BOOK REVIEWS

Mustafa Badawi,1925–2012

pleting a doctorate on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and translating important texts of literary criticism into Arabic, such as I A Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism. He taught in the English department of the University of Alexandria, his “attitudes towards literature and criticism” being defined there in Alexandria before he travelled to England. He and his peers all felt “deeply that literature must have a message and that the writer had to be fully aware of his or her responsibility towards society which suffers from the problems of poverty, ignorance and disease”.

Derek Hopwood, Emeritus Fellow of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, relates how Mustafa Badawi’s wide-ranging interest in “all forms of literature”, and “his comprehensive writings in English on the history of Arabic literature”, united a German orientalist Georg Jacob with himself and Mustafa Badawi through the shadow plays of Ibn Daniyal (1248–1310), and led to Badawi’s translations into Arabic of the British poet Philip Larkin.

The second part of the “Festschrift” focuses on Badawi’s academic legacy, with contributions by Mohamed Mahmoud, Hilary Kilpatrick, Roger Allen, Marilyn Booth, Miriam Cooke, Paul Starkey, Abdul-Nabi Isstaif and Elisabeth Kendall. Roger Allen brings up to date and elucidates his long interest in and study of Muhammad alMuwaylihi’s narrative Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham, begun as an undergraduate, under Badawi’s tutelage, studying for his finals. His DPhil thesis of 1968 on the text that eventually became a book A Period of Time (1992) included time in Cairo studying the archives of the Muwaylihi family’s newspaper Misbah al-Sharq, which serialised the

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