The 1926 Uproar Over Taha Husayn’s On Pre-Islamic Poetry: Islamist-Secularist Debate and the Subversion of Secular Identity in Monarchical Egypt.

This paper uses the 1926 press debate over arch-secularist Taha Husayn’s controversial book Fi al-shi’r al-jahili (On Pre-Islamic Poetry) as a case study whose dynamics and outcome call into question the dominant conception that Egyptian national identity was secular during the 1900-1930 period. This controversy was one of the most important conflicts between secularists and Islamists in the early post-independence era, which scholars argue was characterized by a secular identity. My analysis shows that contrary to the literature on the debate, its outcome was a victory for Islamist ideology. In the paper, I use anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of a ‘social drama’ to analyze the debate. Following the phases of a social drama, the paper is divided into four sections. Section one discusses why the ideas in On Pre-Islamic Poetry represented a ‘breach’ of customary Egyptian societal norms. Section two describes the political ‘crisis’ the book sparked. Section three dissects the ‘redression’ stage of the social drama. I posit that the debate can be analyzed as a public ritual in which Egyptians ‘performed’ a declaration that Islam was their primary identity referent. I suggest that like all ritual behavior, this public performance can be metaphorically viewed as having involved a script. To show this, I treat the secularist and Islamist camps in the debate as interactive fields of competing stances, disaggregating them into internal factions of moderates and radicals, with each having their own characterization of the debate’s significance and of the most effective tactics and strategies for making their ideology dominant. I then argue that the moderate Islamist script -- plotting the debate as one between Religion and Science, casting Taha Husayn as a wayward, but not beyond hope, secularist who defamed Islam, and starring moderate Islamists as voices of reason who would save Islam by making secularists see their errant ways -- was one that did not alienate moderate secularists and thus ‘converted’ many of them to its cause. After discussing why radical positions on both sides of the debate were marginalized, I argue that the moderate Islamist script consequently became the sole script that the majority of both secularists and Islamists ‘read from’ during the debate, thus moving the action of the social drama along to the outcome it plotted. In section four, I analyze the ‘reintegrative’of the social drama, in which Taha Husayn’s public apology was tantamount to a ritualistic sacrifice that symbolized the repair of the original breach and Egypt’s emergence from the social drama as a nation with a strengthened Islamic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]