Ahmad Shawqi: At the Threshold of World Literature

The Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868-1932) was long regarded as the greatest modern Arabic poet by many critics and in the popular imagination. Shawqi sought to draw on the prestige of the Arabic poetic tradition to fashion from it a national literature that could take its place among other national literatures. He composed poems for the Egyptian and Arabic public sphere that addressed issues of national identity as well as political and social topics. These poems were published in newspapers on a regular basis and attained great popularity. Yet writers and critics of the younger generation who adopted European ideals of the literary and world literature regarded Shawqi's work as anathema to an authentic national literature. In this conflict we see the effects of the ideal of world literature on the formation of national literatures as well as the limitations of this concept.