NEOCLASSICISM az and deep seriousness, a class of school children and meditates upon their diverse individual futures, both pitiful and great, tracing it until they are all Jost in the wastes of time. Hafiz Ibrahim Shauai’s name is often linked in the minds of most Arabs with that of Hafiz Ibrahim (1871-1932), the two Egyptian poets being among the best-known neoclassicists in the Arab world. In spite ofmuch resemblance between them in style and general attitudes they form a contrasting pair, for whereas Shauai was for a large part of his life the poet of the court, Hafiz Ibrahim was more related to the common people. He was often described as ‘the people’s poet’, and that was not simply because he was born in a lower middle class family and grew up in poverty, but because he wrote much of his poetry about the suffering of the people and about nationalistic themes — although lately he has come under severe criticism on the grounds of not being nationalistic enough.” Hafiz was of mixed origin: his father was an Egyptian engineer and his mother Turkish. He lost his father at the early age of four, and from that time on his uncle, also an engineer living in Cairo, took charge of his upbring- ing. Hafiz was sent to a modem secular school, but his schooling was inter- rupted when his uncle took him to Tanta to which he had been transferred. After a period of irregular attendance at the Azhar type of madrasa at Tanta Hafiz felt he was not particularly welcome at his uncle's, and so he moved to Cairo where he first tried unsuccessfully to take up the profession of law, then joined the military academy and graduated as army officer in 1891. In 1896 he was posted in the Sudan which he regarded as exile. He was accused of taking part in an abortive army rebellion and was court-martialled. In 1900 he was cashiered and given the meagre monthly salary of €4. After an unsuccessful attempt to get a post in the newspaper al-Ahram Hafiz sought the help of the well-known religious reformer Muhammad ‘Abduh, who soon became his patron and introduced him to the leading figures in the intellectual and political life of the time, like Sa‘d Zaghlul, Qasim Amin, Mustafa Kamil and Lutfi al-Sayyid. Hafiz Ibrahim's wit and sense of humour soon made his company welcome to the leading person- alities of the day, to whom he addressed panegyrics, or poems on various social or political themes of particular interest to them. During this period of his life he wrote his prose work Lyaifi Satih (1907), in which he dealt with the problems of contemporary Arab society in a manner showing the influence of his master Sheikh Muhammad Abduh, and of al-Muwailihi, the author of Hadith ‘Is Ibn Hisham. He also tried to leam French from which, in spite ofHAFIZ IBRAHIM a his lack of proficiency, he attempted a free translation of Hugo's Les Misérables (1903). In 1911 he was appointed to a post in the National Library and this put an end to his financial troubles — although the fear lest he should lose his job and once more find himself impecunious limited the scope of his published political utterances. We are told that he wrote much political poetry of a revolutionary nature, which he recited to friends but did not dare to publish, with the result that some of his poetry which contained forceful political criticism has failed to reach us. The main inspiration for Hafiz Ibrahim the poet was Barudi, whom he regarded as an exemplar even in his life. Like his master, he joined the mili- tary academy, and like him too as an army officer he became involved in a rebellion which only spelled disaster for him. He also turned to the ancient Arabic heritage for his inspiration, endeavouring to model his style on the thetoric and the pregnant phrase of the Abbasid poets. But, although there are times when it is even more rhetorical than Barudi’s, on the whole Hafiz Ibrahim’s poetry is much simpler, and that, in part, may be explained by the fact that his themes were more popular and his poems designed for declama- tion at large gatherings or for publication in newspapers and were, therefore, addressed to a wider audience. Furthermore, Hafiz Ibrahim lacked the force- fal personality of his militant, ambitious and aristocratic master: his was a gentler and more humorous spirit, in many ways typical of the lower orders of Egyptian society who came of peasant stock. When it is not vitiated by forced conceits, his poetry is melancholic, even to the point of sentimentality. Yet in the midst of his earnest political utterances one often comes upon lines of poetry which are moving by their irony and deep humanity. As in the case of Shaugi, Hafiz Ibrahim’'s favourite reading as a youth was al-Marsafi's book, al-Wasila al-Adabiyya, where he could read some of Barudi's poetry, together with much Abbasid verse.“ His main reading, however, was largely confined to the several volumes of the well-known medieval com- pendium of poetry and biographical information on poets, Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs), by Abu'l Faraj al-Isfahani, which according to his friend and biographer Ahmed Mahfiz he had read several times over.**To that, together with his extraordinarily powerful retentive memory, Hafiz owed the solid grounding in the Arabic tradition which might otherwise have been denied him on account of his lack of regular schooling, The extent of his indebtedness to the classical Arabic heritage was fully realized early in the century and was commented on a little too harshly perhaps by his younger contemporary al-Mazini.!* Like Shauqi, Hafiz was provincially Arabocentric in his outlook: he believed Arabic poetry to be the greatest and most eloquent in any lan- ‘guage. The highest praise he could think of to confer on Victor Hugo was toNEOCLASSICISM “4 say that he nearly surpassed Arabic poets (1,33).7 His conception of poetry revealed in the preface he wrote to his Diwan is traditional in the extreme, and that is despite his famous poem in which he laments the stranglehold of conventions on Arabic poetry and calls forits liberation (1,225). Hafiz Ibrahim composed poems of the traditional type such as panegyric, elegy and description and treated traditional themes like love and wine. But with the exception of his elegies these poems tend to be cold, artificial and purely imitative. This is particularly true of the very few love poems he wrote. His elegies, on the other hand, are seldom regarded by critics as mere literary exercises devoid of feeling. Taha Husain, who can neverbe accused of critical partiality for either Shauai or Hafiz, commented on the excellence of Hafiz’s elegies which he attributed to the poet's keen sensibility and great loyalty to his friends. Similarly, Ahmad Amin expressed his admiration for his elegies in the introduction he wrote to the poet's Diwan. Another critic re- marked that ‘in two genres Hafiz excelled Shuai, namely elegy and des- cription of natural disasters’ The poet himself is reported to have said, ‘T enjoy composing poetry only when I am in a sad mood’, and wrote that ‘whoever peruses my Diwan will find that half of it consists of elegies’ (1,130). Hafiz’s elegies therefore seem to agree with his melancholy temperament. It is surprising that in his poetry there is very little trace of his celebrated sense of humour which was apparently such a marked feature of his con- versation. On the contrary, he was prone to complain of his ill-fortune and the way he was treated by the world. Most of the poetry he wrote during his sojourn in the Sudan expresses his unhappiness and his longing to be united with his friends and nostalgia for familiar scenes and haunts in Cairo. The fact that he had to spend many years in poverty and without employment did not help to make his poetry less gloomy. In a poem in which he bids farewell to this world he describes himself as one who finds more ‘solace and profit in the darkness of a tomb’. (1t,114ff) Hafiz wrote some of the best-known of the elegies produced on the deaths of public figures such as Muhammad ‘Abduh, Mustafa Kamil and Sa‘d Zaghlul. These are obviously not purely personal statements, in spite of the strong element of personal emotion which some of them contain; because of the public career of the persons whose death he laments the poems are full of social and political commentary. However, Hafiz was not a profound thinker, and his sentiments and reflections were little more than what the average Egyptian of the time felt and thought on current issues. Critics are agreed that his imaginative power was not of the highest and that he dealt with a narrow range of subjects.‘ His poems are free from any deep philoso- phical or moral reflections and his more subjective pieces are limited to com-HAFIZ IBRAHIM 45 plaints. Much of the effect he had upon his contemporaries — which accord- ing to enthusiastic reporters was at times overwhelming — was due to the skilful way he intoned and declaimed his verse at public gatherings. In this, respect he was a master of so-called ‘platform poetry’? His was oratorical poetry par excellence,*® and in it what matters most is less what is said than the manner in which it is said, a manner calculated to affect the listener at first hearing. Thought is often sacrificed for the sake of immediate emo- tional effect. Consequently, even more than Shauqi, Hafiz Ibrahim generally ‘comes across in translation very badly. As is to be expected, the bulk of Hafiz Ibrahim’s poetry is public poetry written on social or political occasions, ranging from the fall ofthe Ottoman Caliphate or the Anglo-French entente cordiale of 1904, or the injustice of the occupying power, to the establishment of ophanages and educational institu- tions. He also wrote on natural disasters like fires and earthquakes, important events in the Orient like the Japanese victory over the Russians (11,7ff.), whose significance was understandably inflated, as well as Islamic themes, as in his, long poem on the life and achievement of the second Caliph ‘Umar Ibn al- Khattab (1,71—90). Throughout these poems Hafiz Ibrahim gives expression to his sympathy for the cause of Islam and the Arabs, his belief in the political aspirations of his nation, his tortured awareness of the social problems of the time: poverty, ignorance and disease. He particularly emphasised the subject of the sufferings of the poor and the victims of natural disasters, the lurid details of which he described with so much gusto that it seems to betray what is perhaps at bottoma rather crude and blunted sensibility in the poet. ‘What is perhaps of lasting value in Hafiz Ibrahim’s poetry is not the mawkish emotionalism and the near hysteria which some critics mistake for sen- sibility, but its irony which, although it shows the depth of the poet's feelings towards his subject, acts as a brake against blind emotionalism and therefore helps him maintain his clarity of vision. A typical example of this irony is to be found in the poem he wrote on Danshaway. The Danshaway incident, which became symbolic of the injustice of the imperialist and has been the theme of many a poem and popular ballad for decades after,‘ occurred in 1906 under Lord Cromer. A fight broke out between three British officers, who were shooting birds, and the villagers of Danshaway in Upper Egypt, during which one officer lost his life. Two days later the government retal- ated by sentencing four villagers to death, two to life imprisonment and three to one-year imprisonment and fifteen lashes, and the sentence was that the hanging and flogging should be carried out publicly in the village. Naturally the harshness of the sentence only helped to inflame nationalist feeling. Addressing the British government in his poem, Hafiz brahim says:NEOCLASSICISM 46 © you. who manage our affairs, have you forgotten our loyalty and affection? Reduce your armies, sleep soundly, search for your game in every comer ofthe land, Should the ringdoves be lacking on the hill, surely there are men enough for youto shoot. We and the woodpigeons are one, for the rings have not yet parted from ournecks (11.20). Equally ironic is his poem ‘Women's Demonstration’ in which he des- cribes in mock heroic terms the unequal battle between the British troops and a procession of women peacefully demonstrating in protest against the arrest and exile of the nationalist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul to Malta in 1919 (1,874): ‘The ladies came out in protest: I watched their rally. ‘They assumed their black garments as their banner, Looking like stars shining bright in the midst of darkness, ‘They marched down the road, making for Sa'd's house Making clear their feelings, in a dignified procession, ‘When lo, an army approached, with galloping horses And soldiers pointed their swords at the women’s necks, Guns and rifles, swords and points, horses and horsemen formed a circle round them, ‘While roses and sweet basil were the women’s arms that day. ‘The two armies clashed for hours that turned the baby's hair grey, ‘Then the women faltered, for women have not much stamina. Defeated, they scattered in disarray towards their homes. So, let the proud army rejoice in its victory and gloat over their defeat. Could it be perhaps that among the women there were German soldiers wearing veils, A host led by Hindenberg in disguise, So the army feared their strength and were alarmed at their cunning? Or consider how he addresses Lord Cromer in a poem commenting on the dif- ference between the era of British occupation and earlier periods in Egyptian history (1,25): In the past our injustice was untidy, but now its loose ends have been. trimmed off: injustice is orderly everywhere. Of direct western influence there are some traces, though not many, in Hafiz Ibrahim’s poetry. His knowledge of European languages was very limited, compared, for instance, with Shauqi’s. He wrote poems on foreign authors like Tolstoy, but it is clear from the poem itself that he never read any Tolstoy, although he did read some western literature, and as we have already said, he produced a free translation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.ZAHAWI 47 He also claimed to have translated into verse Macbeth’s well-known speech on the air-drawn dagger, but the resultant translation (1,222) is really more of an adaptation, in fact almost a new poem inspired by the original. More- over, he attempted to write a short one-act poetic drama on the subject of the bombardment of Beirut by the Italian navy (1912) which shows a total ignorance of the basic rules of dramatic isno more thana long passage (in no way a dramatic dialogue) which is divided between four speakers — a wounded man, his wife, a doctor and a fellow Arab (1.69ff). Hafiz brahim’s desire to be regarded as a modernist, manifested in his naive introduction of moder inventions like the aeroplane or train, led in some cases to very amusing results. For instance, in a well-known poem which he wrote on the occasion of the opening of an orphanage, he begins with a lengthy descrip- tion of the railway train, very much in the same way asin the opening part of his work the pre-Islamic poet provided a description of his camel (,271ff.). And it is revealing to see how the internal combustion engine is conceived of in terms of a beast of burden, how the industrial aspect of modem life is felt and described in terms of life in the Arabian desert — a classic example of the unresolved tension between the old and the new, between traditional Arab culture and modem westem civilization. Zahawi Just as in the case of the Egyptians Shauqi and Hafiz Ibrahim, the names of the Iraqi poets al-Zahawi and al-Rusafi became linked in the minds of their readers, partly because of the keen and at times bitter rivalry between them.% Both poets published their first volumes of verse in Beirut at roughly the same time: Zahawi in 1908 and Rusafi in 1910. Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863-1936) was bom to parents of Kurdish origin, and his father was a learned scholar who occupied the post of Mufti (official expounder of Islamic law) of Baghdad. He did not receive a modern school- ing, his early formal education being confined to the traditional religious up- bringing, but he developed, largely through translations, both Turkish and Arabic, an interest in liberal ideas and modem scientific thought which he maintained throughout his life. In an autobiographical note he acknowledges his debt to the scientific material popularized in the articles that appeared in the early numbers of the Syro-Egyptian periodical al-Mugtataf, and such Arabic works on modern astronomy, physiology and anatomy as those which the famous orientalist Van Dyck published in Beirut. In 1910 he published a pseudo-scientific treatise On Gravity. Although Zahawi knew no European language, he mastered Turkish and Persian from which he translated al- Khayyam's Quafrains into Arabic (1928). He occupied many posts, in the