By Mursi Saad El-Din Maher Shafik Farid is professor of English at Cairo University. An erudite writer, he combines a critical faculty with a literary style that is reminiscent of the great English essayists. He is an example of what I might call typical Egyptian scholarship. He belongs to a long line of Egyptian scholars who had a command of both English and Arabic. This is a typical Egyptian phenomenon -- scholars with a background in English studies who established reputations based on their creative and critical contributions in Arabic. Rashad Rushdi, professor of English and a leading playwright; Louis Awad, another expert in English who produced plays, poetry and criticism; Noaman Ashour, who created what might be termed popular drama and who was a graduate of the English Department; Ali El- Raei, who taught English drama at Ain Shams University and was one of our leading critics: all belong in this tradition. Farid is an example of the intellectual who does not live in an ivory tower, accumulating culture and keeping it to himself. He has always been an excellent communicator, conveying whatever knowledge he acquires to others through essays published in newspapers and in a number of books. His two most recent books are the product of an academic keen to place his specialisation at the service of non-academic readers. Selections From Masterpieces and Qassa Yaqussu together provide an introduction to world literature and culture generally. In the words of the author, such books are less an aim in themselves than an approach to the subject, one intended to tempt the reader into tacking the original works. They are intended to provide a foretaste of the pleasure that can be derived from reading. The duality of culture is apparent in the first title, which contains essays on Plutarch, Plato, Bacon, Dante, Nietzche, Freud, Malthus, Adam Smith, Leonardo da Vinci, Chaucer, Byron, Poe, Proust, Rumi, Ibn Khaldun, Al-Massoudi and Al-Tabari. And going through this selection of essays one cannot help but being impressed by the overlap in the thoughts and ideas of the Arab and non-Arab writers. The other book, subtitled Theoretical and Applied Studies in the Arabic Novel and Short Story, can be approached as a companion to the kind of literary criticism showcased in the first. In the introduction Farid explains three branches of literary criticism -- theoretical, applied and a combined theoretical/ applied approach. The first is "that branch of aesthetics that seeks general principles embodied in all the arts, as exemplified in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Collingwood and Richards. Applied criticism involves a testing of such theory, and was notably practiced by critics such as Leavis, Brooks and Edmund Wilson. The third branch combines the theoretical and the practical, as exemplified by the writings of T S Eliot, Herbert Read and Alan Tibbet. Having provided the reader with such preliminary explanations the author then goes on to give examples -- from Iris Murdoch, James Joyce and D H Lawrence -- before explaining the difference between the three. Farid then continues to apply these critical principles to a number of Egyptian and Arab short stories, novels and criticism. He begins with a critical analysis of Gaber Asfour's book The Time of the Novel, discussing some of the ideas therein. Asfour believes that the novel occupies a site of great prominence on the map of Arabic writings. From Asfour he goes on to other critics, including Salah Fadl, Youssef El-Sharouni and Ali El-Raei , examining their writings on the novel and the short story. He continues by donning the hat of the professional critic, providing some deep, and what I might term professional, analyses of works by Taha Hussein, Yehia Haqqi, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Idris, Youssef El- Sebaei and others. In doing so he provides considerably more than the kind of superficial reviews one so often encounters, and which these days all too often pass for criticism.
