NEOCLASSICISM 26al-Muttalib, 'Ali al-Jarim, Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi, 'Abd al-Muhsin al-Kazimi,
Ma'ruf al-Rusafi, Muhammad Rida al-Shablbl, and later Badawi al-Jabal,
Ahmad Sail al-Najafi and Muhammad Mahdl al-Jawahiri. This is only a
random selection of a few of the many names of poets who wrote in a neo-
classical vein. The most important of these are perhaps the Egyptians Shauqi
and Hafiz Ibrahim, and the Iraqis al-Zahawi, al-Rusafi and al-Jawahiri. As
these poets are described here as neoclassical it might be useful at this stage
to pause briefly and try to explain in some detail what we mean by this term.
Before we proceed any further, however, a word of warning is necessary.
In our attempt to describe the development of modem Arabic poetry, par-
ticularly in its earliest phases, we have to be very much on our guard when
using European critical terminology. For all their vagueness, when used to
describe western literary phenomena, terms like 'neoclassicism' or 'romanti-
cism' still denote, in a general way, a cluster of meanings. When we apply
these terms to Arabic poetry (as indeed for the sake of convenience we must)
we sometimes have to impose a drastic limitation on these meanings — other-
wise we run the risk of reading one culture exclusively in terms of another, of
viewing Arabic literature, in other words, with too western eyes. This is par-
ticularly true of neoclassicism, the earliest of the stages in the development of
modern Arabic poetry. The fact that this risk grows noticeably less with the
succeeding stages, that the western critical terms do in fact become increas-
ingly relevant to Arabic poetry, the most traditional form of Arabic literature,
shows beyond any doubt the full measure of cultural westernization that in
the meantime has taken place.
Unlike western neoclassicism, the neoclassicism of Barudi and his fol-
lowers has no philosophical foundations, is not based upon a conscious and
elaborate theory as regards the respective roles of reason and the imagination,
and is not a philosophically sophisticated humanist movement which as-
sumes that man's ethical reason is, or should be, his guiding principle in life.
In a sense nothing can be further from Arabic poetry with its wealth of des-
criptive details than the western neoclassical belief in 'generality': the belief
best expressed by Samuel Johnson in a famous statement in chapter x of
Rasselas:
The business of the poet is to examine, not the individual, but the species;
to remark general properties and large appearances.Nevertheless in the classical Arabic poetic tradition the part played by imag-
ination and inventiveness was, as has already been pointed out, very severely
curtailed, and conventions predominated to an extraordinary degree. This
resulted in the early development and prevalence of 'types', particularly