Abstract
This chapter provides a history for Ḥiwār (1962–67), edited by Palestinian poet Tawfīq Ṣāyigh from Beirut with broad dissemination in the Arab world, and outlines the CCF’s other interventions in the Arab cultural sphere from 1955. Over the course of its nearly five-year run, Ḥiwār published both emerging and established authors, serving as a register of some of the most important Arab historians, critics, essayists, short-story writers, novelists and poets of the 1960s, including Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Ghādah al-Sammān, Albert Hourani, Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, Walīd al-Khālidī, Zakariyyā Tāmir, Laylā Baʿalbakī, Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-Ṣubūr, Salmā al-Khaḍrāʾ al-Jayyūsī, Ṣabrī Ḥāfiẓ, Luwịs ʿAwaḍ, Fuʾād al-Takarlī, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ and Yūsuf Idrīs. Ḥiwār also published CCF-supplied interviews with major international cultural figures such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, György Lukács, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Picasso, and letters from CCF representatives and authors across the world.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Little has been written in English about Ḥiwār. In addition to Holt, ‘“Bread or Freedom”’, see Michael Vasquez, ‘The Bequest of Quest,’ Bidoun: Art and Culture from the Middle East 26 (2012), and Elliott Colla, ‘Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Cold War Poet,’ Middle Eastern Literatures 18:3 (2015): 247–263. Mention is also made of Ḥiwār in studies of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, most recently Andrew N. Rubin, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture and the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 59. In Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Timothy Mitchell briefly discusses Ḥiwār and its connections with the CIA, connecting the episode to a far larger edifice of American intelligence that was shaping the region’s intellectual production; see Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 337, fn. 69 and 71. See also the first five pages of Issa J. Boullata, ‘The Beleaguered Unicorn: A Study of Tawfīq Ṣāyigh’, Journal of Arabic Literature 4 (1973), pp. 69–93, and Hala Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32:2 (2012). Cultural memory of the scandal has been reignited in Arabic in recent years with the publication of letters and diary entries kept by Ḥiwār’s editor. See Maḥmūd Shurīḥ (ed.), Mudhakkirāt Tawfīq Ṣāyigh bi-khaṭṭ yadihi wa-huwa yastaʿidd l i-aṣdār majallat Ḥiwār: 6 Nīsān- 31 Tamūz 1962, Bayrūt – London – Bārīs – Bayrūt [Memoirs of Tawfīq Ṣāyigh in His Own Handwriting as He Was Preparing to Publish the Journal Ḥiwār] (Beirut: Dār Nelson, 2011); and Shurīḥ (ed.), Rasāʾil Tawfīq Ṣāyigh wa-l-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ [The Letters of Tawfīq Ṣāyigh and al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ] (Beirut: Dār Nelson, 2010).
- 2.
John Hunt to Tawfiq Sayigh, 29 January 1962, International Association for Cultural Freedom Records, Box 507, Folder 21, Series IV: Financial Files, 1951–1968, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago (hereafter IACF).
- 3.
Shurīḥ (ed.), Mudhakkirāt, p. 42.
- 4.
Ḥiwār 1/1 (1962), p. 2
- 5.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 6.
Issues of Al-Munaẓẓamah al-ʿĀlamiyyah li-Ḥuriyyat al-Thaqāfah, Al-Ḥuriyyah Awwalan, and Aḍwāʾ are held in Box 521, Folders 1–6, Series V: Documentation and Ephemeral Publications, 1950–1972: Subseries I: Newsletters: Sub-subseries 2: Arabic Language: Miscellaneous, IACF.
- 7.
Ivan Kats to Z. Misketian, 20 December 1961, Box 127 Folder 6, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 5: ‘E’, IACF.
- 8.
On the Rome conference, see Muhsin al-Musawi, Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 54–56.
- 9.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod informed Mitchell on 3 August 2000 that Congress representative ‘[Morroe] Berger had attempted to recruit [him] to edit the magazine. Berger did not reveal the source of the funds, but the amount of money on offer and the stipulation concerning the Soviet Union made Abu-Lughod immediately suspicious.’ See Mitchell, Rule of Experts, p. 337, fn. 69 and 71; and Mitchell, ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science’, in David L. Szanton (ed.), The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Zareh Misketian (a.k.a. Toto), director of the CCF Cairo office in the late 1950s and early 1960s, encouraged Abu-Lughod’s candidacy: ‘I really think that Ibrahim would do a good job and is acceptable all around.’ The CCF considered having the Arabic-English translator Denys Johnson-Davies make the initial contact with Abu-Lughod, see Z. Misketian to John Hunt, 20 August 1959, Box 127 File 5, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 5: ‘E’, IACF.
- 10.
Naguib Mahfouz to Ivan Kats, 16 January 1964, Box 127 File 8, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 5: ‘E’, IACF.
- 11.
John Hunt to Z. Misketian, 6 September 1965, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 5: ‘E’, IACF.
- 12.
John Hunt to Yehia Haqqi, 6 September 1965, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 5: ‘E’, IACF. Hunt begins this and other letters, ‘Dr. Morroe Berger has informed me of your interest in the work of this organization.’
- 13.
No author, ‘People Whom I Consulted in Lebanon’, n.d. (between 1959 and 1961), Box 228 File 8, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 12: ‘L’, IACF.
- 14.
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), third page of photo insert. The caption reads, ‘Stephen Spender, chosen by the CIA and MI6 to co-edit Encounter magazine. “Stephen had all the right credentials to be chosen as a front,” said Natasha Spender. “He was eminently bamboozable, because he was so innocent.”’
- 15.
See the opening pages of his Mudhakkirāt. On modernism and the CCF, see Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (NY: Columbia University Press, 2015).
- 16.
John Hunt to Yusuf al-Khal, 19 September 1961, Box 432 File 4, Series III: Seminars, 1950–1977: Subseries 46: Rome 1961: The Arab Writer and the Modern World, October 16–20, IACF.
- 17.
John Hunt to Tawfiq Sayigh, 29 January 1962, Box 507, Folder 21, Series IV: Financial Files, 1951–1968, IACF.
- 18.
Tawfiq Sayigh to John Hunt, 9 May 1963, Box 507, Folder 21, Series IV: Financial Files, 1951–1968, IACF.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
‘Journal: Hiwar—Circulation Figures for Period: 1966’, Box 231, Folder 3, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 12: “L”, IACF.
- 21.
‘Decision # 632’, 21 July 1962, Box 507, Folder 21, Series IV: Financial Files, 1951–1968, IACF. ‘Mr. Jamīl Jabar [Jamil Jabre] [is granted] a permit to publish a monthly literary, scientific, artistic, non-political publication in Arabic with the title Ḥiwār for which al-Amīr/Prince Nadīm Āl Nāṣir al-Dīn assumes [all] responsibility.’
- 22.
Scott Charles to Tawfiq Sayigh, 19 June 1963, Box 507, Folder 21, Series IV: Financial Files, 1951–1968, IACF.
- 23.
Robie Macauley, ‘The “Little Magazines”’, Transition 9 (June 1963), p. 24.
- 24.
Roger A. Farrand to John Hunt, 14 January 1963, Box 507, Folder 21, Series IV: Financial Files, 1951–1968, IACF.
- 25.
Scott Charles to Tawfiq Sayigh, June 19, 1963, Box 507, Folder 21, Series IV: Financial Files, 1951–1968, IACF.
- 26.
Ḥiwār 1/1 (November 1962), p. 2.
- 27.
See Verena Klemm, ‘Different Notions of Commitment (Iltizām) and Committed Literature (al-adab al-multazim) in the Literary Circles of the Mashriq’, Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 3 (2000), p. 54.
- 28.
Mudhakkirāt, p. 68.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom also coordinated with ‘many Arab institutions—among them the National Planning Commission of the U.A.R., the Egyptian Society of Engineers, the Institute of Public Administration in Cairo, and the University of Khartoum.’ ‘Arab Magazine Banned by Cairo’, New York Times, 24 July 1966, p. 3. A similar conference was held at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda in June 1962 on African literature. Postcolonial theorist, playwright, and novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o of Kenya mentions this conference in a footnote to his essay ‘The Language of African Literature’ in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992), p. 30 fn. 2. Thiong’o comments, ‘The conference was organized by the anti-Communist Paris-based but American-inspired and financed Society for Cultural Freedom which was later discovered actually to have been financed by CIA. It shows how certain directions in our cultural, political, and economic choices can be masterminded from the metropolitan centres of imperialism.’
- 33.
See ‘“Bread or Freedom”’.
- 34.
Al-Ādāb 10 (July 1962), p. 59.
- 35.
Mudhakkirāt, p. 17.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 64.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 38.
See the photo of ‘John Hunt, Robie Macauley and Michael Josselson mapping things out in the hills above Geneva’ in Saunders, p. 6 of photo section.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 30.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 45.
- 41.
Tawfiq Sayigh to John Hunt, 15 November 1965, Box 231 Folder 1, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 12: ‘L’, IACF.
- 42.
Mudhakkirāt, p. 85.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 103.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 45.
Ibid., pp. 29–30.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 100.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Consider the letter from John Hunt to Tawfiq Sayigh (11 February 1963), Box 507, Folder 21, Series IV: Financial Files, 1951–1968, IACF, in which Hunt mentions a plan for pieces from an Algerian issue of Preuves to appear in Ḥiwār.
- 49.
John Hunt to Tawfiq Sayigh, 10 December 10, 1965, Box 231 Folder 1, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files: Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–1967: Sub-subseries 12: ‘L’, IACF.
- 50.
Al-Usbūʿ al-ʿArabī hoped to elicit Idrīs’s ‘opinion on the issue of Ḥiwār being banned from Egypt’ in 1966 due to its connections with the CIA; Idrīs responded that it was an affair ‘of which I like to speak neither good nor evil’, Al-Usbūʿ al-ʿArabī (31 October 1966), p. 44.
- 51.
‘Arab Magazine Banned’, New York Times.
- 52.
Rūz al-Yūsuf 1980 (23 May 1966), p. 42.
- 53.
Al-Maktabah 45 (October 1966), p. 57. ‘The journal Ḥiwār, whose entry to Egypt was banned has started to arrive by air mail to a number of personalities in Cairo and Alexandria.’
- 54.
‘Arab Magazine Banned’.
- 55.
Rajāʾ al-Naqqāsh, ‘Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: “ʿAbqariyyah riwāʾiyyah jadīdah”’, Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: ʿAbqarī al-riwāyah al-ʿArabiyyah (Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwdah, 1976), p. 78.
- 56.
Unsī al-Ḥājj, ‘The Issue of the Journal Ḥiwār’, Mulḥaq al-Nahār (12 June 1966), p. 19.
- 57.
Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), p. 32.
- 58.
A slight man hounded by health problems throughout his life, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb was also one of the most renowned and celebrated Arabic poets of the twentieth century, credited especially with being a pioneer of the new free verse poetry and its innovations in Arabic poetic form. See also Elliott Colla, ‘Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Cold War Poet’, Middle Eastern Literatures 18:3 (2015), pp. 247–263.
- 59.
Al-Ḥājj, p. 19. The CIA seemed pretty sure they were the ones laughing. As Stonor Saunders notes, when Nicolas Nabokov published his memoirs in 1975, he included a section on the 1960 CCF conference ‘“commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Tolstoy” on the Venetian island of San Giorgio. Two Russians had attended, including “an odious SOB called Yermilov, a nasty little party hack. They were standing in line, both of them, to receive their per diem and travel allowance from my secretary, or rather the administrative secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.”’ Saunders relates: ‘Nabokov closed the recollection on a jubilant note: “Mr. Yermilov, turn in your grave: you have just taken CIA money!”’ Saunders, p. 332.
- 60.
Klemm, p. 58.
- 61.
Consider, Al-Mawāqif. Thanks to Anne-Marie McManus for noting this.
- 62.
Included in Luwīs ʿAwaḍ’s collection of essays entitled al-Thawrah wa-l-adab (Cairo: Dār al-Kātib al-ʿArabī li-l-Ṭibāʿah wa-l-Nashr, 1967), pp. 433–434.
- 63.
As quoted in Stonor Saunders, p. 312.
Acknowledgement
Research for this chapter in Beirut, Chicago, and Washington, DC was supported by Bard College. I am particularly grateful to the staffs of the Chicago Special Collections Research Center and the American University of Beirut’s Jafet Library. The Forum Transregionale Studien and the Friedrich Schlegel School at the Freie Universität Berlin generously supported me as I completed portions of this chapter as a fellow of the Europe in the Middle East/Middle East in Europe (EUME) programme. Thanks also to this volume’s editor Giles Scott-Smith for his guidance, and to my students at Bard in World Literature and the CIA for their thoughtful questions (especially, ‘So what?’). An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘“Bread or Freedom”: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and the Arabic Literary Journal Ḥiwār (1962–67)’, Journal of Arabic Literature 44:1 (2013), and I thank JAL for permission to reprint portions here.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Holt, E.M. (2017). Cold War in the Arabic Press: Ḥiwār (Beirut, 1962–67) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In: Scott-Smith, G., Lerg, C. (eds) Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59867-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59867-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59866-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59867-7
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)