THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 208two events which in the meantime had contributed significantly to the wide
spread of this attitude of commitment were the Palestine tragedy of 1948,
which exposed the basic political weaknesses and corruption of Arab regimes,
and hence the total irresponsibility of authors in taking refuge in a romantic
world of beauty and daydreams, and the 1952 Egyptian Revolution (itself an
indirect consequence of the Palestine war) with its advocacy of the cause of
the masses and the proletariat and its far-reaching repercussions through-
out the Arab world.
The Sartrean implications of the manifesto-like editorial oiAdab are fully
brought out in the second issue, in an article entitled 'Committed literature',
written by Anwar al-Ma'addawi, of the editorial board oiAdab. Ma'addawi
finds that Sartre is not committed enough. Whereas Sartre exempts poetry
(together with music and painting) from the duty of commitment, Ma'addawi
thinks it is clearly wrong to limit it to drama and the novel, since poetry
ought to aim at the same noble social ends. Fifteen years later Bayyati
expresses a similar view. In 1968 he writes:"I disagree with Sartre when
he exempts the poet from commitment. In my view the poet is immersed up
to his ears in the chaos and welter of this world and of the revolution of
man'.^12
Quite early in the 1950s the word 'committed' had already become a term
of praise. In 1954 one contributor to Adah wrote that 'the idea of committed
literature dominates the Arab world now'.^13 The Syrian writer Muta' Safadi
began to expound his own peculiar blend of 'commitment', partly existen-
tialist, partly Arab nationalist, but in any case 'revolutionary'.^14 Bayyati tells
us in his account of his intellectual development, that what appealed to him
in existentialism was what he could reconcile with social realism, a combina-
tion of Gorky, Sartre and Camus."
In 1954 an important, though noisy, controversy arose in Cairo newspapers
about the relation of form and content in literature, which on the face of it
could be taken as another version of the battle between the old and the new.
What was significant, however, was that the dispute was not so much over
novelty of technique or approach as over the issue of commitment. The older
generation was represented by Taha Husain and 'Aqqad, while Mahmud
Amin al-'Alim and 'Abd al-'Azim Anis spoke for the young. The last two
published their contributions in book form in Beirut in 1955, under the title
On Egyptian Culture, with an introduction by the Lebanese Marxist critic
Husain Muruwwa. The book had a seminal effect in the Arab world and in
the following year Husain Muruwwa published in Cairo his own equally
Marxist book of criticism, • Literary Issues.^16 The question was in fact to be
raised again in 1955 in a celebrated formal debate held in Beirut between