ZAHAWI 51Zahawi believed in relative criteria of judgment, but here again that is not
quite true. For where, in his opinion, does modernity lie? The emphasis
throughout is on the so-called modern consciousness, on the notion that
poetry is primarily an expression of a state of consciousness which (in spite
of Zahawi's almost irritating egoism and arrogance) is not so much the poet's
own individual consciousness as the consciousness of the age. And what
distinguishes the present age from other times, in Zahawi's opinion, is its
complexity of knowledge, the vast increase in facts which are now available
and of which the ancient Arabic poet was ignorant. These important points
are clearly reflected in his own poetry, namely in its excessive intellectuality,
its tendency not only to parade facts and scientific knowledge (from astrono-
mical data to Darwin's evolutionism and Nietzsche's superman),^69 but also to
be discursive and argumentative, to proceed from premise to conclusion in
the manner of a syllogism, to the extent that his language gives the impression
of being nearer to scientific than to literary language — his poetry is some-
times thought of (for instance, by the Egyptian poet and critic al-'Aqqad)
more as versified philosophy or science. It is true that Zahawi's poems dealing
with scientific data are frequently not merely attempts to versify scientific
commonplaces. For instance, in his poem 'A View of the Stars' the night sky is
clearly both a scientific phenomenon and an object of aesthetic feeling. Like-
wise in his long poem 'The Skyscape' there is a tendency to view the planets,
stars and constellations poetically, somewhat in the manner characters from
Greek mythology are treated in western poetry. Yet in this last poem he writes
boastfully: 'I have come to sing of truth, leaving imagination to poets'.^70 And
it is a fact that his almost scientific desire to treat a subject exhaustively, to
view it from all possible angles, has led him to write much that was too pro-
saic, too facile by poetic standards, and in which the poet simply ceases to be a
craftsman or artist whose medium is language. Furthermore, Zahawi's as-
sumption that the duty of the modem is to express modern consciousness
reveals itself in his writing countless poems on political and social issues of
the day.
In the field of political verse Zahawi started off by writing panegyrics to the
Ottoman Caliph, much in the same way as his Egyptian contemporaries Hafiz
and Shauqi, and the Iraqi Rusafi. But when the inhumanity and injustice of
Abdul Hamid grew worse, he soon joined the ranks of those who, again
like Rusafi, attacked the Caliphate and the tyrant Ottoman rulers of Iraq as,
for instance, in his poem 'The Tyrant of Baghdad'. Zahawi wrote many poems,
some of which are deeply moving, dealing with the suffering of the subjects
who in various ways had fallen victim to the injustice of the Caliph's hench-
men, the tortures of those who were hunted down or reported by his spies