Before his death, Yehia Haqqi spoke at length to Mona Anis about the Arabic language, Islam and Nasser In May 1991, having been commissioned to do a profile of Yehia Haqqi for the Weekly, I arranged a meeting with the writer at his flat in Heliopolis. Haqqi, who had for most of his lifetime avoided publicity, was not disposed to meet strangers. Once, in the 1970s, I carried a cane (Haqqi was an avid collector of walking sticks) back to Cairo -- a present from a friend in London. Haqqi remembered the incident and agreed to meet me. In his old age Haqqi did not like to have many visitors, and having agreed to receive me, I was told I should expect at best a short interview. Arriving 15 minutes before the appointed time, and in the company of critic Farouk Abdel-Qadir, we knocked at the door, and to my surprise Haqqi himself, with his famous cane, and wearing a clean white galabiyya (both hallmarks of Yehia Haqqi's public persona) opened the door. Leading us into his study through a flat which has escaped the vulgarity characteristic of almost every middle class Egyptian household since the 1970s, we were given an opportunity to view the souvenirs of a distinguished life; a simple rug on the floor, a few books. The walls were very plain, decorated only with a portrait of the author and a simple paper calendar. Yehia Haqqi, who had excused himself after leading us through to his study, re-emerged some 15 minutes later dressed in elegant day-pyjamas. Laughing, he said, "Thank goodness they make these things now, otherwise I should have had to go to the trouble of dressing up in a suit and tie." We apologised for arriving early, and in reply he told us an anecdote from the days when he served as a diplomat in France. He, and the rest of the Egyptian diplomatic mission, had turned up for a reception at the Elysee Palace an hour early. This gave them the opportunity of watching the officials prepare themselves for the occasion and the musicians polish up their instruments. "They were nice enough to tell us that it was good of us to arrive early, since they were bored," he said. I took this as a characteristic example of Haqqi's famously elegant politesse ; but even now I do not really know whether he minded us arriving early or not. I looked for suitable words with which to begin the interview, and by a stroke of very good luck hit upon the magic words El-Majalla (The Magazine) and the name of the late Egyptian poet Amal Donqol. This was in the context of something about the generation of Egyptian writers of the sixties, many of whom had been first published by Haqqi when he edited the arts magazine El-Majalla. I quoted Amal as having said something to that effect. "Did you know Amal?" Haqqi replied. "I published them all...even things I did not understand. I insisted on publishing their work. I ran El-Majalla according to true democratic traditions. The masthead contained a list of the names of all those who had worked on the issue -- in fact there was a running joke in the office along the lines of the editor (that is me) insisting on the bowab 's name being added to the masthead. And, frankly, I would not have minded, since it is only honest to acknowledge the contributions of everyone who had made the magazine a success." The whole mood of the meeting had suddenly become so very cheerful, that for the following three hours, the old and frail Yehia Haqqi, whom I had been warned not to exhaust, was talking vivaciously about every conceivable subject, with the proviso that the interview could only appear after his death. To my knowledge this is the last interview he had given to press. The following are excerpts from a longer version published in the Weekly on December 17, 1992. ON ARABIC LANGUAGE: "I am saddened by the state of the Arabic language, by its use in the press and in more self- consciously literary writing. There seems to be no genuine style anymore -- it is all discord and platitude. The language is now worn as a kind of decorative adornment, an ornament that is usually in the worst of taste. Have you noticed the proliferation of certificates, of price lists, of mottos, hanging on almost every wall, from the juice shop to doctors' clinics? This is what the language has been reduced to. It is corruption, and in appalling taste. "But the problem is not just confined to the walls of tradesmen. It is far more deeply rooted. The books provided for children in schools are so bad that I am afraid an entire generation of supposedly educated people will emerge whose actual grasp of the Arabic language will be nominal. So, whilst it is true to say that in the recent past the levels of education of the poor and the illiterate have improved, it is also true to say that the educational standards of what might be termed the elite have deteriorated to unprecedented degree." ON STATE-SPONSORED ART: "I see no role for the state except in overseeing projects that are by their very nature national and non- profit making. The state should restrict itself to only the heavy duty work, work that would not otherwise be considered. Reference books, encyclopaedias, books exploring the national heritage -- the publication of these I would regard as legitimate involvement of the state in arts. "In the world of theatre, the state should restrict itself to a single national theatre, guaranteeing funding sufficient to the aims of a truly national theatre -- a level of funding that would allow for the development of a reasonable repertoire, the development of the best talents, and stagings worthy of a national institution. "And the criteria used for state involvement in the national theatre could perhaps apply to one or two other projects that really could not see the light of day without state subsidy. But for the state to be involved in all cultural production, at all levels, not only imposes a heavy burden on the national purse, it also tends to have a deleterious effect on the quality of the product itself. "In the late 1960s for instance, the state became unnecessarily involved in film production. I well remember the publicity given to the half million pound budget allocated to the making of Youssef Chahine's Al-Nasser Salah-Eddin. Now imagine the response of a poor peasant from Faraskour upon hearing of the money his government was spending on a film. he would be shocked, and he would have every right to be shocked, since the funding of this film could just as easily have been found from other sources, thus saving the public purse a then not inconsiderable sum." ON NASSER: "Have you ever been to Upper Egypt? I worked there in the 1920s, at the very beginning of my career. The misery I witnessed then, the level of poverty and deprivation, are indescribable, though I attempted to record some of these images in Kaliha 'ala-Allah [Trust in God, 1960]. "One picture that remains particularly clear in my mind -- an incident I remember most vividly -- occurred in a little Kafr [hamlet] in the corollaries of Manflout in Assiut governorate. I reached the hamlet after a two-hour donkey ride, and the purpose of my journey was to oversee the execution of an Islamic court ruling that decreed that a wife be returned to her husband. The wife did not want to return, and so, with resort to law, the husband had prepared the 'house of obedience'. Now the hamlet itself consisted only of mud huts and caves set in the bank of the irrigation canal along which I had to creep. I am a short man, and still I had to stoop to enter the miserable hovel where this girl was, so that she could be dragged out by the Khafirs [guards] and taken to the equally miserable hovel her husband had 'prepared'. "This was the situation in the 1920s, these were the conditions in which the great majority of the population lived. Scenes like this, thankfully, have disappeared from the countryside. Any liberal minded person -- anyone indeed who was not a feudal landlord, and who saw the condition of the countryside before 1952 -- cannot help but kneel in gratitude before Nasser. "Yet, when it comes to democracy, one's gratitude to Nasser is rather less than whole hearted. I can never forgive Nasser for beginning the post-revolution period with the hanging of workers in Kafr El-Dawar. Neither can I forgive him for the hanging of Sayed Qotb [leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was, incidentally, the first critic to write about Haqqi's The Lamp of Umm Hashim ]. And the regimes imprisonment of the left in concentration camps -- this was all unforgivable. Egypt, thanks to the revolution of 1919 possessed a democratic element in its history, and it was this aspect of political life that was strangled by Nasser. "This, I suppose, is the problem of all military dictatorships. It is a problem I dealt with in Sahhi el-Noum [Wake Up, 1955] -- this idea that with a pistol on the table, dialogue becomes impossible. The whole book is a warning against dictatorship. It is one of my writings to which I feel closest. I spent a great deal of time and effort over it, not least because it was written in the wake of 1954, after the abolition of party life. Consequently, I had to take a great deal of care not to get into any troubles with the censorship." ON ISLAM AND MUSLIMS: "I feel angry when faced with things that are immoral. I am proud of having been born a Muslim, and I believe that Islam provides a comprehensive moral code. But Islam has been done far more harm by Muslims than by its enemies. Whatever happened to Beit al-Mal -- the body responsible for administering funds gathered as alms? It was at least a method of seeing some redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. yet in 1925 it was declared dead when a judge refused the demands of a poor woman to be supported from Beit al-Mal funds, on the grounds that they no longer existed. "Muslims have gone a long way in their attempts to accommodate the West. They have abandoned many practices -- many of the good traditional practices. I was for some time posted in Turkey, and I saw the way Attaturk tried to engineer change in Turkish society. He did not like the Arabic language because he was himself unable to learn it. And his attempts to westernise Turkey were so violent that I felt he was like a man willing to sell anything, including his honour, for acceptance by the West. And where is Turkey now? Is she accepted by the West? I think not. "It is foolish to attempt to write off one's past, one's heritage, in a blind attempt to imitate the West, for this course of action can, in the long run, lead nowhere. in Egypt there used to be people who believed that heritage was something to which lip service should be paid, and that heritage was only for museums. Tawfiq El-Hakim once explained his play People of the Cave to me in such terms, insisting that we did not owe a living to our heritage. Instead, he said, we should kiss its hand, and lead it firmly back to the place from whence it came. "I would take a different stand. I do not believe that the separation of Al-Azhar from the mainstream educational system in Egypt was an altogether good thing. It was something engineered by the French, who held some sway over Muhammad Ali. This separation prevented the development of an educational system that had its roots deep in the national heritage. Azhar education became marginalised, and those who opted for it were considered archaic and anti-modern. "And look at the results. Just listen to the sermons at Friday prayers and you will see that such marginalisation had produced not learned men but clerks. All those sermons that sound like bad compositions, these are the results of the separation in our education system. "Now we face many challenges, about this I have no illusion. Some of these challenges are more obvious than others. And to face this challenge we have to understand the true essence of Islam, and not spend our time quibbling over superficial matters. I wish I had both the time and health to write on this matter. I have neither. But I thank God for having belonged to this country, for having been born a Muslim and for dying so." Il miglior fabbro T.S. Eliot's description of Ezra Pound as il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman) does not apply to any one in modern Arab writing more aptly than Yehia Haqqi. Over a half century of literary production, Haqqi's indisputable contribution has been in his development of the literary language and in his formidable stylistic sophistication. More perhaps than any of his contemporaries, Haqqi has the reputation of being a 'craftsman' in the language, combining the classical and colloquial in a manner comparable to the fine designs of a traditional worker in precious metals. Born in Cairo in 1905, in the then middle class neighbourhood of Sayeda Zeinab, Haqqi's parents were of Turkish and Albanian descent. His paternal grandfather was the nephew of a Turkish lady, who was in charge of the palaces of the Khedive Ismail, who had managed to secure for her nephew, an immigrant to Egypt, a lucrative job in the service of the Egyptian government. His father went to Al-Azhar for a few years, and then moved to a French school, where he obtained sufficient education to enable him to join government service as a clerk in the Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments). The house where Yehia Haqqi was born belonged to the Awqaf ministry, and though the family had to leave the house a few years after Haqqi was born, he always remembers the lasting effect the neighbourhood of Sayeda Zeinab had on his artistic and psychological formation. Yehia Haqqi wrote in his autobiography in 1974: "Until the present day I am still full of love for -- and still living with -- Sit Mashallah, the falafel seller, and Usta Hassan the barber-...and all the beggars and dervishes surrounding the Mosque of Sayeda Zeinab". To appreciate this love, one has to remember that in the Egypt of the early 1920s, most people claiming Turkish origin felt superior to Egyptians from peasant or common backgrounds. But Yehia Haqqi was peculiar in that he was born, as he puts it, "after the land inherited from my grandfather had been wasted through mismanagement". In his autobiography, he speaks about his resulting peculiar social position, "from a family of Turkish descent, but with neither land nor property". This led to a certain shyness and introversion in the young man, and in his family. Haqqi, as a result, felt a greater affinity to the people, and to the popular customs of Sayeda Zeinab, than to the more aristocratic lifestyles of the rich Turkish upper classes. In the early 1920s, Haqqi joined the faculty of law with the hope of earning the honours degree which would enable him to obtain a governmental scholarship and further his studies abroad. He missed being among the top four, however, and in 1927 Yehia Haqqi was appointed assistant attorney in Manfalout in Upper Egypt. He spent two years there, and has always spoken of these years as a major source of inspiration behind his works and his understanding of Egyptian life and the misery of the Egyptian peasant. Many of his stories bear witness to this concern. In 1929, Haqqi joined the diplomatic service, and his first post was in Jeddah. A year later he was posted to Turkey. This was the Turkey of Kamal Ataturk, and Yehia Haqqi "learnt the art of wearing hats, which hat to put on in the morning, and which in the evening, to the extent that I had to buy six hats beside a tarboush." He remained, he says, resentful of Ataturk's westernisation process. "Turkey was exposed to rape, and gained nothing in return. The West will never accept Turkey as a European country," he says. Of his years in Turkey he remembers that "there, I found myself in the land from which my grandfather had migrated. I searched for my relatives, lived with them, and took lessons in Turkish, eventually becoming fluent in it." After four years in Turkey, however, Haqqi was posted to Italy during the heyday of Fascism. He often made visits to Germany and witnessed Hitler and Mussolini mobilising their countries, shouting racist slogans. This first encounter of Haqqi with the West, under such particular circumstances, may be one of the reasons why from his generation of writers and thinkers, he seems to have been the least impressed by the West, though of course he remained appreciative of Western cultural achievements, top of the list being classical music, for which he had a great love. During the Second World War, Haqqi was stationed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo. In 1942 he married his first wife who gave him his daughter Noha. After the war, Haqqi was posted to Paris, where he met his second wife, a painter and sculptor. To be able to marry, however, Haqqi had to resign his diplomatic posting, since under the regulations no Egyptian diplomat was allowed to marry a foreigner. From 1954 to 1959, Haqqi occupied top civil service posts, including Head of the Arts Department, established in the aftermath of the July 1952 Revolution. In 1959, Haqqi resigned from government employ and dedicated himself to literary activity and writing. Among the favourite posts, he held, Haqqi singled out his editorship of Al-Majalla, a monthly literary magazine, between 1962 and 1970. In 1975, Yehia Haqqi took the deliberate decision to stop writing and retire from literary affairs. He ended on an autobiographical note: Haqqi's Autobiography, which is printed in the introduction to the first volume of his Collected Works, being published in 1975. In 1991, the 28th volume in the series appeared (published by the General Egyptian Book Organisation), bringing the account to seven volumes of novels and short stories, 12 volumes of literary criticism and essays, and nine books of what Haqqi calls his 'literary articles.' A last volume of his letters to his daughter Noha appeared posthumously. MA East and West The Lamp of Umm Hashim and other Stories, Yahya Hakki, Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2004. pp88 This slim and elegant volume includes three of Hakki's most memorable short stories ( Story in the Form of a Petition; Mother of the Destitute and A Story from Prison ), as well as Hakki's pioneering novella The Lamp of Umm Hashim. of the latter Denys Johnson-Davies writes in his translator's introduction to the book: " The Lamp of Umm Hashim was the first fictional work in Arabic to deal with the psychological difficulties that were faced by students returning home after being sent to Europe to complete their studies. Though published more than half a century ago, it can still be read with pleasure, for the theme around which it revolves -- as summed in Kipling's lines about East and West never being able to meet -- are still relevant. The novella tells the story of a young man who, after financial sacrifices by his father, goes to England to pursue his medical studies. He comes from a conservative family and is torn between the new influences to which he is exposed in England, including a love affair with an English girl, and his own religious upbringing. On his return to Cairo, this struggle is epitomized when he has to treat the eye complaint of Fatima, his cousin and bride-to-be; the novella recounts his attempts to reconcile the scientific knowledge he has acquired in the west with the superstitious beliefs held by his own mother and the inhabitants of the poor district in which he decides to practice medicine." As for the other three stories collected in this volume, Johnson-Davies writes in his introduction: "Early in his career as a lawyer, ... Yahya Hakki worked for some time in Upper Egypt, where he came to have an affectionate understanding of the peasants who labor under its scorching sun and harsh conditions. His 'Story from Prison' makes up a threesome of longer stories about Upper Egypt in a volume entitled Blood and Mud. The story, like many of his writings, deals with characters who, despite being the very backbone of the country, feature all too seldom in the literature of Egypt... Hakki, however possessed in marked degree a sympathetic rapport with the underdog, combined with an ability to depict, in a way that was not at all condescending, characters from the humbler walks of life. This can bee seen in the short story "Mother of Destitute," in which he creates an atmosphere not dissimilar to that of his novella, and where the 'chorus' to this fable-story is composed of that mass of teeming humanity that crowd the square in which so much of the action occurs. The very early and very short "Story in the Form of a Petition," which I have translated and published locally in Cairo in the 1940s, shows Yahya Hakki's readiness to adopt new modes of storytelling."
