Origin of the school of al-Diwan and its founders

01Origin of the school of al-Diwan and its founders

Preparation

• Khalil Mutran had a French culture tied to the French poets. After him came three poets whose culture joined the Arabic heritage to English literature.
• These three are the group of al-Diwan: Abdul Rahman Shukri (1886–1958), Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad (1889–1964) and Ibrahim Abdel Qader al-Mazini (1889–1949).
• The school was named after the book "al-Diwan in Literature and Criticism", issued by al-Aqqad and al-Mazini in 1921.

The conditions that made the group

• The three embodied the Arab youth of the early twentieth century, living a suffocating crisis imposed by colonialism through the disorder, ignorance and poverty it spread.
• Young people found no room for the growth of their human personality, no way to free themselves from colonialism or to bear responsibility, since their resources were weak against the coloniser.
• Their hopes collided with the hateful colonial reality, so they fled the painful world of fact into the world of dreams and imagination.
• They took refuge in nature, pouring into it their lost hopes and their despair of life, and contemplated the universe and the secrets of existence.

What bound them together

• Pride in Arab culture, and the influence of English Romanticism.
• Expressing, with warm positions and a sincere experience, the tragedy of their generation; turning towards the human self and leaning towards imagination.
• In this they agreed with Khalil Mutran, who took from French Romanticism the personal emotional feeling-direction.
• From 1909 they began publishing their opinions and calling to their doctrine in newspaper articles and in the prefaces to their diwans.
• Al-Aqqad summed up the school's position in the preface to al-Mazini's first diwan (1913): they were young men raised by upbringing and reading, so they feel as an Easterner feels and picture the world as a Westerner pictures it.
• The first fruit of this temper was that pens strained towards independence, the removal of the film of hypocrisy, and freedom from artificial restraints.