If a poem is a fictional, metered statement in which the author decides where the lines should end, how symbolic could a piece of art be of the age in which it was produced? How could a poem convey differently than an intellectual discourse? Such questions invoke the inevitable debate between the literariness of art and its social significance. I approach this issue through a close reading of two of A?mad Shawq?’s poems that thematize the poet’s relationship to Islam, among other traditions in Egypt’s history. As much as they engage in an intimate parodic dialogue with Shawq?’s favorite precursor, al-Mutanabb?, the two poems, “Rama??n Wallá” (Ramadan has Passed) and “al-Hil?l,” (The Crescent), reveal Shawq?’s pluralistic vision of Egyptian national identity. I argue that Shawq?’s work in general, and in these two poems in particular, includes valuable insights, not only into Shawq?’s relationship to the traditional Arabic literary canon, but also into his outlook on Egypt as an ultimately historical entity with a multifaceted trajectory that incorporates the comprehensiveness of the Egyptian self. This articulation of Egyptian national identity under colonial rule is crucial to Shawq?’s poetry, particularly when read against other authors of his age, e.g. ??fi? ?br?h?m, who did not see Islam as compatible with Pharaonic or Hellenic identity, for instance. This is not to say that Shawq? intended to diffuse the conflict between European colonialism and Egyptian nationalism, or that his poetry (marginal, singular, and unverifiable as it is in comparison to the prevailing intellectual debate pioneered by prominent Islamic figures like Im?m Mu?ammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani) creates a palpable rupture to the center of a dominant intellectual discourse. It is, however, fair to argue that the colonial situation afforded Shawq? the opportunity to problematize the conception of what it means to be Egyptian. Shawq?’s maverick view of Egypt’s historic and geographical pluralism falls within this paradigm and is particularly contentious, especially during his own time. Early twentieth-century Egypt witnessed heated debates on the country’s political destiny and the articulations of its identity, in addition to the re-surfacing of the Islamist ideology which saw Islam as an exclusivist condition that cancels out Egypt’s pre-Islamic past. Within this context, Shawq?’s two poems offer a cadenced yet subtle challenge to the idea that maintaining allegiance to various components of Egypt’s rich history must necessarily challenge the integrity of its Islamic present.

This paper will explore the ways in which different socio-cultural environments in Egypt consumed poetry by the Egyptian dissident Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm and his musician Shaikh Imam 'Isa in the 1970s. The duo’s irreverent satires are often thought to have appealed to a popular, ‘folk’ audience due to their use of the Egyptian vernacular and their oral transmission through song. Drawing on interviews and press reports from the period, as well as a number of recently published memoirs, however, this paper will argue that Nigm and Imam’s popularity among the lower classes was difficult to determine in the 1970s and cannot be inferred simply from looking at linguistic register or imagery. Circumstantial evidence, in fact, suggests that subaltern listeners perceived the duo’s didacticism as elitist despite the emancipatory charge of their ballads. On the other hand, Nigm and Imam’s songs won sanction from gatekeepers of the cultural establishment and helped mobilise the urban, left-wing middle-class student movement. To understand their popularity, thus requires examining how their art operated in different milieus and interacted with various media. State-controlled audio-visual and print media briefly promoted the duo. De-centralized media controlled by consumers, such as hand-written copies of the poems and audio-recordings of their songs, disseminated Nigm and Imam’s output once they lost access to the mass media. This paper contends that a notion of ‘folklore’ is relevant to this discussion primarily insofar as the middle-class student movement and the intelligentsia interpreted Nigm’s poetry in line with a nationalist imaginary that required reassuringly romanticized representations of an ‘authentic folk culture’ following Egypt’s military defeat in 1967. The fact that Imam’s songs paid stylistic homage to a largely defunct corpus of pre-1919 Tarab music meant that, in this context, his œuvre was valorised as culturally ‘authentic’ rather than simply ‘anachronistic’. Thus, notions of ‘folklore’ matter to a discussion of Nigm’s poetry not as a description of some ‘objective reality’ but because of the ways in which a historically situated discourse acquires meaning in specific socio-cultural settings. Any attempt to unravel Nigm and Imam’s popularity in the 1970s, therefore, must move from a literary study of ‘text’ to one that examines how the poetry was received in particular socio-cultural environments.

In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of Al Nahda, the Arab cultural renaissance movement, the concept of the committed artist came to take center stage in the Arab world. Like French Romantics who believed themselves to be spiritual guides for the “masses,” the role of the artist at the turn of the twentieth century in Egypt was to surmount the frontier between art and politics and serve a socio-political purpose. However, as Ahmad Fouad Negm, writing in the 1970s, opens a poem with the phrase, “I am the people”, one could ask whether this limit between life and art was in fact being entirely effaced. The poet functionally stops guiding the people to become them, as the separation between the two is superfluous: the choice to elide the political is as much of a position as commitment, and expression—whether supposedly detached or committed—is always political. Negm himself was an Egyptian revolutionary leftist poet whose songs have been sung at demonstrations, particularly at the 1971-1972 student protests and the 1977 insurgency. His work was instrumental in transforming the relationship between poet and people from a state of communication through the interface of art to one of fusion between them, and as such his poetry marked a transitory moment in committed literature. This oft-ignored era of Egyptian poetry is now academically relevant as Negm’s poems have been appropriated by Egyptian revolutionary youth and sung in Tahrir Square since early 2011. This paper will, therefore, examine traits that are characteristic of his poetry, such as the use of colloquial Arabic, a working-class-oriented vocabulary that is nonetheless starkly distinguishable from the regime’s populist rhetoric, and the blending of the lyrical and epic registers. It aims to elucidate the way these elements work together in Negm’s poem to challenge the very supposition of a limit between poetry and politics. It will also tie this shift in paradigm to possible non-Egyptian influences, in particular Sartre, whose Qu’est-ce que la littérature was translated into Arabic as early as 1960.

My paper will present a reading of ‘Ala al-Aswani’s novel Shikaghu (2007) that is informed by the literary encounter with America in Arabic that stretches back more than a century. As a novel that presents a large number of Arab characters who face a variety of challenges in adjusting to American life, Shikaghu closely resembles one of the earliest works of Arabic narrative prose set in America and filled with Arab characters, Hikayat al-Mahjar (Tales of Emigration, 1919) by ‘Abd al-Masih Haddad. Both works feature this cross-cultural encounter, and both engage this encounter through a wide cast of Arab characters, albeit Shikaghu features mainly Egyptian characters while Hikayat al-Mahjar focuses on population of Syrian émigrés at the turn of the century. I will argue that Shikaghu, despite its recent date of publication, is still essentially engaged in a literary project that stretches as far back as Rifa’ Tahtawi; namely, the evaluation and critique of the self through the encounter with the West. The particular encounter that I will analyze is the oft neglected encounter with America in Arabic literature, as its more popular counterpart, the Arab encounter with Europe, has filled thousands of pages. The American encounter in Arabic literature has seen a renewed vigor of late, as al-Aswani’s Shikaghu, along with Rabi’ Jabir’s historical novel Amrika (2009) and Mona Tahawi’s novel Brooklyn Heights (2010) will attest. Our understanding of these new works can only be enriched through a comparison of critiques, symbolism and imagery of America found in the earliest works of Arabic fiction set in America, penned in the early 20th century. The prominence of the Mahjar poetry from this period has cast as long shadow over the short stories written and published during the early part of the 20th century. This is unfortunate, as this poetry, innovative as it was, rarely engaged with America as a place, or with Americans as characters. My paper, through a pointed comparison of Shikaghu and Hikayat al-Mahjar, and a general contextualization of the literary history of the American encounter, will bridge gaps in time and explore the significance of some uncanny continuities of literary forms and themes.