Ahmad Shawqi was the most celebrated Arabic poet of the early 20th century in Egypt and other Arab countries, achieving fame and the title of "prince of the poets" through his neoclassical poems composed in classical Arabic styles for the Egyptian public sphere and Khedival court. However, Shawqi's adherence to traditional poetic forms led younger poets to launch a critical campaign against him, initiating a major literary confrontation over the value of his poetry and the future of Arabic letters. The controversy surrounding Shawqi highlights his position at the threshold of world literature, as his nationalizing project for Arabic poetry prevented it from fully

1. At the Threshold of World Literature: Ahmad Shawqi
The Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868-1932) held the status of the preeminent and most
celebrated Arabic poet for much of the twentieth century in Egypt as well as other Arab
countries. He achieved fame early in his poetic career, serving as the official poet of the Khedive
(Ottoman viceroy) until 1914, and was later crowned “prince of the poets” in a week-long event
sponsored by the Egyptian government with the participation of leading public figures of Egypt
and the Levant. Extensive commemoratory events were sponsored by the Egyptian government
on the twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversaries of Shawqi’s death (Boudot-Lamotte, 1977; 2017).
Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written about Shawqi and his poetry,
many of them in a spirit of adulation. His is still a household name in Arab countries and
particularly in Egypt. Yet Shawqi has been a center of controversy as well. During the latter part
of his career a prominent group of younger poets launched a critical campaign against him,
initiating the first major literary confrontation of modern Arabic letters, one which continued to
agitate for nearly three decades after Shawqi’s death. The controversy over Shawqi and the value
of his poetry is symptomatic of what may be understood as Shawqi’s oblique relationship to
world literature. Shawqi’s poetic work, I will argue, cannot properly be regarded as outside of
world literature, but neither does it find its place in any straightforward manner within world
literature. It stands, rather, at the threshold of world literature, and for this reason helps us to
understand more clearly the relationship between newly emergent national literatures and the
system of world literature into which they sought entry.
The point I am making about Shawqi hinges on a particular way of defining world
literature. I will not follow here the outlook of David Damrosch, who puts his view in the
following way: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their
culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language… a work only has an effective
life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system
beyond that of its original culture” (2003, 4). Damrosch focuses on the phenomenon of literary
works that acquire currency among audiences who consider them to be of foreign origin, and
examines the textual qualities and modes of reading and reception that make this possible. His
way of defining world literature has therefore an ahistorical quality, which he seeks to neutralize
by limiting himself to how world literature can function in the contemporary American context.

2. The Damrosch approach, however, does not work well for the study of premodern times. As he
himself intimates through his foregrounding of Goethe’s seminal role in initiating the idea of
world literature, this idea is modern in nature and arises from modern notions of literature and
the literary. It relies, in addition, on the relation between “national” and “world” literature,
categories that were not in effect before the modern concept of nationality. Languages were not
“national” languages until relatively recently, as I will discuss below, and the mere fact that a
poem or story is composed in a language does not make it “national” by default and potentially
“world.” In any case, by Damrosch’s definition Ahmad Shawqi’s poetry does not qualify as
world literature because it does not circulate outside of Arabic-speaking countries, and it does
not “gain in translation.” This is so, I will argue, because despite the features of universality that
Shawqi’s poetry attains, it is precisely this poetry’s endeavor to bring Arabic poetry into world
literature by turning it into a national literature that has prevented it from finding its own place in
world literature.
The notion of world literature I am working with is therefore historical in nature, and
refers to ideas that had become dominant in Europe by the late eighteenth century, setting off the
literary as an autonomous domain of writing. These ideas delineated the aesthetic nature of
literary works, their relation to humanity and national culture, the categories of works – poetry,
fiction, and drama – that make up literature, and the story of the world-historical progression of
literature, with its great classics that serve as perpetual literary sources, and the cutting edge
styles of the present possessed by the current centers of civilization. The “world republic of
letters” investigated by Pascale Casanova refers to the same phenomenon, though focusing on
the regime of world literature and the hierarchical relations among the national literatures that
constitute it rather than on the concepts that make world literature possible (2004). Before the
late nineteenth century, awareness of this regime of world literature had not taken root among
literate Arabic speaking populations. It was only in that period, the years of Ahmad Shawqi’s
upbringing, that an Arabic public sphere, with printing presses, newspapers, and social venues of
debate and public expression, crystallized. Within this process, a newly arising class of
professionals and publicly oriented intellectuals began reshaping the written Arabic language to
serve the needs of a national public sphere rather than those of highly literate courtly and
scholastic elites. Journalists, intellectuals, and language reformers reverted to classical styles of
Arabic writing which they simplified and adapted to European modes of expression (J.

3. Stetkevych, 2006; Noorani 2013). Only at this point, by the outset of the twentieth century, can it
be said that Arabic had become a national language, both on the practical level and on the level
of public consciousness, among the literate classes of the Levant, Egypt, and to varying extents
other Arab countries. This development rapidly transformed Arabic prose writing, but affected
poetry much more slowly and gradually. It was not until the 1920’s and 1930’s that classical
styles of poetic expression ceded dominance in the literary public sphere to “romantic” poetry
drawing on French and English models for their diction, imagery, and themes (Jayyusi 1977;
Badawi).
The national public sphere emerging in Egypt and the Levant demanded new forms of
writing and expression, different from those that had previously held sway in Arabic letters. This
is seen not only in the development of new forms of writing, which eventually fell into line with
European literary genres, but in the emergence of the concept of “literature” itself in its modern
senses through the semantic transformation of the Arabic term adab. This word had the sense,
and still does, of refined manners, or polite cultivation, and acquired the extended sense of the
kind of education and types of writing that endow one with such cultivation or manifest it. The
term came during medieval times to signify certain types of writing, including poetry, the
embellished prose of epistles and maqamat (highly wrought short narratives), the anecdotes and
legends connected with poetry, and general knowledge that could be used by writers in their
compositions. The great scholar Ibn Khaldun (d. 1405) defines adab as a field of knowledge in
the following manner: “the mastery of the arts of prose and poetry according to the styles and
procedures of the (ancient) Arabs,” and again as “memorization of the poetry and lore of the
(ancient) Arabs and a portion of every field of knowledge” (). It should be noted that when Ibn
Khaldun speaks of the Arabs, he does not refer to himself or his contemporaries, but the pre-
Islamic and early Islamic Arabs of Arabia, and it is they who are definitive of adab. Moreover,
he does not identify the written Arabic language with himself or his contemporaries either, even
though he writes in it, but calls it the language of Muḍar, the immediate ancestor of the pre-
Islamic Arabs according to the genealogists. Only during the course of the nineteenth century
was the term “Arab” taken up by intellectuals to signify Arabic speaking people of the present, a
development that was closely related to the emergence of the public sphere and the
transformation of written Arabic into a national language.

4. At the same time, the term adab began to undergo a semantic shift that eventually
brought it more in line with the modern use of the term “literature” as signifying imaginative
writing and particularly poetry, fiction, and drama. The idea that literature is not primarily a
mastery of language and its styles of expression manifested in eloquent samples of speech, but is
more importantly works of art that directly express human freedom and creativity through the
medium of a national language, began to be increasingly argued by writers seeking to reform
literary expression and introduce new genres. Ahmad Shawqi’s poetic career was fully enmeshed
in this process, in a manner that earned him unprecedented accolades but at the same time made
him a symbol for younger generations of all that was wrong with the Arabic poetry of the past.
Shawqi’s techniques of poetic expression, derived from the great Arabic poets of the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, adapted classical poetic forms and motifs in response to the
demands of national identity and the public sphere, producing a kind of poetry that is often called
“neoclassical” in Anglophone scholarship and “revivalist” in Arabic. The poet and statesman
Mahmud Sami al-Barudi (1839-1904) is generally credited with the founding of this style of
poetry, and is for this reason usually regarded as the founder of modern Arabic poetry. Al-
Barudi came of age in the military schools established by the modernizing Ottoman ruler of
Egypt Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769-1849), participated in the politicized nascent public sphere as
a major figure, and eventually became the first prime minister of Egypt to head a government
that ratified a constitution. Al-Barudi’s poetry expresses an ethos of heroic self-presentation
taken up from pre-Islamic and Abbasid period poets that is far removed from the types of court
poetry and love poems that were prevalent in his time. Al-Barudi’s method paved the way for a
generation of “neoclassical” poets who published their poems in the newly established
newspapers and journals. This is the generation, among whom Shawqi had pride of eminence,
that shaped Arabic poetry into the first stage of a national literature.
One primary impetus that can be identified in this turn to classical Arabic poetry is the
desire to find a direct poetic language, and to abjure the verbal artifice, the piling on of tropes
and elaborate conceits, that was now associated with the poetry of the more recent past. In this
there is a degree of commonality with the English Augustan poets of the early British public
sphere who sought to achieve a poetry reflecting nature by imitating the styles of classical
Greco-Roman poetry. Another key impetus for the Arabic neoclassicists was the connection
between what was now called the golden age of Arab and Islamic civilization, the Abbasid

5. period (the eighth to the thirteenth centuries), and the great poets who lived in that period.
Taking up the styles of these poets gave poetry a key position in the contemporary aspiration of
reviving the golden age. Moreover, it allowed the retention of classical Arabic poetry as the basis
of a national literary heritage extending into the distant past, even though the Abbasid poets
mainly wrote for courtly circles and elites rather than for any kind of national audience. The
boost to national identity and pride that this provided, however, was a mixed blessing in the
longer run for an Arabic national literature. Becoming a national literature meant the acceptance
of and entry into the world system of national literatures, in which an international set of literary
norms and values prevailed, dominated by French, British, and German literary figures.
According to these norms, poets like Ahmad Shawqi did not often hit on true art expressive of
authentic humanity because of their overriding concern with verbal artifice and high rhetoric, the
characteristic feature of “oriental” literature. A clash of literary values, and generations, therefore
became inevitable.
Shawqi himself, however, would have had little inkling of this during much of his career.
The scion of an aristocratic family of multi-ethnic origins with close connections to the Khedival
court, Shawqi studied with highly placed tutors who brought his precocious poetic talent early on
to the attention of the Khedive Tawfiq (r. 1879-1892). He was sent at government expense to
study law in France, at Montpellier, from 1891 to 1893, with the expectation that he would spend
the time familiarizing himself with French culture and literature (Sabri 1979, 4; Boudot-Lamotte
1977, 35). Shawqi later reported that he frequented the theater while in France and became
enamored of the lyrical poetry of Lamartine, Musset, and Hugo. During this period he composed
an Arabic poem, “Bois de Bologne,” that has been translated and anthologized on account of its
greater amenability to translation than Shawqi’s typical poetic style (Jayyusi). He also translated
Lamartine’s famous poem, “Le Lac,” he later reported, which was never published. Shawqi
composed his first play while in France, generally regarded as a premature effort. After his return
to Egypt Shawqi composed a number of narrative poems for children in the manner of
Lafontaine. On the whole, however, the sojourn in France and Shawqi’s French literacy had little
overall effect on Shawqi’s poetic style and techniques, which adhered firmly to classical Arabic
norms. Indeed the Prince Shakib Arslan (1869-1946), who met Shawqi as a young man when
they both stayed at the same hotel in Paris, found him carrying around the diwan (collected
poems) of the tenth century poet al-Mutanabbi, which he had nearly memorized (). Shawqi’s

6. failure to be more deeply affected by French literature was a major complaint of his detractors
later on.
On Shawqi’s return to Egypt he was appointed to a court position in the department of
translation and became the poet laureate of the new Khedive, Abbas Hilmi II (r. 1892-1914).
Shawqi was proud to hold this position, which had significant implications for his poetic output.
Egypt had been under British control since 1882, and the Khedive held only limited authority
even though Egypt officially remained an Ottoman province. Abbas sought to bolster his position
and eventually get the British to leave Egypt to him, and deployed his court poet, among other
means, towards this end. During this period, Shawqi composed poems in praise of the Khedive
on special occasions, such as holidays, official events, royal births and marriages, and so forth,
fulfilling the traditional task of the court poet. He also composed poems that promoted the
political orientation of the Khedive, as well as poems that denigrated the opponents of the
Khedive, including at times the British consul or other British officials. Shawqi also composed
numerous occasional poems of a public nature – on the occasion of major social or political
events in Egypt or elsewhere, visits to Egypt of foreign dignitaries, events of charities and other
social organizations, balls and other high society events, fires and other catastrophes, and so on.
A major category of this type was funeral elegies composed for numerous public figures,
Egyptian as well as foreign – a genre that was extremely popular among poets of Shawqi’s
generation. In keeping with the Khedive’s emphasis on his Ottoman legitimacy, and his
maintenance of close ties with the Ottoman Sultan, Shawqi composed a number of highly
wrought poems in praise of the Ottoman Sultan (whom he addressed as the Caliph of all
Muslims) on special occasions and poems celebrating or lamenting important Ottoman political
events. Shawqi’s work also contains a large number of poems addressed to friends and
acquaintances on various occasions, often humorous in tenor. Many of the praise and celebratory
poems that Shawqi composed began in the traditional manner with a passage of love poetry
known as the nasib, containing descriptions of the beloved, the poet’s feelings, natural settings,
and other conventional motifs. Most of Shawqi’s poems were published in newspapers, as were
those of his contemporaries, as poems were a popular feature and attracted readers. Shawqi
would also recite his poems, or have them recited on his behalf, at the many and varied events
for which he was asked to compose them. The poetic production of Shawqi and his

7. contemporaries reveals the central role that neoclassical poetry played in the early Arabic public
sphere and the great popularity that this poetry enjoyed (Khouri 1974).
In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, the British authorities expelled the pro-
Ottoman Khedive Abbas from Egypt and replaced him with another family member after
declaring Egypt a British protectorate. Shawqi was also compelled to leave the country and
chose to go to Spain, where he resided in Barcelona with his family until he was allowed to
return to Egypt in 1919. During this personally difficult period, it appears that Shawqi decided to
adopt the Egyptian nation as his patron in place of the ruler of Egypt. From this point, Shawqi
composed more poetry that dealt with the Arab-Islamic and ancient Pharoanic identifications
widely understood as definitive of Egyptian nationality at the time, often seeking to fuse these
seemingly conflicting identities in various symbolic manners in his poems. Shawqi continued
publishing poems on the same kinds of topics as he had previously, although in this period he
sought to express and engage with public opinion in his political poems and was no longer bound
by the objectives of the palace, which at certain key moments in the past had been at odds with
public opinion. Nevertheless, it was also during this period, beginning in 1919, that Shawqi
began to come under vicious attack by a group of younger poets, thus initiating a literary conflict
from which Shawqi himself kept aloof while cultivating his many supporters who rose to his
defense. Shawqi and his poetry remained highly acclaimed, particularly with Shawqi’s retention
of the famous singer and composer Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab, who constantly accompanied
the poet and produced many popular songs from his poems. His poetry was performed by other
musicians as well, including the legendary Umm Kulthum, who made famous recordings with
lyrics from a number of his poems (Danielson 1997, 112-117). In the last few years of his life
Shawqi returned to composing plays in verse, a number of which achieved great success on
stage, further augmenting his literary legacy. Shawqi’s literary prestige was such, that despite the
sharp criticism he continued to receive from some Eurocentric writers of the younger generation,
he was asked in the last year of his life to be the honorary head of the Apollo group founded by
prominent romantic poets and to compose the poem that opened the first issue of their Apollo
poetry journal.
Shawqi’s poetry is national on a public, thematic level rather than in terms of the focus
on subjectivity and aesthetic form that became definitive of poetry in modern national societies.
The poems and works that were most celebrated are primarily ones that deal with themes

8. connected with national identity, although Shawqi’s love poetry and descriptive poetry was also
much loved. Shawqi’s poems on Islamic themes, and particularly two tour de force poems in
praise of the prophet, have remained among his most enduring in popularity (S. Stetkevych
2010). These poems, both performed and recorded by the singer Umm Kulthum, relate the
prophet’s life to contemporary issues of Egyptian society. Shawqi composed a number of
descriptive poems on pharaonic themes, of which his poem entitled “Tutankhamun,” inspired by
the discovery of the tomb in 1922, is probably the best known. One of Shawqi’s most ambitious
works, entitled “Great events of the Nile Valley,” is an epic history of Egypt of substantial length
that he recited at the International Orientalist Congress in Geneva in 1894. This poem is one of
the first modern attempts in Arabic at narrative poetry. A much more successful poem that
recounts Egyptian history but, framed as an address to the Nile, is much more lyrical and
descriptive in tenor, was dedicated by the poet to the British orientalist Margoliouth and put to
music by Umm Kulthum. Similarly, Shawqi was inspired to produce an acclaimed description of
his homeland in a poem dedicated to the British novelist Hall Caine, entitled “Spring in the Nile
valley.” Shawqi’s poems on Ottoman topics are epic in tone and highly wrought and earned him
renown early in his career. He continued producing these poems until the elimination of the
Ottoman caliphate in 1924. The period of exile that Shawqi spent in Spain inspired him to
produce a set of his most well-known poems, which fused themes of homesickness and nostalgia
for Egypt with remembrance of and longing for the grandeur of Islamic Spain. A number of
elegies that Shawqi composed, especially his elegy for the great national leader Sa’d Zaghlul,
remain an enduring part of his legacy and of the remembrance of those figures. Shawqi’s dramas,
from the last years of his life, are all but one based on historical or legendary episodes taken
from Arab-Islamic history, like the love story Majnun Layla, and ancient Egyptian history, like
“The Death of Cleopatra.”
Despite the “modern” nature and orientation of many of these themes, Shawqi’s mode of
poetic expression remained firmly rooted in the premodern Arabic poetic tradition. His poems
are fashioned out of the system of motifs of Arabic poetry, the images, objects and scenarios that
go with the conventional set of topics that poems could draw upon. Shawqi was extremely adept
at working with these motifs for different purposes and effects, but to understand his poetry
requires a familiarity with the body of motifs that his poems draw upon that can only be acquired
through immersion in classical Arabic poetry. Similarly, one must have familiarity with the

9. broader structure of classical Arabic poems, what topics they are made up of, how these topics
can be related, how transitions take place, and so forth. Translation therefore is not just an issue
of different languages but an issue of different poetic worlds made of different building blocks.
Take for example the first verses of one of Shawqi’s most well-known poems in praise of the
prophet Muhammad. This poem, like many in Shawqi’s oeuvre, is a “contrafaction” of a famous
poem of the past, that is, a poem composed in the same meter and rhyme as the famous poem,
taking that poem as the inspiration as well as the challenge for the new one. In this case Shawqi
composed his poem in the meter and rhyme of the world famous “Poem of the Mantle” of al-
Busiri (1213-1295), entitling his own poem “The Way of the Mantle” (S. Stetkevych, 2010).
A doe on the plain between the grove and the hill,
Made lawful the shedding of my blood in the forbidden months;
Fate slew a lion with the eyes of a fawn:
O dweller on the plain, overtake the dweller of the thicket!
When it gazed at me my soul said,
Alas for your breast! It has been shot with an arrow on the mark!
I ignored it and concealed the arrow in my heart;
The wound inflicted by loved ones does not cause me pain…
O you who blame me for my love for her – though love is fated –
If passion had emaciated you then you would not blame.
Like al-Busiri’s poem and other praise poems, Shawqi begins with a passage of love poetry.
These verses are fully conventional in the motifs they draw upon. The beloved as a doe that slays
a lion with its glance, the lover who conceals his pain, the blamer who has not yet been fated to
know love, are all stock figures of love poetry. These motifs invoke deeper associations of love
with the human condition of lack and unfulfillable desire, with subjection to fate and nature, and
with mortality, that can be deployed in different registers and for different purposes. Shawqi
treats the scenario in a light and humorous manner, particularly with his reference to the sacred
months of pre-Islamic Arabia in which bloodshed was forbidden. The flow of the words that he
uses, along with the expected images, gives the passage a feeling of pleasing inevitability in its
movement. This passage is an opening that captures the attention and quickly commits itself to
memory, but its reliance on adept manipulation of the system of motifs of classical Arabic poetry
prevents compelling translation.

10. Another feature of Shawqi’s poetry, and classical Arabic poetry in general, that makes its
translation into world literature difficult, is the nature of description and comparison in this
poetry and its difference from modern, romantic aesthetic norms. Consider the following
description of a palm tree on the Nile:
You imagine when it lights up in the late morning
And when afternoon brings flames upon it,
And daylight’s rays of light encircle it,
From a clear sky or through the fringes of clouds,
That it is a maid-in-waiting of Pharaoh in a court-yard
Of the palace standing at attention.
She wears a headdress of carnelian stones
Separated by shards of gold.
She has suspended her coral necklaces
Over her bosom and wears a sash of gold and silver thread.
And she has fastened a shawl around her legs,
Knotted from top to bottom.
Whereas the contemporary reader, perhaps all over the world, expects similes, metaphors, and
poetic description of physical objects in general to work on the level of visualizing the object,
this is not the case in classical Arabic poetry (and no doubt some other premodern traditions).
Just as the conventional reference to a beautiful face as the full moon is not intended to create the
mental image of a person whose head is a full moon, so is Shawqi’s description here not intended
to help us visualize the palm tree more vividly. Just as it is the attribute of “radiance” and
“cosmic” or “heavenly” that justify thinking of the face as a full moon, so it is the attributes of
the brightly illumined palm tree that conjure the image of something valuable and desirable
imagined as sharing these attributes. Pharaoh’s maid is not a random comparison, but comes
from an already given order of objects and meanings to which all beautiful and good things are
to be compared, from the stars and the cosmos, to palaces and kings, to gold and precious stones,
and so on. Poetic description is the means of transferring the listener to a higher world, a world
of absolute meaning that invests ordinary objects through their attributes. In translation aimed at
the contemporary reader whose norms come from romantic and modernist aesthetics, this form
of description and comparison cannot come through, and when it does have success, it is often

11. not on the original poetic basis. Yet there are numerous images in classical Arabic poetry that do
work for modern visual expectations, even though such images were not the norm or the
standard.
We may also consider in this regard one of the most attractive features of Shawqi’s art for
the Arabic audiences of his time and for a long time thereafter, namely, the musicality of his
verse. The scholar and critic Shawqi Dayf describes the aural experience of Shawqi’s poetry in
the following manner:
“I do not exaggerate in saying that when I hear a long poem of Shawqi I imagine that I
am really listening to a symphony whose music builds up in my ears and I feel as if it
multiplies and as if an orchestra of skillful musicians are coordinating to perform it and
render its melodies. I do not doubt that the cause of this is his outstanding control over
the instruments of his words and their phonetic reverberations. It is not simply an issue of
skill and virtuosity, but far beyond that, it is brilliance and inspiration, and an ingenious
sense of the phonetic construction of poetry” (1963, 44).
Shawqi achieves this effect, in part, through the kind of words that he chooses particularly for his
descriptive passages. Shawqi is able to pack his descriptive passages full of words of sumptuous
sound and connotations, which go along with the higher world of the images these words create.
In medieval Arabic discussion of poetry, a term that was used to indicate this effect was
“brocade,” that is, poetry that is of the quality of brocade. This term is quite apt for Shawqi’s
poetry, which creates, through the rhythmic succession of sumptuous words in verses that always
end with the same rhyme, a dazzling effect on the listener. Most ordinarily educated listeners,
even in Shawqi’s day, would not know the meaning of all the words in each verse. Many verses
are enjoyed by listeners on the basis of sound and connotations alone. Of course, there are also
many verses of Shawqi’s that are quoted to this day for their powerful or pithy meanings. In any
case, Shawqi’s Europhile critics often attacked him with the charge that his poetry sounds good
but on the level of meaning fails to be true poetry.
Other features of Shawqi’s verse do not create difficulties in translation, in a direct sense,
but contribute to what can be called a literary translation barrier that prevents readers of modern
sensibilities from experiencing the intended effects of Shawqi’s poetry. On the whole, this results
from the difference between poetry that is conceived of as eloquent, stylized speech, and poetry
that is conceived of as a work of art, or verbal icon. Shawqi’s poetry is structured, but through

12. the structural frames of Arabic poetry that are already given; its aim is not the fashioning of an
original structure and effect. Therefore, many of Shawqi’s poems, in addition to the elaboration
of poetic topics like love, or praise, or description, also contain passages that take the form of
direct communication with the reader, such as gnomic verses that express timeless truths in a
catchy manner, and verses expressing the poet’s opinion or judgement regarding political topics,
or current events. Although this kind of direct message is anathema to modern notions of lyric
poetry, such messages often played a role in classical Arabic poems. These discursive features of
classical poetry reveal a different social function and poetics from modern notions of the literary.
In the case of Shawqi’s poetry, the effects of these differences are magnified by the very nature
of the neoclassical project and its strategies for turning the poetic tradition into a national
literature.
The result is that not only are the verbal poetic dimensions of Shawqi’s verse not
translatable, as is usually the case with poetry, but even the universal dimensions of his poetry,
the levels at which his poems share commonalities with other literary traditions, become difficult
to access and discern in translation. A primary example here is the thematic of nostalgia and
longing for a lost state of fulfillment that is a key structural element of classical Arabic poetry
and for Shawqi in a number of his major poems (Jayyusi 1977, 50-51). In the classical Arabic
ode, a longer poem with multiple parts, the opening section (nasib) that centers on past lost love
could potentially contain a number of different conventional topics, each consisting of a wide
array of possible motifs (J. Stetkevych, 1993). The nasib and its motifs eventually became the
basis for different types of love poems in Arabic, Persian, and other literatures. The nasib is also
closely related to the opening lamentation in funeral elegies, to the extent that the two could be
seen as variations of a single form. Moreover, other poetic genres derived from the nasib and its
motifs, such as wine poetry and garden poetry. Persian mystical poetry as well drew upon the
same body of motifs. This overarching structure and the motifs that constitute it are therefore
fundamental to the Arabo-Persian poetic tradition, and closely linked to poetic forms of other
traditions such as the pastoral elegy. In Shawqi’s regular deployment of the nasib, in his poems
in praise of the Khedive primarily, he generally gave his talk of love a light and urbane tone. In
his poems dealing with longing for the homeland, however, Shawqi plumbed the potentialities of
the nasib more deeply.

13. The topic of the watan, or homeland, had long been connected with the nasib and its
motifs of past love in Arabic as well as Persian and other poetic traditions (Noorani 2016). The
term watan did not refer to a national territory, but to the poet’s hometown or region. This topic
and the particular motifs connected with it combined images of family and childhood fulfillment
with the images of unrestrained love and grief over its loss that are central to the nasib. During
the nineteenth century, the term watan in Arabic as well as Persian and Turkish acquired the
meaning of national homeland and became central to political discourse. Poets like al-Barudi, the
founder of neoclassicism, and Shawqi, worked to transfer in their poems the affective
dimensions of the term to Egypt as a national homeland. Shawqi was able to take this endeavor
beyond the depiction of personal attachment to the national homeland. He employed the structure
of the nasib and its place in the overarching form of the classical Arabic ode to attach the
feelings of nostalgia and longing for the homeland to specific features of Egyptian nationality –
what were regarded as Egypt’s pharaonic and Arab-Islamic identities. In doing so, Shawqi
showed a high degree of mastery of classical poetic structures and their inner possibilities. The
scholar of Arabic poetry Jaroslav Stetkevych puts Shawqi on par with the great classical Arabic
poets in terms in this regard, and considering mastery of the structure of the classical ode to be
“the key to the Arabic poetic heritage” and calls Shawqi “the last poet to possess this key” (S.
Stetkevych 1987, 17).
A primary instance of this type of poem is one known as the “Siniyya,” “poem rhyming
in ‘s’,” also modeled on a famous poem of the past (S. Stetkevych 1987; Noorani 1999). Shawqi
composed this poem at the end of his exile in Spain, after he had visited the monuments of
Islamic Spain in Cordoba and Granada. The poem begins with nostalgic remembrance of youth
and love, invoking fate as the passage of time.
The alternation of day and night causes forgetting;
Remind me of love and the days of affection.
Describe for me a time of youth
Formed out of visions and touch.
It gusted like the playful morning breeze and passed
As a sweet sleep and a stolen pleasure.
And ask Egypt: has the heart been consoled of her,
Or has comforting time healed its wound?

14. The movement here is from longing for the time of youth and past love to longing for Egypt,
which is not only the place of this past, its embodiment, and thus the true object of these feelings.
The alternation of day and night, an image from the Qur’an, is the passage of time, fate, that
brings all to an end, except for this attachment of the poet that is not a mere natural or instinctual
desire but comes from a source that is beyond fate and death. The poet is removed from this
Egypt not simply because of the passage of time, but because of a tyrannical power – the British
authorities – that has brought this about as the embodiment of fate. In the next passage of the
poem, the poet’s personal Egypt becomes the landscape of the Egyptian homeland, the palm
trees and the Nile, that lament and conjure forth the power and majesty of the pharaonic past.
The poet moves from this memory of his distant homeland to the present vista of the monuments
of Islamic Spain, al-Andalus, which though they are desolate in the present, produce through
their architectural beauty visions of the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Rahman III in his court attended
by scholars of diverse lands. The poet wakes up from this dream vision and confronts the reality
of a long lost Islamic Spain, which can now offer a kind of consolation as a lesson of history. In
its movement as a whole the poem enacts the transmutation of personal grief – a longing for lost
fulfillment that in Arabic poetry is constitutive of human desire – into attachment to the
pharaonic and Arab-Islamic pasts of Egypt, which are made equivalent.
On this level, a poem like the “Siniyya” bears connections with many literary works and
genres the world over. Yet the peculiarities of Shawqi’s historical moment work against the
inclusion of such works in world history as we know it. We see this in the disavowal of Shawqi’s
neoclassicism, whether explicit or in practice, that we see in the succeeding generation of
prominent writers. Pascale Casanova, the theorist of “the world republic of letters,” speaks of
this kind of conflict between the first two generations of writers of a newly established national
literature. She states that “whereas the first national intellectuals refer to a political idea of
literature in order to create a particular national identity, the newcomers refer to autonomous
international literary laws in order to bring into existence, still on a national level, another type of
literature and literary capital” (2004, 325). Shawqi’s neoclassicism can be regarded as a
“political idea of literature” in the sense that it seeks to recover a poetic tradition for national
purposes, and its content is often explicitly national. But in this case the conflict is exacerbated
because premodern Arabic poetry does not conform in certain ways to the norms of the modern
concept of literature, and because neoclassicism exaggerated some of these features in order to

15. create poetry for the national public sphere. The attacks against Shawqi centered precisely on the
failure of his poetry be true poetry in the modern romantic sense, and on Shawqi’s failure to
produce poetry shaped by world literature. Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, for example, the most
virulent opponent of Shawqi, took him to task for the lack of organic unity in his poems, for
description that focused on external features rather than penetrating to the essence of phenomena,
and above all, for expressing no personality and personal emotion in his poetry (Semah ; al-
Aqqad). Taha Husayn believed that Shawqi’s popularity was the result of people’s nationalistic
feelings rather than real appreciation for poetry. However, he recognized Shawqi’s talent and
lamented his failure to read contemporary French poets and the epics of Homer, believing that
had he done so, he could have brought about a modern national literature (). Many critics echoed
these points, even some who argued for his greatness ().