By Rania Khallaf It is a quarter of a century since the death of Taha Hussein, writer, translator, educationalist, university teacher and administrator and, between 1950-52, minister of education in the last Wafdist government. Yet his legacy continues to excite heated debate. The subject of "Taha Hussein and Arab Culture," a four day seminar organised by the Supreme Council for Culture (SCC), continues to cast a long shadow. The man who famously remarked that education should be as free as air and water is, variously, held up as an exemplar of enlightened humanism and identified as the culprit behind the deterioration in the education system and mass graduate unemployment. The man who wrote, in "The Future of Egyptian Culture," that "we must follow in the path of the Europeans so as to be their equals and partners" has been alternately charged with undermining Egypt's links with Arab and African cultures and hailed for his attempts to drag the Arab world into the 20th century. He is at once saint and pariah, a nationalist who appeared to kowtow to European values, an elitist who craved democracy. Nor was he a stranger to controversy during his lifetime. In 1926 his book on pre-Islamic poetry was withdrawn after he brooked the suggestion that it might not, perhaps, be pre-Islamic at all, a critical approach that proved anathema to the religious establishment. And in 1932 he was dismissed as dean of the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, only to be reinstated, four years later, after a change in government. Gaber Asfour, chairman of the SCC, noted at the opening ceremony that "by commemorating the anniversary of Taha Hussein's death, we are paying tribute to the values of freedom and tolerance embodied in Taha Hussein's books, many of which are engraved in the collective memory of the Egyptians." Now, more than ever, he continued, we are in dire need of Taha Hussein, and in need of his cultural agenda which never doubted supremacy of the intellect. Others, though, begged to differ. Ahmed Abu Zeid, a well-known anthropologist, pointedly criticised Hussein's underestimation of Egypt's organic relation with Arab culture and his insistence that Egypt should follow steps taken by the West in the field of education and other walks of life. "Hussein, while formulating his cultural agenda, refused to consider the fact that Arab and African cultures have closer affinities to Egypt than the West." Gamal El-Tellawy, professor of English literature, insisted that Hussein's linking of Egypt to other Mediterranean countries was "dangerous, since it paved the way, and still does, for a mid-eastern vision... a political call to redraw the regional map placing Israel at its centre... [It is] an idea that will demolish our Arab and Islamic cultural identity." The bulldozer that El-Tellawy believes was intent on smashing this identity was born in a small town in Upper Egypt in 1889, to a poor though far from destitute family. He lost his sight at an early age, a handicap that did not prevent him from travelling to France in 1915 where, for four years, he read extensively, attended Durkheim's classes, and completed a thesis on Ibn Khaldoun. "I believe," argued Nasser Al-Assad, a former Jordanian minister of higher education attending the symposium, "that Hussein's thought has not yet been thoroughly studied... Taha Hussein did not attack Arab culture, neither did he seek to trivialise the legacy of Arabic literature. On the contrary, Hussein wanted to insert Egypt and the Arab countries in the modern age." He called for a reassessment of "The Future of Egyptian Culture", a call echoed by critic and professor of Arabic literature Abdel-Moneim Tellima, who pointed out that one of the main aims of Hussein's book was to sketch the components of Arab cultural identity. Between Hussein's followers and detractors are those who believe that, first and foremost, Hussein was a great creative writer, and a child of his times, times which inevitably conditioned opinions that need not automatically be turned into policy directives today. Yet the criticisms came thick and fast. According to Salem Hemesh, a Moroccan professor of philosophy, Hussein's disregard of the rise of Fascism as he extolled a European model was at best naive, at worst, a result of his relation to the Wafd, while Zeinab El-Khudairy, a professor of Arabic literature, believed that his ideas should not be accorded canonical status. The principle of free access to education, she argued, tempted thousands of peasants from their lands in search of a mirage -- a job in the government bureaucracy. It was an argument echoed by novelist Baha'a Taher, who questioned the validity of Hussein's educational vision given the increase in population and the subsequent deterioration of the educational infrastructure. And so the arguments continued, the legacy of a life lived to the full. "Boredom," wrote André Gide, "is nothing but abated fervour." And one thing is for sure, Hussein -- who incidentally translated Gide's Thésée and Oedipe into Arabic -- preferred the fervent to the bored.
