The Revival and Neo-classicism school and the generation of development

01The Revival and Neo-classicism school and the generation of development

How the generation was formed

• Al-Barudi's pupils followed his method by direct teaching (face to face): Hafiz Ibrahim, Ahmed Shawqi and Abdul Muhsein al-Kazemi.
• Others followed him by correspondence, such as Shakib Arslan.
• Others still came to it by reading his poetry through "al-Wasilah al-Adabiyyah", the textbook of his teacher Sheikh Hussein al-Marsafi.
• From all of them formed a generation that developed the direction whose foundations al-Barudi had laid.

Causes of the development

• Openness to Western culture — by knowing foreign languages, mixing with foreigners, or reading translations — after the British occupation of Egypt.
• National struggle, which deepened awareness of the heritage and of a distinguished past, together with belief in the idea of Islamic solidarity (al-Jama'ah al-Islamiyyah).
• Political and social positions: the Denshaway incident, for example — Hafiz Ibrahim said of the occupation a line mocking and criticising it ("Are we and the doves the same?").
• Their positions on the constitution, representative councils, freedom of the press, the multiplicity of parties, the unity of the nation (Muslims and Copts), the founding of the Egyptian University in 1908, and Qasim Amin's call for the liberation of women.
• Their connection with the press, which had appeared and spread, made their style fluent and easy.

The traits of renewal in their work

• They treated the problems of their society and the external affairs of the Islamic world, so they expressed the spirit of the age.
• Their poetry takes its form from the old and links its content to the self or to the events of the age.
• They cared for the rhetorical side: the majesty of wording, the beauty of expression and the sweetness of music, and did not confine themselves to imitation.
• They opened room for personal experience, diversified the purposes of poetry and invented new meanings.
• They reconciled two directions: taking from the heritage and turning to the culture of the age.
• They came closer to the ordinary people, and their poetry was more concerned with others than with the self.

What remained in them of the old

• They begin some poems with the traditional love-prelude and then pass to the actual subject.
• They describe the ruined campsites (atlal), as Shawqi did.
• Occasional poetry dominated their work, because they were busy with the questions of their age.