By Mursi Saad El-Din At the turn of the 20th century, enlightenment took a different course. One of the leading figures of that period was Ahmed Lutfi El-Sayyed who, in 1901, started publishing Al-Garida. This became the mouthpiece of the Egyptian intellectuals. The main purpose of the newspaper was to call for independence and for the spreading of higher education. Hence, the paper called for the establishment of a national university, a call which bore fruit in 1908 when the first national university came into being. This was a moment that saw the emergence of the middle class and the struggle against British imperialism which climaxed in the 1919 Revolution led by Saad Zaghloul. It did not take the revolution long to move beyond politics and to become a general intellectual revolution embracing all genres of literature, as well as criticism, philosophy and education. There was a sustained effort to get away from the old established mores. In poetry, we see this most distinctly reflected in one of the bravest attacks against the old forms of versification. The book in question, Al-Diwan in Literature and Criticism, was written by two of the leading writers of the time, Mahmoud Abbas El-Aqqad and Ibrahim Abdel-Qadir El-Mazni. The authors' aim was to imitate a movement which called for the liberation of poetry from the fetters of ancient versification. Such transformations call for historical contextualisation. Egypt had gone through a period we may call the "dark ages", namely the three centuries of Turkish rule. The French expedition, followed by the rise of Muhammad Ali marked the end of that era. Yet the century that witnessed the end of Turkish rule also saw the country afflicted by the British occupation, which began in 1882. What with an alien ruler and a foreign presence, the Egyptians were eager to assert their identity. The first step towards that target was to bring back to life Egypt's heritage and seek a new national identity by looking back to a more glorious past. It was then that a new movement in poetry began, a movement that sought to revive old Arab models. In this respect, the poets were aided by the Arab press's reissuing of classical poetry during the previous decades. Mahmoud Sami El-Baroudi was the first pioneer in that revivalist movement. He was followed by Ahmed Shawqi, Hafez Ibrahim and Khalil Mutran. All followed to the letter the rules and metrics of traditional Arabic poetry: the movement sought mainly to re-establish a continuity with the past. So it was the generation of El-Aqqad and El-Mazni that rebelled against the traditionalists. They attacked their predecessors' poetry as lacking unity of form and betraying an absence of personal expression in content. They claimed that one can reshuffle the lines of a poem without this having any effect on the meaning. With El-Aqqad and El-Mazni came Abdel-Rahman Shoukri, and the three of them began to write poetry according to new canons. Yet a foil of this group came in the form of another group, "The Apollo Group", formed in 1932. The group embraced disciples of a variety of schools of poetry, some poets working with the Arab tradition, others carrying poetry towards a new direction influenced by the European romantics. The Apollo group comprised Ibrahim Nagui, a physician, and Ali Mahmoud Taha, an engineer, among others. The inter-war period witnessed the emergence of a movement that inclined towards logic and rationality. This is evidenced in a number of books such as Islam and the Principle of Government, by Ali Abdel-Razek (1924). The book was written in riposte to the efforts of King Fuad I of Egypt to declare himself a Caliph, a title which had been obliterated by the social revolution in Turkey. Abdel-Razeq's book was an effort to separate religion and the state. In 1925 Cairo University was established. The first governmental higher education institution, it was amalgamated with the 1908 private university. That the new institution marked the beginning of a wave of free thinking is best illustrated by the publication of Taha Hussein's Pre- Islamic Poetry. The book created a furore, and almost landed the author in prison. But this is another story, for a future column.
