University of Life: A Review of
The Days by Taha Hussein, pt. 3

July 31, 2006

A Season of Migration to the North offers an odd contrast to the work of Taha Hussein. In that novel Tayyeb Salih tells the story of a young man from the Sudan who comes to London and gets lost in the difficult mirrors of cultural identity. He takes up serial relationships with western women and finally kills his English wife. If there is any lesson to be drawn from this novel, it is about the need for people to stay rooted and at home.. not to strive outwards. Taha Hussein tells a different story about cultural exchange in the third part of his autobiography.. in fact, I am not sure this story could even be told today: it is a success story.. a young man who succeeds at the Sorbonne and marries a French woman.. then looks back at his life with satisfaction.

At the start it is important to think about the meaning of a "university." Literally, the word seems to imply unity.. and historically I would guess that a community of scholars was expected to come to a unified view of the world. For Hussein, however, the university is his ticket to a diverse world. He complains about al-Azhar:

It was a life of unrelieved repetition, with never a new thing, from the time the study year began until it was over. After the dawn prayer came the study of Tauhid, the doctrine of the divine unity; then fiqh, or jurisprudence... [246]

So literally this course of study at al-Azhar was marked by the study of "unity." Then he mentions the great change:

It was in the midst of all this that the name of the "university" was first mentioned. I had not heard this word before and, initially, a peculiar sense of strangeness possessed me. [246]

The title of this third section of his autobiography is given as "A Passage to France." But that overemphasizes the place of France, per se, in the scheme of the book. France is simply another step in this broadening of horizons. After success at the new Egyptian University he winds up at the Sorbonne, where he again succeeds.

During his time in France he marries a French woman. He meets her in an unusual way: as a blind student (who rejects Braille) he needs to employ a full-time reader, who he happens to fall in love with. He gives the following portrait of their life after they were engaged:

I was so happy with my fiancee and with myself. The gladness was unalloyed, with no trace of misgiving, or anger or contradiction. Here were a youth and girl in the first days of their engagement, filling most of the day with study, Latin in the morning, reading the French translation of Ibn Khaldun's Al-Muaqaddimah in the forenoon and then, after a break at the table for lunch, Greek and Roman history. [358]

That sounds ideal. The only odd thing is that his wife, in reading all this, must be learning it too.. yet there is never a sense that she is in school or a candidate for a higher degree. Maybe that was not possible (this was during World War I). Still, the vision of a lovely voice and a union based on common endeavor is beautiful. Later, as Hussein takes up Greek history, she helps to explain the geography:

She had taken a piece of paper and shaped it to conform to the natural contours of Greece. Her aim was to illustrate the mountains and the plains, where narrow and where extensive, and the surrounding coasts. She did this in relief on the same paper. Then she took my hand and guided it over the paper... [391]

His love is also a part of the "university".. defined not so much as a single place, but as an aproach to the world.

Reading Hussein's descriptions of "that lovely voice" I kept thinking of my own love. Although I am the one that reads to her, we share that same partnership in the university of life.. For Hussein this love tempered the spirit of the great but bitter Arabic poet Abu l' 'Ala al-Mu'arri:

and here was this voice, chasing from within me all the thoughts of darkness, pessimism and despair that Abu l' 'Ala had ever planted there... [328]

It was just last week that the Washington Post had an article about Woody Allen, and about his unabated pessimism.. even after all these years. I reflected on how that point of view once seemed so attractive.. but now it almost takes effort for me to remember why. The only reason is the wonderful new geography that my lovely wifi has opened up for me.

And so, you see, the autobiography has a wonderful ending.. a note of confidence in the ability of a boy who grew up in the countryside of Egypt to succeed not only at al-Azhar, but at the highest reaches of western intellectual endeavor.. and confidence in the ability of an Egyptian to marry and love a French woman. It is a message of cultural acceptance and personal fulfillment that we somehow don't expect from a serious artist.. but there it is.