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Modern Egyptian renaissance man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Robin Ostle
Robin Ostle
Affiliation:
The Oriental Institute, Oxford
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Extract

The rise of political consciousness in the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century has long been referred to as an era of rebirth or resurrection (nahḍa), and from its earliest stages this period saw a dual process of aspirations to political emancipation and creative waves of cultural regeneration. Thus George Antonius was moved to attribute the beginnings of the Arab national movement to the foundation of a modest literary society in Beirut in 1847; the two figures who dominated the intellectual life of Syria in the mid nineteenth century—Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī and Buṭrus al-Bustānī—were ded icated to the resurrection of the lost world of classical Arabic literature, to the virtual re-creation of Arabic as one of the languages of the modern world, and to preaching the virtues of education based on inter-confessional tolerance and patriotic ideals. The most distinguished area of the early history of modern Arabic literature is neo-classical poetry, whose revival of the achievements of the golden age of the ‘Abbāsids provided the foundation on which the first tentative steps towards the renewal of the great tradition were to be based. Indeed the technical excellence of the neo-classical mode was such that it dominated poetry in Egypt at least until the late 1920s, and for even longer in Iraq and the rest of the Levant.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , February 1994 , pp. 184 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1994

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References

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3 See the modern volume of The Cambridge history of Arabic literature for the most complete and up to date version of this history.

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6 Quoted in Silvia Naef: ‘A la recherche d'une modernité arabe: I'évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Iraq.’ Doctoral thesis, University of Geneva, 1993.

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20 This is the reason suggested by Hourani for the publication of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's book in 1938. There is no reason why it should not also apply to Muḥammad Nāgī's ‘School of Alexandria’.

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22 ibid.

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