An Exchange betweenTaha Husayn and Mahmud al-Mas’adi in 1957 (1/3)
In a series of three blogs, I present the first translation into English of an exchange between the Egyptian “Dean of Arabic literature”, Taha Husayn, and the Tunisian iconic writer Mahmud al-Mas’adi, which dates to 1957. The first instalment is a review al-Mas’adi’s play al-Sudd (The Dam) published in the newspaper al-Jumhuriyya on February 27, 1957. Part 2 consists of al-Mas’adi’s response to the review while part 3 is response by Taha Husayn. The exchange has historical and literary value, which should be of interest to scholars, writes and students. (All rights of the translation reserved to Mohamed-Salah Omri, 2024, first translated in 1993).
"Al-Sudd: a Symbolic Dramatic Story by the Tunisian Writer Professor Mahmud al-Mas’adi"
Today I would like to take the readers of this column away from Egypt and its writers and men of literature to another Arab country about whose literary life we know barely anything of significance, because political circumstances have long prevented organized communication with it. This country is Tunisia. The French occupation had descended on this hospitable Arab country and aimed at severing its ties with its Eastern Arab sister nations, and had succeeded a great deal in its wish. This made books by Tunisians rarely reach us directly and made our books and literary works reach Tunisia only smuggled through France itself. Occasionally, a Tunisian might have come to Egypt bringing some works and returning to his country with Egyptian writings. Despite all of this, the Egyptian Ministry of Education had tried at times to establish a link between Eastern literature and the Arab literature in Tunisia. It published a valuable small book about contemporary Tunisian literature written by the honorable Professor Hasan Husni ‘Abd al-Wahhab, member of the Arabic Language Academy in Egypt, and distributed it among secondary school students more than twenty years ago. This effort was then interrupted and never renewed. Some Tunisian contemporary poetry reached Egypt and was received with not only satisfaction but acclaim. But the matter stopped or almost stopped at this stage. Now that the despised French occupation is over, or almost over, the relationship between us and our Tunisian brothers has been renewed again in a certain orderly manner that we hope to see continuing and increasing.
A Story
The work I would like to talk about today is a wonderful but extremely strange dramatic story [qissa tamthiliyya] which its author, Professor Mahmud al-Mas’adi, wrote to be read rather than to be performed, and to be read with a great deal of thinking and the need for re-reading and reiteration. Suffice it to say that I read it twice and then needed to look at it again before dictating this article. It is closer to serious difficult literature than to anything else. The writer put in it all of his heart and mind, his artistic skill and excellent command of the Arabic language with a fresh magic style and carefully chosen idiom.
He intended it to provoke philosophical thinking not entertainment, easy distraction or simple excitement; rather he sought an in-depth inquiry into life and a penetration into what lies beyond it. You could say that it is a philosophical story as deep and as precise as philosophy can be. And you could say, as well, that it is a poetic story as skilled and as admirable as poetry can be. This is not unusual since poetry and philosophy often meet. Learned people are aware that Plato's works were not devoted to either philosophy or poetry alone. They find in them the thinking and investigation applied by reason and the alertness and sublimity [tasami] pertinent to imagination. These works thus rise by this to a height rarely achieved by a poet's poetry or a philosopher's philosophy.
The reader of this story needs to take notice of two elements he has to summon in order to understand the story and delve deep into its secrets. One of these is the fact that the writer is a Tunisian who lived in a country which foreign occupation oppressed and whose people it deprived of freedom, so that they were barrred from productive action. Occupation availed itself of all the riches, and left Tunisians with no more than the bare necessities of life. It also deprived them of fruitful intellectual activity. If it were not for an genuine [asil] strength that guarded them against resignation and obedience, they would have given in to both. With time and reoccurring hardship, occupation had imposed on people a feeling of something that may not be despair itself, but i was not very far from despair.
The second element is that this Tunisian writer had cultivated an exemplary knowledge of Arabic literature and then completed his education in France where he mastered his knowledge of French literature and where he came under the influence of the famous philosophical writer, Albert Camus. Albert Camus grew up in North Africa, in Algeria, but like most Algerian youth, French dominated his language and he became an excellent French writer. He has a well-known philosophical doctrine based on Existentialism and founded on the idea that it is absurd to try understanding human life since it has no recognizable goal to be reached or a rationale [hikma] to be discovered. Life is totally absurd, and man should limit his search to his own self. He should not seek the wisdom of his existence or what is beyond his life since he will gain nothing. Camus compares man's life, and indeed existence as a whole, to the ancient Greek myth that tells of a Greek hero who was condemned after death to spend eternity pushing a stone from the abyss to the top of a mountain. He would push it before him until he reached the summit but he would barely reach the summit when the rock would fall again. So he was forced to keep repeating the same task until the end of eternity, if eternity can be said to have an end. The sentence pronounced against him has no sense or wisdom. For his eternity is absurd and his effort is absurd; in fact, existence as a whole resembles this absurdity imposed on the ancient Greek hero.
Our writer was influenced by this French author, by Arabic literature, by Tunisia, and by the life he had lead before independence. His story turned out to be a magnificent image of all these types of influences. The writer is desperate, or like a desperate person, pushed by hope, imagination, and his human nature to build, create and invent. He, therefore, expends effort, bears hardship, and endures all types of pain until he becomes convinced that he had successfully reached his goal. Yet, everything he had built and invented, and all the results of his building and invention vanished, as if they had never existed, as if he had never invested an effort, endured hardship, overcome difficulties, or subdued hurdles. To be more precise, he imagines man to be thus in all he aspires to and plans, in all he builds and invents. Man, despite all this, is proud by nature. Neither his lost effort and his irredeemable struggle, nor the difficulties that yield to him and the hurdles he brings under his power only to see them rebel and regain their initial state as if he did not conquer them in the long years of suffering due to work and pain, onoe of it would weaken his determination or cause despair to take hold of his heart and mind.
Hope and imagination
Hope and imagination have taken hold of his full attention. They push him to work hard in vain, to endure pain and suffering without reward. They deceive him constantly. They lead him to believe that even if he fails today, he will prevail the following day and that it does not matter whether he fails again and again since success is his destiny. It does not matter if success is destined to him or denied. He is propelled to hope and work, and nothing will make him stray from both, except death. Death can prevent one generation from hope but the following generation does not learn from the one that preceded it. Instead it follows on the footsteps of its predecessors hoping, working, striving for what there is no hope for or no path to. This is like what Abu Tammam has accurately described in the following famous couplet:
Riders shining like spear-tips stopped for a rest, in a similar place while night's darkness descended
For the sake of a matter which they must begin even if its conclusion they could not finish.
It can only be symbolic
It is very clear that our writer's story can only be symbolic since he himself did not fail after hard work and did not wonder about the successes or failures destined him. It is most likely that he now believes in hard work and hope, forging his path toward the successful implementation of secondary education in Tunisia. He, however, informs us that he had written this story during a time of solitude and seclusion, and then put it to the test after living and working with people. It did not seem alien to him and he did not deny it [lam tunkirhu wa lam yunkirha]. We thank God that the story did not seem alien to him and that he did not deny it, since this allowed him to publish it and made it possible for us to enjoy reading it.
Since the writer chose symbolic expression as his method and since he did not wish to write pure philosophy but wanted to produce a literary philosophy or philosophical literature, it seemed natural that poetic style should be his means to portray his idea, using symbol and allusion. In this he has succeeded to a degree unmatched by any other Arab symbolist writer I know. Our symbolist Arab writers from the variety of Arab countries have not succeeded in submitting the Arabic language to their art in order to achieve mastery and creativity. They are still at the stage of trial and experimentation.
His language has yielded to him
As for our writer, his language has yielded to him and responded to his will without resistance or stubbornness. In fact, I fear that it may have yielded to him more than appropriate. It lured him and tempted him to be hard on it and to exhaust it (aghrathu bi'an yashuqqa ‘alayha min 'mriha ‘usran). The author begins by constructing a pure poetic environment. No sooner do you approach it than you find yourself in a strange imaginary world whose likes are unfamiliar in Arabic literature, except in few instances when philosophers symbolize some of the wisdom they want to portray. They would then conceive of a single individual who finds himself in a desert island and sets out to discover knowledge and wisdom on his own, as did Ibn Sina in the East and Ibn Tufayl in the West. Or when they symbolized the relationships of familiarity and subservience or disobedience and rebellion that exist between humans and animals, as did the Ikhwan al-Safa' in one of their epistles.
But our writer is, nevertheless, endowed with fertile imagination, keen intellect, and rich language. He breathes life, reason and logic in the mountain, in its rocks and in its wild and domestic animals, and he spreads it in the atmosphere through voices that from time to time address man, animals, and mountains with what the writer wants them to say. The characters of the story are most unusual (‘ajab min al-’ajab). There is Ghaylan, a man possessed by hope, love of work, rejection of despair, and rebellion against life's reality. Then there is Maymuna, who strongly believes in what is handed down in life and wants to be satisfied with it, rejecting hope and imagination completely. She tries to convince her husband not to respond to (hope and imagination) and to discourage him from pursuing their aims. Then there is her intelligent talking mule -- if mules can be endowed with speech and intelligence. There are the rocks that are brought to life for a while during the day or the night or between day and night in order to talk, pray to and invoke Sahabba’, the Goddess invented by our writer, I believe, to stand for the land that cherishes aridity, drought, and bareness.
Our friend Ghaylan wants this land to drink water, to be irrigated and to open up with its riches in order to change the life of those who live on it and to take them from want to abundance and, from poverty to wealth. But the Goddess is stubborn, rejectful and proud. She neither hears nor responds. Instead, she persecutes those who attempt to force her against her will. She cannot be seen but she talks to the people, things, and animals, and things in her different voices, simultaneously, tempting them to obey the Goddess and to pray to her. She condemns man's vanity that tempts him to imagine in himself the power to disobey the Goddess and to force her to submit to him against her will, to accept the reform and construction he wants to achieve.
Ghaylan has discovered an abundant spring, and he wanted to build a dam in order to prevent water from dispersing and in order to cultivate the land and fill it with wealth and bounty. Maymuna discourages him from the project in an attempt to prevent him from implementing it. But he does not pay attention or listen to her and turns his attention instead to a strange, gentle, most beautiful and most attractive person. She is Mayara, the symbol for the imagination that tempts one to go forward and to shun despair. Ghaylan succeeds in building the dam and is content with it and admires it, but it is barely completed when the workers rebel against him, destroy what they have built, and attempt to kill Ghaylan himself. He is, however, saved by the Goddess Sahabba'. One would think that Ghaylan would regain his senses and refrain from attempting the impossible. But he neither refrains nor repents. Instead, aided by his tireless imagination, he resumes work as if he was not met with failure. When the dam is almost finished for the second time, Sahabba' rises in wrath and destroys the structure beyond repair. It is the rebellion of Nature: winds blow, thunder roars, lightening strikes, rain pours, the mountain shakes and then erupts in a raging fire. Ghaylan and his beloved shadow, Mayara, do not give in but the storm snatches them away to nowhere. Maymouna, now alone, descends to the valley. But, what valley? She imagines it close but it moves farther away from her whenever she thinks it almost within reach.
I do not know if I understood the story or not. I do know, however, that this brief summary is close if not accurate. It should not be surprising that I doubt my full understanding of the story after reading it twice or three times. This is the nature of symbols, which, like poetry, are killed by hasty and easy understanding. Symbolic literature is enlivened by this fertile obscurity that compels you to read it again and again, gaining from each reading something you did not benefit from in the first reading. I wished the author's language were a little easier than it is. He has sculptured it from rock as if he had extracted it from the mountain where the story takes place, thus adding difficult expression to difficult meaning and style.
Poetry
The story, as I said, is all poetry; but it is a poetry that is measured only occasionally. This measure does not rely on any of the traditional poetry known to the ancients and the moderns, but invented by the author in order to express himself. It is closer to the French Free Verse than to anything else. The story is introduced by two honorable Tunisian professors, Mahjub Ibn Milad, Professor of Philosophy, and Shadli Qilibi, Professor of Language and Literature. They both understood the story and commented on it. I join them in admiring the story and in congratulating and praising its writer, although I am not completely sure I understood the book with ease as they did.
Taha Husayn