Table Of ContentThe Intellectual and the People in
Egyptian Literature and Culture
DOI: 10.1057/9781137392442.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137392442.0001
The Intellectual and
the People in Egyptian
Literature and Culture:
Amāra
and the 2011
Revolution
Ayman A. El-Desouky
Senior Lecturer in Modern Arabic and Comparative Literature,
SOAS, University of London, UK
DOI: 10.1057/9781137392442.0001
© Ayman A. El-Desouky 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by 2014
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN: 978–1–137–39244–2 PDF
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DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-39244-2
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www.palgrave.com/pivot
To My Parents Ahmad and Su’ad
&
To the House of Rafi’
In the shadow of whose Tree
I have learned to recognize what it means to connect
DOI: 10.1057/9781137392442.0001
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: Intellectuals, Representation,
Connective Agency 1
Part I The Intellectual and the
Quest for Amāra
1 Amāra: Concept, Cultural Practice
and Aesthetic 18
2 Signature or Cartouche? Dilemmas of the
Egyptian Intellectual 46
Part II The People and the Amāra
of Connective Agency
3 The People Already Know: Positionality
of the Intellectual, Connective Agency
and Cultural Memory 68
4 The Amāra on the Square: Some
Reflections Post 25 January 2011 91
Postscript: Ih.nā al-mas.riyyīn and al-sha‘b:
The Untranslatabilities of Conceptual
Languages 111
Bibliography 127
Index 137
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137392442.0001
Preface
This slim volume is offered primarily as a thought experi-
ment. The thought is that of social reality in its collective
and collectivizing modes of expression, and the challenges
these pose for the endeavours of intellectual and politi-
cal critical thought. The challenge is presented here first
and foremost as one of transitioning from the social to
the political and what that entails – beyond reversing the
abstracting impulse of political thought since the eighteenth
century – to our understanding of the nature of collectivi-
ties, social cohesion and social movements, communities,
societies and nations, what I believe to be one of the most
urgent questions of our time. Such a thought experiment
also has further historical implications as to what it means
to think against the institutionalizing and professional-
izing impulses of modernity, East and West alike. And the
challenges are increasingly shared, or recognized as deeply
implicating beyond the historical frontlines of developed
and developing, with immediate pressing issues such as
social equality and cohesion of communities, the viability
of the representative systems and discourses of so-called
democracies, the threats of extremism, economic crises,
crises of energy and the environment, human rights, and
the list is growing almost by the day. To think aesthetically
and intellectually from within the social is to think against
the grain of the modern political imagination of the collec-
tive, and the related discourses of knowledge production.
This same political imagination is also the sphere of modern
intellectual work and self-perception of the intellectuals as
a socially constructed elite.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137392442.0002 vii
viii Preface
Icons of Egyptian intellectual life, such as Son’allah Ibrahim, Gamal
al-Ghitani, Bahaa Taher and Alaa al-Aswani, all indubitably figures of
resistance to power, have been criticised recently for their failure to think
outside of historical relations to power and the state (by openly support-
ing General al-Sisi in face of perceived threats of the Brotherhood and
extremism). The general perception since January 2011 is that of a ‘failure
in imagination’ on the part of the intellectual and leftist elites to rethink
their relation to the masses of the people.
In modern literary and intellectual history, and beyond the heady
days of socialist realism and proletariat themes and emplotments,
pivotal questions have remained theoretically unresolved and practically
fraught with challenges: whom are we addressing in the end through
the intervening powers of the word and of representation? The power
to articulate social realities, whence does it issue? How is the same voice
recognizable when it turns to those whose truth it is representing and
standing-in for? Are the powers of representation and articulation the
same in this dialogic relation, or are they placed in irreducible tension?
To look for this tension we have so far the resources of literary articula-
tion to fall back on, the dramatization of tension that is otherwise swept
under the conceptually polished discourses of ideologies. What it does it
take to speak to the absent their own truth by allowing their own possi-
bilities of voice? The specifically Egyptian cultural practice of amāra, or
producing the special and mutually recognizable signifier of a shared
identity and a common fate, will be offered for analysis and reflection in
the attempt to address these questions. The tension here is between the
image of absence and the image of voice.
This proposed volume therefore constitutes a sustained reflection
on the nature of intellectual labour amongst Egyptian intellectuals,
as represented in literature. It will not seek to offer yet another study
on the definition of the intellectual, which is also ultimately a study in
social change, but rather an investigation into the positionality of the
intellectual, and of communication and speech as a language of social
identity – as well as the potential for an aesthetic beyond the questions
of realism and the debates over modernity. It is in part also conceived
as offering some reflective responses to Edward Said’s Representations
of the Intellectual – from the point of view of the people whose truth
the intellectual speaks to power, but who, in the context of the recent
Arab revolutions, now seem to have spoken. In the case of Egypt, the
entire range of nahḍa, or revival, intellectual projects (from 1870s to the
DOI: 10.1057/9781137392442.0002
Preface ix
present, but particularly post-1952 with the collusion of state and intel-
lectual modernizing, nationalizing discourses) has been under scrutiny
with regard to the efficacy of the intellectuals’ powers of communication
and their positionalities within the various social groups and in relation
to the different social movements. Since the mid-1950s, the Egyptian
intellectual has had to face the identity-forming decision of the so-called
‘New Intellectuals’: either to remain within the establishment, working
with machinations of the state and its institutions and discourses, or to
remain absolutely unwavering in speaking truth to power and in doing
so only and always embarrassingly, in Said’s phrases (1994). Even then,
with regard to the latter path, the question remains: in whose name is the
intellectual speaking? What standing does the intellectual have amongst
the people or social groups in whose name she or he is speaking and
what ‘truth’? Who really are ‘the People’?
With the urgencies of our present global realities, the task as I perceive
it here is formally to seek to understand exactly how the people speak
and what forms of knowledge they bring collectively and to realize that
such a language and such a mode of knowing are indeed conceptually
viable and no longer dispensable in our intellectual and professional
vocabularies (many phrases, images and historical references are already
in circulation across borders, untranslatable and yet equivalentialized in
the acts of linguistic and cultural translation). But the challenge to the
task is still there: we must be able to recognize and deploy such knowl-
edge, as everyone agrees, but we cannot begin to perform the task if we
remain still within the older intellectual and professional discourses
and structures of representation and of domination. We should be able
to seek the new languages and the new modes of knowing, new to the
discourses but older to the realities, from within considered social posi-
tionalities, already placed in the collective and therefore with access to
the forms of resonance.
The core arguments regarding the role of the intellectual, particu-
larly in relation to ‘the people’, were conceived prior to the events of
2011. Without the remarkable manifestations of mass attunements and
collective and collectivizing creative practices during the events of 25
January–11 February 2011, however, my critical reflection on the tension
in voice and in the discursive modes of intellectual discourses would
have remained at the level of phenomenological and deconstructive
critique. The thought of these history-making, and remaking, 18 days in
Tahrir in 2011 therefore informs most of my analysis of the dilemmas of
DOI: 10.1057/9781137392442.0002
