ZAHAWI 47He also claimed to have translated into verse Macbeth's well-known speech
on the air-drawn dagger, but the resultant translation (i,222) is really more
of an adaptation, in fact almost a new poem inspired by the original. More-
over, he attempted to write a short one-act poetic drama on the subject of the
bombardment of Beirut by the Italian navy (1912) which shows a total
ignorance of the basic rules of dramatic art: it is no more than a long passage
(in no way a dramatic dialogue) which is divided between four speakers —
a wounded man, his wife, a doctor and a fellow Arab (ii,69ff.). Hafiz Ibrahim's
desire to be regarded as a modernist, manifested in his naive introduction of
modern inventions like the aeroplane or train, led in some cases to very
amusing results. For instance, in a well-known poem which he wrote on the
occasion of the opening of an orphanage, he begins with a lengthy descrip-
tion of the railway train, very much in the same way as in the opening part of
his work the pre-Islamic poet provided a description of his camel (i,271ff.).
And it is revealing to see how the internal combustion engine is conceived
of in terms of a beast of burden, how the industrial aspect of modern life is felt
and described in terms of life in the Arabian desert — a classic example of the
unresolved tension between the old and the new, between traditional Arab
culture and modern western civilization.
ZahawiJust as in the case of the Egyptians Shauqi and Hafiz Ibrahim, the names of
the Iraqi poets al-Zahawi and al-Rusafi became linked in the minds of their
readers, partly because of the keen and at times bitter rivalry between them.^56
Both poets published their first volumes of verse in Beirut at roughly the same
time: Zahawi in 1908 and Rusafi in 1910.
Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863—193 6) was born to parents of Kurdish origin,
and his father was a learned scholar who occupied the post of Mufti (official
expounder of Islamic law) of Baghdad. He did not receive a modern school-
ing, his early formal education being confined to the traditional religious up-
bringing, but he developed, largely through translations, both Turkish and
Arabic, an interest in liberal ideas and modem scientific thought which he
maintained throughout his life. In an autobiographical note he acknowledges
his debt to the scientific material popularized in the articles that appeared in
the early numbers of the Syro-Egyptian periodical al-Muqtataf, and such
Arabic works on modern astronomy, physiology and anatomy as those which
the famous orientalist Van Dyck published in Beirut." In 1910 he published a
pseudo-scientific treatise On Gravity. Although Zahawi knew no European
language, he mastered Turkish and Persian from which he translated al-
Khayyam's Quatrains into Arabic (1928). He occupied many posts, in the