Much praise was given to the batunji (bricklayer and builder) whoīecame a professor and a poet, but the pain of the journey left its mark. Nationalism, and later for pan-Arabism, only to return to his love of Lebanon. Along the road Hawi had fallen for Syrian More than a dozen years passed before he would return to school and inġ956 a scholarship took him to Cambridge, England, where he attained a doctorate in literature. Thirteen to earn a living as a stonemason. He was forced to leave school at the age of In the grip of a long, deep depression and he never recovered from that earlierīorn in 1919 to a poor Greek Orthodox family from Mount Lebanon. There had been a suicide attempt a year earlier, when Hawi had taken an Poet’s life had began to unravel long before Israel swept into Lebanon and From Ajami’s researches a much more complex That the political narrative had turned him into. More to the death than met the eye and more to Khalil Hawi than the cut-out Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, ‘weary of looking over a bottomless abyss.’ ‘He was weary of the state of decay’, wrote Letters saw a judgement on the Arab political condition. Sacrificial lamb for an Arab world that had fragmented.
Remove the stain of shame from my forehead?’ The eulogists told a simple tale:Ī nationalist hero against the background of the dark night. ‘Where are the Arabs?’ Hawi had asked his colleagues at the American University of Beirut before he Khalil Hawi, a gifted Lebanese poet, tookĪway his own life on 6 June 1982, the day that Israel
Tale of a suicide and of the cultural requiem that followed it. The Dream Palace of the Arabs opens dramatically and symbolically with a nightmarish tale, the And he reserves his most withering critique not for the despots nor theĭictators but for the intellectuals who, in his judgement, have led the Arabs His view of the Arab condition isĬomprehensively and irremediably bleak. Fouad Ajami would deny that there has everīeen a genuinely liberal age in either Arabic thought or in Arab politics. Albert Hourani called his great work on the history of ideas Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939. Of pan-Arabism, and the conflict between the liberal tradition and the moreĪssertive Islamic tendency of recent years. Of Arab history such as the revolt against Western dominance, the rise and fall Is sketched against the turbulent backdrop of Arab politics and it is enlivenedīy Ajami’s account of his personal encounters with some of the protagonists inįit, or rather the misfit, between ideas and politics in the postwar ArabĪnd writings of major literary figures in order to illuminate the larger themes Propounded a new vision of Arab culture, nationalism, secularism, and modernityĪnd of the gradual disintegration of this vision in the second half of the The sub-title is the ideological journey of the intellectuals and poets who Personal inquiry into the kind of world my generation of Arabs, men and womenīorn in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, was bequeathed.’ The debates of its intellectuals, the fate of its dominant ideas – and a The book is at once a book about public matters – a history of a people, This edifice in the last quarter-century. In these pages I take up what had become of Palace – an intellectual edifice of secular nationalism and modernity. Own, in the barracks and in the academies… Arabs had built their own dream Is to tell the story of the Arabs from the inside, through their own fiction, The legend that came to surround his name, was on the fringe of modern Arab Give the Arabs the foundations on which to build the dream palace of their World War as an attempt to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to Work, Lawrence described his campaign in the Arabian desert during the First Result is a book of singular beauty and pathos. Latest book Ajami uses all his skills as a scholar, as a stylist, andĪs a literary critic to brilliantly illuminating effect. Speaker who fell under the spell of the English language. Joseph Conrad, of whom he is an admirer, Ajami is a non-native English Is the supple and subtle quality of his English prose. To hear and render his culture’s inner voice. Vanished Imam, and Beirut: City of Regrets. Raised in Beirut, and is the author of The Arab Predicament, The Of the postwar Arab literary, cultural, and political scene.įouad Ajami was born in the Shia southern hinterland of Lebanon and It offers an intimate and insightful portrait The Dream Palace of the Arabs is both an intellectual tour de force andĪ delight to read. 332 pp., Columbia University Press, 1997. 344 pp., Pantheon, 1998.Īlso published in Hebrew, as ‘A Disappointing History’, with section on A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East, by Amos Elon. Review of The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey, by Fouad Ajami.
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