By Mursi Saad El-Din It is often said that literary criticism is all but dead, that it has been superseded by flimsy, shallow reviews that deal more with the creator than the work. And yet at one time literary criticism had its heyday in modern Egyptian cultural life, with all sorts of different schools. The movement of criticism was characterised by the creative writers playing the role of the critic: Taha Hussein, Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad, Ibrahim Abdel-Qadir Al-Mazni and others led the battle of criticism. In their critical writings, these writers combined the creative and critical impulses. And they tried, each in his own way, to lay the foundations for an Egyptian, indeed an Arab, school of literary criticism. They looked at literature in its wider scope, not merely as a written text, but as a text in dialogue with society as a whole. Taha Hussein's literary criticism deserves a thought. His critical work is marked by a deep patriotic concern for the future of his country. When only a young man, he realised that he had a role to play and that he had to choose between the traditional approach to the study of Arabic literature and modern Western thought. He realised that it was not merely a question of literature; it was an issue that had a great deal to do with the destiny of modern Arabic culture and even the whole of Arab Society. Setting aside Taha Hussein's battles for freedom of opinion in the history of modern Egyptian thought, it should be noted that for him, literacy criticism was not just confided to a narrow academic ambit; he saw it as part and parcel of the critic's stance towards culture and society. This is what gives his critical work such force and credibility. Of course Taha Hussein's iconoclastic book on pre-Islamic poetry created a huge controversy not only in Egypt, but in other countries as well. This was a pioneering work in its field in that it sought to apply Western approaches to literary criticism to Arabic literature. In tackling pre-Islamic poetry, that most canonical part of the Arab canon, it subjected it to Cartesian doubt, hence the furore that ensued. Like Hussein, others such as Al-Aqqad and Al-Mazni were the great forerunners of modern Arabic criticism. They tried to answer an important question, "does the value of a work of art depend on the ability of the writer to reflect the most intimate aspects of his own life, or the age he lives in?" The answer came later with the 1952 Revolution which resulted in a new approach to criticism influenced by political ideology. Literary works were judged then according to whether they addressed the hopes of society. If the text meets these new aims, then the critic could start assessing its form, style and other literary canons of criticism. But if the work is found lacking in socio-political aims, then it is seen as not worth a critique. That period witnessed the emergence of such critics as Mohamed Mandour, Mahmoud Amin Al-Alim and Ali Al-Rai. They believed that if a literary text is void of a subject that deals with actual problems of life, then it is an insipid kind of work. This was, in a nutshell, the socialist-realist approach to literature. But one must not neglect to mention a middle generation of critics who concentrated on the aesthetic canons of criticism and considered the literary work as a text in its own right, regardless of its socio-political contents. These were critics who had digested Western literature and literary theories chief among them being Louis Awad and Soheir Al-Qalamawi.
