the continuing tradition of arab humanism

1. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13 (2006/2007), 3–20.2. Although, on p. 5, n. 12, I referenced Michael Kreutz’ article on the 1904 render-

ing of the Iliad into Arabic, ‘Sulaymān Al-Bustānī’s Arabische Ilias: Ein Beispiel fürArabischen Philhellenismus im ausgehenden Osmanischen Reich’, Die Welt des Is-lams 44 (2004), 155–94.

Michael Kreutz, Arabischer Humanismus in der Neuzeit, Philosophy in in-ternational context 1 = Philosophie im internationalen Kontext 1 (Berlin:Lit-Verlag 2007), 140 pp.

In 2006, this journal published an article by myself, entitled ‘The Arab“Cultural Awakening (Nahḍa)”, 1870–1950, and the Classical Tradition’.1 Init, I discussed how Arab intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries engaged with the classical past. Recently, I discovered thatMichael Kreutz had dealt with the same topic in the short book under re-view here. Neither of us knew of the other’s work, so that we both ap-proached the issue largely independently of each other.2 Unfortunately,Kreutz’s book is not well distributed in the English-speaking world, al-though it clearly deserves to be read. I would like to state at the outset thatI learned a lot from it. The addition of such serious scholarly work to thefield of classical receptions in the modern Arab world is most welcome.

Kreutz’s book consists of a concise introduction, four article-lengthchapters, and a short ‘epilog’. In his introduction, Kreutz defines what hemeans by ‘Arab humanism (Arabischer Humanismus)’ [p. 9]:

[Wir wollen] im folgenden unter ‘Arabischem Humanismus’ die Summederjenigen intellektuellen Entwürfe verstehen, die die weltliche Sphäregegenüber der religiösen aufzuwerten beabsichtigten und weniger vonder Religion als eher vom Individuum her denken.

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 95-106.

The Continuing Tradition of Arab Humanism

DOI 10.1007/s12138-010-0167-6

96 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / March 2010

In the following, we want to understand by ‘Arab humanism’ thesum of those intellectual endeavours that aim at strengtheningthe secular sphere against the religious one, and which base theirthought on the individual rather than religion.

He continues to argue that three factors are necessary to talk of humanism:‘the translation of a foreign human form into one’s own’; the wish to un-derstand the human individual in all his or her complexity, irrespectiveof religion3; and finally the adoption of examples from the past, especiallythe classical past, leading to secularisation. For Kreutz, four individuals inparticular illustrate humanism thus defined, and he discusses them in thefollowing chapters. These prominent Arab intellectuals all played a sig-nificant role in the transmission of Classical literature into the Arabic-speaking world, and they are: Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ at-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–73), famousfor his translations from French into Arabic, and his description of Paris;Sulaimān al-Bustānī, a high-ranking Lebanese official, known for havingproduced the first Arabic version of the Iliad; Ṭāhā Ḥusain (1889–1973),the most influential Egyptian intellectual of the twentieth century; andTawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987), the most important Egyptian playwright.

Aṭ-Ṭahṭāwī symbolises the intellectual, cultural, and scientific cu-riosity which characterised the era of Muḥammad ʿAlī (r. 1805–48) andhis immediate successors as rulers of Egypt. Aṭ-Ṭahṭāwī went to Paris aspart of a student ‘delegation (biʿṯa)’ in the 1820s.4 Soon after his return, hebecame head of the newly founded Egyptian School of Languages(Madrasat al-ʾAlsun), which trained generations of future translators in themajor European tongues. His contribution to classical receptions is two-fold. First, he translated Fénelon’s Adventures of Telemachus (Les aventuresde Télémaque) into Arabic, thus acquainting the public with a classicaltheme. The Arabic title Mawāqiʿ alʾaflāk fī waqāʾiʿ Tilīmāk, literally meaningsomething like ‘the regions of the skies where Telemachus’s deeds oc-curred’, is a clever combination of rhyme and paronomasia.5 Second, he ar-gued, like many of his contemporaries, for an engagement with theEuropean, and therefore also the Greek and Roman, past. In the area ofpolitical ideas, he views the Greeks through the lens of French enlighten-ment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau. For instance, he sharesthe latter’s admiration for Lycurgus’ Sparta, where the citizens were totallydevoted to their state.

The second chapter, on Sulaimān al-Bustānī’s Iliad, is largely an ex-tended summary of Kreutz’s earlier article on this subject.6 He places al-Bustānī’s Arabic version in the context of other Mediterranean renderings

3. For these first two points, he quotes Walter Rüegg, ‘Humanistische Elitenbildungim antiken Rom und in der europäischen Renaissance’, in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt,Kulturen der Achsenzeit II, Teil 3: Buddhismus, Islam, Altägypten, westliche Kultur(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 358–84.

4. See his account An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–31) (London:Saqi, 2004).

5. See Hermann Reckendorf, Über Paronomasie in den semitischen Sprachen (Giessen:Alfred Töpelmann, 1909).

6. See above n. 2.

Review Articles 97

7. See H. I. Bell, ‘Kenyon, Sir Frederic George (1863–1952)’, Oxford Dictionary of Na-tional Biography, rev. May 2006 Online Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34292, accessed 9 Nov 2009].

8. Another famous case is that of Bacchylides. The English Orientalist Sir Ernest Al-fred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857–1934) purloined the papyrus, illegally smug-gling it out of Egypt; see David Fearn, ‘Imperialist Fragmentation and theDiscovery of Bacchylides’, in M. Bradley (ed.), Classics and Imperialism in the BritishEmpire (Oxford: Oxford University Press) [in press]; see also M. Smith, ‘Budge, SirErnest Alfred Thompson Wallis (1857–1934)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biogra-phy, rev. May 2006 Online Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32161, accessed 4 Dec 2009].

9. Sidney Glazer, The Future of Culture in Egypt (Washington, D.C.: American Coun-cil of Learned Societies, 1954), ch. 34–5.

such as the translations into modern Greek (dēmotikḗ) by Iakovos Polylas;into Ottoman Turkish by Ömer Seyfeddin; and into Hebrew by Saul Tcher - nichowsky. Kreutz goes on to paraphrase the main ideas of al-Bustānī’spreface, focussing notably on the many parallels between Greek and Ara-bic poetry which the latter endeavoured to establish. A recurrent trend ofKreutz’s approach can be illustrated here. Kreutz is always keen to relatethe engagement with the classics to the prevalent political and social sit-uation. Al-Bustānī, for instance, praised the Ottoman empire after thetanzīmāt (the modernising reforms culminating in the first constitutionalera of 1876); he applauded the tolerant millet system which afforded dif-ferent religious communities largely equal rights in some parts of the Em-pire such as his native Lebanon. Kreutz [pp. 43–4] links al-Bustānī’spolitical inclinations to the latter’s interpretations of the Homeric text. Forinstance, al-Bustānī favours the Greeks for following a system of ‘consul-tative rule (al-ḥukm aš-šurawī)’, which is better than that by a ‘tyrannicaland totalitarian monarch (al-malik al-istibdādī al-muṭlaq)’.

Politics also play an important role in the next chapter on Ṭāhā Ḥu-sain. After a very traditional Islamic education, Ḥusain obtained two doc-torates, one from the newly founded University of Cairo and another fromthe Nouvelle Sorbonne in Paris. In the 1920s and ’30s, he taught first an-cient history, then Arabic literature at Cairo University, and translated asignificant amount of Greek texts into Arabic. In 1921 he published hisArabic rendering of Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution (Ἀθηναίων πολιτεία),in which the author describes the political order of classical Athens. Thistext had been discovered in Egypt’s sands, but was brought to Britain andedited there by the papyrologist Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952).7 For Ḥu-sain, this was doubly defeating. He keenly felt the loss to his homeland ofthis important source, which like so many others was taken away by colo-nial powers.8 Moreover, he had a sense of shame that he had to go to Eu-rope to learn about it, although Egypt’s culture was so closely connectedwith that of Greece in general, and Athens more particularly. In a laterwork, the Future of Education in Egypt (Mustaqbal aṯ-ṯaqāfa fī Miṣr), he wasto urge his compatriots to train a new generation of Egyptian scholars whowould be able to read Greek and Latin.9 Only thus trained would they beable to gain intellectual independence from their colonial overlords, whothen still dominated the cultural institutions and universities.


The content of the Athenian Constitution also offered a political modelfavoured by Ḥusain: that of democracy. For Aristotle focusses in particu-lar on the democratic system reintroduced after the so-called ‘rule of thethirty tyrants’. Their oligarchic coup of 404–3 BC was supported by a for-eign power, Sparta. In the heated days of early 1920s Egypt, when a con-stitutional monarchy had just been imposed by the British, Aristotle’s viewof Athens offered a poignant alternative. Kreutz also discusses Ḥusain’stranslations of Sophocles, and paraphrases some key texts of vulgarisa-tion. For instance, Ḥusain wrote a work entitled Leaders in Thought (Qādatal-fikr), in which he provides short introductions to the lives and ideas ofHomer, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as Alexander the Great andJulius Caesar, two ‘leaders’ who were instrumental in promoting the ideaof an all-encompassing empire where Greek thought dominated. Ḥusainadmires Socrates in particular for his method of submitting everything torational scrutiny. In the mid-1920s, he himself applied the principles ofradical doubt to Pre-Islamic poetry, and thus triggered a controversy, inwhich he only narrowly escaped being convicted of apostasy.

Kreutz’s last chapter is devoted to Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, the leadingEgyptian playwright. Before turning to him, however, Kreutz briefly dis-cusses Aḥmad Luṭfī as-Sayyid (1872–1963), an important journalist andlawyer, who also translated a number of Aristotelian texts into Arabic,namely the Nicomachean Ethics; the Politics; and On the Heavens. He did notrender them directly from the Greek (as he did not know this language),but used English and French intermediaries. Yet these efforts were ex-tremely important, as Ṭāhā Ḥusain himself attests, in bringing these Greekworks to an Arabic reading public. There had been, to be sure, medievalArabic versions,10 but they generally baffled the modern lay reader by theircomplexity and outmoded vocabulary.

As-Sayyid’s contemporary Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm wrote numerous plays,many of which also draw on classical sources, such as his Praxa I (1939, in-spired by Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen); Pygmalion (1942) and Isis (1955).11

Kreutz considers two plays in particular: The People of the Cave (ʾAhl al-kahf; 1933); and King Oedipus (Al-Malik ʾŪdīb; 1949). The former drama-tises a story found in the Qurʾān, sūra 18, called ‘The Cave (al-kahf)’.12 Agroup of young people enter a cave and sleep for more than three hun-dred years. When they awake, they find themselves in a different world.This episode resembles that of the so-called ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’,mentioned in Syriac martyrological texts. The latter play, Oedipus theKing, tells the familiar tale of the Sophoclean original, but with important

10. See, for instance, Uwe Vagelpohl, Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East: the Syriac and Ara-bic Translation and Commentary Tradition, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science76 (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

11. For translations of these and other plays, see William M. Hutchins, Plays, Prefaces& Postscripts of Tawfiq al-Hakim, 2 vols (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1981–84); and A. Khedry, N. Costandi, Tewfik el Hakim: Théâtre arabe (Paris: NouvellesÉditions Latines, 1954).

12. For a plot summary, see William M. Hutchins, Tawfiq al-Hakim: a Reader’s Guide(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 108.

Review Articles 99

13. See Marvin Carlson (ed.), The Arab Oedipus: Four Plays from Egypt and Syria (NewYork: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications, 2005).

14. I am providing some references to English and French translations in the notesabove and below.

variants.13 It also comprises a fascinating preface by al-Ḥakīm, in which heelaborates on his motives for choosing classical themes, and how Greekand Arabic drama and poetry ought to be linked just as Greek and Arabicphilosophy and science had been. Al-Ḥakīm insists that engaging with theGreek source is absolutely necessary, but wants to do so whilst retaininghis own religious (i.e., Islamic) tradition and outlook. He argues that he isactually closer to the Greek original than are modern European authors,who have lost their religious awe. Whereas his compatriots and the Greeksare constantly concerned with the metaphysical world, that of the Gods orGod, modernists have been disenchanted and lack the religious affinitywhich the former share.

In his epilogue, Kreutz reiterates that he sees the Arab nahḍa as a trulyhumanist movement, which favours individuality, secularism, Cartesiandoubt and unfettered intellectual enquiry. Yet, Kreutz argues that this proj-ect came to an infelicitous end from the 1950s onwards [p. 113]:

Die Nachkriegszeit bis in die jüngste Gegenwart steht unter einemneuen Stern; das Projekt eines ‘Reformislam’ überdauerte die nahḍa.Der Arabische Humanismus war angetreten, dem Individuumgegenüber der Allmacht des Religiösen mehr Autonomie zu verschaf-fen und die eigene Kultur als Teil der Menschheitsgeschichte zu be-greifen, die nicht vom Islam her gegründet ist, in der der Islam aberseinen würdigen Platz findet. Woran ist dieser Humanismus geschei -t ert?The post-war period until the most recent times marks a differentage; the project of ‘Islamic Reform’ survived the nahḍa. The Arabhumanism set out to provide the individual with greater freedomin the face of religious omnipotence and to conceive of one’s ownculture as part of human history, which is not founded on Islam,but in which Islam occupies a dignified position. Why did thishumanism fail?

Kreutz continues to claim that both secularism and humanism faded. Arabthinking allegedly was ‘hardly capable to emerge from the shadow of re-ligion’ [p. 114]. In a stereotypical way, Kreutz pits secularism and progressagainst religion.

Kreutz’s book is obviously much richer than this brief overview canshow. There are some shortcomings and points where I disagree with theauthor. I shall not mention the copy-editing which, at times, could havebenefited from another pair of eyes (especially in the foreign languagequotations and the references). The primary sources favour Arabic origi-nals, some of which have been translated into modern European lan-guages. The uninitiated reader would undoubtedly have welcomedreferences to these translations.14 But more substantively, I disagree withsome of Kreutz’s generalisations in the introduction and the epilogue. In


the second part of this review article, I shall discuss these more generalpoints.

Arab or Islamic Humanism is a complex concept.15 As we have seenabove, Kreutz focusses on the secular aspect of humanism in his intro-duction and the epilog. Yet the key figures of this Arab humanism, ṬāhāḤusain and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, were by no means atheists, even if some oftheir detractors accused them of apostasy. Nor is the idea that religion ispitted against humanism correct for the European Renaissance: fromDante to Erasmus and Thomas More, few humanists were atheists. Fur-thermore Greek and Islamic sciences were not diametrically opposed toeach other in the medieval Arab world; they rather overlapped and inter-locked, as Dimitri Gutas and others have persuasively argued.16 Andnowadays, religious interests do not necessarily preclude humanist ones.For instance, the prominent Egyptian classicist Aḥmad ʿEtmān partici-pated not only in the translation of the Iliad into Arabic,17 but also of theQurʾān into Modern Greek.18

I believe that by somewhat modifying Kreutz’ three criteria for hu-manism, one can arrive at a better theoretical framework to describe the in-terests, aspirations and activities of the Arab intellectuals discussed byKreutz. The first, and more narrow, criterion is the study of Greek andLatin, and of the authors who wrote in these languages. The second com-prises a creative engagement with the classical authors. Thirdly, human-ism obviously puts the individual human being at the centre: man’sintellectual inquiry and cultural creativity should not be shackled by therules of superior entities, be they god, the state, or the party. Humanismthus understood is by no means dead in the Arab world today, as I shallnow argue.

First, anyone who knows the Classics scene in today’s Egypt can onlybe surprised by Kreutz’ contention that Ṭāhā Ḥusain’s ideas have goneout of fashion. For Classics as an academic subject is thriving in Egypt:hundreds of freshers embark on degrees in Greek and Latin each year.Even such strongholds of Islamic orthodoxy as Al-Azhar University nowteach Classical Studies, and the same is true for most large Egyptian uni-versities. It is precisely the foreign universities such as the American Uni-versity in Cairo, the German University in Cairo, or the French Universityin Cairo that do not offer any instruction in Greek and Latin. When I at-tended the annual Classics conference held at Cairo University in 2007 and

15. See Mohammed Arkoun, Humanisme et islam: combats et propositions, ser. Étudesmusulmanes (Paris: Vrin, 2005); Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 2003); Joel L. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam:the Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age (2nd rev. ed, Leiden: Brill, 1992); GeorgeMakdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West with SpecialReference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).

16. See, for instance, Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge,1997), 166–75.

17. Aḥmad ʿEtmān (ed.), Al-Iliyāḏa (The Iliad), al-Mašrūʿ al-qaumī li-t-tarǧama (TheNational Translation Project) 712 — Mīrāṯ at-tarǧama (Translation Heritage) 1(Cairo: al-Maǧlis al-Aʿlā li-ṯ-ṯaqāfa, 2004).

18. Aḥmad ʿEtmān et al, Holy Quran (The meanings of) (Athens 1987).

Review Articles 101

19. The proceedings, containing only a selection of the papers read, have been pub-lished as ʾ Awrāq Klāsīkīya (Classical Papers) 7: The Proceedings of the Conference Mod-ern Trends in Greek and Latin Studies, ed. O. Fayez Riyadh (Cairo, 2007); and ʾAwrāqKlāsīkīya (Classical Papers) 8, ed. O. Fayez Riyadh (Cairo, 2008).

20. This play is contained in Carlson (ed.), The Arab Oedipus (as in n. 13).21. Published as ʿAlī Aḥmad Bā Kaṯīr, ʾŪzīrīs: masraḥīya fī arbaʿat fuṣūl (Osiris: a Play

in Four Acts) (Cairo: aš-Šarika al-ʿArabīya li-ṭ-Ṭibaʿa wa-n-Našr, 1959).22. Louis ʿ Awaḍ (tr.), Agamemnon by Aeschylus (ʾAǧāmimnūn li-ʾIsḫīlūs) (Cairo: Dār al-

Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1966); id. (tr.), Libation Bearers by Aeschylus (Ḥāmilāt al-Qarābīn li-ʾIsḫīlūs) (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1967); id. (tr.), Eumenides by Aeschylus (Aṣ-Ṣāfiḥātli-ʾIsḫīlūs) (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1969); id., Nuṣūṣ al-naqd al-adabī al-yūnānī (GreekTexts on Literary Criticism) (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1965). The last item contains atranslation of Aristophanes’ Frogs.

23. I owe this reference to Mohammad N. Almohanna; see his forthcoming paper ‘TheReception of the Ichneutai in the Modern Arabic World’, note 7.

24. See Mieke Kolk, Freddy Decreus (eds.), The Performance of the Comic in Arabic The-ater: Cultural Heritage, Western Models, Postcolonial Hybridity, Documenta: tijdschriftvoor theater; mededelingen van het documentatiecentrum voor dramatische kunst, Gent23 (2005), no. 3; and Marina Kotzamani, ‘Lysistrata on the Arabic Stage’, PAJ: AJournal of Performance and Art, 83 (Volume 28, Number 2), May 2006, 13–18.

25. See also, Muhammad M. Badawi, ‘Arabic Drama: Early Developments’, in: id.,The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1992), 329–57, on pp. 372–3; and Hutchins, Tawfiq al-Hakim: a Reader’s Guide (as in n. 12), 174–5.

2008, hundreds of delegates listened to dozens of papers, ranging fromHomeric themes in Sappho to late antique Greek medical texts.19 There-fore, Ṭāhā Ḥusain’s vision to have Classics firmly established as a funda-mental subject in the Arts faculties in Egypt has largely been realised.

Second, many Arab authors in the period after the second world wardrew again and again on classical themes and reworked various stories,books, and plays. Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm himself continued to write politicaldrama in the 1950s: for instance, he published the second part of his Praxa,an adaptation of Aristophanes’s Assemblywomen (which we shall discussshortly in greater detail). But he is by no means the last one to base histheatre on Classical themes. Aḥmad Bākaṯīr (1910–69) followed directly inal-Ḥakīm’s footsteps by writing two plays, The Tragedy of Oedipus (1949)20

and Osiris (1955).21 The critic Louis ʿAwaḍ translated plays by Euripidesand Aristophanes in the 1960s.22 A steady stream of other works appearedin World Theatre Series published by the Kuwaiti National Council forCulture, Arts and Letters since the late 1960s.23 In the 1970s, Amīn Salāma,a graduate of Cairo’s Classics department, translated Aristophanes’ Lysis-trata. And, to mention a post-9/11 example, Lenin ar-Ramlī (El Ramly) setan adaptation of this play, called Peace of Women, in pre-invasion Iraq.24

One could mention many other plays drawing on the Classics pub-lished in Arabic or performed on the Arab stage. I shall just highlight oneplay by Aristophanes, his Assemblywomen, that served as an importantsource of inspiration for Arab playwrights throughout the second half ofthe twentieth century. We already mentioned that Tawfīk al-Ḥakīm wrotea play called Praxa which is based on Aristophanes’ work.25 He publishedit in two parts. Praxa I appeared in 1939, at the end of a tumultuous decade


in political terms. The play is set in classical Athens, in which any readeror spectator immediate recognises contemporary Cairo. In act I, Praxagoraleads a group of women, who disguise themselves as men and take partin the assembly. They want to end the men’s political folly by hook or bycrook, and manage to get Praxagora elected as leader of the government.The assembly meeting itself is not staged, but rather foreshadowed in apreparatory meeting of the women (scene 1), and reported by one of themale citizens, Chremes, to his neighbour, Blepyrus, who is alsoPraxagora’s husband.

Already in the first scene of this act, al-Ḥakīm’s criticism is only thinlyveiled. Praxagora, for instance, says in her speech:26

My heart bleeds, because I see that corruption has crept into thebody of the state like a slow death. I see that the state has put itsaffairs into the hands of presidents [ruʾasāʾ] who only care forthemselves, not the state. […] No man has yet appeared whowould make the state a single circle at the centre of which is thepublic benefit [an-nafʿ al-ʿāmm], and who would then removehimself only to watch over it from far, like a God.In the second act, we see Praxa installed as the ruler in the palace. Dif-

ferent factions of the people make demands on her, and she does not havethe courage to disappoint them, promising them contrary things. She isalso under the spell of the beautiful general Hieronymus, who urges herto spend more money on the military and to go to war with Sparta. Sheeven retires with him to her boudoir, fainting to discuss the affairs of thestate. Praxa also puts her friends and family in high placed and lucrativepositions. At the end of act II, a disgruntled crowd appears, requestingregime change. At the beginning of the next act, set in a jail cell, we learnthat Hieronymus has seized the power. Hippocrates, the philosopher, whohad previously advised Praxogora, is imprisoned. Praxa first comes to seehim, and they are later joined by Hieronymus. All three discuss the mer-its of different types of government. For Hieronymus, Praxa representedanarchy, and Hieronymus barbarism. The latter praises the merits of histype of government in no uncertain terms:27

HIERONYMUS: I am order [an-niẓām]! Since I have seized the reinsof power, have you heard a single faction proffer a request? orhas anyone praised an opinion? or has any mouth opened tocry? or has anybody raised his voice to shout a slogan? All thatis past. The age of the parties has come to an end. The differ-ences, struggles, and competitions have been wiped out. I havebrought together the whole nation, and united the country’svoice. Everything is now as if one. The people are like one in-dividual.

THE PHILOSOPHER [i.e., Hippocrates]: It is you!

26. Tawfīk al-Ḥakīm, Brāksā aw Muškilat al-ḥukm (Cairo: Dār aš-Šurūq, 2008), p. 20; p.33 (tr. A. Khedry, N. Costandi, as in n. 11).

27. pp. 58–9 (Arabic text as in n. 26); p. 56 (tr. A. Khedry, N. Costandi, as in n. 11).

Review Articles 103

28. p. 9 (Arabic text as in n. 26).29. pp. 114–15 (Arabic text as in n. 26); p. 87 (tr. A. Khedry, N. Costandi, as in n. 11).

HIERONYMUS: Yes! It is I. There is nothing else but I; no wish butmine. And I will give the people with this hand the most eter-nal glory.

PRAXA[GORA]: And what is this glory?HIERONYMUS: Triumph and victory!

Hippocrates, the philosopher, argues that the best type of governmentwould be to have all three, Hieronymus, Praxa, and himself, rule togetherin equal balance. But Hieronymus dismisses this idea, and has Praxa joinHieronymus in jail at the end of the act.

This was the end of the play as it was published in 1939. In his pref-ace to the 1960 edition of the play, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm laconically states:28

Praxa or the Problem of Government first appeared in 1939 in threeacts only. At that time, it would not have been easy [lam yatayas-sar] to publish more than that. After it had been translated [intoFrench] to be published in Paris in 1954, it appeared complete forthe first time.

A short summary of the second part, consisting of acts IV to VI, will showwhy publication was difficult at that time.

In act four, Hieronymus has lost the war against Sparta, and fears thewrath of the people. He recalls Praxa and Hippocrates from prison in thehope that they can help. During their deliberations, Blepyrus, Praxa’s hus-band, arrives, and the three decide that it would be best to make him king.The three, Praxa, Hippocrates, and Hieronymus, hope that they can eas-ily control the gullible husband who is under his wife’s spell. He ascendsto the throne and is acclaimed by the people. In act five, however, we seethe three together in prison. For other people gained Blepyrus’ confidence,and persuaded him to have the former rulers thrown into jail. Finally in actsix, Chremes, Blepyrus’ former neighbour and current advisor, conductsa show trial against the three in front of the people. They are not accusedof betraying the country, as they first think, but of adultery. The trial turnssour for Chremes, however, when Hieronymus tries to persuade the peo-ple that Blepyrus is weak, and his regime corrupt:29

HIERONYMUS (shouting): I say that these people alone are dupedtoday. O Athenians! Search a little in your heads, and you willfind the answer. Think a moment and it will become clear thatthey betray you and rob you. It is they who keep you occupiedwith a small and paltry matter which does not concern you, sothat you do not become aware of greater matters which touchyour rights and your interests directly. It is high time that youpay attention. It is high time to observe the hands which fiddlewith your pockets in darkness.


Chremes attempts to calm the populace, and severely inveighs against Hi-eronymus:30

CHREMES (through his teeth): So be it. Since you wanted it so, thenlisten, Hieronymus. You were an absolute ruler [ḥākim muṭlaq]over Athens. And what have you done for its people? You de-prived them of their freedoms, their possessions, their food, andtheir sons. You threw all this away for a war through which yousupported your rule and built, as you believed, your glory.

Finally, Hippocrates, the philosopher, instigates the people to governthemselves. Since Praxa, who just tried to please everybody, Hieronymus,the military dictator, and Blepyrus, the feeble and gullible king, all failed,the people themselves should seize power. He addresses them directly:

O people, can you not walk one path or another yourselves?Then, where are you? What do you do? Do you always sit likethis? You observe, and listen, and shout? You may be excused forthis, if you have in front of you one of the shrewd snakecharmers[…] But only swindlers [daǧǧālūn] and pickpockets [naššālūn] areleft. Then what is the wisdom in sitting around? What are youwaiting for?

In the end, the people storm to the palace, and with them Hippocrates.Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm expressly states that he took Aristophanes as his

model for this play. Here is not the place to explore the relationship be-tween the two plays. Suffice it to say that the first act follows the Greeksource at times very closely, but as the action unfolds in the Arabic play, itdeparts further and further from the original.31 To return to our main point:the history of this play itself already casts a doubt over Kreutz’ idea thathumanism declined in the post-war period. For it was only after the Julyrevolution in 1952 that the second part of the play could appear, with itsintense criticism of the rulers who fleece the population. Moreover, onewonders whether the legal setting in act six does not also represent a thinlyveiled rebuke of the show trials common under various regimes of thetime. And although al-Ḥakīm may not have agreed with this interpreta-tion at the time, Egypt’s first president, Ǧamāl ʿAbd an-Naṣir, appears toshare many traits with general Hieronymus, especially when one looks atit with the hindsight of Egypt’s crushing defeat in 1967 and its pyrrhic vic-tory of 1973.

30. p. 116 (Arabic text as in n. 26); p. 88 (tr. A. Khedry, N. Costandi, as in n. 11).31. The resemblances are strongest in the first act, where the protagonist is called

Praxagora; in acts II–VI, al-Ḥakīm shortens this to Praxa, thus hinting at the greaterliberty which he takes with the Greek source. – See my forthcoming article “TheArabs and Aristophanes, Menander among the Muslims: Greek Humour in theMedieval and Modern Middle East,” in Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Ancient Comedy andReception: Studies in the Classical Tradition of Comedy from Aristophanes to the Twenty-First Century, Dedicated to Jeffrey J. Henderson, Boston University Studies in theClassical Tradition 1/2 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011).

Review Articles 105

32. Aḥmad ʿEtmān, Al-Ḥakīm lā yamšī fī z-zaffa, Maṭbūʿāt al-Hayʾa al-ʿāmma li-quṣūraṯ-ṯaqāfa 31 (Cairo: Šarikat al-ʾAmal li-ṭ-ṭibāʿa wa-n-našr, 1999). This play has re-cently become available in French: Ahmed Etman, Al-Hakim ne suit pas le cortège,tr. Fatma Khalil M. El-Dessouki, Publicaciones del Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Is-lámicos en Madrid (Madrid: Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos, 2008).

33. ʿĀlam al-Kitāb (Book World), July-August-September 1988.34. See the preface pp. 38–42 (French tr.).35. Dalia Basiouny, ‘Millions wasted on lavish reworking of “Praxa”’, Daily News

Egypt, 24 July 2009, available at http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=23310 [accessed 9 November 2009].

36. Peter E. Pormann, ‘The Arabic Homer: An Untold Story’, Classical and Modern Lit-erature 27 (2008), 27–44.

Be that as it may, the story of Praxagora in Arabic does not end in the1950s, nor even with al-Ḥakīm’s death in 1987. For shortly afterwards, togive just one example, the Egyptian classicist, theatre critic, and play-wright Aḥmad ʿEtmān (b. 1945) wrote a new version of Praxa, entitled Al-Ḥakīm Does Not Follow the Common Crowd (Al-Ḥakīm lā yamšī fī z-zaffa).32 Init, al-Ḥakīm, on his deathbed, slips into a hallucinatory dream, in whichhe encounters Aristophanes and discusses his play with him. The two thenattend the rehearsal of a different version of Praxa where Praxa is marriedto Pedro. Through the clever use of self-reference and allusion, ʿEtmānthus constructs an updated criticism of Egyptian society. The play wasoriginally published in 1988,33 and was produced in Luxor in July 1990,and then twice in 1991: first in somewhat difficult conditions at the Sāmirtheatre in Cairo, and then at the sumptuous Cairo Opera house.34

Finally, I would just like to mention a lavish production of a new mu-sical Praxa by Nādir Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn (Nader Salah Eddin), which was per-formed on the Main Stage of the Cairo Opera House at the end of July,2009. It featured ‘a cast of 62 actors and dancers, in addition to the six maincharacters, including the star singer, film star Boshra.’35 This continual andenduring interest in Praxagora, the heroine of Aristophanes’ Assembly-women, suffices to show that the active and creative engagement with theClassics in the Arab world is far from declining. This conclusion is sup-ported by the large number of translations and adaptations of Classicaltexts which have appeared since the second world war. For instance, onlyin this decade no fewer than three Arabic versions of the Iliad have beenpublished, two of them complete and unabridged; and older ones havebeen reprinted.36 Thus the reception of the Greek past has increased ratherthan decreased during the last decades.

Third, critical debate about cultural identity, social reality, and politi-cal aspirations certainly continues in the modern Arab world. To takeagain Egypt as an example, the journalistic landscape is nowadays cer-tainly more diverse than it was during the 1920s and ’30s. In the mid-1920s, Ṭāhā Ḥusain was dragged through the courts for daring to arguethat the time-honoured Pre-Islamic poetry was a forgery of later times. Inthe 1960s, Louis ʿAwaḍ (1915–1990), Ḥusain’s pupil and a prominent in-tellectual and literary critic in his own right, fiercely fought for his right tointerpret Arabic and Islamic intellectual history in the light of the Greeklegacy. And in the 1990s, Naṣr Ḥāmid ʾAbū Zaid went into exile after


being declared an apostate for his view that the Qurʾān is a text revealedin a context and should thus be interpreted.37

Here is obviously not the place to discuss religious and intellectualfreedom in the Arab world. Yet the idea that humanism was alive in thefirst half of the twentieth century, and now is dead flies in the face of theavailable evidence. The engagement with the classics, whether throughscholarship, literature, or culture, currently appears to be at a peak. I thinkthat if we were to compile an inventory of all Arabic translations and adap-tations of Greek and Latin literary texts, we would probably find thatmany more have been produced in the time after the Second World Warthan in the modern period before it. Finally, challenges against religious or-thodoxy continue, as the examples of Louis ʿAwad, Naṣr Ḥāmid ʾAbūZaid, Mohamed Arkoun, and others clearly demonstrate.38 Therefore, it isstrange that Kreutz can speak of ‘a capitulation of humanist thought inthe face of the traditionalists’ claim of religious omnipotence (eine Kapitu-lation humanistischen Denkens vor dem Allmachtsanspruch religiöser Tradi-tionalisten)’ (p. 113).

Despite these differences in opinion about historical facts and theirinterpretation, I would like to stress that this book will be of immense in-terest to anyone wanting to study classical reception in a non-Europeansetting. I disagree with the generalisations that Kreutz offers mostly in theintroduction and the epilogue. But after all, they only occupy a small (ifsignificant) part of his argument. For the age of the Nahḍa, the Arabic ‘Re-naissance’ of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Kreutz’work provides rich details about how Arab intellectuals studied, trans-lated and interpreted Greek texts; and how they often resorted to the clas-sical past as a referential model in their anti-colonial struggle. It can onlybe hoped that this attractively priced book (€17.90) will find a wide read-ership.

Peter E. PormannDepartment of Classics & Ancient History

University of Warwick

37. I have discussed these cases more fully in a recent article in this journal: ‘Classicsand Islam: From Homer to al-Qāʿida’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition16 (2009), 197–233.

38. See above for further literature. One could also mention books such as KhaledAbou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (Oxford:Oneworld, 2001); and Ahmad Atif Ahmad, Islam, Modernity, Violence, and EverydayLife (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), although neither of these authors in-vokes the Greek past as a particularly powerful model.

the continuing tradition of arab humanism

Documents