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November 4, 2020

Interview with Nabil Fahmy

Nabil Fahmy is a former Egyptian Foreign Minister and diplomat. He served as the head of the Egyptian delegation to ACRS as well as the head of Egypt’s delegation to most of the Steering committee meetings

November 4, 2020

Interview with Aly Erfan

Aly Erfan is a former Egyptian diplomat. He served as a member of the Egyptian delegation to ACRS. 

November 2, 2020

Interview with Ariel Levite

Dr. Ariel Levite is a former Israeli senior official. He served as a member of the Israeli delegation to ACRS and the inter-ministerial committee on arms control. 

October 6, 2020

Interview with Hesham Youssef

Hesham Youssef is an Egyptian diplomat. He served on the Egyptian team, working on the Steering Committee and in three working groups (REDWG, water, and the environment).

November 2, 2020

Interview with Shimon Stein

Shimon Stein is a former Israeli diplomat. He served as a member of the Israeli delegation to ACRS. 

September 22, 2020

Interview with Michael Moodie

Michael Moodie is a former US diplomat. He served as a member of the US delegation to ACRS. 

October 28, 2020

Interview with Peter Jones

Peter Jones is a former Canadian diplomat. He served as a member of the Canadian delegation to ACRS. 

October 27, 2020

Interview with David Ivry

David Ivry was a Major General in the Israeli Defense Forces. He was the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, a commander of the Israeli Air Force, and director of the Israeli National Security Council. He served as the head of the Israeli delegation to ACRS.

1938

Taha Hussein, 'The Future of Culture in Egypt' (Excerpts)

The text printed here, an English translation, is constituted by two excerpts from the famous yet controversial Arabic book Mustaqbal al-thaqafa fi Misr (1938) [The Future of Culture in Egypt],by Taha Hussein (1889-1973).

Born in a village in Upper Egypt and blind from the age of three, Hussein was first educated in his village school. He went on to the famous Azhar Islamic university in Cairo, to the newly founded Egyptian (Cairo) University, where he received a doctorate in 1914, and to Montpellier and the Sorbonne, which in 1917 awarded him another doctorate. For one thing, Hussein was a powerful educational institution builder, as Hussam Ahmed’s The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt (2021) shows. Thus, he became a Cairo University professor in 1919, teaching Islamic history and Arabic literature, and he was the university’s Dean of Arts (1928, 1930-32 and 1936-39), a member and then president of the Arabic  Language Academy (1940-73), and Egypt’s Minister of Culture (1950-52). For another thing, Hussein was a supremely influential intellectual and a specialist of premodern and modern Arabic literature. Thus, from 1926 to 1967 he published the three-volume autobiographical novel Al-Ayyam [The Days], and in 1926 wrote Fi al-shi‘r al-jahili [On Pre-Islamic Poetry (2016)], which he revised as Fi al-adab al-jahili [On Pre-Islamic Literature (1927)] after traditionalists (unsuccessfully) took him to court. And although helping to introduce thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre to Arabs as the 1945-1948 editor of the journal al-Katib al-Misri, he belonged to the Arab Renaissance (nahda) literati who were from the 1940s accused by many younger intellectuals for not supporting committed art; in turn, he defended the necessity of not delimiting what art should be or do.

His 1938 text The Future of Culture in Egypt, excerpted here in a 1975 English translation, was very detailed—it included dozens of suggestions about how to improve Egypt’s educational system—and quite complex. On the one side, Hussein confidently took Europe to task in the main body of the work, and emphasized the need to thoroughly know one’s own culture and history. But on the other side, he saw European empires as still very powerful; thus, a lagging Egypt should embrace European concepts—an approach internalizing (self-interested) European Orientalist views, as Stephen Sheehi has argued in The Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (2004). In a sense, both of these two sides were framed by his work’s immediate historical context: the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. Maximizing Egypt’s sovereignty and allowing it to become a League of Nations member in 1937, this treaty showed strength—but also continued weakness vis-à-vis Britain, whose troops remained in the Suez Canal zone. In the same vein, the introduction’s argument about Egypt’s geo-civilizational position accepted the discourse of a dominant Europe—only to make Egypt its geographical and historical pioneer by giving it great weight vis-à-vis Ancient Greece, which was conventionally seen as the cradle of European civilization.