimilated authors as unlike as Marx, Heidegger and Sterner, and people, by the way, who had read Hallaj and Djabarti, which is something not so common...

...These measures already showed the importance of the nationalist movement which shook the last years of the old regime, and within which a new intelligentsia was formed from the meetings of students and their street demonstrations...

...Ali El Chalakani—lawyer and journalist...

...The Communism of the intelligentsia, which is without influence on the rulers, and is able to affect public opinion only within limits set by Nasser, is, of course, a transparent mask, worn only because it frightens the West...

...During the first years of World War II, for example, Georges Henein, an exceptionally gifted poet and the friend of Andre Breton, launched a newspaper in Arabic, Al Tattauvor, in which communism and surrealism were the dominant tendencies...

...some do scenarios for the screen...

...It was then, in the light of political events, that the real flaw which had inspired the editing of the review showed itself: artificiality...

...and Rose El Youssef, the crypto-Communist weekly which is read by the whole left now, publishes nothing but sophisticated gossip...

...For both, the revolutionary adventure meant a chance for revenge...

...This fundamental error reveals their twin faults: their lack of scope and the essentially sentimental character of their ideas...

...In the West, the term "intellectual" is used to designate a person capable of dealing with general problems and resolving them from some original standpoint...

...One of the rarest theoreticians of the new regime, and perhaps the only one who has thought broadly of the problems of a modern Egypt is—Gamal Abdel Nasser...

...As for relevance and topicality: while these writings were provocative in the extreme, after all, they were edited in a foreign language by former feudal lords or pseudoEuropeans who could scarcely hide their dread of a future marred by a growing nationalist movement...

...most of what is to be found is badly translated...

...A surrealist movement at that time brought together all those whom Egypt, rich in refugee intellectuals, considered the best artists and writers to be found there...

...or very likely they would have belonged to one of those hybrid groups designated pejoratively in Arab slang as "Bazramites...

...Almost all have been or are in journalism...

...The Levantine intellectual—and this holds also for the Egyptian—is not so different from the oriental...

...The principal cause, though, is the absence of any real Arabic literature other than religious or scientific texts...

...yet Nasser's republic forbade them practically any kind of political activity, threatened them with new nationalizations, cut up the golf courses of their clubs and sold at auction the collections of the royal family—that very family whose salons they had frequented, whose princes, friends of their fathers, had some time before been exiled by the British, and with whom they were still, in a way, allied...

...Moreover, there are few translations in Arabic of the masterworks of world thought and literature...

...That guilty conscience of the West which condemns colonial...

...they are badly dressed, they do not wear eyeglasses...

...The author, of course, has never been to China, and his book is made up of borrowings from various reporters who have been there...

...Then the veil was rent...

...an Egypt which it will be necessary to find once more when the present Egyptian intelligentsia seeks better nourishment than Nasser's Philosophy of the Revolution...

...Formed in Khedival Egypt, having lived under monarchy and a false democracy, they acquired the taste of freedom and for pure knowledge...