Thinking ahead

The Supreme Council for Culture this week honoured Louis Awad, marking the tenth anniversary of his death. Ahmed Abbas Saleh participated in the memorial conference, sharing memories of the late Awad and outlining his intellectual legacy
It must have been towards the end of the 1940's that I met Louis Awad for the first time, during a period when Egypt was awash with nationalist demonstrations and revolutionary thought. Quite what the circumstances of that first meeting might be, however, I do not recall, though one particular incident that I do remember, after all these years, is entering the Isavich Café, in Tahrir Square, and finding Louis Awad sitting at a window table, writing an article. I sat opposite him, and he almost immediately excused himself to go to the bathroom. Instinctively I glanced at the papers spread out in front of him, noticing his weird, square writing and thinking it resembled Kufi script.
I must, of course, have known him before this incident, otherwise I should not have sat at his table quite so readily. At the time he was publishing articles in Al-Katib Al-Misri magazine, edited by Taha Hussein and a platform for the most distinguished writers of the day. Awad's contributions tended to be studies of English writers. It is likely, too, that I was familiar with his [vernacular] book, Mudhakkirat Talib Bi'tha (Memoirs of a Research Grant Student) and had probably read some of his attempts at poetry, including Pluto Land. He was enthusiastic about writing in colloquial Arabic, something I could not at the time understand.
At that time the issue of language was highly controversial. Arabic was at the centre of an ongoing debate: remember, this was the period during which the lawyer and Al-Ahrar Al-Dustouriyin Party Minister Abdel-Aziz Fahmi's project of writing Arabic in Latin script was a staple of intellectual debate.
Fahmi's overriding concern, in pursuing his project, was to promote a strategy of modernisation. Awad was equally concerned with the formulation of a modernising strategy, though he took an entirely different direction. He believed that the emergence of the vernacular within the Latin world -- the prime example being the Italian of Dante's Divine Comedy -- was the first step towards the European Renaissance. And any Egyptian renaissance, he believed, would follow the same route, hence his promotion, at the time, of the colloquial.
There were many technical problems to which writers were seeking solutions. In drama, particularly, the use of standard fusha presented an enormous problem, and could hardly convey, credibly, a conversation between two intellectuals, let alone between a fellah and his wife. And what went for the stage, went too for radio and cinema.
The use of colloquial, too, soon took root in novels and short stories, in which the dialogue would be written in the vernacular; such was the solution adopted by Tawfik El-Hakim in the novel Awdat Al-Rouh (Return of the Spirit). Naguib Mahfouz, however, continued to write dialogue in Fusha, and managed to make conversations flow as if they were written in colloquial even though they were conveyed in impeccable Arabic. El-Hakim suggested establishing a "third language" that would bridge the gap between colloquial and fusha, and Ibrahim Abdel-Qader El-Mazni played a pioneering role in the creation of a simple language that, though it adopted a vernacular cadence, remained standard. Egyptian society, it seems, was unwilling to alter its (standard) language or its script. Yet though Awad subsequently refrained from writing in colloquial (not only in translations and literary studies but in creative works such as the novel Hassan Muftah and his play on the monk Aba Nufur), his conviction that any Egyptian renaissance depended on the use of spoken language remained firm. His study of European Renaissance, produced towards the end of his life, makes it perfectly clear that he held onto the belief in the importance of utilising vernacular forms throughout his long career.
Whatever the failures of his promotion of the colloquial as a literary form (and he was not alone in promoting this trend), Awad attracted a great deal of attention by his attacks on traditional Arabic metre and his insistence on the necessity of a poetic transformation that would break the rhythms of Aroud Al- Khalil Ibn Ahmed. And perhaps this was the beginning of the "new poetry" movement that flourishes to this day.
Awad had travelled to Cambridge to study English literature on a grant -- an experience that resulted in Mudhakkirat Talib Bi'tha. His grant, though, ended before he could complete his thesis, curtailed by the outbreak of the World War II. He arrived in Cambridge in 1937, during what was one of the most fertile periods in the life of that ancient institution. Marxist ideas were current among both students and teachers. The battles of the left against fascism were in full swing, targeting, in particular, General Franco in Spain, supported by the Nazis. Many English volunteers travelled to Spain to aid the republicans, including George Orwell. The American Ernest Hemingway, too, lived among the revolutionaries, an experience that was to result in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Yet despite this left-wing orientation Cambridge University remained a stronghold of younger members of the British aristocracy, who were being prepared for holding leading posts in the still thriving British Empire. Awad -- dark, rugged and born in Upper Egypt -- did not feel welcome among his upper-class colleagues. Perhaps he faced racial discrimination for the first time then, experiencing the disorientation that results from a contradiction between a progressive intellectual outlook and conventionally racist behaviour. Any bitterness Awad harboured about his time in Cambridge was kept firmly under wraps. It was only when I witnessed his distress following the death of his friend Bakr Hamdi Seifennasr, a contemporary at Cambridge, that I began to have an inkling of Awad's unhappiness at that time.
Seifennasr was a truly wonderful character. He was the son of Hamdi Pasha Seifennasr, the Wafd Party's minister of defence, who married a woman of royal descent. Their son, Bakr, was sent to England to continue his education at Cambridge, where he was attracted to, and immersed himself in, the radical fervour of the times, eventually becoming a key revolutionary activist on his return to Egypt. Seifennasr was studying political economy at Cambridge when Awad arrived: he found in his compatriot a companion, friend and protector which must have ameliorated the frustrations the younger man felt facing British hypocrisy.
Awad's family was obviously enamoured, on some level, with the West -- his name, Louis, cannot, after all, have come about merely as a matter of coincidence. But the father who called one of his sons Louis called his younger son Ramsis; the latter had tumbled into the world in the wake of the uproar caused by ancient discoveries, events that gave Egyptians living under occupation a new driving force, filling them with pride in their ancient heritage.
Awad does not seem to have been the kind of young man willing to dissolve into the character of the predominant other, for he was always objective in his treatment of British history, and his Egyptian nationalism was almost chauvinist on occasion, be it directed against the British or the Turks or any other race. In his insistence on Egyptian nationalism as the backbone of Egyptian unity he constantly rejected any outside force, Islamic or Arab. His rejection of these two precepts in particular caused him many problems, and lie at the root of the frequently levelled accusations of Christian extremism.
In reality he professed no such extremism, though his writings were often misinterpreted. Yet even his defence of General Yaqoub -- a Copt who joined Bonaparte's army at the end of the 18th century, assuming positions under the French and leaving Egypt along with them -- was undertaken not from a Coptic but from a purely nationalist perspective. The general's position, Awad insisted, was intended as a strategic alliance aimed at helping Egypt liberate itself from Turkish occupation and Mameluke control.
Awad's analysis of such historical episodes extended to the Roman Empire, in which Copts like Aba Nufur struggled to liberate Egypt from Roman occupation. Indeed Awad was instrumental, it can be argued, in directing the attention of younger analysts to Coptic history, a period that extends from the arrival of the Romans to that of the Arabs and one that had been neglected, with the exception of a few manuals and treatises written by Coptic religious scholars. Led by a respected scholar, Raafat Abdel-Hamid (who died only months ago), research of this period has since spread widely, particularly at Alexandria University. (It is worth noting that most of the scholars who have undertaken such research, both within and outside the academic framework, are Muslims.)
Awad, like other well-known writers of his generation -- Naguib Mahfouz, Abdel-Rahman Badawi, Mohamed Mandour and many others -- was a product of the 1919 Revolution. Their ideas revolved around a number of axes -- independence, democracy and the secular orientation embraced by the Revolution. The modernisation of Egypt was endlessly debated and Awad, who was four years old when the Revolution flared up, gleaned the cultural benefits that seeped into the decades preceding the World War II.
True, Awad's great predecessors had paved the way: by the time he came into his own Taha Hussein, Lutfi El-Sayed, Mohamed Hussein Heikal, Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad and El-Hakim had already ploughed the cultural terrain. Awad's generation was, consequently, well-prepared for the notion of modernity, especially those aspects of it relating to independence and enlightenment.
When, following the July Revolution, Al-Gumhuriya newspaper was established in 1953, I was made the managing editor of its literary supplement. I was in my twenties, and Awad, along with Ismail Mazhar and Taha Hussien, were in charge. I knew but little about Mazhar, whose strict scientific approach caused an uproar in Egyptian society in the 1920s and 1930s: he had published Al-Osour, a celebrated monthly magazine in which he discussed current scientific theories, including Darwinism. Whether or not one agreed with him, he was no doubt an astonishing character. As for Awad, I was already familiar with him; in an editorial meeting he had asked me to interview El-Aqqad, a request that surprised me, for El-Aqqad was staunchly right-wing. Why should a left-wing person like Awad, I wondered, request an interview with him? When I brought this up with Awad, his response, which was full of admiration for El-Aqqad, fascinated me, reminding me of a similar conversation I had had with Naguib Mahfouz. My generation had encountered only El-Aqqad's later writings, which obscured his status as one of the few men who had battled for democracy and the constitution to his last breath, a struggle that led him to prison despite his being a member of parliament. It was this short conversation with Awad that spared me from adopting a superficial attitude towards El-Aqqad, whose achievements I was to subsequently discover.
In Al-Gumhuriya Awad wrote articles under the title "Literature for the sake of life," in which he discussed engagement in literature, coming close to social realism in aesthetic and philosophical issues. His articles, too, were an expression of the progressive literary trend, which existed in Egypt alongside others. Awad was forced into a series of battles to defend his viewpoint, eventually being elbowed out of Cairo University in a large-scale purging campaign by the new regime, whose own political orientation was to the right of Awad's.
Awad's generation never doubted that the transformations which had taken place in Renaissance Europe could take place in Egypt, and in the same way, Awad's own passionate nature made him perhaps the greatest proselytizer for such a renaissance; it was this that drove him to deepen his knowledge of ancient Greece and medieval Europe in particular, in order to acquaint himself with the central ideas and actions that contributed to moving Europe from the Dark Ages to the modern era. This impulse gave rise, too, to the many translations undertaken by Awad aimed at acquainting his readers with the essential precepts of Western thought. He hardly approached the Arabs' intellectual heritage at all, perhaps due to his conviction that Taha Hussien, Ahmed Amin, El-Abbadi and Mustafa Abdel-Raziq had paid sufficient attention to it. And he invariably placed the emphasis on the modern era, which extends from the French Campaign until the present time.
It was in this context that he produced the three- volume History of Modern Egyptian Thought. Yet Awad was working to establish an intellectual basis for the Egyptian renaissance, as secular as it is democratic and popular. He did so through reconsidering and revising that history to the letter.
Much in the way as he was dismissed from the university for no clear reason -- he was an individual leftist with no underground affiliations -- he was again arrested, in 1959, following the regime's rift with the Soviet Union. To my knowledge he never wrote about this experience, but he visited me upon his release and, taking off his jacket and shirt, showed me the marks on his back left from being whipped.
Awad's cultural project took its cue from the efforts of his predecessors, from Rifaa El-Tahtawi to Taha Hussien, to modernise the nation. He had discovered, perhaps more clearly than anyone, the importance of moving from theocratic to humanist thinking, which implied a liberation of the mind from preconceptions imposed by men of religion as sacred and admitting of no human debate. Being Christian, perhaps he was unable to extend or deepen his explanation of this crucial point as much as he would have liked -- a leap that subsequently led to huge developments in the methods of scientific research and especially modern theory of knowledge. He was to discover, though, the starkly original genius of Sheikh Mohamed Abduh, who resolved the historical dilemma of reason vs transmission (al-aqal wal-naql) in Islamic thought, making the former paramount in cases in which the (Qur'anic) text was ambiguous or unclear. And it was only natural for Awad not to like Sheikh Gamaleddin El- Afghani, who was more of a politician than a philosopher, and who promoted, before all else, the strengthening of the Islamic tie among the peoples of the world -- an orientation that was too reminiscent of the Ottoman occupation and too specifically based to be to Awad's liking.
Awad did not think to reach an intellectual equation of Islamic heritage and modern thought. Rather, he gave himself over to the notion of Western modernism. Perhaps I was right to think that he did not give Islamic thought its dues, nor did he study it sufficiently. He was in a hurry to effect the split between Egyptian society and its old connections. Many of his generation, like Abdel-Rahman Badawi and Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, managed the aforementioned equation with success, even if they reached no final resolutions.
Unlike his generation of thinkers Awad was subjected to many forms of persecution and attack. He was dismissed from the university, placed in prison, accused of religious extremism. Indeed, there was something of the martyr in his character, and occasionally one suspected that such persecution acted in some way to validate his intellectual and moral positions, a suspicion sections of his autobiography, Awraq Al-Umr (Life's Papers), confirm. Like many such characters it was impossible to dissuade him of his opinions or persuade him of others.
I looked again at some of Awad's writings before undertaking this article, and experienced once again the magic and beauty of his thought, wondering whether and to what extent these passionate and sublime exhortations might have passed us by. How fascinating the environment that produced such an invaluable intellect: the more we look at it, the more astonishing Awad appears before our eyes.
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