NEOCLASSICISM 56absence from home, with the result that the boy was brought up virtually by
his mother to whom he remained strongly attached all his life. After receiving
his early education in a Baghdad Koranic school Rusafi joined the military
school which he left after only three years without completing his training.
He subsequently attended religious schools in Baghdad, studying Arabic and
traditional Islamic sciences, mainly under the scholar Mahmud Shukri al-
Alusl of whom he was a pupil for many years. Later he worked as teacher of
Arabic in a government school in Baghdad, where he remained until 1908,
the year of the declaration of the Ottoman Constitution, that significant event
which many Arab intellectuals regarded as a symbol of political freedom. In
1908 he was invited to Istanbul to work as editor in the newspaper Sabil al-
Rashdd. In Istanbul he was also appointed as teacher of Arabic, then (in 1912)
as an Iraqi representative in the Ottoman Parliament. His sojourn in Istanbul,
which he loved dearly, was probably the happiest period of his Me: there he
received recognition, lived in comparative ease, and married a Turkish
woman. During the First World War he worked as a teacher, and when the
war ended he left Istanbul but did not return immediately to Baghdad. He
first spent some months in Damascus which he left, a bitterly disappointed
man: his well-known Pan-Islamism and his attack on al-Sharif Husain for the
latter's declaration of war on the Ottomans in the name of the Arabs, had not
endeared him to Husain's soa King Faisal.^83 Rusafi then moved to Jerusalem
to teach Arabic literature in the Teachers' Training College. In 1921 he re-
turned to Baghdad at the invitation of the Iraqi Government and from then
on held a number of posts in the fields of education, politics and journalism.
Rusafi lost all hope of ever attaining senior office in the government when
Faisal became King of Iraq. He resigned his last job as teacher as early as 1928
and consequently had to live for many years on a meagre pension which he
supplemented for a while by keeping a small tobacconist shop. He withdrew
from Baghdad, and chose to lead a solitary life. He died a poor man.
Rusafi's fame, like Zahawi's, soon spread throughout the Arab world,
because of his powerful poems which were full of outspoken social and politi-
cal criticism, especially of the tyranny of Sultan Abdul Hamid (and later of
British imperialism). Like Zahawi, he too used to send his poems to be pub-
lished in Egypt, in reviews and newspapers like al-Muqtataf and al-Mu'ayyad.
It is perhaps interesting to mention that he published his first Diwan or col-
lection of poems in Beirut in 1910 while he was on his way home from Istan-
bul, in order to raise enough money to pay for the journey. A second and
much enlarged edition of the Diwan came out also in Beirut in 1932 and was
republished several times (although the best edition is the sixth which
appeared in Cairo in 1958). The Diwan however, does not include all of