THE GENERAL BACKGROUND 207as in the work of other Arab writers such as the Iraqi novelist Dhu'l Nun
Ayyub.^9
A frontal attack on romantic literature generally was made in a celebrated
article published in the Egyptian periodical al-Thaqafa in 1951 entitled 'The
Erring Literature' by Mufid al-Shubashi, who dismissed the whole of'romantic'
literature as 'adolescent'. Shubashi pointed out the serious shortcomings of
the literature of the ivory tower and called for the need for socialist realism
and for the writer's commitment. Just as Kamal' Abd al-Halim had criticized
the errant lost poet (al-ta'ih), Shubashi attacked what he called'erring'litera-
ture (al-dall), which for him was both the literature that sought its inspiration
and ideals in the Arab past and that which derived its models from western
Romantic literature. He found the latter no less harmful than the antiquated
Arab models, for according to him European Romanticism appeals only to
adolescents, and those Egyptian writers who fell under its spell were in fact
still adolescent 'despite their grey beards'.^10 (It is worth noting perhaps that
as early as 1934 Amin al-Rihani attacked the tearful sentimentality of his
contemporary Arabic poets in his book You Poets, and the Lebanese poet
Sa'id 'Aql, inspired by French Symbolist poetic theory and practice wrote
poetry such as Magdalen (1937) in which he reacted against the emotionalism
and dilution of romanticism and tried to produce works of serene beauty
which, however, tended to be rather cold and lifeless.)^11
It is in the early 1950s that the debate about commitment began. The Arab
word for commitment (iltizam) has been an essential part ofthe vocabulary
of any Arabic literary critic for many years. Since its introduction to the
literary scene, most probably around 1950, in an obvious attempt to translate
Jean-Paul Sartre's engagement (Qu'est-ce que la litt&ature? was published in
book form in 1948 but it appeared a year earlier as articles in his review
Les Temps Modernes), the word has grown steadily in popularity and is now
repeated as a stock phase. Its meaning has become so difiuse that it some-
times means adopting a Marxist stand, or sometimes expresses an existen-
tialist position, but at all times it denotes atleastacertainmeasureofnational-
ism, Arab or otherwise. But perhaps the most common denominator in all
the usages is, to put it simply and a little crudely, the need for a writer to have
a message, instead of just delighting in creating a work ofthe imagination.
In January 1953 Suhail Idris produced the Beirut monthly periodical
al-Adab, which, perhaps more than any other, helped to determine the course
of modern Arabic literature, by publication of both creative work and of
criticism and evaluation of contemporary literature. In the editorial note to
the first volume the editor announced that the policy ofthe periodical was to
publish and promote the cause oiadab multazim: 'committed literature'. The