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Shumayyil is significant to this study because he introduced or promoted three major ideas in the intellectual arena during the Nahda: science (Darwinism), socialism, and secularism. He is of major influence on a generation of writers who saw science and socialism as two ways to reform the Orient. This reform will later culminate, in 1952, in the largest reform project in the modern history with the Nasserite revolution that used these two ideas as its motto to create a “new” Egypt. This, however, does not mean that Nasser was directly influenced by Shumayyil, but rather that the latter introduced these ideas that will drive the revolution 70 years later. Socialism was a major phase in the development of political, intellectual, and cultural awareness of the people in the Middle East in general and in Egypt and Syria in particular; it not only formed an central theme in secular nationalism, but it was also an impact on religious nationalism, which, in the 1950s, began to Islamize the concept through the writings of Qutb, Umarah, and others, creating a discourse of Islamic socialism. Any study of the history of socialism in the Arab world would not be complete without referring to Shumayyil as one of the first thinkers to introduce the concept that will later be popularized by writers such as Farah Antun and Salama Musa.
The controversy around Shumayyil began after he published his translation of Ludwig Büchner’s (1824-1899) book Sechs Vorlesungen Über Die Darwinsche Theorie (Six Lectures on the Darwinian Theory) under the title Nathariyat al-Nushu’ wa al-Irtiqa’ (Evolution Theory). Although Shumayyil was not the first writer who discussed Darwin’s theory, his book was the first scientific study of the evolution theory to be published in Arabic in a book form, rather than sporadic articles in some Syrian magazines.
Shumayyil is one of the important writers of the Nahda because he envisioned a whole project for modernizing the East. This study essentially discusses Arab projects of modernity that are influenced by the Other/Europe, especially the orientalist discourse. In this case, Shumayyil, out of his perception of the Middle East as being stagnant, proposes a cultural/educational reform project that aims at modernizing the Orient and transforming it from a dormant, immature, and undeveloped setting into a scientific, modern society that possesses the tools of self-development and maintenance.
The second idea that was promoted by Shumayyil is socialism. Shumayyil was not the first to introduce the term into Arabic but he was the first who presented it within the discourse of modernity to the intellectuals and readers of the Cairene magazines of the 1880s-1910s (Hourani 252). Socialism, according to Shumayyil, is not a political, sociological, or philosophical concept, but a definitive result of the movement of society, the consciousness of the individual in his society, and the awareness of the worker of his value (Mabahith 183). When one reader suggested founding a socialist party to Shumayyil, he published a humorous article in al-Muqtataf in 1908 announcing the regulations of this party; the humor of the article springs from the extremist positions of Shumayyil’s own ideas. He suggests that all the “unscientific” books be collected, along with their readers, and be shipped to the North Pole; that law schools be demolished, their books, along with political economy books, burned; that the university programs be stopped to prevent any further damage; that Mixed Courts, if not all courts, be demolished and replaced with others based on equality between the worker and the owner; that monopolist companies be outlawed; that political newspapers be obliterated; that a school of natural sciences be established where nothing else is taught; that resources of the country be distributed fairly among the people; that new newspapers be established, teaching people purity of body and mind (Mabahith 187-89). The article’s mixture of reality and humor provides a simple illustration of Shumayyil’s political and socialist ideas, situating them within his reformist program in general. Allowing the reader to confuse humor with reality, Shumayyil ends his article wondering, “do you now see, friend, how absurdity becomes serious, and how dreams become reality, and how today’s so-called reality is nothing but a dream, a foul one, unfortunately” (Mabahith 189). Socialism here is not another reformist program but rather a whole new concept of living. Shumayyil’s third concept in the discourse of modernity is secularism. Shumayyil saw religion as a factor of division among the people of the same national origin, and that the stronger the nation grows, the weaker the religion gets (Falsafat 51). This idea was mainly derived from his study of the development of the European nations and how the industrial revolution and scientific progress coincided with the dwindling of the power of the Church. In Falsafat Shumayyil declares his views about religion that
Man is a natural product, and everything in and around him is acquired through nature. This fact today is indisputable, even if still resisted by those who cling to the old practices allowing these ancient myths to engrave themselves in their minds. Indeed, man is connected to the physical world, and has nothing to connect him to the world of the unseen or the metaphysical world. All the elements that compose the human are found in nature according to whose laws he operates. (39-40)
Despite this direct attack on religion as an idea, Shumayyil, in a possible avoidance of confrontation, praises religion as a “human heritage” promoting morals among its adherents and encouraging them to communicate with each other in a moral, honorable, and just manner (Falsafat 53-54). Oddly enough, it is Shumayyil who defends Islam against the attacks of one orientalist, Lord Cromer, whose Modern Egypt declares that “Islam as a social system has been a complete failure” (2. 134). Islam, according to Cromer, is beyond any reformist project. “Let no practical politician think” he warns, that they have a plan capable of resuscitating a body which is not, indeed, dead, and which may yet linger on for centuries, but which is nevertheless politically and socially moribund, and whose gradual decay cannot be arrested by any modern palliatives however skillfully they may be applied. (2. 184) Shumayyil published his response to Cromer’s book in a series of articles that appeared in al-Mu’ayyad in 1908, “al-Quran wa al-Umran” (Quran and civilization) and “hawl maqalati” (on my article). Shumayyil centers his defense of Islam around the history of the Islamic Empire where the Quran did not prevent the civilization that was brought upon the world by the Muslims. The dilapidated conditions of the Muslims were not caused by Islam as a religion, Shumayyil argues, but by its leaders who prevented the people from developing themselves, or properly understanding the essentials of their own religion (Mabahith 63).
Despite his refutation of an orientalist view about the Quran, Shumayyil seems to share with orientalism more than he disputes. His view of the Orient, analysis of its problems, and ultimate solutions are based on an idea about the Orient which is for the most part orientalist. When Shumayyil engages in his writings about the Orient and its affairs, he provides a counter-image of the Orient that borrows heavily from that of the orientalist discourse as explained by Said in Orientalism. Shumayyil’s recognition of a single body named the East, with identifiable characteristics and certain cultural boundaries, is based on his awareness of the Orient’s representation by orientalists. This Orient, as Shumayyil sees it, shares most, if not all the qualities attributed to it by orientalists such as Lane, Warburton, and Burton: it is moribund, stagnant, lazy, unclean, and above all, morally and materially inferior to Europe. In his article “Inhitat al-Sharq” (Degeneration of the Orient), Shumayyil argues that despite the fact that the term “Orient” encompasses various lands, races, religions,
it is unified under one condition: that of the idleness of order, corruption of leaders, decline of intellectual capabilities, and degeneration of values. Its peoples have no knowledge to raise them, nor labor to protect them, left for the rule of the survival of the fittest, subject to servility and wretchedness, working for their European masters who abuse them, but they cannot help but follow their masters. . . . It behooves the writers of the Orient to elegize it for it is indeed dead appearing to be alive. (Mabahith 194-95)
Shumayyil’s treatment of the problems of the Orient is colored by his acknowledgment of the Orient as an inferior cultural body. His re-writing of the image of the Orient is both orientalist (in its orientalist analysis of the identity of the Orient/oriental) and postcolonial (in its attempt to elevate the Orient by means of re-writing its image or modernize it). What is interesting in Shumayyil is that his re-writing of the Orient bears within it not a revival of the Orient, but an acknowledgment of its demise. The orientals cannot survive, Shumayyil is seen to argue, unless they give up being orientals, because it is their “orientalness” that leaves its incurable mark on them. Although he sees a chance to “save” the people of the Orient which differentiates him from the classical orientalists, he in fact shares the idea that the oriental cannot be saved as an oriental, an idea that associates his exposition and understanding of the shortcomings of the oriental with the penetration of the Orient of Lane and Burton, who understand the Orient more than it understands itself.
According to classical orientalism, the oriental is a mere receptive agent that is created, shaped, and maintained by factors such as the desert, climate, war, etc. The Egyptians, according to Lane, are the “product” of the heat of Egypt that made them what they are: lethargic, sensual, and lazy. Similarly, Shumayyil returns the inferiority of the oriental to the climate (Mabahith 197). This climactic influence on the orientals has caused their “orientalness” to be one of their innate qualities. In an article entitled “Kutabuna” (Our Writers), Shumayyil views the laziness and idleness of the Arabs to be an inevitable oriental attribute that has become to be “a natural instinct among the people of the East” so much so that they have become “a burden on their own societies” (Mabahith 235).
The ideas of Europe are capable of transforming the identity of the Orient, according to Shumayyil, who considers Europe to be a progressive “idea” rather than a geo-political term. This permits him also to view the East as an idea, an antithesis of Europe. The Europe of Shumayyil acquires its full meaning and significance from his understanding of the Orient which he describes as a depository of myths and falsehoods. Like the orientalists, Shumayyil recognizes the religious “nature” of the Orient, calling it the cause of its failure; the Orient is like this because it is the Orient (Falsafat 354). The only way out for the Orient is to give up its oriental-ness. The orientalist practice of restricting the oriental to a knowable state of being by the use of racial restrictions (they are like this because they are orientals) is one of the major techniques of the orientalist discourse that Said addresses in Orientalism. Denouncing the myth of the oriental religious unity, Shumayyil declares that the Orient is the opposite of Europe, and advises the reader not to follow “the ridiculous East, with its nations, governments, and sovereigns where this unity transcends any other objective in the society, but study the most civilized of the nations and compare their glorious present to their own history” (Falsafat 354-55). Shumayyil proclaims that the only way for the Orient out of its slumber is to adopt science as a way to understand and study the world. Although his “scientific” view is dependent upon the German materialism of post-1848 known as Vulgar Materialism, Shumayyil was able to transcend its limited view regarding the role of science in cultural and social revolutions (al-Sa’id 29). Because of this strong belief in the empirical method of studying the world, Shumayyil negates the validity of any other epistemological possibility, whether religious, rational, or subjective. As he stresses the importance of natural sciences, he refuses all other branches of knowledge: philosophy is a “pedestrian field” that does not provide benefit for its students; logic a “hallucination that aims at explaining what cannot be explained, interpreting what cannot be interpreted, and applying what cannot be applied”; linguistics is a fruitless, disputatious field; poetry is an uncanny, convoluted way to describe reality; humanities is a field where imagination leads the senses, rather than being harnessed by them (Falsafat 4). Any reformist project, Shumayyil argues, must base its foundations on the laws of natural sciences, because science is capable of modernizing the Orient like it did Europe (Falsafat 8).
The Orient cannot live as itself, but rather must acquire a new identity in order to transcend its crisis. The intellectual intervention of Europe in the Orient is not only desirable, but also imperative if reform is sought, Shumayyil would argue. Beside his anti-nationalistic view of the renewal of the Suez Canal concession to the England, Shumayyil expresses many opinions that legitimize the English presence in Egypt due to its civilizing and modernizing effect on Egypt and the Egyptians. He writes that “under the British, Egypt has its irrigation systems organized, its cultivation developed, its fellah enriched, his life becomes of value, its finances systematized so much that Egypt today is a respectable state where freedom prevails” (Mabahith 207). He admits that England may have other reasons for being in Egypt, but he concludes that despite their economic depletion of Egypt, their presence permits Egypt to thrive morally and culturally (Mabahith 207).
The reformist project of Shumayyil depends on European intervention in the affairs of the East. This intervention takes multiple shapes: intellectual (secularism), philosophical (socialism), scientific (Darwinism), and even cultural (colonization). Although he cannot be described as a collaborationist, his acceptance of colonial rule in Egypt, and his willingness to negotiate its benefits puts him in an area between those who see the necessity for colonialism to aid modernization and those who oppose at all together.
Chapter two
Now that the dichotomy between the East and the West is established, enabling us to recognize the chasm between the two worlds, then what? The pioneer writers did not want, nor did they care, to provide a “real” project to transform the Orient to a better state of being. Their analysis of the Orient was always directed to the need to modernize or alter the Orient, without materializing this idea into actual programs. In the contemporary age this “need” does not require to be reiterated or reinforced any further. We do not expect writers of this group to speak about the “importance” of modernizing the Orient, like the first generation of writers did, but rather to offer their cultural projects directly. No one by now questions the imperativeness of change or modernity, but the question is how this modernity should be accomplished. The writers in this age built on the ideas of the pioneer writers, elaborating their views, extending their arguments to their logical ends, or remolding their “theoretical” cultural programs into less idealistic ones. This period also witnessed the birth of the nation-states and the rise of nationalism which influenced many of these writers. Thus, the covert chasm between the two wings of nationalism, religious and secular, in the age of the pioneers has widened and became overt in the second generation.
Among the influential thinkers and authors of the 20th century, Taha Husayn appears to be one who possesses a clearly-defined project for modernity. Those who oppose him oversimplify his project to be blindly following the steps of the West. Although he did emphasized the importance of following the cultural models of the West in order to achieve modernity, his project can be said to respect its subject matter, the Muslim Orient, and its distinctiveness.
Husayn was born to a poor family from a village in Upper Egypt in 1889. He lost his sight in his early childhood. After studying in local Kuttab , he studied in Azhar for ten years, deepening his knowledge of Arabic and Islam, but he was discontent with the style of teaching and the narrow-mindedness of the teachers of Azhar, and with Azhar as an educational institution. In 1908 he went to study at the new secular Egyptian University (now Cairo University). He was impressed with the curriculum and style of teaching at the new university. In 1914 he went to France’s Sorbonne, where he earned his doctorate degree on Ibn Khaldun. After his return to Egypt he joined the faculty of Cairo University, where he taught for a number of years. In 1950 Husayn became the Minister of Education. During his ministry, elementary and secondary education became free, a step which raised literacy in Egypt. Husayn died in 1973 after an active career that witnessed many controversies in his defense of his cultural project.
Husayn proposes re-reading Egyptian/Arab history and tradition, scrutinizing them to establish a true identity based on textual evidence, rather than oral heritage. He was particularly influenced by Descartes’ principle of methodic doubt to investigate—based on empirical reasoning—the cultural and literary heritage of the Arabs, rejecting as though false all the essentials of Arabic literature/culture until proven, by means of scientific and empirical methods, to be true. By systematically doubting everything, Husayn argues, we establish a reliable body of knowledge and filter the existent reservoir of information from false accumulations. In 1926 he published his book fi al-Shi’r al-Jahily (On Pre-Islamic Poetry), using this Descartian theory to conclude that this poetry was not written before Islam. On the methodology of his research in this book, he explicitly states that he will use the Descartian theory to scrutinize the Arabic/Islamic heritage overlooking “our nationality and all its characteristics and our religion and its products” (fi al-Shi’r 22).
This new epistemological approach to heritage aroused an unprecedented outcry in the Azhar, creating a controversy that, perhaps until today, lingers in the academic and literary circles as well as newspapers and magazines in the Arab World. Hourani explains that behind the Husayn’s book was opposed because “it suggested a critical method which, if applied to the texts of religion, might cast doubt on their authenticity, and because it struck at the roots of the traditional structure of Arabic learning by which the faith was buttressed” (327). In fact, Husayn does indeed apply this method of research to the religious texts when he states that “the Torah may speak to us of Abraham and Ishmael; the Quran may also mention these names, but the fact these names are mentioned in the Torah or Quran does not guarantee their historical existence” (fi al-Shi’r 32). The book was withdrawn from the Egyptian markets, and Husayn published it two years later under the title fi al-adab al-Jahili (On Pre-Islamic literature) after omitting a chapter and adding a few other chapters, and removing some of the objectionable passages.
Husayn’s re-reading of the Arabic/Islamic heritage falls under his grand structure of re-evaluating the Arab/Islamic culture based on “modern” European theories. He perceived the world to be comprised of two opposing halves/powers, the enlightened world and the dark world, or as he perceived it, Europe and “anti-Europe,” or the West and the East. Whereas the former depends on human reason to derive its legitimacy and legislation, the latter depends on sentimentality, tradition, or superstition. Egypt, Husayn claims, has always been part of Europe; its intellectual capabilities are Western by nature (Mustaqbal 9). To understand the future of Egypt, one must understand the capabilities of the Egyptian mind, which can only relate to Europe (Husayn, Mustaqbal 4). One may ask then how does Egypt relate to the Muslim and/or Arab East? Husayn explains:
Islam arose and spread over the world. Egypt was receptive and hastened at top speed to adopt it as her religion and to make the Arabic of Islam her language. Did that obliterate her original mentality? Did that make her an Eastern nation in the present meaning of the term? Not at all. Europe did not become Eastern nor did the nature of the European mind change because Christianity, which originated in the East, flooded Europe and absorbed the other religions. (The Future 7)
Like Mediaeval Europe, Egypt now is experiencing the dark ages, but must return to its original position in the enlightened world. Egypt must accept modernity with its good and bad: In order to become equal partners in civilization with the Europeans, we must literally and forthrightly do everything that they do; we must share with them the present civilization, with all its pleasant and unpleasant sides, and not content ourselves with words or mere gestures. (Husayn, The Futhre 15)
Husayn’s statement about modernity is perhaps the first strong proclamation of the nature and function of modernity. Modernity, Husayn understands, is always Western, and to evade Western vocabulary of epistemology conceals a hypocritical stance towards modernity and renders any project for modernization ineffective. The East must change its way of looking at things, of understanding things, including its own past.
The nature of colonial literature is to place Europe in the center by privileging its discourse and marginalizing the Other, providing this Other with the tools of knowledge and expression that help maintain its “Otherness” and marginality, and ensure its eternal subservience to the colonizer. As a result, the nature of the postcolonial literature must oppose this epistemological technique, by providing an alternative to self-discovery and by reconstructing a pre-colonial image that responds to the discourse of the colonizer. In our case, however, Husayn’s discourse seems to be colonial in every sense. Despite his call for an independent Egypt, a free and educated Egyptian, his project ensures complete cultural subordination to Europe by privileging the West over the East, and seeing only a strictly Western sense of modernity. His privileging the literature over the oral traditions of the East (Orature) supports the Eurocentric claims of universality, and subjects other cultures to be judged by these “universal” standards.
Understanding the East through the ideas of the West is one of the main interests for this study; Husayn may indeed be the epitome of this approach. From Descartes’ methodic doubt, Husayn learned how to use empirical reasoning in the study of Arabic literature. From Ferdinand Brunetière’s literary evolution, he learned that the birth, growth, and fall of literary genres are due to common factors. The historical frames of reference of Sainte-Beuve taught Husayn how to reread literature with the intent to “free” it from the sentimental liking and disliking of critics, a reading that is based on scholarly principles of criticism. Hippolyte Taine’s French positivism introduced Husayn to the idea that literature is influenced by physical and psychological factors. Husayn “borrows” his scholastic and social tools for studying the East from Western scholars and thinkers. But instead of reconciling these tools of investigation with the uniqueness of the subject matter, Husayn adopts a wholly Western perspective in this investigation. Influenced by his professor Taine, Husayn refuses any reconciliatory syncretism between the East and the West, or that eclecticist method that advocates selecting doctrines from multiple philosophies without fully committing to one. Instead, the cultural paradigm proposed by Europe is a model that the nations in the colonized world must imitate in their march for development.
Husayn’s imagining and, consequently, imaging of the Orient is derived heavily from his orientalist professors at Cairo University such as David Santillana, Ignazio Guidi, and, above all, the famous Italian orientalist Carlo Alfonso Nallino (1872-1938), who taught Husayn History of Astronomy by the Arabs and History of Arabic Literature. In his introduction to Nallino’s Tarikh al-Adab al-Arabiyah (History of Arabic Literatures), Husayn states that he is indebted to two professors: Sayyid Ali al-Marsafi and Carlo Nallino:
the former taught me how to read the old Arabic text, understand it, and imitate its style, and the latter taught me how to extract facts out of this text and how to reconcile two opposing texts. Every scholarly benefit that I’ve gained, either in or outside Egypt, is based on these two rules that I’ve received in my early youth from these two professors. (89) The former taught Husayn a technique, whereas the latter taught him a methodology of how to deal with the text, utilizing it to substantiate readings proposed by the critic. This essentially orientalist methodology becomes one of the powerful tools of Husayn by which he later proposes some of his “controversial” readings of the history of Arabic literature such as negating the authenticity of the pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. When the critic Fu’ad Dawarah asked Husayn about the extent of the influence of orientalists on his thought, Husayn replied: “very intense indeed,” observing that he was influenced by their methodology of research, but not necessarily with their opinions (Bakkar 68).
From Nallino, Husayn learned to question the text, go beyond it, and use it to reconstruct the age in which it is produced. Reading the text as a reflection of its historical and social milieu explains Husayn’s theory of “the unity of literary phenomena,” which compares and contrasts old texts together in order to gain a better understanding of these texts as well as their age and society (Bakkar 30). Nallino’s idea of historical determinism is also found in Husayn, whose view of the Arab poet Abu al’Ala’ al-M’arri (973-1057) is based on this theory: “Abu al-Ala’ is a product of his age, perfected by the powers of time and place, economic and socio-political factors” (Husayn, Tajdid 16). The strong opinions of Husayn on the inauthenticity of most of the pre-Islamic poetry can also be traceable to orientalist scholars. Also by the use of Descartian methodic doubt, the British orientalist David Margoliouth published some similar views regarding Arabic poetry. In 1925, only four years before the publication of Husayn’s book on pre-Islamic poetry, Margoliouth published “The Origins Of Arabic Poetry” in The Journal Of The Royal Asiatic Society, in which he admits that he was not the first to address this question:
the subject of this paper was treated by Ahlwardt in a monograph called Bemerkungen über die Aechtheit der alten arabischen Gedichte, Greifwald, 1872, and by Sir C Lyall in the preface to vol. ii of his Mufaddaliyyat. The former is not very confident, and calls attention to some of the matters which have been discussed rather more fully below; Sir C Lyall deals chiefly with the character of the transmitters, which he rates rather more highly than the present writer. (417)
Qasim Iqbal, and others, in “On Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Quran,” critique Margoliouth’s reading from within the orientalist discourse, quoting many orientalists who refute Margoliouth’s idea of the inauthenticity of pre-Islamic poetry, questioning its very methodological premises.
Husayn’s reformist project sought to change the Orient through reforming the study of Arabic literature. Changing the past, Husayn would argue, results in a different present and future. His skepticism about the ability of the East to modernize itself while still maintaining its “East-ness” likens him to another of his contemporaries, Salama Musa (1887-1958), the Copt writer whose alienation from the Muslim society of Egypt justifies his inability to relate to the heritage or Islamic history of Egypt. Musa perceives the East as an underdeveloped and backward region. This backwardness is caused by the East’s fanatical clinging to its Islamic and traditional roots, and its inability to embrace “Western” modernity, which should by taken “in its totality,” not selectively, because the Egyptians are physically and psychologically closer to the Europeans than they are to the Asians (Musa, al-Yawm 6). Musa then pronounces his project more clearly when he writes:
this is my theory to which I am committed throughout my life, in secret and in public: I reject the East and embrace the West. In my writings I try to introduce the readers to the European qualities that distinguish Europe today, hoping to make them turn towards Europe and disown the East, because I believe that we cannot succeed in today’s world . . . unless we renounce whatever we gained from the East in social customs, familial guidelines, or governmental laws, and acquire new ways in our views of women, literature, and technology. (al-Yawm 7) Musa was greatly influenced by the Lebanese writers in Cairo, such as Shumayyil and Antun, who introduced him to the ideas of Darwinism, secularism, and socialism. Echoing the views of Antun, Musa sees the prophets to be philosophers who sought to develop their nations. He rejects the idea that the West is materialistic whereas the East is spiritual because “spirituality means any idea, that can help man get hold of, and control Matter and Nature, in order to live a free life and attain economic equality” (qtd. in Ibrahim 349). Therefore, Europe, that is in control of its mind and spirit, is able to control nature; the East, however, remains trapped in the physical world, where one works like a beast but is unable to engage in the slightest intellectual activity; The West, then, is spiritual and the East is materialistic (Musa, “al-Sharq” 12-13). Musa advocated adopting the Latin alphabet in the writing of Arabic because it will aid “the technological renaissance in the East” (Musa, al-Balaghah 160). Musa’s strong statements against the East or the Islamic/Arabic heritage of Egypt is the strongest so far; he calls the Islamic conquest of Egypt the beginning of decline because it created a chasm between Egypt and Europe, to which Egypt always belonged; this “historical mistake” was “corrected” by Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt and the Khedives attempts to reconnect with Europe (Musa, al-Yawm 177-78).
Like Husayn, Musa recognizes the division between the West and the East and the conflict between these two worlds/ways of thought. Europe is an idea, much like the Orient is an idea. The East-West binary opposition is a classical orientalist concept, restructured by these postcolonial authors in their quest for modernity. Whereas Husayn’s and Musa’s domain was mainly the intellectual world, other writers believed that thought and literature give us a perspective on our ability to view ourselves, but they do not provide much change to the society, its customs, and values. Changing the present, not the past, indicates our willingness to embrace modernity. Although this is a clear break from the past, the past should be re-read in order to remove any incongruity (either real or imagined) with modernity. Qasim Amin and Huda Sha’rawi are among the advocates of this approach . Their view of a new East depends on the emancipation of the oriental woman from the shackles of her “orientalness.” Although Amin belongs (chronologically) to the pioneer age, I included him in the second generation because of this influence of Abduh on his thought. In my definition and demarcation of these ages I rely on thematical, rather than chronological, divisions, as I explained in the introduction to this chapter.
Appearing in 1899, Amin’s Tahrir al-Mar’ah (The Liberation of Woman) is the first text that explicitly calls for the modernization of social practices regarding women in a set of suggested rules. However, it remains the natural product of the social writings of the pioneer writers who addressed the topic of women in the East and their rights, such as Tahtawi and Bustani. The influence of early liberal writers, especially Abduh, on Amin is so great that some critics see the ideas of Amin in Tahrir to be replicas of Abduh’s. Actually, since the publication of Tahrir, many critics attributed parts of the book to Abduh himself. Umarah, in his commentary of Abduh’s Complete Works, argues that Abduh is the author of Tahrir, or at least many of its chapters, but Amin’s name was put on it because of the book’s controversial theme and because of Abduh’s sensitive position in the Azhar (1. 252-56). Umarah argues that the heavy documentation from religious and Arabic texts suggests that Amin, who is unfamiliar with these texts, cannot be the author of Tahrir. In al-mar’ah al-jadidah (1901) (the New Woman), which is definitely authored by Amin, no references are made to Arabic/Islamic texts, but rather the author heavily quotes European sources with which Amin was very familiar. However, I include Amin in this study for three main reasons. First, Amin is the “published” author of the book, a fact that cannot be easily eclipsed by Umarah’s or other critics’ skepticism. Second, Amin is the founder of the feminist movement in the Arab World. Tahrir is a major text in the shaping of the feminist discourse in Arabic at least for the next half century after its publication. Finally, Amin is the undisputed author of Al-Mar’ah al-Jadidah (The New Woman), a logical expansion of the ideas expressed in Tahrir.
In Tahrir, Amin calls for the importance of the education of women in Egypt, promoting a new way to raise girls in Egyptian society in order to prepare them for the responsibility of adulthood, and to prepare them to serve their nation in a better way. The largest chapter of this book is concerned with women’s hijab (veil), in which Amin argues that one of the reasons behind the underdevelopment of Egypt is the status of its women. Arguing that there is nothing in the original Islamic texts that decrees that women should wear the veil (68), Amin, in his call for the liberation of women, claims that he actually calls for the return to the spirit of Islam, rather than breaking from it (83). To establish the legitimacy of his feminist cause and the necessity for social and cultural reform, Amin must first attack the status quo, the Orient, and the orientals. Most of these attacks launched against the Orient strikingly resemble those expressed by the orientalists. Although calling for the “liberation” of women, Amin’s description of Egyptian women is anything but flattering. In Egypt, he claims, “most women are careless about their physical appearance: they do not comb their hair daily, they do not take a bath more than once a week, and they do not know how to use a toothpick. They do not take care of the clothing worn close to their bodies” (Liberation 20-21). The Egyptian woman, Amin claims, “does not in reality experience love” (Liberation 22). The Egyptian mother’s ignorance causes her child to grow up to be “lazy, running away from work and wasting his precious time, which is his capital, lying down or sleeping or dallying” (Amin, Liberation 26-27). Egyptian women “have become accustomed to idleness; they consider it a necessity of life” (Amin, Liberation 32). These “orientalist” sweeping generalizations about the Egyptian woman are supported by Amin’s sense of authority to remain unchallenged, an authority which is “borrowed” from the mastery of the orientalists over the Orient.
In Al-Mar’ah, Amin continues his attack against the “backward” Orient, making more explicit comparisons with the “already-civilized” West, than in his first book. Amin here quotes Western thinkers to support his views regarding women. The veil continues to be a badge of “ignorance and weakness and [a sign] of gullibility” (Amin, The New 132). It is the symbol “of ancient ownership, and is one of the vestiges of the barbaric behavior that characterized human life for generations” (Amin, The New 134). The oriental man’s continuous doubt about his wife, symbolized by the establishment and preservation of the veil, is contrasted with the Western man’s respect for women’s freedom symbolized by the Western man’s restraining of himself “from opening mail that comes to his daughter or to his wife” (Amin, The New 144).
Whereas the objective of Tahrir is to establish the backwardness and inferiority of the Orient, al-Mar’ah reinforces this inferiority by drawing clear comparisons with the “advanced” West. Amin concludes his al-Mar’ah by acknowledging this comparison: During the past few years, Egyptians have begun to be aware of their poor social condition, their faces show the pain of it, and they have recognized the urgent need for improvement. They have heard about how Westerners live, they have mixed and lived with many of them, and have learned of the extent of their progress. When they saw that Westerners enjoy a good life, broad independence, self-determination, and other prerogatives that they themselves are not permitted and without which life has no value, there awoke in them a yearning to catch up and a desire to earn some of that happiness. (199)
Amin reads the social problems of Egypt/Orient only in light and as a result of the comparison with the West. His view of the conditions of oriental women resemble those expressed by British orientalists and missionaries. Leila Ahmad, in Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, allocates a chapter, “Discourse of the Veil,” in which she relates Amin’s Tahrir to the orientalist discourse, especially of British and French orientalists, with whom Amin was very familiar. Ahmad maintains that Amin’s calls for the education of women was not his most revolutionary idea, since it had been repeated since the days of Tahtawi and Abduh (“Discourse” 144). Ahmad maintains that Amin’s call for the abolition of the veil was not his major idea of the book either; it is rather a symbolic step that stands for the larger social and cultural reform of the nation (“Discourse” 145). For Amin, this reform must take the form of cultural subservience to the West by disowning and ultimately rejecting the Orient. This vision of the inferiority of the Orient in relation to the West links Amin to the orientalists and missionaries, whose ideas, as Ahmad points out, formed the basis of Amin’s book. The rationale in which Amin, a French-educated upper-middle-class lawyer, grounded his call for changing the position of women and for abolishing the veil was essentially the same as theirs. Amin’s text also assumed and declared the inherent superiority of Western civilization and the inherent backwardness of Muslim societies: he wrote that anyone familiar with ‘the East’ had observed ‘the backwardness of Muslims in the East wherever they are.’ (“Discourse” 155)
Amin’s project to modernize the Orient depends on cultural grounds. The West works as the model for this cultural reform that must be imitated. Arab feminism has yet to determine its foundations and theoretical perspectives since the inaugurating texts of the movement merely incorporate European colonialist ideas into the context of Arab social life. Ahmad comments on this aspect of Amin’s book and how it is relevant to the current feminist debate in the Islamic World. Amin’s Tahrir, she states,
marks the entry of the colonial narrative of women and Islam—in which the veil and the treatment of women epitomized Islamic inferiority—into mainstream Arabic discourse. And the opposition it generated similarly marks the emergence of an Arabic narrative developed in resistance to the colonial narrative. The veil came to symbolize in the resistance narrative, not the inferiority of the culture and the need to cast aside its customs in favor of those of the West, but, on the contrary, the dignity and validity of all native customs, and in particular those customs coming under fiercest colonial attack—the customs relating to women—and the need to tenaciously affirm them as a means of resistance to Western domination. (“Discourse” 163-164)
