Arabic Still Dying After All These Years? A New Lament

Longtime readers may recall that a couple of times a year at least, some Arab intellectual or literary figure laments the death (or moribund status) of Arabic, usually either because young people are speaking colloquial instead of fusha or because they're mixing it with foreign languages. You can find some of these earlier posts here. One of the better responses to this frequent theme was Elias Muhanna's 2010 "The Death of Arabic is Greatly Exaggerated."  He pointed to this quote from the lexicographer Ibn Manzur:

Ibn Manzur was driven by a belief that Arabic’s position as the ultimate language of social prestige, literary eloquence, and religious knowledge was under threat. “In our time, speaking Arabic is regarded as a vice,” he wrote in his preface. “I have composed the present work in an age in which men take pride in [using] a language other than Arabic, and I have built it like Noah built the ark, enduring the sarcasm of his own people.”

"The present work" refers to his massive 20-volume Lisan al-‘Arab, most extensive of the great medieval Arabic dictionaries. Ibn Manzur died in 1312 AD, so Arabic's death throes have been around for a while.

I presume the languages threatening Arabic then were Persian and Turkish.

But fear not! Arabic is still going downhill fast, as Lebanese novelist Iman Humaydan tells Beirut's Daily Star, in "Lost in Translation: Connecting Youths with Arabic":

“The Arabic tongue is deteriorating, not only because of globalization and the mainstream English language, but because the educational system in the Arab World is connecting the language to social values that are no longer convenient for the youth,” said Lebanese novelist and writing instructor Iman Humaydan.

Humaydan has presided over students from at least nine different Arabic countries -- with different cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds -- in an attempt to reintroduce the Arabic language to the classroom.

Many of her students were initially resistant to the Arabic tongue, with students refusing to participate at first because they believed that they were entering an purely English writing program.“What really was a serious issue was to make these students believe that their mother tongue is capable of reflecting their inner selves,” said Humaydan.

The novelist and writer expressed her view that orthodox educational methods have associated the Arabic language with religious values, and other conventional norms derived from old Arabic literature.

According to Humaydan, by eliminating contemporary Arab writers from the school curriculum and simply exposing youths to the same conventional references and teaching methods have, in turn, contributed to the death of the Arabic tongue.

I have no doubt that her comments reflect her own teaching experience, but this chorus has been echoed so many times that it seems repetitive, and many countries have sought to counter the trend. But I suspect the lack of emphasis on contemporary Arabic authors is as much a political as a pedagogical concern. And the colloquial forms are alive and well on social media, but the literary disdain for the spoken lahajat (lahja, ‘ammiyya, darija, etc.)  is also often present in these discussions.

Marcia Lynx Qualey at Arabic Literature (in English) offers some further context at "The Fragility of a Deteriorating Arabic?":

Humaydan, an award-winning novelist whose beautiful novel Other Lives was recently published in translation by Michelle Hartman, recently taught a seminar in Arabic at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program for teens, Between the Lines. . .

The “Between the Lines” workshops, which took place between June 21 and July 5, were for students from across the region. They were divided in to two sessions each day. The morning session was in English, and the afternoon creative-writing seminar was in the student’s “native” language. (Although in the case of Arabic, of course, the seminars likely had a focus on Modern Standard Arabic.)

If you’ll be between the ages of 16 and 19 next summer — or know a talented writer who will be — you can check the Between the Lines website in January 2015 to apply for the next session.

A video from last year’s Between the Lines seminar:

Of course, the video is entirely in English. Still, I think reports of the demise of Arabic are greatly exaggerated. And personally,  I would also re-link to this post at the Arabizi blog which I've cited before: “'We must make space for non-standard Arabic if we really care about FuSHa': Interviews with Spoken Arabic language teachers." 

And to drive the point home, "Arabizi" is a transliteration which, while not invented for it, has spread widely as a means of transliterating for social media in the Roman alphabet.

There's Hope for Arabic Yet

You'll recall that on several occasions here we've linked to aspects of the ongoing debate in the Arabic world over whether the rise of English and other languages and of colloquial speech (and the occasional leader such as King ‘Abdullah II of Jordan or Sa‘d Hariri who stumblewhen speaking the literary language) mean that Arabic is a dying tongue. You can find many of these earlier links by checking out my Arabic language tag.

Anyway, to bring a little sanity to the debate, let me refer you to a column by Elias Muhanna (AKA the Lebanese political blogger Qifa Nabki, but here a columnist writing a lead article in the Review section of The National) arguing that The Death of Arabic is Greatly Exaggerated. (He also links to it at the Qifa Nabki blog, with a post starting out in Arabic noting that it has nothing to do with Lebanese politics, and joking that he got carried away, presumably by his passion for Arabic.)

He does it better than I can, but it doesn't take a lot of reflection to know that much of the "death of Arabic" stuff is nonsense: literacy is more widespread today than in earlier eras; though the Arab world may still produce fewer books than other regions, it produces more than it did a few decades ago, and websites, satellite channels, Facebook postings, Twitter tweets, etc. mean that Arabic has never been written so much as today. Muhanna cleverly quotes Ibn Manzur, author of the massive lexicon Lisan al-‘Arab, (which is the Oxford English Dictionary of Arabic, the gold standard) who in the 1200s was lamenting that Arabic was being eroded away. The central role of the Qur'an has kept Arabic, at least in its literary form, less susceptible to change than most languages, but of course the spoken language has diverged. You can equally find medieval and early modern writers in any language or culture agreeing with the critics of today: the young people are disrespectful; manners are no longer observed; the language is going to hell in a handbasket, etc. etc.

Let me add something to what he has said: it's singularly appropriate that someone who blogs as Qifa Nabki is writing about the Arabic language. Those of you with more than casual Arabic already will recognize that his blog takes its name from the most famous and recognizable poem in the Arabic language, rather as if he'd called it something like Arma virumque cano, or perhaps "Twas brillig and the slithy toves." "Qifa nabki" (let us stop and weep) is the opening of the Mu‘allaqa of Imru'l-Qays, one of the standard seven pre-Islamic odes (qasidas) preserved as the dawn of Arabic poetry, and the most famous of them. The whole poem in the original Arabic is here. A 1917 English translation (not the best but online) is here. You can hear it recited in Arabic here (MP3). I'm just doing my best to promote classical Arabic.

Also, "Let us stop and weep" is a pretty appropriate name for a Lebanon blog.

Anyway, read his piece if you have any interest in or love for the Arabic language. Or want to learn more.

Moncef Marzouki on Arabic; Souag on Marzouki

This blog has frequently had posts on the various debates about the future of the Arabic language; laments over the imminent death of Arabic, debates over the role of classical and colloquial, etc.; my Arabic language tag will provide lots of examples.

Recently, Moncef Marzouki, whose Congress for the Republic (CPR) ran second in the recent Tunisian elections, has unburdened himself of an essay on "What language will the Arabs speak in the next century?" At least, unlike some of these types of essays, this one is actually written in Arabic. He sees the mix of colloquial and French that is common among Tunisian elites as an ill omen, and favors a return to literary Arabic. His is not a new argument, though it is somewhat infused with the enthusiasms of the revolution and the identity of the Francophone elite with the old regime.

Linguistics blogger  Lameen Souag, who also addresses this issue from time to time, analyzes Marzouki's argument and raises some objections. If you don't read Arabic, Souag's piece in English will give you a sampling of the debate.

The reality remains that literary Arabic is, and is likely to remain, the language of a limited elite so long as literacy is not universal; purists and prescriptivists have been lamenting this fact for centuries, with all the effect of King Canute ordering the sea to retreat. (Elias Muhanna once noted that the great Arabic lexicographer Ibn Manzur issued similar warnings in the 1200s, so the death of Arabic has been a lingering one.)

But, as I say, at least Marzouki wrote his piece in Arabic. Often these warnings appear in English or French.

"Death of Arabic" Issue Gets a Lecture at Brown by a Fellow Skeptic

I can't resist plugging this, since the recurring meme "the Death of Arabic" has been a frequent topic on this blog (most recently two weeks ago). Professor Elias Muhanna at Brown University (he of the Qifa Nabki blog) is as skeptical as I am but is actually a specialist in Arabic literature and knows whereof he speaks, and will be giving a lecture at Brown October 8 entitled "The Death of Arabic is Greatly Exaggerated: Notes on the Future of a World Language."

The abstract;

Is Arabic dying? Across the Middle East, calls to forestall the language’s demise have taken the form of public advocacy campaigns, school curriculum reform, and a great deal of hand-wringing over the future of one of the great world languages. But just how dire is the crisis facing Arabic? Is it in danger of becoming merely a language of religious ritual, as some have wondered, or is it, conversely, becoming something it has not been in many centuries: a living language?

Any of you within commuting distance of Providence might want to take note. I don't qualify but I hope they post online video or a podcast or a transcript or something, or Elias does. (I promise to share it.) Here's the announcement:

Arabic Really Must Still Be Dying: Even the New York Times Says So

It's been a while since we've had a "death of Arabic imminent" article, which I always enjoy dissecting; purists have been complaining about the threat to the language since the lexicographer Ibn Manzur back in the 13th century, when Persian was threatening it. These days the culprits are usually English or French, or the spoken dialects. You can find many of my earlier comments on these types of articles (a surprising number of which are published in the Middle East in either English or French, apparently without a sense of irony).

But it must be true. Now even The New York Times says so.

Actually, the key point that is apparent in the article but not in the headline is that this is talking about the Gulf, where English has long been the primary language of higher education, and where Modern Standard Arabic is often neglected after the primary grades. It's not surprising that graduates of some of the (US) universities in Doha have to offer courses to train Qataris and other Arabs to speak media Arabic well enough to appear on Al Jazeera. If (Modern Standard) Arabic really is under threat anywhere in the Arab world, it's the Gulf (and maybe still Algeria, where French still holds elite dominance).  The University of Qatar is switching its language of instruction to Arabic, and the Saudis and others are placing new restrictions on English.

So I won't be as snide about the "death of Arabic" theme as I usually am: in the Gulf, the story is not so exaggerated.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/world/middleeast/11iht-educlede11.html

The Daily Star on Hans Wehr, Followed by Me on Hans Wehr

Beirut's Daily Star recently ran a piece called, "Wehr Next: On the joys of Reading Arabic Dictionaries," which should be appreciated by any English speaker who has studied or is studying Arabic, or who uses it regularly.  Hans Wehr's Arabic-English Dictionary: The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is the vademecum of English speakers working on or in Arabic, as its German original is (I presume) for German speakers.

Daily Star's illustration, not mine

The Daily Star article is pretty good, but with some observations that will seem simplistic for veteran Arabists:

"One paper is called the “idha’a tijariyya.” So I’m trying to translate that and all that comes to mind is that Lebanese radio station jingle – ‘Idha’a al-sharq ... in Beyrouth.’

“Hans Wehr isn’t of much use because, quite honestly, I have no f?ing clue what the jidhr [root] of  “idha’a” is. According to Google Translate, “idha’a tijariyya” means “commercial radio,” which is confusing, as I thought I worked for a social development consulting firm, not a radio station.

“Consulting with a native Arabic-speaker,” Dushku says, “I learned ‘idha’a tijariyya’ is the ‘commercial broadcast announcement’ – as in the announcement of your registration as a commercial company. Who knew?”

Excuse me? "I have no f?ing clue what the jidhr [root] of “idha’a” is." (More properly idha‘a by the way.) Beyond the unusual choice of a "?" to euphemize an expletive, if you have "no f?ing clue" about how to determine an Arabic root, why are you being so "f?ing" pretentious as to use the term "jidhr"?   Dictionaries are organized by roots and you need enough knowledge of grammar to figure out the root, and that's how Arabic dictionaries work. No big deal. And the root is ذ ع ى.

Next complaint:

Heidelberg University Arabist Ines Weinrich says Wehr is the dictionary she uses most often, “although it is not well-equipped for texts from the seventh century.”

If there’s vocabulary in that seventh-century Arabic text of yours that really needs translating, she elaborates, “you may refer to some Latin or French [dictionaries], and, of course, the Arabic-English Lexicon of E.W. Lane.”

Well, duh. What part of "the Modern Written Language" don't you understand? Would you go to Webster for seventh-century Anglo-Saxon? (To be fair, Arabic has changed far less, but even Arabs need commentaries for Qur'anic Arabic. This isn't what Wehr is trying to do. When I work medieval texts, I use Lane, Kazimirski, Dozy, and the Lisan al-‘Arab, though I might check Wehr first, just in case.

Other issues raised are alphabetization versus root-based order, and utility in understanding spoken Arabic, an odd intrusion in discussion of  dictionary of "Modern Written Arabic."There are many colloquial dictionaries, but Wehr isn't one of them.

Hans Wehr (1909-1981) was a German Arabic scholar who created what has become the standard dictionary of Modern Written Arabic into German. In 1961 it was translated into English and edited by J Milton Cowan (no period after the "J": Cowan, whom I met once long ago, really did have just "J" as his first name.) and became the essential Arabic-English dictionary. Some English-speaking students of Arabic before that time had to own the German version as well as a German-English dictionary.

My first Wehr was a hard-cover purchased at ridiculously high cost in Cairo in 1972. The bulk of it survives, though the hard back cover is long gone and so are some pages, perhaps a whole binding signature, of parts of ha plus waw and ya. Once it came out in paperback, I acquired that, and two or three copies of the second and third editions are somewhere in this house, buried under other books. The fourth edition paperback is just to my left as I write, and a hardcover sits on my desk at work. I'm actually surprised that in five years of blogging, I haven't posted specifically on Wehr before this.

The first edition was published in German in 1952, but Wehr noted in early editions that most of the work was set in type during World War II. Wehr's exact relations with the Nazi regime are a bit fuzzy, though he was apparently a party member. I've seen it suggested the work was commissioned in order to facilitate translating Mein Kampf into Arabic, but that makes no sense as it's an Arabic-German dictionary, not the other way around, and besides, Mein Kampf had already appeared in Arabic in 1937. As the Daily Star article notes:

“Yes he was an NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers' Party] member (joined in 1940),” Hanssen notes, “but defenders point to his efforts to save his Jewish dictionary assistant, Hedwig Klein, from the Gestapo, ultimately unsuccessfully. His ‘defenders’ in the Orientalist guild downplay his critique of Zionism and support of Arab nationalism.”

And the dictionary has continued to be updated and revised since Wehr's death. It remains the essential work.

Historical Vignette: The Scholarly Royal: Prince ‘Omar Toussoun

My post last week at this time on Sir K.A.C. Creswell has drawn private comment from some fellow old Cairo hands of that era, who claim my occasional historical and nostalgic vignettes are one of the blog's strengths. Watch out, folks, it only encourages me.

As I noted then, Creswell was a classic amateur, a man who lacked formal academic training but went on to dominate the field. He represented the positive side of a tradition that would one day become a pejorative, the "Orientalist," but which is the underpinning of modern Middle Eastern scholarship. But this week I want to offset any impression readers might have that only Europeans and Americans produced all the serious scholarship of the last century about the Middle East. Though Egyptians will recognize the name I want to talk a bit about a man often forgotten in modern Western scholarship but who contributed to a broad range of scholarship in Egypt, from archaeology to history to geography to agriculture, and even Coptic studies though he was a Muslim. He was not just a dilettante dabbling in these fields either: he produced many works in both Arabic and French, and those I have used — mostly in my case his La géographie de l'Egypte à l'époque arabe — were solid scholarly contributions that are still valuable today. And — improbable though it may seem if your image of the Egyptian Royal Family is King Farouq — he was a Prince of the Muhammad ‘Ali dynasty to boot. This is Prince ‘Omar Toussoun (‘Umar Tusun, but the French spelling is what you'll find in many bibliographies, since he published in French when not publishing in Arabic).

I was astonished to find that he apparently has no English Wikipedia biography, or even (unless my search for various transliterations left something out), in French, the language of much of his oeuvre. Even his Arabic Wikipedia biography is somewhat short, though you'll find longer bios online among followers of the Egyptian royals, such as here, and also here. Those who don't read Arabic will have to settle for what I'm about to write, though the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a biographical monograph out called Omar Toussoun: Prince of Alexandria, though it's outside my price range.

Anyway, Prince ‘Omar Toussoun (1872-1944) was royal on both sides of his ancestry and both a great-grandson and great-great-grandson of Muhammad ‘Ali; his father, Prince Toussoun, was a son of Sa‘id Pasha, Wali of Egypt 1854-1863 and fourth son of Muhammad ‘Ali, while the Prince's mother, Princess Fatima Isma‘il, was the daughter of  the Khedive Isma‘il, whose lavish modernization of Cairo and grand opening of the Suez Canal created the modern city but bankrupted the country. Isma‘il was a grandson of Muhammad ‘Ali and a nephew of Sa‘id Pasha.

His father died when he was a child; his mother, Princess Fatima, seems to have been the inspiration for his scholarly career: she famously agreed to sell her royal jewelry in order to bail out the newly-founded National University (ancestor of the University of Cairo) when it was about to lose its quarters due to lack of funds.

His royal ancestry gave him access to education and wealth, and after studying business and languages in  Switzerland he traveled in Europe before returning to Egypt. In addition to Turkish (still the language of the Egyptian court in his youth) and Arabic, he spoke French and English, and apparently had some knowledge of classical languages as well. In a Royal Family where no King before Farouq spoke Arabic natively, he became an authority on Egyptian history and geography, fields which demanded a facility in classical Arabic.

In 1936

He headed the Royal Agricultural Society; actively engaged in archaeological research and carried out and published digs, including a famous head of Alexander the Great, was a member of the Geographical Society and published the aforementioned La géographie de l'Egypte à l'époque arabe, a multi-volume study on Egyptian geography in the Islamic period, wrote a study on the branches of the Nile in ancient times, was a member of the Arabic Academies of Cairo and Damascus, was a patron, like his mother before him, of the University of Cairo, helped found the Sporting Club of Alexandria, headed the Alexandria Museum, and so on.

Though a Muslim, one of his books was an account of the Coptic monasteries of the Wadi Natrun, and he was a President of the Coptic Archaelogical Society. He joined the Coptic Patriarch in opposing the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

But again, he was not just a Royal dabbler. His scholarly contributions were real. He was also a committed Egyptian nationalist, not always typical of the Royal Family. He supported the Ottomans against the Italians in Libya when Libya invaded, but also backed the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. He was a friend of Sa‘d Zaghloul, and was at least a sympathizer with the Wafd Party.

He was also a philanthropic benefactor of many scholarly and educational societies, and is said to have personally subsidized hundreds of Egyptian villages; he was the only Royal to pay much attention to the fellahin, perhaps a legacy of his interest in agriculture. Although he had a palatial estate in Cairo, he was associated primarily with Alexandria, the city of both his birth and death. On his death in 1944, he was given a lavish funeral widely attended by the Alexandrian people, who considered him their own.

The Muhammad ‘Ali dynasty is remembered for the excesses of King Farouq and the sometime remoteness of the Royal Court, but Prince ‘Omar Toussoun, who was outside the line of succession but a prominent figure nonetheless, was popular with his fellow Alexandrians, among the peasantry, and in the academic community. A figure worth remembering, I think.

Dissident Poet of the Poor Ahmad Fuad Negm, 1929-2013

As Egypt's revolutionary moment increasingly seems a distant memory, its most famous revolutionary poet, Ahmad Fuad Negm, has died at the age of 84. For over three decades his revolutionary lyrics were combined with the musical genius and oud playing of the blind composer Sheikh Imam to provoke a powerful blend of radical, satirical lyrics and powerful music. The partnership endured from their meeting in 1962 until they eventually quarreled prior to Sheikh Imam's death in 1995.

A Younger Negm (l.) and Sheikh Imam

Born in a Delta village and partly raised in an orphanage, Negm lived all his life in the poorer quarters in Cairo, and spent time in prison as a youth. His work was usually banned from state media so he wrote, and he and Sheikh Imam sang, in coffeehouses and before student groups. His poetry celebrated the oppressed workers and fellahin, and satirically skewered he ruling elites. It was a voice of the left; as M. Lynx Qualey notes in her appreciation at Arabic Literature (in Translation):

Promotional material on Alwan for the Arts once stated that, “if the Internationale were to have been written in Arabic, its author would likely have been Ahmed Fouad Negm.”

He died just two weeks before he was to be awarded the Prince Claus Award. Their tribute, now in past tense, reads:

Ahmed Fouad Negm (1929-2013, Kafr Abu Najm) was a master poet, fearless social and political critic, and beloved advocate of the poor and the disenfranchised. Rooted in local working class culture, he had been a perceptive public intellectual and a much-loved balladeer of the people for many decades. Negm was both an icon and a folk hero, renowned in literary circles for the quality, lyricism and beauty of his work, from love songs to radical satires that take the complex, highly nuanced vernacular Arabic to unprecedented poetic levels. He was celebrated on the streets of Cairo and across the Arab world for giving voice to the spirit of the people’s movement for social justice.
       Negm drew creatively on the rich colloquial language, its rhythms and traditions of song, invocation and especially humour, to give vibrant expression to the people’s concerns and aspirations. Since the 1960s, he criticised the succession of authoritarian regimes and elites in Egypt – from British colonial times onwards – exposing their willingness to oppress and impoverish people, their abuse of power, their self-serving deceptions, hypocrisies and corruption. Achieving this through hilarious caricatures, double meanings, reworked slogans, satiric mimicry and devastating irony, Negm uplifted, encouraged and inspired people, keeping hope alive in the face of tyranny.
       Liberal and open-minded, Negm reminded his audiences of Egypt’s heritage of ethnic and religious diversity, its deep pluralist and humanist roots and universal values of mutual co-existence and social solidarity. In the 1970s and 80s, when such public performances were outlawed, Negm's charismatic underground performances with legendary musician Sheik Imam were well attended despite great personal risk. Combining poetry and music in this traditional form, Negm spread his message to the widest possible audience including the illiterate and reached populations across the Middle East through samizdat cassette tapes. And today his stirring message is still highly relevant – many young Egyptians know his poems by heart, chant them on the streets, use them in graffiti and posters, and reinterpret them in new music.
       Ahmed Fouad Negm is honoured for creating true poetry in vernacular Arabic that communicates deeply with people; for his independence, unwavering integrity, courage and rigorous commitment to the struggle for freedom and justice; for speaking truth to power, refusing to be silenced and inspiring more than three generations in the Arab-speaking world; for the aesthetic and political force of his work highlighting the basic need for culture and humour in harsh and difficult circumstances; and for his significant impact on Arabic poetry bringing recognition to the rich literary potential of the colloquial language.

An earlier appreciation by Al Jazeera English here.


Zeinobia offers a tribute and is Storifying the funeral.

Egyptian media in English at Ahram Online, Daily News Egypt, Egypt Independent (Al-Masry al-Youm), and Mada Masr.

Other English appreciations by The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

But eulogies and obituaries are not the way to remember a poet who moved the masses. A poem and an excerpt from  a selection of Negm poems translated (with the original Arabic) by Walaa Quisay at the Revolutionary Arabic Poetry (in Translation) site.

First, "What's Wrong with our President?": 

(What’s wrong with our president?) ماله الريس?

English Translation

I never fret, and will always say
A word, for which, I am responsible
That the president is a compassionate man
Constantly, busy working for his people
Busy, gathering their money
Outside, in Switzerland, saving it for us
In secret bank accounts
Poor guy, looking out for our future
Can’t you see his kindly heart?
In faith and good conscience
He only starves you; so you’d lose the weight
O what a people! In need of a diet
O the ignorance! You talk of “unemployment”
And how condition have become dysfunctional
The man just wants to see you rested
Since when was rest such a burden???
And this talk of the resorts
Why do they call them political prisons??
Why do you have to be so suspicious?
He just wants you to have some fun
With regards to “The Chair[1]”
It is without a doubt
All our fault!!
Couldn’t we buy him a Taflon Chair?
I swear, you mistreated the poor man
He wasted his life away, and for what?
Even your food, he eats it for you!
Devouring all that’s in his way
After all this, what’s wrong with our president?

[Power]

Arabic Original

أنا مابخفش وحفضل أقول
كلمة حق عليها مسؤل
إن الريس راجل طيب
وبشعبه دايماًَ مشغول
مشغول إنه يلم فلوسهم
بره سويسرا يحوشهلنا
وف حسبات سريه يشلها ....نفسه يأمن مستقبلنا
شفتوا إزاي بقه قلبه رحيم
عنده إيمان وضميره سليم
بيجوعكوا لجل تخسوا
آه يا شعب محتاج لرجيم
من جهلكوا بتقولوا بطاله
وإن الأحوال مش شغاله
دا الراجل نفسه يريحكم
هي الراحه تبقي عواله ؟؟
أما حكاية المنتجعات
ليه بتسموها معتقلات ؟؟؟؟
ليه الظن...... وسوء النيه
نفسه يفسحكوا يا بهوات
أما الكرسي واللى تقال
دا كلام مش محتاج لسؤال
الغلطه دي غلطتنا يا عالم
إن مجبناش كرسي تيفال
والله إنتوا ظالمين الراجل
ضيع عمره ومين يستاهل
حتى الأكل بيكله بدالنا
طالع واكل نازل واكل
ماله الريس بعد دا كله ؟؟؟

Excerpt from "We support Your Excellency" (excerpt from a much longer poem, so do follow the link):

(We support your Excellency) نؤيد سيادتك لفترة جديدة 

English Translation

We support your Excellency for another term
In which we will continue the happy march
Maybe we can sell the curb
As there is nothing more one can sell

We support your Excellency to achieve more
Than what has already been accomplished under your reign for sure
We are now at last under the mercy of God
And God alone can have mercy on us

We pledge allegiance to your Excellency and no one else
It’s quite enough for us to swarm in your luxury
The people of Egypt are sound asleep
Which tells the thieves, to steal on

Arabic Original

نؤيد سيادتك لفترة جديدة
نكمل خلالها المسيرة السعيدة
و بالمرة فيها نبيع الحديدة
مفيش حاجة تانية نبيعها خلاص
*****
نؤيد سيادتك لأجل المزيد
من اللي تحقق بفضلك أكيد
بقينا خلاص ع الحميد المجيد
و ربك لوحده ف ايده الخلاص
*****
نبايع سيادته ولا حد غيره
كفايا علينا نبرطع في خيره
و نوم شعب مصر العظيمة و شخيره
يقول للحرامي ما تسرق كمان
*****

He was, of course, a strong supporter of the 2011 Revolution.

How the Copts Will Choose their Next Pope

With the death of Pope Shenouda III this weekend (see my appreciation of Shenouda here), the Coptic Church of Egypt embarks on a process for choosing the next Pope, who will be the 118th successor of Saint Mark the Evangelist. Since Shenouda reigned for 40 years, it has been a long time since the process of succession has been implemented, so even Copts may need to familiarize themselves with the process.

It is a process likely to take several months at least. There are reports suggesting the Church may delay the election until after the election of an Egyptian President, no excessive delay may be required: the President should be chosen by July 1, while in 1971 the interval between the death of Pope Kyrillos VI and the election of Shenouda was eight months. (It can take even longer; in 1956-59 it took more than two years.) The basic rules currently in force were laid down by a Presidential decree of 1957 by Gamal Abdel Nasser, (link is in Arabic), prior to the election of Kyrillos VI.

Acting Pope Bp. Pachomius

The first step in the transition is the election of a locum tenens or Acting Pope who will preside over the Church during the transition. The holder of this post is considered ineligible to be elected Pope since he will have overseen the electoral process, though in the last century there were exceptions to this. The Acting Pope has already been named, Bishop Pachomius (Bakhomious), Metropolitan Archbishop of Buheira.

The Holy Synod — the body of Coptic bishops — is the Church's man ecclessiastical body; the Millet Council (Al-Maglis al-Milli) is the lay body of prominent Copts who have provided a voice for the laity since 1874. These two bodies play a key role in the creation of the electoral council to choose the Pope. Each nominates nine of its members, presided over by the Acting Pope to form a 19-member Council, which receives nominations. These are then voted on by the Holy Synod, the Millet Council, and a third body, created by the 1957 decree, which consists of prominent Copts from each diocese, former Ministers and MPs, and other notables. This body may be the way the state maintains some oversight in the selection process.  At the end of a vetting process, the Electoral Council announces the names of no fewer than five and no more than six or seven candidates. This process can easily occupy three months, so once again little delay is required to postpone the papal election past that of the President.

Under the Presidential decree, the only specified requirements are that the candidates be 40 years old, never married, and have spent at least 15 years as a monk. However, an ancient tradition of the church was to choose the Pope directly from a monastery, not from the bishops (though the bishops themselves are all drawn from the monks, in the Eastern tradition). This was relaxed in the 20th century and several Popes wee elected from the bishops. Shenouda himself was a general bishop (administering a Church-wide department, not an individual diocese). There are some who favor returning to a monks-only rule; others who accept election of a General Bishop but not a Diocesan Bishop, and others who believe precedent allows the election of Diocesan Bishops as well. At least one prominent figure, Bishop Bishoy, is both a General Bishop as Secretary of the Holy Synod and the Diocesan Metropolitan Bishop of Damietta. This eligibility issue is likely to be argued within the Church in the coming weeks and months.

In the Acts of the Apostles, when the eleven remaining Apostles sought to replace Judas Iscariot, they chose a new Apostle by lot. The final decision in the election of a Coptic Pope is still carried out, by ancient tradition, by what is known as the Altar Lot. The Coptic faithful, including their children, gather at the Cathedral of Saint Mark in Abbasiyya. A young boy is randomly chosen from the congregation, blindfolded, and draws a name from a box on the altar. The name drawn becomes the successor of Saint Mark.

Just as Italians love to speculate on the papabile or papal candidates when it is time to elect a Roman Catholic Pope, so Copts speculate about the candidates for their Papacy, and the question of whether Diocesan Bishops are eligible comes into play.  But that will be the subject of a separate post in the coming weeks.

Return of the Death of Arabic Strikes Back Revisited, Part VII: The Next Generation

For those alarmed by the (supposed) rapid* death of Arabic, which I've frequently questioned, some new cause for alarmism: Abu Dhabi is going to require instruction in both English and Arabic, beginning with three and four year-old preschoolers. Now, it's a bilingual curriculum, beginning from the early years and phasing upward, and Abu Dhabi has a huge expatriate population from South Asia whose common lingua franca is English, and its indigenous population hopes for international jobs so this, uh, makes a lot of sense on the surface.

*And as Qifa Nabki noted, it's been rapidly dying since the great lexicographer Ibn Manzur lamented its decline in the 12th century AD.

The UAE is doing a lot to preserve its cultural heritage and traditions, and this does not strike me as a particularly bad idea, but with all the Arabic-is-dying the-sky-is-falling talk lately, this fuels the fire.

Or as Barbie might put it according to one urban legend: "Arabic is hard. Let's go shopping."

Now go back and learn those weak verbs and broken plurals.

What You Liked Best in 2011: Dead Villains, Nude Bloggers, Great Novelists

This is a graph of my Pageviews during 2011 from Google Analytics. It's mostly predictable, chugging along at a few hundred a day, with surges in January and February during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and late in the year due to the renewed violence and elections in Egypt. But what are those two huge spikes that look like the Burj Dubai? (Excuse me: Burj Khalifa?) They were days I passed 1,000 pageviews in a single day. But why those days?

Well, the one in May was the death of Usama bin Ladin, and the one in October was the death of Mu‘ammar Qadhafi. Are my readers just bloodthirsty, or what? I think in the Qadhafi case a few news sites and bigtime blogs linked to me and spurred my traffic. I didn't even write all that much about Bin Ladin, though.

My blog is structured so if you visit regularly you can read the recent posts on the homepage; you don't have to click through to another page by clicking "Read more," as in many blogs. As a result I can only judge the popularity of individual posts by those who clicked on the individual link, either coming to it from a referral, a search engine, or one of my own links later. Curiously, the single most Googled-for post in 2011 was one I posted in 2010 on the 10th anniversary of the USS Cole.

Of course if I just look at the last couple of months of the year, I find that one of the most searched for terms was Aliaa Elmahdy, the "nude blogger." But I'm also gratified to see that my interview with Raymond Stock, Naguib Mahfouz' biographer, on Mahfouz' centennial brought a lot of incoming traffic. (I think I owe Raymond for that as he plugged it at the Arabic Literature (in English) blog and on Facebook, which probably brought over many Arabic lit types who might otherwise not have heard of my blog. Neither was the most searched topic across the year, but they led searches in December, when the Mahfouz interview appeared.

I do wish I could figure out how much overlap there is between those searching for Aliaa ElMahdy and those searching for Naguib Mahfouz. And I guess I should root for more bad guys to bite the dust in 2012, since that really seems to bring you in.

October 10, 732 (Maybe): The Battle of Tours

On this date (or close to it; see below) in AD 732, Charles Martel, Mayor of the Palace in the Merovingian Frankish Kingdom, and Odo, Prince of Aquitaine, won a battle with a Muslim force from Umayyad Spain (al-Andalus) between the towns of Tours and Poitiers in Gaul, after several days of maneuvering. Usually called the Battle of Tours (though sometimes Poitiers), the battle came to be regarded by Europeans as one of the most decisive in history. It has long featured in "Great Battles" type books, from Edward Creasy's 1851 Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World onwards, and a century earlier, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon had penned his memorable vision of a Muslim conquest of Europe:

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

Charles Martel became a hero not just to France but to all of Christian Europe, portrayed as having been the only thing standing between Europe and an Islamic conquest. For nearly 1300 years Tours has been a powerful symbol, and European nativists and Islamophobes have even adopted it as a symbol for their own hostility to Muslim immigrants.

But was Tours really that decisive? Though mentioned by most of the (relatively few) chroniclers of the era, both Christian Franks and Muslims (and one Mozarabic Christian chronicler living in Muslim Spain, author of the so-called Chronicle of 754, formerly attributed to  an apparently nonexistent Isidore of Beja), and by later chroniclers on both sides, the actual descriptions of the battle are fairly sparse. For a battle for which so much importance is claimed, we know little for certain, including the exact date and place, the numbers involved or the long-term intentions of the Muslim operation (raid?)(invasion?)(attempted conquest?).

The Date:
I am posting this on October 10 because this is the traditional date found in standard modern  European accounts; the contemporary and other early sources generally only specify that it occurred in October of 732. Two rather later Latin chronicles say It took place on a Saturday. On the other hand, the Arab chronicler Ibn ‘Idhari in his Bayan al-Mughrib fi Akhbar Muluk al-Andalus wa'l Magrhib dates the battle to Ramadan AH114. If we accept these two statements, which are not contemporary to the battle, it cannot have been on October 10, since October 10 was a Friday in 732 (a leap year in the Julian calendar), and it coincided (give or take a day or two for differences in sighting the moon in differing countries) with 26 Sha‘ban, AH 114. So not only was October 10 not a Saturday but it also was not in Ramadan. If we insist on meeting both conditions, the only date in October 732 that was both a Saturday and in Ramadan would be October 25, which was a Saturday and the first of Ramadan AH114. On the other hand the monkish annals mentioning Saturday date from the century after the battle and Ibn ‘Idhari from about 1312,  so assuming both are accurate is a leap of faith, but is still the best guess.

Where was the Battle? And Why was it Fought?
We can be a bit more confident here. The commander of the raid, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, had been named the governor of al-Andalus by the Caliph Hisham two years before. The Berber governor of Catalonia (today Catalunya) allied with Odo (or Eudo) of Aquitaine to rebel against ‘Abd al-Rahman. After putting down the rebellion, ‘Abd al-Rahman crossed the Pyrenees, where Muslim rule in Narbonne and Septimania had been established since 719-720. The earlier invasion of Gaul had been stopped at Toulouse and remained limited to the area around Narbonne. This time, determined to punish Odo, ‘Abd al-Rahman raided farther north, taking and sacking Bordeaux and defeating Odo on the Garonne. Odo fled and sought help from Charles Martel, though they were old enemies.

The Muslim Army, probably mostly cavalry and of both Arab and Berber ethnicity, continued northward in the direction of Tours; the Christian chroniclers generally agree that the immediate goal was to take and sack the Shrine of Saint Martin at Tours. Martel reportedly took indirect routes to intercept ‘Abd al-Rahman.

They met somewhere between Tours and Poitiers, but then as now the two towns are about 100 kilometers apart. The battle almost certainly took place along the old Roman road between the two; the traditional Arabic name for the battle, balat al-shuhada'  (road or literally "pavement" of the martyrs) implies a paved road.  The exact location is uncertain, though the village of Moussais-la-Bataille claims the honor; it is a strategic position where the road crosses the Clain and Vienne Rivers near their juncture, though there are arguments against it (would Martel have fought with his back to a river with a single bridge for retreat?). You can find a rather detailed argument about the site here; another detailed account here; and you can reflect on what meticulously detailed maps people have drawn of a battle whose location is uncertain and so are the strengths of the Armies. Which brings us to:.

Numbers:.
The Christian sources agree that the Franks were badly outnumbered by the Muslims, and the victory was a miracle that saved Christianity. The Muslim sources agree that they were vastly outnumbered by the Franks, and the results were inevitable. Numbers range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands (the enemy always being bigger) and are totally unreliable. Casualties were high, and ‘Abd al-Rahman himself was among the dead.

What Was ‘Abd al-Rahman's Goal?
There is no real reason to doubt the assumption that ‘Abd al-Rahman.'s immediate goal was Tours and the rich pilgrim's shrine at Tours. Martel's victory certainly saved Tours. But did it also, as the conventional European narrative had it, save Paris, save France (which didn't exist yet), save Europe, and save Christianity? Was Charles Martel, the "hammer," all that stood between ‘Abd al-Rahman. and Gibbon's vision that:

the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

Leaving aside the fact that the interpretation of the Qur'an is taught at Oxford and has been for at least the last couple of centuries, was the Battle of Tours all that prevented a Muslim conquest of all of Europe?

There is plenty of reason to question that. Most of the Arabic accounts spend less time on the battle itself but on the death of ‘Abd al-Rahman, who after all was governor of al-Andalus.The Arab historians clearly saw this as a raid on enemy territory (several note that ‘Abd al-Rahman died as a ghazi, the term used for the border raiders along the Byzantine frontier). In fact most of the Arab historians seem to portray this as a ghazwa or border raid, for plunder and retaliation against Odo of Aquitaine, remembered mainly for the "martyrdom" of ‘Abd al-Rahman and the other casualties; hence, balat al-shuhada'.

There is an old saying, "Amateurs talk about strategy; professionals talk about logistics." Tours is a very long way from the center of the Umayyad Caliphate, in Damascus. The width of Africa, the Strait of Gibraltar, all of Iberia, and the Pyrenees lay between. And distant Gaul was hardly the main priority of the Caliphs. In 717-718 the Second Arab Expedition against Constantinople had been beaten back; taking Constantinople was a far higher priority for the Caliphs.

Tours in the Arab chroniclers is a sidelight of the history of al-Andalus, mainly remembered for the death of ‘Abd al-Rahman. By contrast Martel's victory, and the much later victories at Vienna in 1529 and 1683, became enormous symbols of the defense of Europe.

And it probably didn't look much like this French Romantic painting from the Palace of Versailles, either (and no, I don't know what the partially unclad woman is doing right in the middle of the two armies, unless she represents France being rescued by Martel from a fate worse than death — a sort of proto-Marianne — nor do I know why the cross looks Celtic):

Charles de Steuben, La Battaille de Poitiers

For Naguib Mahfouz' 100th, An Interview With His Biographer

The great Egyptian (and world-class) novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was born a century ago this weekend. Mahfouz remains the towering figure of Egyptian and Arabic literature, still the only Arab winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1988). I thought it would be valuable to talk with someone who knew him well in his later years, Raymond Stock, who as well as being one of Mahfouz' most prolific translators, also is writing his biography. And a note: though the official celebrations will be on Sunday December 11, Dr. Stock notes that Mahfouz was actually born on the 10th:

FYI, his birthday has traditionally been observed on Dec. 11 — the day it was registered in 1911 — but he was actually born on Dec. 10, at 2:00 am, according to his birth record at Dar al-Mahfouzat.  This was fifteen years to the hour after Alfred Nobel's fatal stroke in San Remo in 1896.  Though I informed Naguib of this finding, he preferred to stick with Dec. 11: he was always a creature of very fixed habits.

I  thought by posting this on Friday it would adequately cover either date.

The interview is unusually long for this blog, but Mahfouz is an unusually outsized subject.

MCD:  Can you give us some brief account of your own experiences with Mahfouz during his lifetime, as one of his translators, and his biographer?

RS: I first met Naguib Mahfouz on March 4, 1990, on my first full day as Acquisitions Editor for the American University in Cairo Press, Mahfouz's primary English language publishers and literary agents.  He came into our offices, then in the basement of the former AUC Main Library on the corner of Yusuf al-Gindi and Mohammed Mahmoud Streets, at quarter of nine in the morning.  In those days he would walk each morning from his home in Agouza to the Ali Baba Cafe on Tahrir Square, drink his coffee and read the newspapers.  Each Sunday, he would then make his way to the AUCP nearby to pick up his mail, always arriving at the same time.  This particular Sunday, I was seated at my desk, which faced that of the then director, the late Arnold C. Tovell.  He was then in what I consider to be the most beautiful phase of his appearance: simply dressed, with a lean natural elegance, his trademark dark glasses (which he wore due to a sensitivity to light) giving him a wise and mysterious look.  We said hello; he shook my hand warmly, and went on his way inside. After a quarter hour or so he came out again: someone, I think, snapped a photograph of us together with my camera (not with me now, unfortunately), and he was gone. 

The next week we spoke for a minute or two, each week a bit more, and on the third Sunday I gave him some of my poetry (which was in English).  The next week he told me that he had read and liked it, and from his comments it was clear he had understood it very well. (For some years afterward, he would introduce me as "my friend Raymond Stock, the American poet.")  Soon we were on very warm terms, and I had some opportunities to work with him, sometimes going to see him at his office at al-Ahram on Thursdays, and to his Friday nadwa (literary salon) at Kasino Kasr el-Nil.  By the time I left the AUC Press at the end of June 1991 — laid off because of the loss of trade in the wake of the Gulf Crisis after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait (my letter of termination began, "Saddam Hussein has left me no choice"), we truly were friends.

A few months before I left the AUC Press, I met Sasson Somekh — the great Israeli scholar of Arabic literature, who was the author of the first book in English on Mahfouz, and whom Mahfouz considered to be his most perceptive critic — as he came out of a meeting with Mahfouz at his office in al-Ahram.  (With him, I believe, was Sami Mikhail: like Sasson, an Iraqi-born Jew who emigrated to Israel in the early 1950s: Sami, one of Israel's most famous novelists, was also the translator of Mahfouz's Trilogy into Hebrew, the first language into which all three of its volumes were translated.)  After getting to know Sasson, he suggested that we collaborate on a biography of Mahfouz, a tremendous honor, given his stature.  This was the first time the idea that I work on such a project had been suggested to me: I had fantasized about the idea, to be sure, though I thought it more realistic to perhaps become one of his translators one day.

In the "It's a bizarrely small world" department, it recently emerged that Steve Jobs had a Sunni Syrian father, I had no idea that this same father also sired the writer, Mona Simpson. One day back in the early 1990s, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo hired me to serve as a guide to a visiting American novelist, who had a Syrian father and American mother, named Mona Simpson.  She was a delightful person and we had a great time on the day we spent together at the Giza pyramids and other sites in Umm al-Dunya. Later that year, when I left the AUC Press and Cairo in search of new employment in the US, she recommended me to a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG) book publishers in New York, named John Glusman. John did not have any jobs available, but — as he had been to Egypt and loved the works of Naguib Mahfouz — he wondered if I would be willing to write his biography, instead?   As it turned out, it did not appear practical to try to collaborate on such a complex project with another writer, so I undertook the assignment on my own.  Ironically, John then did not want the work to be academic: at that point, I struck him as having the right background but with the approach of a professional writer and editor.  Sasson, however, generously continued as one of my most important mentors, and has been a great source of knowledge, counsel and encouragement throughout.

(Yet I soon found that only academe allowed me both the continuous funding and the vital library access that I would need for the project.  As a result, at the invitation of Roger Allen, an outstanding specialist on Arabic literature generally and on Mahfouz particularly, whom I met in 1988 in Baghdad, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program under his supervision at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1992, and took my Ph.D. in the summer of 2008.  My dissertation, A Mummy Awakens: The Pharaonic Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz, focused on his works set in ancient Egypt, with a very biographical, "New Historicist" approach — much of this will also fit in one way or another into the biography itself.)

While I had been negotiating with FSG for the biography contract, I contacted Mahfouz through the AUC Press, to see if he would cooperate in the work.  At that time he declined, saying that he had already told his life story to Raja‘  al-Naqqash, the literary critic, who had conducted a very extensive series of interviews with him in 1990-91 for a verbal self-portrait of the author.  (This book was not actually published until 1998, and is a remarkably useful document, though no such work can hope to cover everything.)  Nonetheless, FSG still decided to proceed despite this setback. The contract was signed in January 1992: in February I went to London, where he had gone for a month in September 1991 to have surgery on an abdominal aneurism, then headed for Cairo to continue my field research there.  Soon after arriving I saw Mahfouz at al-Ahram: to my great relief and surprise, he readily agreed to cooperate in my book, sending a letter to John Glusman through the AUC Press to confirm it.  (Incidentally, some years ago, John left FSG to work at Harmony Books, a division of Random House: my current editor at FSG is Paul Elie.)

For the next fourteen and a half years — until his death at age 94 on August 30, 2006 — I continued seeing Mahfouz in every possible place and way that I could. This included frequent one-on-one interviews in his office at al-Ahram, and faithful attendance of his Friday nadwas at Casino Qasr al-Nil near the Opera.  One day in that first summer (1992), knowing that he went every other week to Alexandria in that season by the Superjet bus, I bought a ticket and discovered after paying for it that we shared the left front seat, behind the driver, which turned out to be his usual spot.  When I tried to exchange it, I was told it was the last seat available.  Though we were indeed friends, Mahfouz treasured his privacy and was not used to company on these trips.  The next morning at departure, after a warm greeting in which he clearly seemed surprised, we barely spoke to each other most of the way.  I was afraid that I'd blundered, and so kept quiet, though all was fine by the time we arrived in Ramle Station.  In fact, Alexandria gave me an opportunity to see him for many more hours per week than was possible in Cairo, in his nightly gatherings in the Hotel San Stefano (mentioned in another context in a piece I published on September 25 about the downward trajectory of the Egyptian revolution).  And here is another piece, published today, which gives a broader idea of my views of the current situation in Egypt, though without reference to Mahfouz — who I suspect largely would agree with my analysis. 

One of my greatest breakthroughs in my first six months on the project was to gain the cooperation of his two daughters (and only children), Hoda and Faten (formally named Umm al-Kulthoum and Fatima respectively). In my case, for the first time, they agreed to cooperate with someone writing about their father, eventually allowing me to copy and/or photograph his private albums, passport, old IDs, an extract of his birth record (in which I first learned that he was born on December 10, not December 11, later confirmed by examining his original birth record at the aptly-named Dar al-Mahfouzat), complete manuscripts (with corrections and signs of printer's ink on them) of two of his novels (Miramar and al-Shahhadh, or The Beggar), and letters to him from his editor at Doubleday, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.  This was the beginning of many other important documentary finds that I have been fortunate enough to make during my research.

Stock Visiting Mahfouz after the Stabbing

The great turning point, of course, was his stabbing by an Islamist militant on October 14, 1994 as he sat in a car in front of his home in Agouza bound for his Friday nadwa, an event that left him unable to write more than his name for the next four and a half years, and which totally and permanently altered his daily routine as well.  On the day of the assault, I was in New York, and heard the news on the radio as I visited the headquarters of the American Research Center in Egypt, which had offered me a research grant for the biography that year (replacing a Fulbright I had the year before).  Normally I would have been waiting at his front door with him for Dr. Fathi Hashem to pick us up in his red Fiat, but I had delayed my expected return from the States by a week, and so missed the fateful day.  Given the seriousness of the damage (he had stabbed twice in the neck by a young man who approached him like an admirer, with a switchblade, severing a small blood vessel, barely missing his jugular and damaging the base of the nerve that controlled his right arm and hand), I expected him to be taken to London for treatment, and so went to there and waited for a week for him to arrive.  When this did not happen, I continued on to Cairo, and saw him in hospital, as shown in the picture above.

He did not emerge from the Police Authority Hospital next door to his home until his birthday in December.  In the meantime, Dr. Yahya al-Rakhawi, a psychiatrist who also wrote on literature, befriended him and proposed a routine that would last until his final hospitalization in July 2006.  Concerned that Mahfouz would fall into depression with his new-found infirmity and sense of vulnerability (before his stabbing, he had rejected personal guards despite death threats by Islamist militants against him), he proposed that six nights of the week, Mahfouz should join his friends in a rotating series of venues, that ultimately worked out as follows: Sunday at Shepheard's, Monday at the Novotel in Heliopolis, Tuesday on the Farah Boat in Giza, Wednesday at the Sofitel in Maadi, Thursday with his traditional gathering of intimates, called the Harafish (a group of artists and writers that first met on houseboats in the early 1940s), and Fridays at the home of Dr. al-Rakhawi in Muqattam.  On Saturday evening he would receive visitors at home. 

And so I saw him not only during many of the nightly gatherings (usually between one and three times week), but also occasionally in his home.  The most difficult time was during the military trial at Haikstep of 16 defendants rounded up after his attempted assassination, which I covered for The Financial Times.  On several occasions I  came to brief him on the day's proceedings, and to get his reaction.  This was very hard on both of us, actually, though much more so on him.  We reached a breaking point temporarily when it became clear there was doubt that the principal defendant, Mohammed Nagi, a 23-year old electronic appliance repairman, who had confessed on television to actually stabbing him, was guilty.  (He swore to me that he had confessed under torture, and that he was actually innocent.)  This deeply upset Mahfouz, who one day threw me out angrily when he saw the implications of my findings.  He had also been hearing a great deal of noise from some of his more anti-Western friends that I was a spy — why else would I be investigating his stabbing?  Though he didn't truly believe it, I wound up writing him a letter reiterating that my sole interest was in his biography, and he soon welcomed me back.  There was never another moment of tension between us.  But my own, private duress really began when the final judgments were handed down at Haikstep, including twelve prison sentences (ranging from 1 to 25 years), two acquittals, and two executions — one of those being Mohamed Nagi, whom I had gotten to know rather well.   On that day, the families and defense lawyers were not allowed to attend, to avoid their making a scene at the close.  But because at one point State Security had removed me from the trial when all the prisoners, who I later learned had thought I was really a human rights investigator from the UN come to document their torture and abuse, had shouted out, "Raymond, we love you!" the families turned to me after the session to learn the verdicts on their loved ones.  They kept coming up to me, asking me over and over again if what I had just told them was true.  This included the families of both Mohammed al-Mahallawi, a 21-year old convicted of casing Mahfouz's home before the attack, and Nagi, both of whom were condemned to death.  As the court was closing on that final day, the other defendants, including al-Mahallawi, shouted out their loyalty to the terrorist organization, al-Gama‘a al-Islamiya, and called for the death of Naguib Mahfouz, contradicting everything they had told me when I spoke to them in their cages during the trial.  Nagi too was calling out, but I could not hear what he was saying.  When he saw me approaching him, he turned to speak to me, but at that moment two men grabbed me and pulled me out of the building — I never saw him again.  I kept trying to arrange a visit to him on Death Row, and even extracted a promise from State Security that I could see him before his hanging, scheduled for the next Saturday — but he was actually executed that Tuesday.  When I went to see his family in Ain Shams three days after his death, they received me very warmly, spoke respectfully of Mahfouz, and told me that their son — who had been convicted mainly based on very weak eyewitness testimony and his own confession under probable duress — had been with them at the time of the stabbing.  I still don't know what to believe.

These were the most dramatic, and traumatic, moments of my long sojourn with Mahfouz.  Yet most of the time there was just his enormously quick wit, his unfailing hospitality to the hundreds of guests that I brought to see him over the years, and the incredible richness of our conversations with his friends (and, sometimes, family).  Though sadly we never could return to our former interviews alone at al-Ahram — to which he stopped going after the assault — he remained ever tolerant and patient with my endless questions, even if he did logically wonder where it was all leading after so much time.  But given that such projects normally take up to twenty-five years — a time-frame inconceivable in a culture where biography (as opposed to autobiography) has a much more limited tradition — his bemusement was certainly understandable.  Finally, we had a standing joke: would he finish his book on me before I finished my book on him?   Perhaps some day we'll find the manuscript to his, and know that he won.

MCD: How did Mahfouz feel about the various English translations of his work? Did he feel some were superior to others? I believe he worked with all his translators during his lifetime.

RS: If memory serves, Marcia Lynx Qualey, who has a very impressive daily blog on Arabic literature in English, has counted fifteen translators of Mahfouz, including myself.  Though Mahfouz actively collaborated with Phillip Stewart in his translation of Awlad Haratina (Children of Gebelawi) in the 1960s (not published until 1981), and with Denys Johnson Davies, Roger Allen and perhaps a few others, he did not work with most of his translators directly.  In fact, many of his books were commissioned for translation only after his death, when the AUC Press decided to complete the translation of them all by his centenary.  In my case (I have translated seven of his books and placed a great many of his stories in magazines), I did not consult him on language questions but constantly did so on the people and locations found in his stories — elements that helped in his biography.  I cannot recall Mahfouz ever complaining about any particular translations of his works, though he was aware that some of them were controversial. Once I arranged for Denys to see him at Shepheard's, and it was clear in their conversation that Mahfouz really respected him as a translator.  Though he was unable to read most, if any, of my translations due to the loss of most of his eyesight in later years, he told me that his friends had reassured him that I should translate his Dreams series (of which I had already done the first volume after proposing it to the AUCP) because of my particular style.  That was one of the high points of my time with him. 

MCD: You've been asked this more than once, but for the English-language reader new to Mahfouz (and perhaps daunted by the size of the Trilogy, what would be some good works to start with?

RS: First one should ask, do you like short reads or long?  For long reads, one should begin with (if not the Trilogy) Miramar, Midaq Alley (now out in a new translation by Humphrey Davies), or Khan al-Khalili.  For shorter ones, Adrift on the Nile or The Thief and the Dogs are excellent, as are Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth, Cairo Modern, Thebes at War, and The Coffeehouse (his last novel, which gives a brilliant, brief historical overview of Egyptian politics and society of the twentieth century, and is a moving story with some very poetic passages to boot).  Also the short stories in The Time and the Place.  These are all among his best works — very accessible and also entertaining.  But everyone would have their own list.  Incidentally, the last time I was asked this question, it was to choose his most representative works.  The titles I've recommended here are those I think would be most appealing.

MCD: I presume you have personal favorites among his works. What might they be? 

RS: My list is quirky and not all critics would agree.  In my view, his most inventive, innovative work was his last — The Dreams (published in two volumes as The Dreams and Dreams of Departure — a combined, updated edition was published in paperback by Anchor Books/Random House in 2009).  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, as I chose them as the subject of my doctoral dissertation (because I considered them both neglected and underrated), I am very fond of his pharaonic works — all of them, in fact, including Voices of the Other World: Ancient Egyptian Tales, Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth, and Before the Throne: Dialogues with Egypt's Great from Menes to Anwar al-Sadat (the latter actually covering five thousand years of history, from the First Dynasty to the 1980s).  And I'm intrigued by the stories that I assembled for the collection entitled, The Seventh Heaven: Supernatural Stories — as Mahfouz himself was fascinated by the occult, the uncanny, and the other-worldly.  And I especially love The Coffeehouse (as should be clear from my comment in the previous question — here is a wonderful review of it by Andre Naffis-Sahely, which connects it to theArab Spring,   and here is a piece of my own which shows how Before the Throne in a sense presaged the uprising in Egypt. )  One reviewer actually accused me of choosing the books I have translated (which were Voices from the Other World, Khufu's Wisdom, The Seventh Heaven, The Dreams, Dreams of Departure, Before the Throne, and The Coffeehouse), based on their utility to the biography, rather than literary merit.  But in fact I chose them for both reasons, and wound up loving them all as significant works of art that also revealed a great deal about the ingenious mind that created them.  (I should further mention one of the short stories I have translated that has not yet appeared in a book in English: "Assassin," published in 1962 in the collection, Dunya Allah, which appeared in Harper's Magazine in January 2005.)  And beyond these, of course, I'm very fond of all the works I cited in the previous question about recommendations for new Mahfouz readers, to which I would add The Beginning and the End.  Incidentally, Mahfouz used to say that he regarded all of his books as his children and so hated to play favorites, but in fact he was most proud of The Harafish and Arabian Nights and Days, as well as the Trilogy.  From our discussions, I also sensed he was particularly attached to Miramar and Midaq Alley, but that is not all, of course.

MCD:  How about the cinematic versions of his works? Do you know if Mahfouz had favorites there? Do you?

RS: Mahfouz's immense cinematic contributions fall into two categories: his literary works adapted for the screen, and his own original scenarios and other material written specifically for cinema — which he (incorrectly, I believe) did not view as genuine creative works. He personally never adapted any of his published works for cinema — which he saw as an entirely different medium, with very different needs and demands.  For this reason he largely refrained from judging them — also because he himself worked in cinema, both as chief censor for film and entertainment in the late 1950s, and as a bureaucrat in charge of the state's cinema production (and support for private films) in the 1960s: he did not want to offend anyone in that community.  On the other hand, he was very, very warm in his praise for at least three directors with which he worked in the 1940s and '50s, and for whom he wrote scenarios and other material: Salah Abu Seif, who brought him into the business and taught him how to write for cinema; Tawfik Saleh, whom he got to know when Tawfik came to him with an idea for a film that became known as Darb al-Mahabil (Dunces' Lane), soon becoming his closest friend until his death, and Youssef Chahine.  Though this list is not exhaustive, Mahfouz seemed very pleased with Rayya wa-Sakina (Rayya and Sakina), al-Wahsh (The Beast), and Bayna al-sama' wa-al-ard (Between Heaven and Earth), all three directed by Salah Abu Seif, and, I believe, Jamila, directed by Youssef Chahine.  Interestingly, one of his best known film credits — as the scenarist for Chahine's classic historical film, al-Nasir Salah al-Din (The Conqueror Saladin) — was misplaced, both he and Chahine told me, because Chahine had largely discarded the original screenplay that Mahfouz had worked on in favor of another, but still kept his name in the final product. As for my own favorites, in the adaptations of his fiction, they would be Palace Walk, Miramar, Bidaya wa-nihaya (The Beginning and the End), The Thief and the Dogs, Tharthara fawqa al-Nil (Adrift on the Nile), and Qalb al-Layl (The Heart of the Night).  Among those for which he wrote the scenario, etc., they would be, Darb al-Mahabil, Rayya wa-Sakina, Bayna al-Sama' wa-al-ard, and al-Wahsh.

MCD:  Does Mahfouz have any heirs? I know some have compared Aswany's Yacoubian Building to some of his work. Any comments?

RS: The late John Updike published a wonderful poem on mortality, "Perfection Wasted," which basically reminds us that each of us is unique and can never be repeated: "imitators and descendants aren't the same." Though uniqueness cannot be further quantified or qualified, there simply could not be another Naguib Mahfouz, either as a persona or a literary figure.  He was not so much the product of his time — there was no one like him when he grew up (or now) — as the maker of it, for it was he who created the modern prose style in Arabic fiction and brought the Arabic novel to maturity.  Though his reputation is that of an Egyptian Dickens or Balzac, he was also a Proust, a Galsworthy, a Joyce, a Kafka, a Faulkner, and a Zola, as well as a Muwaylihi, a Manfaluti, and an al-Hakim, among others, and yet none of the above as well, for he combined them all, adding his own personal elements to the mix.  No other writer in Arabic (and perhaps in any language) has matched his enormous — and enormously varied — output, that he owed not only to fertile mind but also his enormous, iron-bound discipline.  Nor has anyone in that language (or again, perhaps in any other) ever written in so many different styles and genres. As a person, he was both domestic and foreign in style: I've always said that he treated people like an Egyptian and time like a German. 

But if you mean, who might be the next great writer in Arabic, that is a different question.  I doubt it will be Alaa al-Aswany, whose Yacoubian Building is a ripping read that broke many taboos, that came almost literally straight out of his own life.  One minor example is the fake article that a tailor — a profile of himself — kept in his own shop window downtown to promote his business: I actually published such an article in Egypt Today magazine in 1997, that was kept in the tailor Samir al-Saqqa's shop window on Abdel-Khaliq Tharwat Street downtown, not far from the actual Yacoubian Building — but this is only one of many such details, apparently.  Nonetheless, Al-Aswany certainly made his characters live, and his story really move.  His second novel, Chicago, was much less successful.  But the third time could be the charm, while he has been more effective, in my view, as a political commentator and critic, especially since the fall of Mubarak, though I don't always agree with his views.  Two other writers I have in mind instead are both people I have been fortunate enough to translate.  One, Najem Wali, an Iraqi writer living in Berlin, has written a handful of brilliant, very intricate, vivid and powerful novels set in his native country, along with a number of short stories, one of which, "Wars in Distant Lands," I have published in Harper's (in February 2008).  I have also translated just under a quarter of his novel, The Journey to Tell al-Lahm (Tall al-lahm), which is now seeking a new publisher after its original home tragically went bankrupt.  The other writer, Sherif Meleka, is an Egyptian Copt who has just published his fourth novel (that ends with the start of the January 25th Revolution), in addition to two story collections and three books of poetry (some in colloquial).  I have translated two of his stories, and a portion of his novel, Suleiman's Ring (Khatim Sulayman) — the latter about a Jewish father and son in Alexandria, who possess a magical talisman that, when lent to the young Gamal Abdel-Nasser, enables him to launch the Free Officer's coup. [Update by MCD: for more on Meleka, see Raymond's comments in the first comment below.] So far these translations are unpublished, but we hope to change that soon.  Incidentally, one thing that both Wali and Meleka have in common (quite coincidentally to my own involvement), is that they both have that rarest of things in Arabic literature — positive Jewish characters —in their fiction.  But that is certainly not all that commends them.

Returning to the heart of your question, I also comment on the succession issue in this video obituary of Mahfouz broadcast by the BBC on the day of his death.  Though there are a few minor errors in the narrative, I find it very moving.

In any case, thank you very much, Michael, for asking me these questions at this fateful time in the history not of only of Arabic literature, but of Mahfouz's homeland as well.  Let me close by saying that thanks to my opposition to what I consider to have been the anti-Semitic and anti-peace cultural policies of the Mubarak regime (though at least he did keep the peace itself), one year ago today (December 9, 2010), I was detained overnight and deported back to the US, the following morning (December 10 — which would have been Mahfouz's actual 99th birthday, as noted above).  (Here is the link to an article about this travesty)  Hence I am unable to attend Sunday's Naguib Mahfouz Medal ceremony, in which they will celebrate his centenary, at the AUC on Sunday.  But I will be there in spirit — for after first visiting Egypt thirty-four years ago this month, and living there for two decades, Egypt is more than my second home — I am spiritually Egyptian, and always will be.  Egypt is the place where I met most of the loves of my life, and where a number of them, including dear Naguib Bey, have died.  Though I hope to go back to her one day, Egypt will always live within me.