By Mursi Saad El-Din To Salama Moussa's attack on writers given to stylistic flourishes at the expense of content, as mentioned in my previous column, Mustafa Sadeq Al-Rafi'i had a rather harsh reply. "The true weakness of Salama Moussa may be traced to his inability to master the language and literature of the Arabs. This is due to the fact that he did not study the Arabic heritage, but focussed on the literature of a foreign language." Taha Hussein came to the rescue of Moussa with an acerbic critique of Al-Rafi'i. "We believe," he writes, "that Mr Al-Rafi'i exaggerated in his judgement. The reason for his exaggeration is, perhaps, his misunderstanding of what was written by the supporters of Western thought, due to his dislike of the supporters of the new. However, these proponents [of Western thought] have certainly acquired a good knowledge of the Arabic language and literature. Their proficiency in a foreign language and its literature will never be at the expense of Arabic. Besides, their support of the new is neither a weakness nor a bias for the foreign literature they exalt in." Another controversy emerged, this time between the protagonists of the new themselves. Which of the two European cultures should be given priority by Egyptian intellectuals, the Latin or the Anglo-Saxon? That argument started with an article by Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad in the course of a review he wrote of a book on the poet Ahmed Shawqi by Antoun Al-Jumayel. There, Al-Aqqad made a comparison between the Latin method of literary criticism and that of the Anglo- Saxons. His main argument was that whereas the Latin method treated literature as a pleasant conversation in the salon, the Anglo-Saxon sought to critique it objectively, without altogether neglecting urbanity and sociability. Al-Aqqad believed that these differences between the two European literary cultures were reflected in the critical writings of their respective Egyptian followers. As in previous literary debates, Taha Hussein was bound to make an intervention. "There is no such thing as Latin criticism and Anglo-Saxon criticism; there is only one criticism," he wrote, one that follows the high canons created by Greek and Latin cultures. The modern nations are the heirs of the Graeco-Roman literary heritage. All French, Italian, German and English critics have read the best that was written in Greek and Latin literature, and are well-versed in the Roman and Greek arts, he adds, claiming that there is an intrinsic value acquired from Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Plato. Whatever position one adopts on these debates, one thing is clear: there was a painstaking effort to establish foundations on which a revitalised Egyptian literary culture can be built. Nor was this endeavour confined to poetry, literary criticism and theory; it also meant borrowing genres from the west, namely the novel and the play. Traditional literary history has it that the first serious attempt at the novel was Zeinab, by Mohamed Hussein Heikal. He wrote it in corroboration of Qassem Amin's call for the emancipation of women, and to expose the drawbacks of a classicist traditional society which separates a man from the woman he loves along class lines. The novel was published in the middle of the second decade of the 20th century. By the end of the following decade, we find that the novel genre has established itself as an accepted literary form, with the publication, among other things, of Tawfiq Al-Hakim's ' Awdat Al-Ruh (translated into English as Return of the Spirit ). I would like to linger here on 'Awdat Al-Ruh, which came at a turning point in our intellectual history that hinged on a quest for national identity. This is palpable in the novel where the myth of Isis and Osiris is used to symbolise Egypt. The story of Isis and how she collected the scattered parts of Osiris until she reassembled him and restored his soul is made to symbolise Egypt's condition -- its "dismemberment" and the hope that it should be "re- membered" and "revived" by a new leader. This theme become a catalyst in later novels and plays, as I will demonstrate in my next column.
