The Books: “Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey” (Fouad Ajami)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is a fabulous and heartbreaking book called Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey by Fouad Ajami.

I’ll post what’s on the back of the book to give you an idea of the topic. One of the things I loved about the book was how it introduced me to an entire world of Arabic poetry and literature.

Here’s the blurb on the back of the book:

… a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut’s once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.

Ajami was raised in Beirut. It was damn hard to find an excerpt – but I’ll post a bit of his writings on Egypt. The picture of the young “Gulfie” desperate to find a certain book while he is in Cairo – because he knows that when he goes back to his home country – there will be NO chance he coul find the book anywhere – is heartwrenching, and – one of those small human moments that is, at its heart, an indictment of the way things are.

From Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey by Fouad Ajami.

A small political-literary storm that broke out in early 1993 and a Syrian-born poet’s “open letter” to the Egyptian General Assocation of the Book come close to capturing that unique Egyptian role in Arab cultural life. At the center of this controversy was the celebrated poet Nizar Qabbani. A furor broke out over a poem he had written, “When Will They Declare the Death of the Arabs?” and a campaign was launched to rescind an invitation that the General Association of the Book had issued him to visit Cairo. The literary and political elite stood their ground: The great poet was free to write what he wished, and Egypt’s doors would always be open to him. As it turned out, Qabanni had not been able to come. He sent instead an “open letter” from his new home in London, an unabashed letter of gratitude and devotion to the country. It was published in a new, vibrant magazine, al-Qahira, sponsored by the assocation:

My dear friends in the land of Egypt:

I can’t write of Egypt with neutrality or love her with neutrality. Egypt is my mother: from her I was fed, I drank from her wellsprings, from her I learned how to walk, how to utter my first words. When I arrived in Cairo in the mid-1940s I was but a boy looking for a mother, for a cultural womb. I want to acknowledge that Egypt nursed me, sang over my bed, until I learned how to compose my verse, until I was able in 1948 to publish my first daring poetic collection … I want to say that Egypt never made a distinction between me and its native sons. Often she took my side and the side of my poems paying no heed to my Damascan ancestry and my Syrian dialect. Egypt had embraced my ancestor, my grandfather, Abu Khalil Qabbani, welcomed him as a pioneer in theatre in the final years of the nineteenth century. And here it is embracing my poetry in the final years of this century. This is but a confirmation of its heritage as a defender of freedom, creativeity, and the creative spirit.

The invitation I received from the General Egyptian Assocation of the Book is not just an ordinary invitation. It is an invitation that carries the scent of Egypt, and the tenderness of Egypt and her eternal devotion to her progteny: I am one of Egypt’s children who was not abandoned in the midst of a storm, left to face wind, rain, and the cold of exile. In the midst of the flood stirred up by my recent poem Egypt extended her hand to me from under the water … Such is the destiny of Egypt since it has been Egypt. It has not been Egypt’s way, at any time in its history, to be with the killer against his victim, with the oppressor against the oppressed, with the jailer against the prisoner, with the illiterate against the letters of the alphabet. My dear friends this annual celebration of the book held in Cairo is a victory for those who read over those who kill, for those who know over those who don’t, for those who compose beautiful poems over those who make coffins.

The genius of Egypt lies in her artistic and cultural sensibility: the skill of its men and women of letters with narrative, a way with cultural creation in film, soap operas, theatre, political and philosophical argument, and the song. On a recent visit there, in the famed Cairo bookshop Madbuli, where a publishing firm displays and sells its recent titles, in Talaat Harb Square, I saw that indispensable Egyptian role in Arab and Muslim life. A young man from the Gulf was pleading for a book he wanted that was temporarily (so the publisher said) out of stock. It was the young man’s last day in Cairo; he was desperate for the book; he had been told that new copies would be available on that day, but the books had not arrived. He offered endless deals for Madbuli’s manager. He would pay to have it delivered to his hotel, he would pay in advance, and he would throw in a generous tip, if one of the boys at Madbuli would meet him at the airport with the book. The young Gulfie was from a place of wealth, but he was leaving a city where the gift of the writing and the culture of books had not yet died. (On that very day, there had been a run on every title that the embattled academic and philosopher Nasr Abu Zeid had written.)

There was a cultural seige (of sorts) in Egypt, but the life of letters has deep roots here. It was in Cairo, in the mid-1870s, that two brothers, Salim and Bishara Taqla, Christian emigres from Lebanon, established the daily paper al-Ahram. And it was Egypt that gave two great figures of Arab modernity, Faris Nimr and Yaqub Sarruf, a second chance in the 1880s, after the American missionaries at the Syrian Protestant College (the AUB) dismissed them for their enthusiasm for Darwin and the theory of evolution. The first of these two men rose to become one of the great, wealthy personages of Egypt, the powerful editor of a paper of his own. Faris Nimr lived a long, full, and productive life; he worked at the intersection of politics and journalism until his death in 1951, on the eve of the Free Officers revolt, at the age of ninety-five. He never bothered to hide his devotion to the ways of the West, and the virtues and disclipine of Anglo-Saxon culture, which he wanted to graft onto ‘the east’. It was the Egyptian theatre, and the social rhythm that sustained the theatre, that gave the Syrian, Ahmad Abu Khalil Qabbani, the chance to pursue his craft and art in the latter years of the nineteenth century. When a remarkable pair, Farid al-Atrash and his sister Amal, children of the ruling princely family in Jabal Druze in Syria, yearned for a world beyond their confining ancestral land and for careers in music, film, and song, they left their home for Cairo in the 1930s. Farid al-Atrash became one of the most successful crooners and film stars. His sister Amal, using the single stage name of Asmahan and whose career was cut short by a premature death, was one of the great beauties of the age. Her talent with the song fused Arabic and European asthetics, and her films were huge hits. The public could never get enough of her or of the gossip about the men in her life, who included the head of the king’s administrative council, a noted film director, and the ex-husband of her closest friend.

The (Western) novel came to Egypt in 1911; the first Egyptian film was made in 1926, and it was made by a woman filmmaker and actress, Aziza al-Amir, who had been raised fatherless and poor. Women’s magazines made their appearance in the 1900s. By 1914, there were more than twenty women’s periodicals. To come to a possession of a cultural sensibility in the Arab world was to assimilate the artifacts and products of Egyptian creativity. Arabs have not always known what to make of Egypt. The very same men and women from other Arab lands who have been known to be crushed and surprised by Egypt’s poverty and squalor on their first encounter with a land that had come to them in film and fiction touched by glamour and magic have been known to recover their poise as they went out againt o savor the graces of that surprising place.