Abstract
Today, the case for new writing may not appear as urgent as it was for its turn-of-the-century advocates. As Arab neoclassicists, especially in Egypt, promoted their predecessors’ compilations of epistles, prose selections, and studies in grammar and rhetoric, there was also a corresponding movement to reinvigorate Arabic and make it accessible to the press. However, there was no serious rift between these two attitudes. Writers were aware that no style can be effective without sufficient knowledge of, and training in, the classical tradition. One of the advocates and practitioners of this communicative style was the Egyptian writer and scholar Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, whose revered teacher was the philologist Ḥusayn al-Marṣafī (d. 1890). The latter’s book Al-Wasīlah al-Adabiyyah ilā ‘Ulūm al-’Arabiyyah (The Literary Way to the Arabic Sciences, 1872–1875) was studied by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn as well as by all who attended Dār al-‘Ulūm (House of Sciences), where Ḥusayn al-Marṣafī offered his lectures (later compiled into a book) on Arabic style, morphology, syntax, figures of speech, meter, and rhyme schemes.1
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Notes
See Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of Its Genres and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 392.
See Muḥsin al-Mūsawī, Al-Istishrāq fī-al-Fikr al-‘Arabī (Orientalism in Arab Thought) (‘Ammān: Al-Mu’assasah al-‘Arabiyyah lil-Dirāsāt wa-al-Nashr, 1993), 62.
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and intro. G. B. Tompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 46.
See Abu al-Faraj Muḥammad Ibn Isḥāq (Ibn al-Nadīm), Al-Fihrist, eds. Yūsuf ‘Alī Ṭawīl and Aḥmad Shams al-Dīn (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, 1996);
Aḥmad Ibn Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, Akhbār al-Nisā’ fī al-‘Iqd al-Farīd, eds. ‘Abd al-Amīr ‘Alī Muhannā and Samīr Jābir, 3rd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, 2002);
Abū al-Faraj al-Isfahānī, Akhbār al-Nisā’ fī Kitāb al-Aghānī, ed. ‘Abd al-Amīr ‘Alī Muhannā (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Kutub al-Thaqāfiyyah, 1988);
‘Abd al-Amīr ‘Alī Muhannā, Akhbār al-Mughannīn wa-al-Mughanniyāt fī al-Jāhiliyyah wa-al-Islām (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr al-Lubnānī, 1990);
‘Abd al-Amīr ‘Alī Muhannā, Mu‘jam al-Nisā’ al-Shahīrāt fī-al-Jāhiliyyah wa-al-Islām (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, 1990);
Salīm al-Tanīr, al-Shā‘irāt min al-Nisā’: A‘lāmwa Ṭawā’if (Damascus: Dār al-Ktāb al-‘Arabī, 1988).
For a detailed discussion of the history of the salon in the pre-Islamic, Umayyad, Abbasid, and Andalusian periods, see Thoraya Abdulwahab al-Abbasi, “Women’s Voices in Arabic, French, and English Salons: Literary Impacts” (diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988).
Abū al-Faraj al-Isfahānī, Al-Aghānī, 6 vols. (Dār al-Taḥrīr lil-Tab‘ wa al-Nashr, 1963–1965), 3: 890–891; ‘Abd al-Amīr Muhannā, Akhbār al-Nisā’ fī Kitāb al-Aghānī, 160–163.
Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Al-Ayyām (The Stream of Days) (Cairo: Dār al-Ahrām, 1992), 339–340.
Bāḥithat al-Bādiyah (Malak Ḥifnī Nāṣif), Al-Nisā’iyyāt (Feminist Pieces), 3rd ed. (Cairo: Multaqā al-Mar’ah wa-al-Dhākirah, 1998), 173.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 49.
Cited in Alison Finch, Women’s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3.
Maḥmūd al-Sharqawī, Ibrāhīm Nājī al-Shā‘ir wa-al-Insān (Ibrahīm Nājī the Poet and the Man) (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anglo al-Miṣriyyah, 1973), 216.
As cited in Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 75.
Janet Gurkin Altman, “Women’s Letters in the Public Sphere,” Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 111–112.
Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 138.
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© 2012 Boutheina Khaldi
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Khaldi, B. (2012). Style as Persuasion: Pleading the Case for the New. In: Egypt Awakening in the Early Twentieth Century. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137106667_6
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