al-Hurriyya wa-al-adala fi fikr Abdallah al-Nadim (Freedom and Justice in the Thought of Abdallah al-Nadim), Radwan al-Kashef, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2005. pp204 The life and thought of the nineteenth-century activist and pioneer of reform Abdallah al-Nadim (1843/44-1896) has long been of interest to some of Egypt's most distinguished writers, and books such as Abdallah al-Nadim khatib al-wataniyya (Abdallah al-Nadim: Orator of Nationalism) by Ali al-Hadidi, Adab al-makala al-sahafiyya fi masr (The Literature of Journalism in Egypt) by Abdellatif Hamza, and, most importantly, Zoa'ma al-Islah fi al-asr al-hadith (Pioneers of Reform in Modern Time) by Ahmed Amin testify to the significance al-Nadim has had for later writers and intellectuals. The late Egyptian film director Radwan al-Kashef (1952-2002) has now added his take to this distinguished list of readings of al-Nadim. Produced sometime in the early 1980s, al-Kashef's study had to wait some 25 years to be published posthumously by his family. Abdallah al-Nadim, reformer, political activist and pioneering journalist, was active in the 1880s and 1890s, a transitional period in modern Egyptian history following the 'Urabi Revolution in 1881, its failure months later and the subsequent occupation of the country by the British in 1882. Al-Kashef's book does not seek to retrace al-Nadim's life in detail, but rather aims to scrutinise his values, and particularly his ideas on freedom and justice, as significant principles contributing to the future development of the country. Though deeply opposed to the regime at the time, in his political work al-Nadim refused violent protest against what he saw as the corrupt government of the Khedive, and at the beginning of his career he refused to join underground organisations, such as Masr al-Fata, which promoted violence, including assassination, as a means towards achieving fundamental change. Instead, al-Nadim established what would now be described as a civil-society organisation, Al-Jamiyya al-khairiyya al-islamiyya (the Islamic Charity Society), which aimed to raise people's awareness of their rights and the importance of freedom and justice. Young preachers were dispatched by the society to the Egyptian provinces, al-Nadim placing a strong emphasis on the proper training of them, and the society, established to assist the poor and help them to educate their children, swiftly became a kind of cultural meeting point, mixing preaching with the promotion of popular discussion of contemporary issues. The society also put on productions of al-Nadim's plays, among them the nationalist work Al-Watan (The Homeland). Branches of the Jamiyya were set up in communities throughout Egypt, including in Coptic communities, and al-Nadim's intention was that the group would help develop Egyptian public opinion and promote resistance to the British occupation, as well as protest against the widespread injustice and corruption of the surrounding society at the time. The Jamiyya enjoyed some striking successes, and the number of its branches in the provinces increased markedly, helped by al-Nadim's proselytizing journalism, which was written in such a way as to appeal to a wide audience and used story-like forms to discuss social, economic and political issues. It was this use of popular stories and the desire to use popular forms to discuss complex social and political issues that seems to have drawn the late filmmaker Radwan al-Kashef to al-Nadim, and indeed the two men's careers have some similarities. Responsible for the development of a strand of gritty realism in Egyptian cinema, sometimes called the "cinema of the marginal," in films such as Arak al-balah, Leh ya banafseg and Al-Saher al-Kashef depicts the lives of the poor living in underprivileged areas of Cairo, and he provoked much discussion and a fair measure of controversy in the Egyptian cultural scene in the 1990s. Al-Kashef was also a political activist from his student days in the 1970s onwards, and during the latter part of that decade he lived as a fugitive from the police, before giving himself up to the authorities and subsequently spending some months in the Abu Za'abal prison. Al-Nadim, spent nine years in hiding from the Egyptian authorities following the British occupation of the country in 1882. When he was arrested in 1891, he was exiled for a few months before the new Khedive pardoned him. Al-Nadim is best remembered as a journalist and editor of the weekly magazine al-Tankit wa-al-Tabkit (June-October 1881). This magazine, first published in Alexandria, owed its popularity to al-Nadim's humorous and satirical articles, which poked fun at those in power and protested against contemporary abuses. Al-Kashef includes quotations from this publication and from a later magazine, al-Ustadh (1892-93), also published in Alexandria, which add to the reader's sense of al-Nadim as a satirist and reformer. In one such article, for example, called The End of the Whole Country -- a Mere Life ending in Death, al-Nadim tells the story of an ordinary man who is unable to defend even his most basic rights. Thus, when burglars break into his house the man does not move and remains silent, unable to stir even when he sees the thieves carrying his property out of the door in boxes. The man lets the thieves go, thanking God that neither he nor his family have been harmed, and al-Nadim uses the story as a kind of parable to criticise those whom he sees as being responsible for the waste of Egypt's resources and the mortgaging of its independence and political rights to present advantage. Elsewhere, al-Nadim criticises quietist ulema, who, in choosing a life of religious asceticism, have in his view been content with the humiliation imposed on the people by the British occupation and have made themselves complicit with it. Al-Azhar scholars who had not kept themselves informed on modern scientific and political developments were also criticised by al-Nadim. Al-Kashef paints a sympathetic portrait of al-Nadim as a tough pioneer of reform and as a man wanting to spread awareness and new ideas among the people. In his play Al-Watan, for example, which called for the establishment of scientific and industrial schools as a means of economic development, al-Nadim puts forward the idea that illiteracy itself is a form of injustice and that freedom cannot be achieved without the spread of education, which would help liberate minds from the shackles of ignorance and superstition. One of the most interesting parts of al-Kashef's book focuses on al-Nadim's ideas on freedom, giving it its title. In the fourth issue of al-Tankit wa-al-Tabkit, al-Nadim raises the question of the limits of freedom, answering it by pointing out that the issue of the freedom of the individual cannot be discussed in isolation from the idea of the individual as a part of the society as a whole. This being so, absolute freedom can never be achieved, al-Nadim says, going on to argue that the limits of freedom apply to all: all are enslaved in a framework of law in order that all may be equally free. According to al-Kashef, al-Nadim's ideas on the extent and limits of individual freedom come near to being at the centre of his thought, though he also has much to say about constitutional freedoms and the mechanisms of the constitutional state. He was, for example, an advocate of representative democracy, strongly arguing that the members of the Shura Council, a consultative assembly appointed by the Khedive, should be elected instead, and that its composition should seek to be as representative as possible of the actual composition of the nation and not just a collection of the rich and influential. As far as individual freedoms are concerned, al-Nadim emphasised social values at the expense of practices he saw as being imported from Europe, such as drunkenness, atheism and the promotion of equality between men and women. Al-Nadim believed that the state had a duty to regulate such ideas and the freedoms they led to, outlawing alcohol and penalising those who violate society's moral norms. Al-Kashef argues that al-Nadim's ideas in this regard were not so much derived from religious precepts, but rather reflected an ethic of individual responsibility for the proper flourishing of society. Yet, he says, al-Nadim nevertheless mistook ethical degradation for the exercise of personal choice, and this may be a significant limitation in his thought. In one of his satirical articles, al-Nadim attacks the inequality between the social classes of his day, exposing the gap between the rich and the poor and criticising the prejudice encountered among those living in the country's cities for the fellaheen, whose living conditions were often appalling. Al-Nadim argued forcefully that the suffering fellaheen were the source of the wealth of those city- dwellers who regarded them with contempt. Al-Kashef explores the implications of al-Nadim's support for the rights of the poor and denunciation of the harsh inequalities of his day, suggesting that it would be wrong to see socialist sympathies in his work. Instead, al-Kashef suggests, al-Nadim was concerned to criticise the deterioration of both the country's agriculture and its industrial production. Landlords were shackled by a feudal mentality that not only hurt agricultural production, but was also responsible for a good part of the poverty of the countryside and was hindering the country's more general progress and development. Finally, al-Nadim's views on the position of women have been controversial in recent years, and they contrast with those of contemporaries such as Qassim Amin. Whereas Amin had argued that women's emancipation was a pre-requisite for the more general development of the country and an index of its modernity, al-Nadim took a more traditionalist line, arguing that women should submit to their husbands and that their education should be restricted to religious topics. Although he was keen to address women in his articles, thereby conjuring up an audience of women readers, al-Nadim was adamant that women should continue to occupy their traditional roles. Abdallah al-Nadim died in his early fifties, after offering his country works of intelligence and creativity that have influenced generations. Unfortunately, another similarity between him and Radwan al-Kashef is that each died while still in his prime. Reviewed by Rania Khallaf By Rania Khallaf
