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Al-Manshiyya district of Alexandria he sat before William Butler Yeats for a portrait but he did not readYeats’ poetry nor enjoy it, having stopped at William Blake and his Christian mysticism . . . . . . In his art, Jibran rejected modern schools such as expressionism or surrealism, remaining drawn to classicist art, and to the chiaroscuro of Italian iconography.” Saif al-Nasr Basha went on telling his stories in dramatic monologue: “When I returned from France, I established a literary club in my village, and I invited Habib Bourguiba there once”. . . “I knew Habib Bourguiba when he was a refugee here in Egypt and he came to the club and gave a lecture”. He fell silent for a moment, as if he were bringing back those years, as he looked out at the sea on the September afternoon from his balcony in Sidi Bishr, in that building opposite the Saray Asmahan . . . As for me, I just went on looking at his face – that impressive countenance in the Romantic style of the portraits of 1920s intellectuals, those who had grown up and had their formative years after the first world war . . . those who had grown up in a society that was in harmony with itself, with its ancient values . . . with the nobility of its urban and rural aristocracy, and the nobility of its people . . . they had graduated from al-Zeituna, from al-Azhar and Qarawiyin, and Fouad I University, and the American University of Beirut, or the University of Algiers during the days of Mohammad ibn Shanab and AhmadTawfiq al-Madani and MohammadTizut, or from the univer- 16 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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KHALED NAJAR sities in Istanbul andTehran, continuing on to respectedWestern universities: the Sorbonne, Cambridge or Oxford. They lived through the colonial era, then through independence, the liberalization of monarchical rule and the spread of competing political parties, parliaments and the free press. Then he said, as if to himself, “I was a senator during King Farouq’s time”, a phrase he had repeated several times on our way to his home via the Corniche. Then he added: “I used to call for a benevolent dictator to rule the Middle East, to rule Egypt, the biggest country in the Middle East . . . And Abbas alAqqad wrote an article about me.” After a brief pause, he blurted out, in a voice filled with sharp sorrow and bitterness: “But Abdel Nasser and his gang were a bunch of thieves . . .They took our property and our money, but that Anwar Sadat promises to return it, and to put things back in order.” * * * And now, years later as I write these lines, the image of Saif alNasr Basha is still clearly impressed on my memory; I can still see him standing there in front of Petro’s café, with his debonair air, in his beige jacket, beige hat and white shoes, as handsome as an American film star, standing beside Tawfiq al-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, a film director whose name I’ve forgotten and another man whom I didn’t know . . . They were wrapping up a conversation as they parted ways on the pavement. I saw al-Hakim walk off, with his cane and his beret. I stood to the side, acutely embarrassed. Then I heard a voice addressing me, as if I weren’t hearing the man myself: “Come here, son.” He said it in the friendly manner that no dialect but the Egyptian can express so well . . . But how did he call me, what magnet or mysterious chemical reaction rules the meeting between two men? He added: “Come home with me.” * * * It all started completely by accident that afternoon . . . I met him at Petro’s café. I had been looking for the poet Salah Abdel Sabur, who, months before, as he left Tunis, had told me that if I passed through Egypt in the summertime, I’d find him in Alexandria, at Petro’s café. Indeed, I visited Alexandria in September, and went to Petro’s café looking for Salah Abdel Sabur. The waiter BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 17

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Al-Manshiyya district of Alexandria he sat before William Butler Yeats for a portrait but he did not readYeats’ poetry nor enjoy it, having stopped at William Blake and his Christian mysticism . . . . . . In his art, Jibran rejected modern schools such as expressionism or surrealism, remaining drawn to classicist art, and to the chiaroscuro of Italian iconography.”

Saif al-Nasr Basha went on telling his stories in dramatic monologue: “When I returned from France, I established a literary club in my village, and I invited Habib Bourguiba there once”. . . “I knew Habib Bourguiba when he was a refugee here in Egypt and he came to the club and gave a lecture”.

He fell silent for a moment, as if he were bringing back those years, as he looked out at the sea on the September afternoon from his balcony in Sidi Bishr, in that building opposite the Saray Asmahan . . . As for me, I just went on looking at his face – that impressive countenance in the Romantic style of the portraits of 1920s intellectuals, those who had grown up and had their formative years after the first world war . . . those who had grown up in a society that was in harmony with itself, with its ancient values . . . with the nobility of its urban and rural aristocracy, and the nobility of its people . . . they had graduated from al-Zeituna, from al-Azhar and Qarawiyin, and Fouad I University, and the American University of Beirut, or the University of Algiers during the days of Mohammad ibn Shanab and AhmadTawfiq al-Madani and MohammadTizut, or from the univer-

16 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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