Being Arab by Samir Kassir

Author:Samir Kassir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

V

THE ARAB MALAISE IS NOT

THE RESULT OF MODERNITY BUT

OF MODERNITY’S COLLAPSE

IF THE NAHDA had been an isolated historical phenomenon, without sequel, one might be justified in denying it any exemplary value. But it was nothing of the sort. As a historical moment and expression of nationalism, the nahda was undoubtedly over by the end of the First World War, but it lived on as an attitude and an outlook on the world. Despite the radical political breakdown of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Western – French and British – domination in the Levant (with its apotheosis in Arab Africa), there was no noticeable discontinuity between the culture of the nahda and that of the ‘short twentieth century’. If there was a radical change, then it came in the last two decades of that century.

Arab modernity, in other words, was not confined to a few decades of the nineteenth century. This is true as much for the history of ideas and cultural creation as it is for social history.

If literature is anything to go by, continuity was such that public opinion readily confuses Arab cultural figures of the first half of the twentieth century with the pioneers of the nahda. The literary effervescence between the wars picked up the spirit of renaissance; the 1920s in fact are often depicted as the tajdid, the renewal. A publishing boom as sustained as that of the height of the nahda revealed prose writers and, for the first time, poets engaged in passionate exploration of new forms that both enriched and remodelled Arabic, and kept it in tune with the universal. The great writers of the time were citizens of the world: the Egyptians Taha Hussein, a French-educated confirmed secularist; Tawfiq al-Hakim, inseparable from his beret, his badge of modernity; Ahmed Shawqi, ‘prince of poets’ and poet of princes, the bard who sang of Rome, Ancient Greece, Arab Andalusia and Egypt and Syria’s struggle for independence; the Lebanese Amin Rihani, international globe-trotter, with one foot in America and the other in his village, and open agnostic, which did not stop Abdel Aziz, the future king and founder of devout Saudi Arabia, making him a trusted friend.21

Rihani’s travel writing reflected the new spirit. Arab novels and short stories moved away from historical fiction to realism and novels of manners, a shift in which the new journalism played a part. But poetry was undoubtedly the most vivid expression of renewal: whereas before a Parnassian, or even downright pompous, classicism dominated, now a Baudelairean school, occasionally with overtones of Apollinaire, began to emerge.

Amid this intellectual excitement, nationalist aspirations seem initially to have been relegated to the background, although they were apparent in certain works – notably Ahmad Shawqi’s poetry – and in the vogue for trips to Andalusia. But Arab nationalism was not long in making a comeback. It may have been anti-European from now on, due to the frustrations surrounding the settling of the Eastern Question, but it was no less a product, in its content and all its variants, of the history of European thought.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.