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2 - Muhammad Mustafa Badawi in Conversation
- from Part I - Alexandria to Oxford
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- By Abdul-Nabi Isstaif, University of Damascus
- Edited by Robin Ostle, Roger Allen
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- Book:
- Studying Modern Arabic Literature
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 April 2015, pp 18-32
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Summary
(In 1997, Abdul-Nabi Isstaif conducted an extensive interview with Mustafa Badawi which has not previously been published. We reproduce here the sections relating to Mustafa's early life and education until 1947 when he was sent to England to pursue further studies in English. Professor Isstaif, who has translated the text from the Arabic, hopes to publish the interview in full in 2015.)
ANS: May we begin with the years of your early formation in the family, the neighbourhood and your various schools in Alexandria?
MMB: I was born in the city of Alexandria in Egypt in the year 1925 in a popular quarter. We were a middle-class family, for my mother used to own a flat in the quarter with my grandmother. I grew up in that flat as the only male child among seven children: four elder sisters and two younger than me. My father had a modest education, for he was a craftsman working as a contractor (muqawil), and he did not have a great interest in the education of his children. However, my mother, though she herself had also had a modest education, was the opposite of my father, owing to the fact that she was descended from a family in which most men were religious scholars. So, she took care of my education and that of my sisters, enduring great financial difficulties in the process since education was not free at the time. In fact she insisted that the girls complete their studies in the School for Women Teachers in the al-Wardian quarter: this required a special uniform including a hat which led the children of the quarter to tease them about their outfits when they came back from the school. The school authorities would not allow the girls to leave on their own at the end of the school week. Hence my grandmother had to go to the school to accompany them at mid-day on Thursday of every week. She used to take me as a child to school, and among the most beautiful memories of my childhood is of that trip on the tram with my grandmother wearing the most beautiful clothes, a trip to which I used to look forward every week.
11 - Towards a Comparative Approach to Arabic Literature
- from Part II - The Academic Legacy
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- By Abdul-Nabi Isstaif, University of Damascus
- Edited by Robin Ostle, Roger Allen
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- Book:
- Studying Modern Arabic Literature
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 April 2015, pp 178-193
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Summary
Introducing his contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature, entitled ‘Comparison, World Literature, and the Common Denominator’, Professor Haun Saussey, the former President of the American Comparative Literature Association (2009–11), and the author of the Association's Report on the State of the Discipline, 2004, which appeared later in book form, edited and introduced by him under the title: Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006), writes:
I think the job of the comparatist is to invent new relations among literary works (and relations with things that have not been previously classed among literary works).
Bearing in mind this suggestion from a distinguished authority on comparative literature, students of Arabic literature, if they ever thought of studying this literature comparatively, might wonder if they need to look for relations between Arabic literature and other world literatures, and whether, if they do not find them, they need to invent such relations. Fortunately, the student of Arabic literature has no need to look too hard for such links, let alone to invent them, for they are as old as Arabic literature itself.
In the first place, Arabic literature's relations with other literatures of the world go back to pre-Islamic times, if not earlier, when the Arabs of the Peninsula were in close contact with the various surrounding nations and empires. Their relationships with their neighbours were not only commercial but also political, military, social and cultural. One aspect of the outcome of these ties is reflected in the many foreign words which permeated the Arabic language from Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Persian, Amharic, Ethiopic and other languages of the Ancient Near East. It is enough to refer in this context to the foreign vocabularies in the Qur͗an, the claimed linguistic miracle of the Prophet Muhammad which the eloquent Arabs were challenged and failed to imitate. ‘Language’, as Rene Wellek rightly states, ‘is the material of literature as stone or bronze is of sculpture, paint of pictures, or sounds of music. But one should realize that language is no mere inert matter like stone but is itself a creation of man and is thus charged with the cultural heritage of a linguistic group.’