This is how the shrine of the Saint appeared to him now: "Instead of fresh air, rose thick vapours of barbaric perfumes. There was the lamp hanging above, dust sticking to its glass and soot having turned the chain into a black line.
It gave off a stifling smell of burning. It emitted more smoke than light, and even the faint ray of light it did give was only a sign of ignorance and superstition. Near the ceiling hovered a bat, which made his skin creep. Around the tomb leaned people like logs of wood, propped up against it. They stood there paralyzed, clutching at the railing.
Amongst them was a man begging of the Saint to do something for him, which Isma'il could not fully understand, but he gathered that the man wanted her to punish an enemy of his, to bring destruction on his home and to orphan his children. Turning to a corner Isma'il saw Sheikh Dardirl surreptitiously hand to a man, wearing a woman's handkerchief for a bandage on his head, a small bottle, as if he were smuggling something.
Unable to bear it much longer, and hearing the clangour of innumerable bells in his head and his eyes swimming, Isma'il stood up on his toes and, aiming the stick at the lamp, he with one blow, broke it to pieces, the bits of glass flying all over the I. The crowd rushed at him, he was beaten up and trodden on. He would have been lynched, had not Sheikh Dardiri recognized him and delivered him from the wild and furious mob, telling them that he was the son of Sheikh Rajab cAbdulla, a child of the neighbourhood and that he was obviously possessed.
Ismacil was carried to his house. He spent a number of days in bed, talking to nobody. When he recovered a little from his injuries, he toyed with the idea of going back to England and settling there, away from "this accursed land. One morning, however, he woke up to find himself resolved to treat Fatima's eyes. He had treated successfully many similar cases in Europe before. He applied his medicine to Fatima's eyes for some time without seeing any noticeable improvement. He doubled his care, took her for consultation to his colleagues at the school of medicine, who all approved of his method of treatment.
But Fatima's eyes became much worse and finally one day she woke up to find herself completely blind. Isma'il ran away from home: he could not stay there facing Fatima, whose blindness, the author says, "was a proof of his own blindness.
He sold his books and some of the equipment he had brought with him from England, and rented a room in a boarding house, run by a Greek woman, to whom only money mattered. Certainly, Europeans in Egypt, he thought, were made of a different stuff from those he had encountered in Europe.
She exploited him and made his life generally so difficult that he was driven to roam about in the streets from morning to midnight. It was during his wanderings that his reconversion took place. It happened gradually.
At first he found himself in the evenings gravitating towards the Mosque Square near his parents' house. He began to feel some sympathy for the people in the square, who, he thought, were more sinned against than sinning.
Although every night, before going to sleep, he thought of some device to escape back to Europe, the following day he would find himself back in his usual spot in the Sayyida Square. When the holy month of Ramadan came it did not occur to him to fast.
Yet he felt I 2. Isma'il wondered why he had failed, but could not find an answer that would satisfy his intellect. However, he found himself spending more of his time in the Square, gradually accepting its people, enjoying the jokes he could hear, and, in general, feeling the ground becoming more solid under his feet.
He could now detect a virtue in the ability of the Egyptians to keep their distinctive character and temperament, despite the change of rulers and the vicissitude of events.
Here, he thought, were no separate individuals, but a whole people united by a common faith tempered by time. Far from being devoid of all human expression, their faces now acquired a meaning hitherto unnoticed by him. Moreover, he found in his people the peace and tranquillity which appeared to him to be lacking in the west, where 'there were only hectic activity and anxiety, an unflagging war and the sword ever drawn.
It occurred on the Night of Power the night on which, according to Muslim belief, the Koran was sent down , which he had been brought up from childhood to cherish and venerate.
While he was loitering in the Square his attention was suddenly drawn to the sound of deep breathing echoing throughout the Square, which as a child he was told only those blessed with a clear conscience could hear. When he raised his eyes he beheld the dome of the Mosque flooded with a bright light emanating from the lantern of the Saint. He saw at once that the light of which he had been deprived for years had come back. Now he realized why he had failed. He had nursed his pride and rebelled; he attacked and, overreaching himself, he fell.
Now he knew that 'there could be no science without faith. Isma'il entered the mosque, walked reverently to the shrine which had now regained the beauty he used to see in it, asked Sheikh Dardirl for some of the lamp oil which the Sheikh gladly gave him, telling him that it was particularly holy, because it was not only the 1 2. Night of Power, but the night of the Visitation as well.
Ismacil took the oil straight to his parents' house, and went up to Fatima and told her never to despair of being cured, since he had brought her the blessing of Umm Hashim. Once more he applied his science of medicine, but this time fortified by faith.
He did not despair when he found that the disease had become chronic, but persisted and persevered and fought tenaciously until he could see a ray of hope. Vhen she had completely recovered, the writer says, 'Isma'il sought in vain both in his mind and heart for any feelings of surprise he was afraid he might find.
He no longer felt uprooted in his own society. He later set up a clinic, not in a residential area but in a poor district, in a house that was fit for anything but receiving eye patients. His fee never exceeded a piastre at a time. His patients were the poor and the bare-footed, not the elegant men and women he had hoped to get when he returned from England. His clinic swarmed with peasants, who brought him gifts of eggs, honey, ducks and chickens. We are told that he performed many a difficult operation successfully, using means which would have made a European surgeon gasp in amazement: he held only to the spirit and principles of his science, abandoning all elaborate instruments and techniques.
He relied first upon God and secondly on his learning and the skill of his hands. He never sought to amass wealth, buy land or own huge blocks of flats. His sole aim was to help his poor patients recover at his hands. Towards the end of his days he grew very corpulent, had a huge appetite, was given to laughter and joking. His clothes were untidy, with cigarette ash scattered all over his sleeves and trousers.
Until this day, his nephew, the narrator, says, the people of al-Sayyida district remember him with kindness and gratitude, and then pray that God may forgive him his sins, the nature of which, however, they would not disclose because of the great love they bore him.
But the nephew gathers that it is his uncle's fondness for women that they have in mind. After this crude account, which can hardly do justice to a work 1 2. Exactly what is the natureof the crisis Isma'il goes through and from which he emerges triumphant? Here, as in the case of many other literaryworks of merit, it is by no means easy to find one clearand neatanswer.
Thereare,however, a numberof possible answers which, taken together, seem to me to give an adequate account of the work. On one level one can say that what the author is depicting here is the age-old problem of religious faith and doubt.
The experience Isma'il undergoes is that of a sensitive religious nature, temporarily and not irrevocably robbed of its faith, and although the faith is lost through an overexposure to reason and science, it is regained mysteriously. Isma'il did not face a Pascal-like type of wager. And indeed, in spite of the mystical vision that brings him back his lost light, the dominant element in Isma 'il's nature, the element emphasized by the author, is his gregariousness.
The problem, therefore, is set in social terms. It is not the eternal silence of the infinite spaces that terrifies Isma'il, but the silence of people around him, the absence of communication with his own family, the discovery that he is an outsider among his kith and kin.
With Isma il, therefore, religious faith and acceptance of his own people went hand in hand, each of them was a manifestation of the other; it is only when he recovered his faith that he fully accepted his people, found purpose in life and meaning in the lowliest human being in the Mosque Square.
But it surely would give only a partial view of the problem to claim that it is simply one of faith and doubt expressed in social terms. After all Isma il did not spontaneously or independently lose his faith and turn his back on his own culture. He did that only after he had fallen under the influence of an alien culture. The contrast between his behaviour and attitude before and after is brought out most clearly in the neat structure of this work, namely through a number of almost symmetrical and parallel themes and situations, all centred on the mosque and the square.
This aspect of the work, which presents the clash between the cultural values of East and West, places The Lamnpof Umm Hashim within the context of a larger literary tradition in Egypt. This tradition, where serious literature is concerned, goes as far back as al-Muwailihi's Hadith 'Isd Ibn Hishdm , a work which, in spite of its shortcomings, holds in many respects a crucial position in modern Egyptian literature. Muwailihi's standpoint was a relatively simple one: it was mainly ethical.
He realized the enormous material and technological superiority of the West, recommended the use of some of its technology, but gave a strong warning against the bad moral effects that would and did result from a blind imitation of the West.
Now he and the moufflon together come under. Islam on the Street deals with the popular side of Islam, as described not only in tracts and manuals written by Sufi shaykhs and Islamist thinkers from among the more militant groups in Islam, but also in writings by other, more secular thinkers who have also influenced public opinion. Egypt in the ninth century ad: an Arab, Muslim ruling class governs a country of mostly Coptic-speaking Christians.
After an exorbitant land tax imposed by the caliph's governors sparks a peasant revolt, Budayr is dispatched to the marshlands of the Nile Delta as an escort for a church-appointed emissary whose. Compilation of lectures given by Dr Shariati on the roles and responsibilities of women as according to the life of Fatima Zahra a. From her cell in a women's prison, Aziza decides to create a golden chariot to take her to heaven, where her wishes and dreams can be fulfilled. As she muses on who to take with her, she tells the life stories of her fellow prisoners and decides in her heart.
This series is designed to bring to North American readers the once-unheard voices of writers who have achieved wide acclaim at home, but are not recognized beyond the borders of their native lands.
The latter story deals with the people of Upper Egypt, for whom the writer had a special understanding and affection. It is, however, for the title story in fact, more of a novella of this collection that the writer is best known. Recounting the difficulties faced by a young man who is sent to England to study medicine and who then returns to Egypt to pit his new ideals against tradition, ''The Lamp of Umm Hashim'' was the first of several works in Arabic to deal with the way in which an individual tries to come to terms with two divergent cultures.
This brief introduction offers a unique overview, focusing on developments over the last fifty years. It provides a guide to the literary landscape, indicating the major landmarks in the shape of authors, ideas and debates. The picture that emerges shows that the literature of the modern Arab world, Europe's closest neighbour, is not so far from us as we are sometimes encouraged to think. Available online. Full view. Green Library. Q7 Q Unknown. More options. Find it at other libraries via WorldCat Limited preview.
Contributor Johnson-Davies, Denys. Summary Together with such figures as the scholar Taha Hussein, the playwright Tawfik al-Hakim, the short story writer Mahmoud Teymour and - of course - Nagulb Mahfouz, Yahya Hakki belongs to that distinguished band of early writers who, midway through the last century, under the influence of Western literature, began to practice genres of creative writing that were new to the traditions of classical Arabic.
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