ماذا كتب ادوارد عطية عن معاوية نور
AN ARAB TELLS HIS STORY
A STUDY IN LOYALTIES
By EDWARDS ATTIYAH
John Murray
ALBERMALE STREET
LONDON W.r
First Edition
CHAPTER XX1X
MASTER AND PUPILS
In my work I found a great and compensating interest. I liked my pupils and felt that they liked me They were mostly friendly, smiling boys, tidy and pleasant to look at in their white gallabiyas and turbans. Sons of cultivators and government officials and artisans and tribal chiefs, they came mostly from backward homes but were tremendously keen and very anxious to learn.
Their backwardness in English and general knowledge was more than counterbalanced by their freshness and spontaneity, their enthusiasm and earnestness. These boys, whose fathers and grandfathers had till thirty years before lived their own traditional lives completely unaffected by foreign ideas, using the sailing boats and water-wheels of Pharaonic times, were now receiving a qumtEnghsh education and rapidly coming under the influence of Western thought and the example of other and more advanced Eastern countries.
Apart from books and teachers there was the Egyptian Pre s s, coming in twice a week, daily political papers, and illustrated weekly magazines—news from all parts of the world, especially Eastern countries, the latest developments of the political situation in Egypt; Gandhi imprisoned or released; Mustaplra Kemal doing this and kb, Saoud that; fiery patriotic articles, denunciations of Western greed and.
predatory imperialist designs; chronicles of sport events, biographical notes on film stars ; a story from Guy de Maupassant, a critique of Nietzsche, a commentary on Bernard Shaw; descriptions of the latest mechanical wonders and reports of the latest speed records; articles on democracy and socialism, the League of Nations and disarmament—and running through all this, one main theme—the awakening of the East, the unfolding nationalist aspirations of Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, India, China.
The Sudan had already had its first unfortunate experience of nationalist eruption. Under the impetus of the Egyptian movement in its first re v olutionary stage, a number of Sudanese of the fist educated generation organized an agitation aiming at independence in union with Egypt . The agitation, which was confined to a section of the nascent intelligentsia, itself a very small minority, led to an outbreak of disorder in some of the towns and a mutiny in some units of the army. The Government struck swiftly and decisively. The organization was broken up, the leaders severely punished, and Egyptian influence removed from the Sudan for several years. The whole thing had been an immature and misguided ebullition.
This had happened in 1924, and when I arrived in 1926 the country [4[ was .-__ a..nd the educated class somewhat subdued. Iu the minds of mg pupils, however, the ferment of budding thoughts and new emotions was going on. The narrow walls of their traditional prison-house had been perforated with a few holes sufficiently wide to let them see the outside world, and hear is mighty rumblings. The more imaginative of them responded vigorously to the stimulus.
Their reaction was a complex of conflicting emotions. Wonder and an awed admiration of this outside world with its immense wealth and power, Inowledge and skill and speed ; thrills of excitement at coming into contact with it, though ever so slightly, at beginning to form a part, though as yet a remote and passive one, of this living, progressing colotsm; contempt and pity for themselves and their country for being so backward and poor and ignorant; a collective feeling of sntallne:s and inferiority, provoking in many arses a strongly assertive individual attitude and an inordinate self-conceit derived from the acqu i sition of Western education.
Among these various elements one was dominant: mortification that this incident world into the outskirts of which they were being admitted, should he entirely dominated by the West, and that one of the principal manifestations of Western power should he the subjection of the East. But the East was beginning to stir, and they were a part of the East. Emphasizing their Arab descent, and excluding from their conscious*ness their association with Africa and its negroes, they found great consolation in these facts. They were sharing in the renascence of the Arab East, but as this renascence had not much to show yet, they sought comfort and encouragement in the past greatness of the Arabs.
What if the Christian Europeans were now the masters of the world? Had there not been a time when the warlike Arabs, fired by the spirit of their Prophet and the zeal of their new faith, swept victoriously through Christendom, carrying the Crescent beyond the Pyr e nees and as far as the Bosphorous? Had not the Arabs been the =aims and teacher, of the world when the now mighty Europeans were steeped in mediaeval right? Had they not translated Aristotle into Arabic and transmitted to the European barbarians the first gleams of the light of Greece ? But the greatest consolation of all, the one beyond doubt and dispute, the safe and sure anchorage of their being was the know-ledge that in their Book and Prophet they possessed the Ultimate Truth.
In this serene knowledge they felt superior to all outsiders even if God for some inscrutable reason had given some of these material powers of a somewh remarkable kind. Truly that knowledge was a rock of comfort , and as long as it was not undermined by the burrowing, of the imps of doubt they could lean on it and face the world. But in some cases the imps were already at work.
It did not take me long to see that the reactions of my pupils were very analogous to that psychological attitude I had known so intimately in Syria as a child. The exaggerated glorification of the Arabs by the Sudanese was the exact counterpart of the Syrian Christians ' hero-worship of the West while they were under Turkish suzerainty. 'the consolation which they derived from the feeling of kinship, through community of religion, with the European nations, the Mohammedan Sudanese, governed by Western Christians, sought and found in their relationship with the Arabs of the past.
A true son of Victoria College and a faithful disciple of Mt. Reed, I had come to the Gordon College determined to have intimate personal relations with my pupils, to practise all the ideals of teaching and human intercourse which I had acquired during my own education, and the state of things I found there added fresh incentive to my resolve. The military atmosphere sharpened my determination to be human; the aloofness of the British masters made me want to be nearer to the Sudanese.
For by treating my Sudanese pupils as I believed pupils should be treated I was conscious of a moral superiority which buttressed my self-respect. I liked to think that by getting nearer to the minds of my pupils, by gaining their confidence and affection, by making them feel that I was their friend as well as their teacher, I could exercise over them an influence far deeper and subtler in its ultimate results than the authority of the British tutors for all its outward power. It was my compensation for the official inferiority of the position in which I had been placed.
The most promising of my pupils, the one whose subsequent career was to be the most remarkable, as it turned out to be the most ghastly in its final failure and tragedy, was a slight, pleasant-looking boy of eighteen in the final year, called Moawiya Nur . He attracted my attention from the first day by quoting from Shaw and Anatole France. I thought he was trying to show off a little superficial knowledge, but to my surprise I found when I probed him that the knowledge was deep and that behind it lay a shrewd and critical understanding.
Moawiya came of an old and noted Arab family. His grandfather had achieved distinction under the Mandi's rule, and one of his uncles was a judge under the Sudan Government. Being one of the most promising boys of his generation at the College, Moawiya had been selected by the College authorities for a medical career and given a scholarship to the recently established Kitchener School of Medicine for which the. best talent was being recruited. Moawiya ' s own inclinations were strongly literary, and although a medical career offered hint the best prospects a Sudanese could look forward to in Government service, he had no wish to become a doctor.
Almost alone among the boys of his generation he did not regard education as the door to government employment. He desired education for its own sake, and he wished to study literature. But there was no university in the Sudan , and no literary course which he could take after leaving the Gordon College choice before him was to become a clerk on leaving the Coll e g e or ket t the scholarship offered him and study medicine.
He might bsotnc a teacher, but the College authorities did not think he d make a good schoolmaster. So it had to be medicine. Iris lc naturally thought him mad to demur to the splendid chance al him of free medical training and a secure and lucrative govern - _ career. Such a phenomenon had never been known in the Sudan re. It was something in the nature of a biological mutation. the mutation had occurred in an unfavourable environment, and h against his will Moawiya consented at least to try the school of rein e.
:t already Moawiya ' s heart was elsewhere. The literature that cast its spell over his mind was English literature, and his heart gone to the West.
Moawiya was the first Sudanese to make real act with the spirit of the West. In English literature, this North _an drab boy, who had never crossed the frontiers of the Sudan , Bred in a household where the women could not read or write Arabic, found his spiritual home. His case was similar to my own more unusual, more extreme. The differences between his tual home and his native soil, between the country, family and icon to which he belonged and the remote and invisible world to h he was reaching out with all the eagerness and intimacy of a new ion, were far sharper and deeper than they had been in my case.
seas a Moslem boy, a black boy. He was not only an Arab, but also tfrican, and his country had never known any culture but a narrow stunted form of Islamic tradition. To have a picture of the rat, to visualize the gulf he was stepping across, imagine him in the nn of his family at Omdurman, surrounded by his mother and s, thitets and cousins, segregated women who had never looked on -anger, illiterate women whose minds encompassed nothing beyond elementary facts of biological and domestic life-birth, tiruum*m, marriage, pregnancy, divorces, death, mourning, cooking, onal adornment—imagine him in this setting reading Jane ten or Aldous Huxley, moving about in polished 18th century * lish drawing-rooms, breathing the atmosphere of loth century imsbury.
felt a deep sympathy for him which he sensed and repaid with the t and admiration of a young enthusiast eager and grateful for lance, He and I had met in this great country of English literature, •hick we had come separately, travelling from different puts of the h. 1 had been there for some time, but he was a raw newcomer, the climate was utterly different from that of his native land. I been able to acclimatize myself. I could go on living here eflnitely in great comfort and happiness, and if I had to go hack to homeland I could live there too, though perhaps at a little Joker
level of vitality. .But this complete stranger, inhaling this new air so passionately, how would he get on?
A few months after he had joined the School of Medicine Moawiya came to sec me one day. In the course of our calk he asked several questions about universities abroad, what qualifications one had to have to be admitted to them, what the fees were like and so on.
A week later I heard that he had left the School of Medicine and absconded to Egypt . His family were profoundly shocked and also alarmed. Egypt in those days was politically taboo in the eves of the Sudan Government. A student running away to it in quest of higher educa*tion might be easily mistaken for a political renegade. Moreover, by leaving the School of Medicine and seeking education abroad Moawiya would forfeit his claim on the Government for subsequent employment.
His uncle therefore appeared before the Director of Education, denounced his nephew's ungrateful madness and undertook to proceed immediately to Egypt and bring back the young fool by force if neces*sary. The Director promised to keep Moawiya ' s place for him at the School of Medicine until the uncle came back, and the latter left for Egypt . In Cairo he appealed to the Ministry of the Interior. He explained that he had come to reclaim a runaway nephew Who was under age. The Government lent its support. The necessary orders were issued and Moawiya was arrested, kept at a police station for the night and handed over the next day to his uncle, who pushed him into the return train and brought him back to Khartoum .
But Moawiya had made up his mind and bluntly declared that he would neither go back to the Medical School nor become a Government clerk. He wanted to go to a university and study English literature. His uncle, who was a friend of mine and knew that I took a special interest in the boy and had some influence over him, decided that I should arbitrate on the matter. Uncle and nephew came along and a solemn
conference was held in my room to decide Moawiya's fate. Moawiya said that he wished to go to die America
University of Beyrouth, and that his family had the mans to send him there. The uncle admitted the means but ohjceted that by going to Beyrouth Moawiya would lose his career and all guarantee of government employment. Moawiya said he did not want any guarantees and would be able to earn his living somehow or other when he had taken his degree.
The uncle turned to me for judgement. I felt that I was reliving my own experi*ence of four years before in the person of Moawiya. I knew what he was feeling for I had felt that yearning and known that strife myself. I could see the dream in his eyes, the look fixed on the distant horizon. The uncle, a decent fellow, neither hard-hearted nor narrow-minded, but merely practical, merely sensible, thought in relative values, balanced one advantage against another, considered consequences, employment, career, livelihood. But for \loawiya, passion-possessed,
there was nothing to be considered, there was only one absolute value, one end which must be sought for its own sake regardless of all consequences—the education of his mind, the development of his personality along the lines of its choice. I-Ic wanted to realize himself before worrying how he was going to feed and clothe and house that self. I pronounced in his favour and a few weeks late: he left for Beyronth
A DEFEAT AND A TRIUMPHANT
ALTHOUGH we now had many British friends and felt completely at home with them, we did not belong to the British community, and indeed had no desire to belong to it. We did not wish to belong to any community, and shut ourselves up in a narrow and monotonous national circle- We wished to be able to make friends everywhere and live a cosmopolitan life. And this we now did. We had many Syrian friends without belonging ro the Syrian community, and we also had Egyptian, Greek and Armenian friends. Above all, we had a large circle of Sudanese friends, some of them elderly people who had been my father's friends, but most of them young men whom I had taught at the Gordon College or got to know suhscqucntly through my work. They were all genial and hospitable and ready to return friendship with a warm and open heart. jean took to them easily, and having mastered Sudanese Arabic and social customs and developed a taste for the national dish, Kisra and Mulah, became very popular with them. Their women did not sit with us when we went to their houses, but after dinner,while I and tile men sat in the male quarter, she used to go in and visit them in the Harem and converse with them fluently on children and housekeeping and sewing and all other feminine matters.
It was a social life of great variety and sharp contrasts, and we enjoyed it immensely. It was our own creation. We had not found it in Khartoum , but had carved it out for ourselves, and we were very happy in it. There were no more any tensions in my life arising out of the clash of race or nationality.
My greatest friend among the Sudanese was still my old pupil
Moawivn Nur. I had kept in close touch with him during his three
years at Me American University of Beyrouth, where he took his degree
in English literature. We used to meet every summer either in Syria
or in the Sudan , and I had followed with delight the fulfilment of his
dream and the development of his powers from year to year. On
graduating from Beyrouth he had gone to Egypt with the ambition of
earning his living there as a free-lance literary journalist. Fired with
the young intellcc uaPs enthusiasm for the literary life in a great city,
of which he had dreamed with so much longing in his home in
Omdurman and as a medical student, against his will, in Khartoum,
he had won through to his dream, be had smashed all the shackles that
had threatened to chain him down—family opposition, Caesar's hat,
the insidious lure of government service, and now, at zt, a B.A. in
literature from Beyrouth, the young Sudanese boy from Omdurman
A DEFEAT AND A TRIUMPH
w-as Ca lint ;he lid of his choice in the great city of Cairo . The
Bohemia imaginat i on was waiting for him, with its attic, and cafe.. it, f eructs Latins peopled by Zola:, sod Johnson and Dos:um sky, its glories of the mind and contempt for matter.
'fhz t sicking Sudanese, very dark in complexion, with inspira?
tion in h .i og eyes and mirth in his flashing teeth, his fierce idealism and burning literary passion, his prodigious reading and over-flowing mind, was something new in Cairo literary circles. He
attracted :mention of the distinguished Egyptian writer Abbas El
A gqui and iv is welcomed into his set. He became known and popular.
His Ii e ; des, applying European canons of enucisms to Arabic
literaiur y i dly gained him a name, and well-known writers carte to vaiuc his opinions. For some time he was intensely happy happy in his spirit uid rip mph s, and happy in the ascetic rigours of his material life. He lived in a small room on a roof in Heliopolis , amid little furniture bra stacks of hooks and papers in the disorder proper to the artistic temperament. IIis meals were few and spare. Most days he lived on bread and cheese in his garret, and when sometimes he went to bed hungry, he got a thrill out of it. Had not Zola felt the pangs of hungers He was living in the authentic tradition. The mind triumphed in the discomforts of the body.
But before long the flouted body began to take its revenge. His health suffered from lack of nourishment. The money he earned with his argyles was not enough to feed him, and there were no prospects of improvement since it was impossible in Egypt to earn a living in literary journalism alone. He was ill several times and on these occa*sions he spent lonely days confined to his attic on little nourishment and wi llcnobody to care for him. Depression assailed him. Bohemia , seen from the windows of a lonely sickroom, lost
its charm. He struggled on ear a few more months, borrowing money from friends and extracting a Hide from his family, but in the end he yielded to the exhortations of his uncle to return to the Sudan and seek a job in government service. His objection to government service, now that he had achieved his ambition of completing his literary education, had lost mud; of its force. As a university man with a trained mind he might hope for an educational or administrative post in which he would have an opporn unity of pursuing, if not his purely literay, at least his cultural and human interests, while the security and ample leisure of a government career would leave him enough time for writing.
With these hopes Moawiya returned to the Sudan and spent some months trying to get a government post. I saw a good deal of him during this pHDLI, and I was greatly impressed by the maturity and ohjc tivhy el his thought. He was a nationalist, but a new kind of nationalist in the Sudan , and very rare indeed in the whole of the Near East . Ile was a self-critical nationalist, a rational and constructive
nationalist who repudiated not only the blind emotional upsurge of hostility to the AVet, but also the abstract purposeless craving for independence as an end in itself. He believed, with all the intensity of his earnest nature, that the only justification for nationalism was the possession by a people of something worth expressing in itself and as a contribution to world civilization. He believed that independence was only the means to an end, and that if a worthy end did not exist in a healthy and creative nationalism, independence was not deserved, and if secured would be valueless. IIe wanted nationalism to start by being a movement of internal creation, of economic development, cultural progress and social reform, before it became a revolt against external control. For the British he had no hatred. For their good qualities and the good work they were doing in the Sudan , which he could see with an eye unclouded by passion, he had a great admiration, coupled with an objective and tolerant criticism of their faults. He was convinced that in her thought, culture and institutions, England had something valuable to impart to the East, and he was very anxious that the Sudan should acquire it.
Sitting in my office, where he visited me frequently in the morn*ings, he would discourse interminably on these matters, analysing Imperialism and Nationalism, quoting Lugard and Julian Huxley, and also laughing and flashing his teeth a good deal. For his earnestness and zeal were balanced by a great sense of humour, which never failed to reveal to him the ludicrous even in himself, and often, in the middle of a fervent exposition he would suddenly sec his subject or himself in a comic aspect and burst out laughing.
He failed to get the kind of job he wanted. The Government found him alarming, and the Education Deparunent turned him down as being unsuitable for a teaching career. His inter v iew with the high official who passed the final sentence on him was somewhat unfor*tunate. Moawiya \vent to the interview wearing a loud mellow tic, which had a devastating effect on the staid bureaucrat. They talked about English literature and somehow got on to Johnson, about whom Moawiya knew a good deal and the distinguished civil ser v ant apparently very little. Feeling called upon to say something, the high official thought he would play for safety and hide behind a cliche which he deemed to be non-committal. So he advanced the opinion that John-son was born before his time. This statement shocked Moawiya as much as his yellow tic had shocked the high official, and the interview ended negatively. Later Moawiya was offered a small post in the Finance Department which neither agreed with his inclinations nor took account of his university qualifications. IIe refused it and returned once more to Egypt, d i sappointed and harbouring a grievance against the Sudan Government for having denied him the chance to live and earn a living in his country in a post that suited his bent and
attainm cat; . Out of pique rather than conviction, and in order to car the money which he needed desperately and which some Cairo news-paper. were willing to pay for political anti-British copy, and not for literary matter, he wrote a number of articles satirizing the white man toiling under his burden on the pleasant lawns of Khartoum, with ic e tinkling in his sundown refreshment.
.H asviyss return to Egypt was not only due to hi, failure to lied u government joh. A deeper reason was that he had become to a large extent a strange- in his own country, a lonely soul among his people and in his timid,. IIc, if not Johnson, was certainly born before his time. "nu gulf between his mental life and his native environment had become immense. He no longer had an anchorage in Sudanese ilk, ad his tragedy was that he had failed to find a n e w anchorage elsewhere. Egyptian Bohemia was largely a pose and a phase. It offered him intellectual satisfaction and superficial excitement. But it had no soil into which he could strike new roots. In all the intimate things of life he felt a stranger in Egypt . He was a wanderer with no real home except in the imaginary world of Western literature. Only among .the characters of Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley could he live intimately and intensely.
There may, of course, have been other psychological processes of a more insidious nature at work in Moawiya's mind, but Were is little doubt that this spiritual homelessness had much to do with his tragic end. One day, a few months after he had gone back to Egypt , I heard that he had had a nervous breakdown and was in the Cairo mental hospital. A few weeks later, having rallied slightly from the first shock of his diwrder, he came hack to the Sudan , for the last time,
to live with his family in Omdurman and be looked after by those who in spite of intellectual disparities cared for him as nobody in Egypt could. It was the pathetic homecoming of an adventurous soul, returning in failure from a daring quest, maimed and frightened. For some time he was able to go about and superficially looked normal. lle came to see me at my ollice as was his custom, and at first I could see no difference in his behaviour. I noticed, however, that he had a bulky book in his pocket and asked him what it was. Ilis answer surprised me. The hook was the Koran, and Moawiya explained that he was deriving great comfort from it and discovering in it meanings he had not understood before. He spoke with mysterious innuendoes as one to whom something of deep import was being revealed. This gave me a shock. I had had some previous experience of religious symptoms in cams of nervous breakdown, and immediately recognized the significance of \loawiya's speech and the way he said it. But a greater shuck came a few moments later. The year was 1935, and AIus c,'ni was rumbling at the British Empire . Moawiya, with a meaning look in his eye s asked me whether the British in the Sudan were not afraid.
and to my amazement went on to suggest, by means of the same mysterious innuendoes, that there was sonic secret connection between him, the Koran, Mussolini and the approaching doom of the British Empire. He threw out hints of occult powers, giving me to under-stand that there was more in the international crisis than met the eye, at least my eve, and that Mussolini was the instrument of a high purpose which somehow was associated with Moawiya's private desires. I looked speechless at the fragile pathetic figure sitting opposite me, marvelling at the fimtastic resourcefulness of the human mind when defeated by reality. Moawiya ' s delusion was his answer to the might of the British Empire, his revenge on the British for their dominion over the Sudan , his retaliation against the Sudan Government for having denied him a job.
I did not see him for some time after this first meeting. He did not come again, and I heard that he was spending all his time at home and did not wish to see anyone. Then one day I had a message from him asking me to go and see him. I went and was staggered by the change that had come over him. He was in a comparatively lucid state when I saw him, and this indeed added poignancy to what I saw and heard. He knew that there was something wrong with his mind, and he was seeking a cure. He had put himself in the hands of a Fiki, a primitive, ignorant, half-religious and half-medical quack, who was treating him by means of charms and mysterious potions. Moawiya believed that this man could do him good. He believed in his powers, in his super*stitions. He had reverted to his native dress, and this change in his appearance, which at a normal time, would have made no impression on me, now seemed the symbol of a deeper reversion. For behind those clothes a whole culture and a whole personality had disintegrated. Piece by piece, like Emperor Jones in the panic of his forest night, Moawiya ' s disordered mind had east away all its cherished Western garments and fallen back into its primitive trembling nakedness. The Fiki did not cure him. He became completely insane and later died.
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