My first encounter with Taha Hussein, the prominent Egyptian thinker (1889-1973) happened when I was about 7 or 8 years old watching a famous (inside the Arab World) Egyptian TV series based on his autobiography "Al-Ayyam (The Days)". The series was touching or at least that is how I perceived it then (which is the most important to me anyways:-). It tells the story of a kid who lived in a poor village in Upper Egypt, became blind when he was 9 because of the amazing "medical" treatment he received due to a pain in his eyes, and memorized the Quran in the Quranic school (Kuttab). The story goes on to show how the poor blind kid who had every reason to become as everyone else: a blind farmer or at most a blind "fiqi" (teacher in a Quranic school) went on to join Al-Azhar (the major Islamic higher education institution), heavily criticized the 1000-year-old Islamic institution, entered the newly established Egyptian University, and ended up in an educational mission in France to obtain his PhD from the Sorbonne! He later became one of the most renowned "liberal" thinkers in the Egyptian intellectual life that started to thrive at that time early in the 20th century.
Taha Hussein, in my view, revolutionized the Egyptian intellectual life. The writers at that time were basically imitating the methodologies of the traditional Arab/Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages. They simply accepted their thoughts and methods of thinking as given... as absolute truth. They did nothing to innovate or to question the validity of the ideas we accept as "true". Hussein significantly modified this stagnant environment, employed the tools of scientific thinking, and opened the debate in many "taboos". One of the major battles that Taha Hussein fought was the one on the pre-Islamic poetry, a poetry that was long viewed as an integral part of the Arab civilization (and pride?), and that was taught at Al-Azhar for centuries. Hussein used the tools of the Cartesian skepticism, and employed evidence from the new (at that time) excavations made in the Arab peninsula by the European Orientalists to show that the major bulk of this pre-Islamic poetical tradition cannot be true and should be refuted on scientific grounds. According to Hussein, this large body of pre-Islamic poems was simply a forgery made up by the later post-Islamic poets perhaps in order to establish deep historical roots of Arab civilization. As an example on the evidence he employed to support this view, he brought up some of the newly discovered scripts from pre-Islamic Yemen which showed a Semitic language that is definitely NOT Arabic. Knowing that this was indeed the language used in Yemen at the time of the renowned (perhaps legendary?) pre-Islamic Arab poet (Imru' Al-Qays), whose poetry is written in the "usual" Classical Arabic language, he concluded by saying that what we have in our hands now as Al-Qays' poetry must have been a forgery, since Al-Qays definitely spoke a Semitic language different from Arabic!
The battle ended up in a trial! Hussein was accused of heresy!
Hussein is just wonderful. He provokes your mind to think, to explore, to be able to make scientific judgements. These are capacities that are simply lacking in our modern Egyptian society.
I like :)
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