Al-Azhar without Theology: A Review of The Days by Taha Hussein, pt. 2

July 19, 2006

The second part of Taha Hussein's autobiography centers around the years in which he was connected to the great religious institution of al-Azhar in Islamic Cairo. It would be difficult for a person to recount so many years at Azhar and have less to say about religious matters. This is what we get instead:

An immense number of shoes used to be stolen at the Azhar, and innumerable were the notices posted on the walls round the court announcing the loss of a pair of shoes and calling upon the person who had got hold of them to return them to their owner at such and such a place, or in such and such a section, with the promise of a reward and threats of expulsion to anyone who kept them unlawfully. [207]

For anyone who goes to mosques and knows about leaving his shoes in the little wooden cubby-holes, this is enough to strike fear into the heart. I make sure I cast frequent glances back at my shoes. It is immensely amusing that Azhar.. the serious-minded religious institution.. suffered from shoe stealing.

But that's not all; here is another passage:

In front of him was a shop which played an important part in his life; it belonged to El-Hagg Firuz, who supplied the neighborhood with most of the necessities of life. In the morning he sold boiled beans, prepared in the usual variety of ways. But El-Hagg Firuz used to boast the special virtues of his beans—and raise their prices accordingly. He had plain beans, beans in fat, beans in butter, beans in every kind of oil... [109]

If one is looking for a description of what it felt like to be a student at Azhar.. the types of foods that students ate or the rooms that they lived in.. then this is a marvelous book. I daresay that is not what most religious folk will want from an account of life at Azhar.

The characters surrounding Taha Hussein also come in for lively description. There is the older student who has been at Azhar for years and years but never finishing (like a grad student hanging around an institution). There is the sweets seller living down the hall. There are the ridiculous professors who can't stand being questioned, and threaten one with a shoe. Taha Hussein lovingly portays this group of people clustered around the Azhar. In fact, these characters.. wastrels or clowns or peasants or sheikhs.. seem to finally become the reason for the book:

In all probability the experience of life and of human character which he gained there at first hand were at least as beneficial to him as the progress he made at the Azhar in grammar and logic, law and theology. [170]

Hussein provides a dreary list of the Azharite textbooks he had to get through, but these take second place to the education in people and personalities which Hussein acquired.

For a guy who periodically thinks about writing down his memories from Bible College, this book appeared to be a model. I would love to capture that little world where I spent three years on a flat prairie! And this is the spirit with which I would like to go about that task: to concentrate on the characters and the sounds.. not to talk about the abstruse theological points that actually filled our time in classes. Hussein is the master of the fond critique.

This emphasis on the texture of his experience and the characters that surrounded him should not lead one to think that Hussein was without intellectual curiosity. At his arrival at Azhar he was elated:

He felt the conviction of being in his own country, amongst his own people, and lost all sense of isolation, all sadness. His soul blossomed forth, and with every fibre of his being he yearned to discover... well, what? Something he was a stranger to, though he loved it and felt irresistibly drawn towards it—knowledge. [115]

The problem is that this love of knowledge leads him away from the stuffy rote lessons of the Azhar.. and toward a world in which he is more at home.. a world in which he will pass the rest of his life. That world can be summarized in one word: literature.

In describing his conversion from the turban to the tarboush.. that is, from the religious path to the secular path.. Hussein gives one of the most eloquent summaries of the value of literature, describing the life of the teacher who first opened up to him the study of literature:

Sheikh Marsafy was not merely a teacher, but a man of the broadest culture. In conversation or lectures at the Azhar he assumed all the gravity of a learned sheikh; but when he was alone with his intimate friends he lived the life of a humanist, conversing with perfect freedom on any subject under the sun and quoting the poetry and prose, yes, and the lives, of the ancients, to prove that they had been as free and unconstrained as he was and talked of everyone and everything with the same unhesitating candour as himself. [218]

That is a paragraph which will win Hussein a place in the honor role of Old Roads. Further, it hits close to home as I too had to learn to make the switch between theology and literature.. and to follow the intellectual path of a humanist.. free to converse about everything.. rather than a partisan.. even a partisan for God.