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In November 1956, shortly after the Suez crisis, the American writer Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) asked Taha Hussein in Cairo what he thought of the Hungarian revolt. Hussein, the gray eminence of Egyptian letters and one of the chief disseminators of Western culture in the Arabic-speaking world, had this to say in reply: “I am not informed of what has been happening in Hungary, because I have only seen the reports in the British and French press and they are not trustworthy ” (as reported in Encounter, January 1957, 12–13). Hussein’s reply was a fair reflection of the attitude of the Egyptian and Arabic-speaking intelligentsia vis-à-vis a civilization with which they had the strongest of cultural and material ties, and which was in large measure responsible for the emergence and training of that very intelligentsia. Nor did this process of disillusionment and hostility start with the Suez conflict or even with the establishment of the State of Israel. The attitude of the Arabicspeaking world to the West had always been one of ambivalence—of admiration and an urge for emulation on the one hand, and of resentment and rejection on the other. But following World War II, the general mood began to be dominated by a variety of sharp sentiments, ranging from suspicion and hostility to soaring self-confidence; sometimes, indeed, there was discernible in their attitude a feeling of scorn, derogation, and downright superiority. Several factors accounted for this growing hostility—the Palestine debacle , the feeling of frustration that followed the consistent failure of panArab unity ventures, and so on. But there were many more deep-seated factors at work. Gustave von Grunebaum, an Orientalist, remarked that from the standpoint of the West, “the greater the success of Westernization, the greater the political resistance to the West, but all the greater, [is] the resistance to every feature of full Westernization, the political utility of which is not immediately discernible” (quoted in Rejwan, Nasserist Ideology, 127). It may be useful to give at least one example of this ambivalence in its eleven the west’s inroads the west’s inroads 137 less extreme form, and from an earlier period, before turning to more recent manifestations of it. Ahmad Amin (1886–1954) was a prominent Egyptian Muslim author, educator, and man of letters. As far as the influences of the West were concerned, Amin was in no way hostile to them; in fact, as the editor in chief and leading light of the Authorship, Translation, and Publishing Committee as well as editor of the cultural weekly Al-Thaqafa, he was responsible for bringing to the reader of Arabic many of the philosophical , literary, and scientific products of Western culture. This did not seem to conflict with his traditionalism as a Muslim, nor did it impede his own work as a historian of the old school. Until 1947, the year in which he visited London, Amin had not paid much attention to such topics as Westernization, East-West contrasts, or the comparative merits and demerits of these two civilizations. Following his visit, however, he wrote a book, Al-Sharq wal-Gharb (East and West; 1955), in which he set out to discuss these subjects. Here Amin, who in the past had taken a rather positive position on the influence upon Islam of Greek, Jewish, and Christian cultures, and thus sought to justify and encourage contemporary borrowings from Western civilization, suddenly announced that his whole attitude on the West had undergone a basic change, and that his visit in a Western country had led him “to doubt the soundness of the prevailing belief that, regarding civilization (hadara), the West was ahead of the East.” Among the things that Amin found wanting in the West were its worship of power, its pride, the excessive freedom that it granted women, and the lack of balance between the material and the spiritual. Besides, the West was already in decline (Amin’s criticisms of the West are summarized in Rejwan, Nasserist Ideology, 134–135). Amin’s revised ideas about the West and its culture were pursued five years later with an even greater bitterness and intensity of feeling in Yawm al-Islam (Islam’s Day), a volume that concluded his seven-volume study of Islam’s social and cultural history. Here the hostility is so overt that Amin accuses Christians in general of hating Muslims, a hatred that he says is evident in their support of...

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