Egyptian critic Sabri Hafez published more than 20 books in Arabic, and about 13 books in English (Al Jazeera)

Sabri Hafez is a critic who lost his way from science to literature. His dreams were to become a professor of chemistry, but he found himself in critical discourse. He worked in the beginning of his life in a transportation company, and studied social sciences while working. He worked during the day and studied at night.

His early career taught him to rely on himself, so he made his way quickly like an eagle against the tide, writing stories, practicing criticism at an early age, and confronting the writings of great writers and novelists by analyzing and dissecting them with new visions. He would write an analysis of Naguib Mahfouz’s novels and Yahya Haqqi’s stories, and then practice his hobby of writing stories. He sends his production to the writer Abdel Fattah El-Gamal in Al-Masaa newspaper, and he neglects the stories and publishes criticism.

It was published in the Beirut magazine "Al-Adab", and Yahya Haqqi wrote it in the "Al-Majalla" magazine, and he digested theories of criticism and modern literary doctrines through what was published in specialized literary magazines. He even thought that Naguib Mahfouz was writing from outside Egypt because of his great familiarity with modern literary doctrines and visions.

He traveled on a short scholarship to Britain in 1973, but did not return until after 6 years, during which he obtained a doctorate degree. For more than 50 years, he is a good observer and honest witness to the Arab cultural situation. He wrote more than 20 books in Arabic, and about 13 books in English, and he has dozens of books. Students in European universities, we met him during his recent visit to the book fair in Cairo, and Al Jazeera Net had this meeting with him:

  • How do you see yourself after 50 years of jumping from the eastern shore to the western shore?

I confirm first that, despite my life in the West, my eyes, heart, and pen never left the East, and I did not abandon writing in the Arabic language. I was one of the writers who contributed most to cultural work, and I did not leave a publication or publication without participating in it, out of my belief in my effective role as a committed intellectual.

On the other hand, I consider myself a bridge between Arab and Western cultures. I present the best of the West and what I feel our culture needs. I try to convey the most prominent achievements of my culture to Westerners. I present the West to Arab culture, and in return I present part of our Arab culture to the English reader.

  • Can you describe to us the cultural climate in Cairo at the time you began writing literary works and participating in the general cultural atmosphere?

Cairo was full of cultural movement in the early sixties of the last century, and it was full of serious literary and intellectual forums and seminars. It had what could be called a literary calendar. Every day a symposium was held. There was a symposium of the Egyptian Literary Society, which was run by Farouk Khorshid, Salah Abdel Sabour, and Abdel Qader. Al-Qat, the Modern Literature Group symposium run by Al-Saharti and Khafaji, the Trustees’ symposium headed by Amin Al-Khouly, the Anwar Al-Maadawi symposium, which was held at Indiana Coffee in Dokki Square every Thursday evening, and the Story Club symposium headed by Youssef Al-Sibai, which was held every Wednesday evening, and a short story competition was organized for young people. Its prize is 50 pounds, which was a very large sum at that time, and the first to win it was the writer Muhammad Al-Bissati.

Professor Yahya Haqqi was following my articles, and I went to him and began publishing my articles in the magazine “Al-Majalla” which he heads, and I attended his big salon, and there I met Jamal Hamdan, and Badr al-Din Abu Ghazi, later Minister of Culture, and the leading critic Anwar al-Maadawi was working with me in the magazine. Life in the magazine took me along until Dr. Suhair Al-Qalamawi conspired to expel Yahya Haqqi from the magazine in line with the campaign led by Sadat to close literary magazines at that time.

I got to know the group of the generation of the sixties at a symposium by Naguib Mahfouz, through writing in the Beirut Journal of Literature. I was 21 years old when I was publishing my articles about Naguib Mahfouz, analyzing his novels “The Thief and the Dogs,” “The Quail and the Autumn,” “The Road,” and “The Beggar.”

I joined the Institute of Dramatic Arts, and I was the first in the first batch. A scholarship came from the Soviet Union to study drama and I applied for it, but it went to Fawzi Fahmy on the recommendation of security, as I later learned from the artist Badr al-Din Abu Ghazi, the Minister of Culture at the time, and after that I traveled to Europe in March. 1973 as a 3-month scholarship from the University of Oxford, during which I obtained a 3-year scholarship to study for a doctorate from the University of London, which I joined in October 1973. I did not return to Egypt until 6 years later, holding a doctorate.

Sartre and Abdel Nasser

  • You once said that the French philosopher Sartre had a virtue for you. What merit, since you did not study philosophy and did not meet him?

When I joined the School of Social Studies, I was an employee during the day and a student at night, and I was in the same class with the late writer Salah Issa in 1958-1959. We edited the school magazine together, and we learned the other side of the culture of opposition and underground activity, and we got to know some leftists, until we graduated in 1962. Until we were arrested in 1966 along with many educated youth in Egypt.

At this time, Egypt was preparing for the visit of Jean-Paul Sartre to find out the truth about the Palestinian problem, and Le Monde newspaper published the news of our arrest. As a result, Sartre refused the visit. After that, Lotfi El-Khouly called him and assured him that all the detainees had been released. Sartre came to Egypt in March 1967.

When I visited the Sartre Museum, which was founded by President Mitterrand, I learned from the documents what took place during this visit, and what Sartre said to President Abdel Nasser, and Abdel Nasser promised him to release the detainees before his departure from Egypt, and indeed we were released in March, and the setback was in June 1967.

Two contradictory critics

  • There are a number of Arab critics who excelled in international critical studies, such as Edward Said, Ihab Hassan, Sabri Hafez, and other Arab critics. The question is: What did Arab critics add to the global process of criticism?

First, I see that putting Ihab Hassan with Edward Said in one context is a huge fallacy, because Ihab Hassan is the complete opposite of Edward Said and other Arab intellectuals and critics who tried, with their individual efforts, to contribute to Western culture, or correct Western culture’s vision of our Arab reality.

Ihab Hassan actually left Egypt after studying engineering, and since he became a professional critic, he has been viewed, and he views himself, as an American literary critic. He truly began his brilliant studies, with his book “The Radical Innocent” in 1961 about the contemporary American novel, as if he was participating in The founding of the American novel, and his important research continued with the book “Literature of Silence” 1967, and “The Dismemberment of Orpheus,” then the book “Towards a Postmodern Literature,” then “The Postmodern Gesture” 1979, until his autobiography “The Exodus from Egypt.” It was published in 1985, and contains a kind of deliberate intertextuality with the Book of Exodus in the Torah.

The truth is that Ihab Hassan represents the desire for a complete break with his history in Egypt, and I knew him and Edward Said, and my first acquaintance with him was when he came to give a lecture at Stockholm University, and I was teaching there, and when I approached to get to know him after the end of the lecture, he refused to speak to me in Arabic completely. Secondly, his speech gave me complete certainty that he has no relation to Egypt or its literature. Rather, he is only interested in American literature, and he has an important role in American literature, because he is one of the important critics who undermined the theory of postmodernism and denied his connection to Egypt and any form of Arab culture during his lifetime. His biography and work.

The irony is that Edward Said, who began studying authentic Western and English literature and grew up in an aristocratic environment, tried to put his homeland, Palestine, at the heart of the event, and tried to draw his studies in English literature into his own project as a Palestinian, his great project on Orientalism, which included 4 basic books, the book “ Orientalism." Then, in application of this book, he published his two books, "The Question of Palestine" and "Covering Islam," in which he explains how they talk about Islam in the American media, and culminated in criticizing Orientalism in the book "Culture and Imperialism."

Edward Said's merit was not only in revealing the truth about Orientalism, but also in his destabilizing the position of the Orientalists in their vision of the East, until two very important trends emerged from this project, the first of which was the postcolonial trend, and the second crystallized through what is known as cultural criticism.

Analysis of the Arabic narrative

  • Did you benefit from Edward Said's project, and what did you offer through your research and books for application in the field of critical discourse?

Firstly: with regard to the post-colonial movement, a topic on which I wrote a book that will be published on post-colonial novels by applying it to the works of the Tanzanian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Abd al-Razzaq Qaranah, and on the other hand as a matter of applying the new approach established by Edward Said in dealing with what he was writing. About our culture, and refuting what the Orientalists wrote, I published a large group of researches, and the book “The Formation of Arab Narrative Discourse” included applying completely new methods in analyzing the text, and analyzing an Arabic narrative text. The book was published in 1990, and was translated into Arabic unsuccessfully, and many theses about the emergence of The new literary genres in our Arab culture are still absent from the Arab debate due to the absence of a good translation of my book, and research is still revolving around traditional approaches that consider the new narrative genres to be descended from the Maqamat or imported from the West, and all of this I refuted in this book.

As for my second book published in English, “The Striving to Formulate Identities,” which was chosen by the American academic magazine “Ikhtiyar” as one of the best critical studies, it proposed a new theory in the concept of the short story as an imaginary for formulating individual identity. It also proposed the individual imaginary instead of the collective imaginary presented by the novel. Many of those who worked on the theory of the short story as a literary genre in the world used my book, even though all of the applications mentioned in the book were to the short story in Egypt, from Yahya Haqqi until the generation of the sixties.

  • What was the impact of your immigration and work abroad? Did working there leave an impact on your thinking and intellectual structure as an intellectual, meaning, did your vision differ while you were working in the West than if you had stayed in the East?

Of course, I benefited greatly from my experience in the West, and here it is necessary to mention another Egyptian who contributed to changing the vision of our Arab culture in the Western world, and he is the distinguished Egyptian researcher Muhammad Mustafa Badawi.

He is credited with introducing modern literature as a subject of study into the heart of the ancient citadel of Orientalism, the University of Oxford.

Arab culture and Arabic literature in general were taught in Western universities as one of the literatures of ancient languages, such as Greek and Latin.

This entails an implicit misappropriation that says that the Arabs had a culture that deserved to be studied, but it had disappeared, just as ancient Greek culture or Latin language literature had disappeared.

This is what makes Badawi’s gesture important because he says, through his teaching of modern literature, and his supervision of a number of his English students who have played a role in teaching this literature in England and America, such as Robin Austell and Roger Allan, that the Arabs have an important current presence that is worth studying.

This is something whose importance I have been aware of since the beginning of my educational journey in Britain.

This is because I began to realize early on that Western theoretical knowledge must be absorbed, digested, and redeveloped again through our culture and literature, through the course of our culture, and through the structure of the literary movement and the historical movement. This is the aspect that I believe I contributed to crystallizing. During my studies, which I published in Arabic or English, and also through my supervision of my students who produced something worthy of celebration, this is because my awareness of this implicit perception that focuses on our ancient literatures and ignores our present was part of this old Orientalist perception that Edward Said exposed and overthrew.

Since I began teaching in the West, I have been keen to place our modern literature at the heart of what is known as modern language literatures such as French, Italian, Spanish, and others, and to conduct its study according to the approaches of these new critical literatures of structuralism, feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies approaches.

This is what placed our literature and culture at the heart of contemporary concerns.

There are 4 of my students who are now working as professors in British universities, including a professor from Lebanon who I expect will have a good future in Britain.

  • Are there serious cultural magazines in Egypt or in the Arab world?

I raised this problem as I was preparing to issue “Al-Kalima” magazine. In fact, throughout the course of Arab culture, there were several magazines that unified Arab culture from the ocean to the Gulf. Starting in the 1930s was “Al-Risala” magazine, followed by “Al-Thaqafa” magazine and Taha Hussein’s important magazine, “The Egyptian Writer.” In the 1950s, there was the Lebanese magazine “Adab”, and in the 1950s and 1960s there was also the “Al Majalla” magazine, then “Contemporary Thought”, “Theater”, “Cinema” and a large group of 1960s magazines appeared at the regional and general Arab level, and since Sadat closed all of these literary and cultural magazines in favor of one magazine, Al-Jadeed, headed by Rashad Rushdi, and literary magazines are experiencing their long decline.

When Al-Kalima magazine was published in 2006 on the Internet, it crossed the geographical borders crossed by Camp David, and was able to cross the borders for every reader in Arabic. When I asked Mahmoud Darwish to write in it, he said: “Writing on the Internet is like writing in a toilet. Everyone writes what he wants.” I told him that this is the real reason for its publication, which is to bring the standards of editorial rigor, the selection standards, and the standards of the high-end literary magazine to the Internet space, and therefore it is a magazine, not a website, and it remains like paper magazines that are collected every year and preserved like any important magazine.

  • What do you say about the large institution founded by the artist Farouk Hosni in the Ministry of Culture in Egypt?

    Was it a good innovation that served culture and intellectuals, or was its main goal political propaganda for the regime?

A large part of it - as Farouk Hosni himself used to say - is that he seeks to bring intellectuals into the fold, and the fold implies that there is fodder and animals, and that whenever he feeds the animals and brings them into the fold, it is possible to control cultural reality, and this is a large part of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and that there is no Hegemony must take place without the use of violence, because with the beginning of the use of violence, the ability of any regime to dominate is undermined, and therefore Farouk Hosni was largely successful, through the Experimental Theater Festival in its early years, and after that he completed his plan with the Supreme Council of Culture and his tireless attempts to introduce intellectuals. Barn.

The traitorous intellectual

  • You attacked intellectuals and accused them of treason and of being a major reason for the state of Egypt before and after the revolution. Is there any clarification?

Of course, I do not exonerate them. Rather, they are a large part of this deteriorating reality, because the intellectual is the conscience of his people and the conscience of the reality that emerges from him, especially since we are in a reality in which the intellectual represents a minority of the minority. The percentage of written illiteracy in Egypt is high, then cultural illiteracy is very high, and therefore the intellectual who belongs to a minority Educated, it is a minority capable of playing the role of expressing the silent majority and presenting its future and issues as Taha Hussein did, as he wanted everyone to learn and be active in their societies despite the widespread want and poverty. This is the role of the true intellectual.

But when an intellectual affiliated with a trustworthy system attacks an experienced intellectual and the revolution, his betrayal of the role and message he stood for is proven. Here he betrayed himself, his role, and his country.

Death precedes Nobel

  • Was Edward Said really nominated for the Nobel Prize and almost won?

Dr. Sabri Hafez springs a big surprise and says: Nomination for the Nobel Prize is everyone’s right, and through my work at Stockholm University I learned many secrets about the award. Many Arabs were nominated for the Nobel Prize, but none of them were lucky except Naguib Mahfouz, and I knew that Edward Said was a strong candidate to win the award, and the award council agreed to nominate him, especially due to the absence of an important critic from its ancient history, but he died on September 25, 2003, less than a month before it was announced, so it went to the South African J.M. Coetzee.

  • You follow closely at times and from afar at other times the Arab cultural situation. How do you see the literary situation?

    Is literature in good health or are there influences that hinder its progress?

In fact, my monitoring of the cultural situation has decreased over the past years, but from my humble observation and follow-up, I can say that Arabic literature is in good health and in a very good condition at all levels, and there are many names, and there are always big names who are constantly nominated, even at the Nobel Prize level. Always Arabic names.

Source: Al Jazeera