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KHALED NAJAR family, the uprising that had made contemporary Egypt. * * * He said, reminiscing about his youth in France: “I studied law at the University of Montpellier.” I followed with: “That’s where Taha Hussein also studied, for a short period of time, as far as I know . . .” In those days, change depended on the educated elite, or what in leftist ideology is called the vanguard, or the intelligentsia, that elite which has now just given up, replaced by an elite of populist religious discourse, who traffics in the religious illusions that have now taken over the entire religious fields, an elite that reproduces the populist imaginary and markets it back to the people, claiming that it is charisma: And so I returned to the scientific delegations to Europe, to Rifaa Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, to Slaheddine Bouchoucha, who had been sent by the Bey’s government to London before Paris became the Mecca of the Tunisian intelligentsia, with the first Tunisian delegation before the French mandate. Bouchoucha returned from Europe and established the newspaper Al-Hadira in Tunisia at the start of the twentieth century. There is a photograph of Slaheddine Bouchoucha wearing a monocle, his moustache trimmed and his features stern, resembling Jurji Zeidan. I returned to Suleiman al-Harayri, with Ali Bash Hamba by his side, and Sheikh Mohammad al-Sinoussi, who was the tutor of Prince al-Nasser Bey and who had met Sheikh Mohammad Abduh when the latter visited Tunisia, imbibing nationalism and reformism. When he ascended to the throne in the 1920s, he allowed the Tunisian Constitutional Free Party to operate and he infused this spirit into his son, King al-Mufdi Mouncef Bey, who rejected colonialism and was sent into exile by the French, to Algeria, and then to Po, only returning to Tunisia lying in state. And to Ahmad Shawqi who studied law in France, as al-Tahtawi had done . . . Ahmad Shawqi was a contemporary of Paul Verlaine and Rimbaud but he was uninterested in them; he didn’t read any of his contemporaries, not even Stéphane Mallarmé or Paul Valéry. He read Victor Hugo, of whose poetry Hafiz Ibrahim said that it almost rivalled that of the Arabs . . .And as Jibran did after them, BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 15

KHALED NAJAR

family, the uprising that had made contemporary Egypt.

* * *

He said, reminiscing about his youth in France: “I studied law at the University of Montpellier.”

I followed with: “That’s where Taha Hussein also studied, for a short period of time, as far as I know . . .”

In those days, change depended on the educated elite, or what in leftist ideology is called the vanguard, or the intelligentsia, that elite which has now just given up, replaced by an elite of populist religious discourse, who traffics in the religious illusions that have now taken over the entire religious fields, an elite that reproduces the populist imaginary and markets it back to the people, claiming that it is charisma:

And so I returned to the scientific delegations to Europe, to Rifaa Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, to Slaheddine Bouchoucha, who had been sent by the Bey’s government to London before Paris became the Mecca of the Tunisian intelligentsia, with the first Tunisian delegation before the French mandate. Bouchoucha returned from Europe and established the newspaper Al-Hadira in Tunisia at the start of the twentieth century. There is a photograph of Slaheddine Bouchoucha wearing a monocle, his moustache trimmed and his features stern, resembling Jurji Zeidan. I returned to Suleiman al-Harayri, with Ali Bash Hamba by his side, and Sheikh Mohammad al-Sinoussi, who was the tutor of Prince al-Nasser Bey and who had met Sheikh Mohammad Abduh when the latter visited Tunisia, imbibing nationalism and reformism. When he ascended to the throne in the 1920s, he allowed the Tunisian Constitutional Free Party to operate and he infused this spirit into his son, King al-Mufdi Mouncef Bey, who rejected colonialism and was sent into exile by the French, to Algeria, and then to Po, only returning to Tunisia lying in state. And to Ahmad Shawqi who studied law in France, as al-Tahtawi had done . . . Ahmad Shawqi was a contemporary of Paul Verlaine and Rimbaud but he was uninterested in them; he didn’t read any of his contemporaries, not even Stéphane Mallarmé or Paul Valéry. He read Victor Hugo, of whose poetry Hafiz Ibrahim said that it almost rivalled that of the Arabs . . .And as Jibran did after them,

BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 15

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