Hala Halim remembers Dea Al-Saqqaf (1919-2006) "O my beloved Jalal Al-Din Al-Rumi : At the beginning of Al-Mathnawi, you recount the story of a nayy [ flute ] that had been part of a tree in the forest then was severed from its source, and now it sobs its yearning to be reunited... O my beloved ! " -- Abkar Al-Saqqaf, "Wamadat", Al-Qahira (May 1996) How to write an obituary of an extraordinary woman known, in her waning years, as a family friend? Considering the life of Dea Al-Saqqaf (1919-2006), I cannot but think of Hannah Arendt on the twists and turns of Walter Benjamin's life, the posthumous fame and the "element of bad luck" that went into it, encapsulated in his being haunted by the "little hunchback", a figure from German fairy tales who bungles things for children. The "little hunchback" certainly seemed to have been busy in Dea's life, though she would perhaps have said that applied more to her sister, Abkar Al-Saqqaf (1913-1990). Indeed, it is impossible to write about one sister without writing about the other, so inextricably bound were their lives, despite the marked difference in their personality. Abkar, the writer, and Dea, the artist: born to a distinguished family name and wealth, and blessed with talent; their prospects must have seemed great, the descent from there steep, and when fame came for Abkar it was posthumous fame, thanks largely to Dea's having devoted her final years to her sister's legacy and giving no thought to her own. Their paternal family, the Saqqafs, originating in Hadramawt, Yemen, are a clan that extends throughout the Arabian peninsula and beyond, all the way to Singapore, where the sisters owned assets they were unable to claim. Abkar was wont to use her title as " sharifa ", a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, a lineage which, as Dea glossed it, passed through a Sufi, the 'Aydarusi Mustafa Bin 'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Saqqaf, whose shrine is close to the Sayyida Zaynab Mosque in Cairo, and from him to Al-Husayn, the grandson of the prophet. Their father, Muhammad Al-Saqqaf, who had an Iranian mother, chief treasurer in Mecca during the reign of Sharif Husayn, was heavily involved in the turbulent politics of the Arabian peninsula in the first decades of the 20th century. On one of his travels he met and married Aziza, the daughter of a Turkish tobacco merchant, whom he settled in a Heliopolis villa, commuting regularly from Cairo to the Arabian peninsula. Dea went to an Italian school, Abkar to the Sacré Coeur. Of the Heliopolis villa where they spent their earliest years Abkar, Dea and their brother Mustafa retained nostalgic memories, of their father's meetings with politicians and notables and his huge library. When their mother refused to move to Yemen permanently Muhammad Al-Saqqaf divorced her. Eventually he died in Yemen, in suspicious circumstances connected with his political activities. Their brother's attempts to later claim their inheritance -- a sizable plot of coffee-growing land -- had to be abandoned as too risky an enterprise. The mother, being determined to give Mustafa the kind of education he would have had had his father been supporting them, made huge sacrifices, selling jewelry, objets d'art , carpets, Yemeni antiquities and, what Dea and Abkar missed most acutely, large portions of their father's library. The family moved to Alexandria, to a villa called Les Jasmins in the Domaine de Siouf, while Mustafa was studying at Victoria College. Later he went to Cambridge and after that embarked on a distinguished career in banking abroad. The sisters and their mother moved back to Cairo, where Abkar was to remain in her Zamalek apartment while Dea eventually moved back to Alexandria in the 1970s to look after her brother's villa off the Rond point Wabour El-Mayya. She was to remain in Alexandria until the end of her life. "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness": Dea would quote Carlyle whenever she heard of a friend's smart career move or professional success. She sometimes referred to her own attempts to find a job which either failed -- an interview at an embassy -- or led to short-lived tasks -- interpreting for an American crew during filming in Upper Egypt. There is no doubt that her art was a source of pride. I forget where she learned oil painting and sculpture, but in an old interview she says she received art lessons from an Italian teacher (see Al-Gomhouriyya, 1 October 1960). Dea's first exhibition was held in Cairo in the late 1940s at the old Semiramis Hotel, to be followed by another in a gallery that had opened in a building next to the hotel. Later there would be, among others, an exhibition at the Alexandria Atelier, where she met and struck up a friendship with the Alexandrian poet Celine Axelos, of whom she made a portrait as a gift. Favouring realism -- Picasso is admonished in the interview -- her subjects, both painted and sculptured, were mostly private: a bust of her mother Aziza, another of a boy servant in the Heliopolis house, but above all Abkar, portrayed again and again. There were some public subjects -- a bust, never displayed, of Sayyed Darwish, for the Muhammad Ali Theatre that had been renamed after the Alexandrian composer; designs for stamps that she submitted and that were adapted without credit or remuneration; a maquette for a statue showing Nasser with a peasant and a worker, staple socialist realism, for the plinth in Tahrir Square that had remained unoccupied following the revolution, which also came to nothing. But such disappointments, one sensed, were not what ate at her. Art was not her vocation: her sister was. Dea seems to have earlier made a handful of decisions on which she never went back. Of the two of them, she determined it was Abkar who had the greater talent; that, coupled with her sister's passionate nature and the downturn in the family fortune, left Dea convinced she must become her sister's guardian. Compounding Dea's devotion to her sister was the blightedness of Abkar's private life. As a young girl Abkar had become engaged to Prince Idris Al-Senoussi, later to become King of Libya. The engagement was broken off when Abkar's father had her seen by a male doctor during an illness, which her fiancé considered unacceptable. "I would have been a queen, darling," Abkar said with a tongue-in-cheek smile one New Year's eve. "You wouldn't have found life among the Senoussis congenial, and besides the coup d'etat would have caught up with you, so you were lucky it didn't go through," Dea consoled her. But out of earshot of her sister Dea would confide that it was a cruel thing to tempt an impressionable young girl with the prospect of becoming royal, then suddenly pull the rug from beneath her feet. Abkar would marry, twice: first to Mustafa Al-Kharboutli, who died a few months after their wedding, and then, much later, to Omar Bassin, who also left her widowed. As for Dea, there were one or two loves that did not work out, a short marriage to a man she said did not share her intellectual interests, and some suitors turned away. In appearance, as in personality, the two sisters could not have been more different. Well into old age Abkar retained traces of her beauty, her poise and an attendant vanity that required stylish, if no longer fashionable, suits, accessories and golden sandals. Dea, whose features were more visibly Asian, her slim figure always clad in simple clothes, had the air of a hermit. Where they met intellectually was in their skepticism, their suspicion of narrow dogma, and their mystical turn of mind; neither sister was afraid of death, seeing it only as a transition, a "reunion" with the "source". Abkar was steeped in the traditions of Sufism, and variations on these themes were the staple of her books and resonate in her poetry. To this shared vision Dea brought her readings in science -- particularly astronomy, a subject that held great fascination for her -- especially when science appeared to corroborate an "intelligent universe" (the title of a book by Fred Hoyle she often cited). Their intellectual pursuits led to many friendships and correspondences with scholars and writers, their acquaintances including Muhammad Aboul-Uyoun, secretary-general of Al-Azhar, Muharram Kamal, the director-general of the Egyptian Museum who offered guidance with Abkar's research on religious beliefs in Ancient Egypt, the poet Ibrahim Nagui, and the writer Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad, whose salon Abkar frequented and who, in the 1960s, as head of the literary committee of the Ministry of Culture, commissioned Abkar to write Israil Wa 'Aqidat Al-Ard Al-Maw'uda (Israel and the Doctrine of the Promised Land, published in 1967). An analogy can be drawn between Abkar and the Palestinian-Lebanese Cairo- resident poet and writer May Ziadeh (1886-1941). May hosted a literary salon, as Abkar was later to do. Both had a public persona; May gave public lectures and wrote for various newspapers, Abkar at one point had a radio programme, and both were courted by the intellectuals of the day. If May lost her mind at the end, it was quite likely an index of the patriarchal double-standards that appear to give full-reign to, while limiting its understanding of, the role of a "woman of letters". If Abkar kept her sanity, it was probably in large part due to Dea, who shielded her not only from personal but also literary disappointments, of which there were many. Throughout the 1950s, Abkar was at work on a three-volume book, Nahw Afaq Awsa': Al-'Aql Al-Insani Fi Marahilihi Al-Tatawuriyya (Towards Broader Horizons: The Human Mind in its Evolutionary Stages), an ambitious project that provided a comparative analysis of the development of religious thought in different cultures. The first two volumes were published by the Anglo-Egyptian Press in 1962, but were soon banned by Al-Azhar and withdrawn from the market, while the third volume remained unpublished, together with the manuscripts of several books the writer did not have the means to print. After Abkar's death Dea resolved to get as much of her work published as possible. She commissioned Mahdi Mustafa, a poet who had worked as editor for a while at the progressive Dar Sina publishing house in Cairo. On his first visit to the villa in Alexandria, Mahdi recounts, Dea gave him a suitcase full of manuscripts and letters, pleading with him to help her save her sister's legacy (one thinks of Benjamin again, at the border, lugging the suitcase that contained his manuscripts). Mahdi says that when he later browsed through the material he was stunned, and that he returned it, saying it was a "treasure" to be kept by Dea. The fruit of their collaboration was the publication, for the first time, of Abkar's Al-Hallaj; Aw Sawt Al-Damir (Al-Hallaj; or the Voice of Conscience, Ramatan Press, 1995), a study of the mystic executed on charges of apostasy (see my "Notes in the margin" and Ibrahim Fathi's "The speed of light", both in Al-Ahram Weekly, 26 October-1 November 1995). This was followed by a reprint of Israil Wa 'Aqidat Al-Ard Al-Maw'uda (Madbuli, 1998), then the first two volumes of Nahw Afaq Awsa', broken into smaller volumes (Dar Al-Usur Al-Jadida, 2000). The third volume of the book again never made it to press. The reprinting of Nahw Afaq Awsa' catapulted Abkar to posthumous fame, although, as Mahdi adds, her rights were again withheld when a pirated copy (incidentally erasing his name as editor) was printed in Lebanon. In her final years, Dea appeared a lonely figure, unmoored by the absence of her sister and alienated from an Egypt where long-standing friends could suddenly turn around and reproach her, on religious grounds, for being a sculptor and keeping statues in her house. Her solace was in reminiscences, especially about her sister. When Yemeni TV interviewed her, recounts an Alexandrian friend, Afaf El-Naggar, Dea spoke mostly about Abkar. At Dea's funeral last Thursday only two people were present, the two Alexandrians who looked after her at the end, El-Naggar and the present writer's father. What will be the fate of the artistic and literary legacy of the two sisters? Mahdi says that Abkar's unpublished manuscripts include two volumes of prose poetry, an autobiography, a philological study of the Arabic language, a book about the Prophet Muhammad, another on Moses, a study about the Sufi Al-Sahrawardi, and the third volume of Nahw Afaq Awsa'. Would it be too much to ask that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which houses many donated private collections and permanent exhibitions, devote a gallery to Dea's paintings and statues, preserve the two sisters', and their father's, correspondence, and publish Abkar's manuscripts?
