Search

Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥilmī Jāhīn (1930–86), an Egyptian intellectual, made important contributions to Egyptian colloquial poetry, the art of the cartoon, theatre, television, and cinema. He was also an influential editor for two of the most widely circulated Egyptian cultural journals of the second half of the twentieth century, Rūz al-yūsuf and Ṣabāḥ al-khayr. Jāhīn was born on 25 December 1930 in the Shubrā quarter of Cairo. When he was four years old, his father was appointed as a prosecuting attorney for the Egyptian government. During Jāhīn’s…

Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (1872–1932) was an important Egyptian revivalist (sometimes called “neo-classical”) poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work is commonly associated with that of other celebrated poets of his era, in particular Maḥmūd Sāmī al-Bārūdī (d. 1904) and Aḥmad Shawqī (d. 1932), and, later, with that of Khalīl Muṭrān (d. 1949). He wrote poems—often published first in newspapers and journals—commemorating important figures and events (often political) from th…

Ismāʿīl Ṣabrī (d. 1923) is generally considered the most important Egyptian poet of Madrasat al-Iḥyāʾ (the Revivalist School) after Maḥmūd Sāmī al-Bārūdī (d. 1904), Aḥmad Shawqī (d. 1932), Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (d. 1932), and Khalīl Muṭrān (d. 1949). In a famous formulation, his poetry, composed mostly in the early twentieth century, has been described as concerned primarily with love, death, and nationalism (Tawfīq, 64; see also Jayyusi, 1:40). Ṣabrī was born in Cairo in 1854 to a middle-class mercantile family of Ḥijāzī origin. In 1866 he was enrolled in the governme…

The Dīwān Group (Jamāʿat al-Dīwān) was a loose alliance of three poets and critics—ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād (d. 1964), Ibrāhīm al-Māzinī (d. 1947), and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Shukrī (d. 1958)—who collaborated on various literary projects in Cairo from 1912 to 1921. They are known today mainly as the Dīwān Group, a name taken from the periodical al-Dīwān (“The collection”), published by al-ʿAqqād and al-Māzinī in 1921, of which only two issues appeared. They have also been called the Dīwān School (Madrasat al-Dīwān), the Dīwān Poets (Shuʿarāʾ al-Dīwān), and,…

ʿIzz al-Dīn Ismāʿīl ʿAbd al-Ghanī (d. 2007), an important twentieth-century literary critic, was born on 29 January 1929 in Cairo. He developed an interest in drawing and literature from an early age (Donohue, Tramontini, and Campbell, 517). He studied for several years in the local kuttāb (Qurʾān school), then transferred to the government-run Ḥadāʾiq al-Qubba primary and secondary school, where he excelled in Arabic language and literature, being particularly interested in the poetry of Aḥmad Shawqī (d. 1932) and the traditionalist writi…

Free verse (Ar. al-shiʿr al-ḥurr) was the most successful metrical experiment in twentieth-century Arabic poetry. The principles of free verse in Arabic were discovered and popularised after World War II by two young Iraqi poets, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d. 1964) and Nāzik al-Malāʾika (d. 2007). They knew one another as students in the English department at the Higher Teachers’ Training College (which would eventually be incorporated into the University of Baghdad), although both claimed that they arrived inde…

Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932), an Egyptian, was one of the foremost Arab poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His influence stretched beyond Egypt to embrace other parts of the Arab world because he frequently wrote on themes that resonated with supporters of pan-Arab nationalism and celebrated the great legacy of early Islam. His work has been a staple of school curricula throughout Arab countries for many decades. Although Shawqī’s poetry had many detractors, especially among the l…