By Mursi Saad El-Din The recent visit of President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan has brought back pleasant memories of Tashkent, the capital of the republic. Following the Cairo Conference of Afro-Asian People's Solidarity of 1958, a number of organisations sprouted. One, and an important one at that, was the Afro-Asian Writers Organisation. It was decided to convene a conference for writers from the two continents and a preparatory meeting was held in Moscow in April 1958, attended by writers from India, China, Japan, the Soviet Union and Egypt, and presented by Youssef El-Sebai and myself. It was decided to hold the first Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent and in September I was dispatched to the city to make preparations for the conference. That was the first time I set foot in the city, once a centre of Islamic art and culture. The moment I arrived I felt completely at home, met by the smiling faces of members of Uzbekistan's Writers Union. The conference convened from 7 to 13 October, and the Egyptian delegation was headed by Dr Khalafallah Ahmed, professor at Alexandria University, and a number of Egyptian writers, including Aisha Abdel-Rahman, Soheir El-Qalamawi, Amina El-Said and Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi. I shall never forget that gathering of the best literary talents of Africa and Asia. For the first time in history writers from all over the Afro-Asian world met. The Cairo conference of Afro- Asian Peoples Solidarity was a forum for politicians and liberation leaders; the Tashkent Conference was a forum for African and Asian writers where they laid the foundation for an intellectual movement that had a character all its own. It was, in many ways, an eye-opener for African writers in particular to break the colonially imposed isolation. African writers not only had the chance to meet fellow African writers, but also to come face to face with established Asian practitioners. Out of that first conference came the Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers. Colombo, the capital of Veylon (now Sri Lanka) was selected as the site of the Bureau, and I was appointed as representative of Egypt. But this is another story that I may come back to in the future. My second visit to Tashkent was in September 1968, to attend an international symposium on literature and the modern world. The inaugural address was given by Sarrar Azimov (I don't know if he is from the same family as the president). The symposium was attended by writers from Africa, Asia, Europe, America and Australia. Youssef El-Sebai and I represented Egypt, and from Lebanon came Soheil Idriss and Hussein Marowa. When I look at the papers that were submitted now, I still wonder at the depth and foresight of the delegates. They dealt with such issues as friendship, solidarity and internationalism; literature and life; nationalism and universalism; tradition and innovation; man between two languages. For me the two visits were not only an occasion to meet with such leading writers as Muin Bessisso from Palestine, Alex Laguma from South Africa, Kamal Djumblatt from Lebanon, and others, but also to discover the treasures of Islamic civilisation which had flourished in Central Asia. Visits to Bukhara and Samarkand gave us the opportunity to see some of the best Islamic architecture on display in the many mosques of the two cities. They also afforded proof of how the people of Uzbekistan were able to preserve their Islamic civilisation in spite of the process of Russianisation carried out by Tsars, then by Comissars. I shall always remember those wonderful relics and also some of the contradictions I found. We were invited to attend a performance of Laila Wal Majnoun at the Novoi Theatre in Tashkent. The play is part of the ancient poetic tradition of the Arabs. Alishan Navoi, the great Uzbek poet after whom the theatre was named, turned out to be a Russianisation of Asad El-Din El-Nawawi, a great Muslim thinker!
