Tawfiq al-Hakeem
Encyclopedia
Tawfiq al-Hakim or Tawfik el-Hakim (October 9, 1898 – July 26, 1987) ( Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm) was a prominent Egyptian
writer. He was born in Alexandria
, Egypt
, the son of an Egyptian wealthy judge and a Turkish
mother. The triumphs and failures that are represented by the reception of his enormous output of plays are emblematic of the issues that have confronted the Egyptian drama genre as it has endeavored to adapt its complex modes of communication to Egyptian society.
, "Prince of Poets," who during his latter years penned a number of verse dramas with themes culled from Egyptian and Islamic history; these included Masraa' Kliyubatra (The Death of Cleopatra, 1929), Magnun wa Layla (Driven mad by Layla
, 1931), Amirat el-Andalus (The Andalus
ian Princess, 1932), and Ali Bey el-Kebir (an 18th-century ruler of Egypt
), a play originally written in 1893 and later revised. However, between the popular traditions of farcical comedy and melodrama and the performance of translated versions of European dramatic masterpieces, there still remained a void within which an indigenous tradition of serious drama could develop.
as well as in other sources. It concerns the tale of the seven sleepers of Ephesus who, in order to escape the Roman persecution of Christians, take refuge in a cave. They sleep for three hundred years, and wake up in a completely different era - without realizing it, of course. In its use of overarching themes - rebirth into a new world and a predilection for returning to the past - el-Hakim's play obviously touches upon some of the broad cultural topics that were of major concern to intellectuals at the time, and, because of the play's obvious seriousness of purpose, most critics have chosen to emphasise such features.
Within a year el-Hakim produced another major work, Shahrazad (Scheherazade, 1934). While the title character is, of course, the famous narrator of the One Thousand and One Nights collection, the scenario for this play is set after all the tales have been told. Now cured of his vicious anger against the female sex by the story-telling virtuosity of the woman who is now his wife, King Shahrayar abandons his previous ways and embarks on a journey in quest of knowledge, only to discover himself caught in a dilemma whose focus is Shahrazad herself; through a linkage to the ancient goddess, Isis
, Shahrazad emerges as the ultimate mystery, the source of life and knowledge.
When the National Theatre Troupe was formed in Egypt in 1935, the first production that it mounted was The People of the Cave. The performances were not a success; for one thing, audiences seemed unimpressed by a performance in which the action on stage was so limited in comparison with the more popular types of drama
. It was such problems in the realm of both production and reception that seem to have led al-Hakim to use some of his play-prefaces in order to develop the notion of his plays as 'théâtre des idées', works for reading rather than performance. However, in spite of such critical controversies, he continued to write plays with philosophical themes culled from a variety of cultural sources: Pygmalion (1942), an interesting blend of the legends of Pygmalion and Narcissus; Sulayman el-Hakim (Solomon the Wise, 1943), and El-Malik Udib (King Oedipus, 1949).
Some of el-Hakim's frustrations with the performance aspect were diverted by an invitation in 1945 to write a series of short plays for publication in newspaper article form. These works were gathered together into two collections, Masrah el-Mugtama (Theatre of Society, 1950) and el-Masrah el-Munawwa (Theatre Miscellany, 1956). The most memorable of these plays is Ughneyyet el-Mawt (Death Song), a one-act play that with masterly economy depicts the fraught atmosphere in Upper Egypt
as a family awaits the return of the eldest son, a student in Cairo, in order that he may carry out a murder in response to the expectations of a blood feud.
El-Hakim's response to the social transformations brought about by the 1952 revolution, which he later criticized, was the play El Aydi El Na'mah (Soft Hands, 1954). The 'soft hands' of the title refer to those of a prince of the former royal family who finds himself without a meaningful role in the new society, a position in which he is joined by a young academic who has just finished writing a doctoral thesis on the uses of the Arabic preposition hatta. The play explores in an amusing, yet rather obviously didactic, fashion, the ways in which these two apparently useless individuals set about identifying roles for themselves in the new socialist context. While this play may be somewhat lacking in subtlety, it clearly illustrates in the context of el-Hakim's development as a playwright the way in which he had developed his technique in order to broach topics of contemporary interest, not least through a closer linkage between the pacing of dialogue and actions on stage. His play formed the basis of a popular Egyptian film by the same name, starring Ahmed Mazhar
.
In 1960 el-Hakim was to provide further illustration of this development in technique with another play set in an earlier period of Egyptian history, El Sultan El-Ha'er (The Sultan Perplexed). The play explores in a most effective manner the issue of the legitimation of power. A Mamluk
sultan at the height of his power is suddenly faced with the fact that he has never been manumitted and that he is thus ineligible to be ruler. By 1960 when this play was published, some of the initial euphoria and hope engendered by the Nasserist
regime itself, given expression in El Aydi El Na'mah, had begun to fade. The Egyptian people found themselves confronting some unsavoury realities: the use of the secret police to squelch the public expression of opinion, for example, and the personality cult surrounding the figure of Gamal Abdel Nasser
. In such a historical context el-Hakim's play can be seen as a somewhat courageous statement of the need for even the mightiest to adhere to the laws of the land and specifically a plea to the ruling military regime
to eschew the use of violence and instead seek legitimacy through application of the law.
1- Biographical Theatre:
The group of plays he wrote in his early life in which he expressed his personal experience and attitudes towards life were more than 400 plays among which were "al-Arees", (The Groom) and "Amam Shebak al-Tazaker", (Before the Ticket Office). These plays were more artistic because they were based on Al Hakim's personal opinion in criticizing social life.
2- Intellectual Theatre:
This dramatic style produced plays to be read not acted. Thus, he refused to call them plays and published them in separate books.
3- Objective Theatre:
Its aim is to contribute to the Egyptian society by fixing some values of the society, exposing the realities of Egyptian life.
Al-Hakim was able to understand nature and depict it in a style which combines symbolism, reality and imagination. He mastered narration, dialogue and selecting settings.
While el-Hakim's earlier plays were all composed in the literary language, he was to conduct a number of experiments with different levels of dramatic language. In the play, El-Safqah (The Deal, 1956), for example - with its themes of land ownership and the exploitation of poor peasant farmers - he couched the dialogue in something he termed 'a third language', one that could be read as a text in the standard written language of literature
, but that could also be performed on stage in a way which, while not exactly the idiom of Egyptian Arabic
, was certainly comprehensible to a larger population than the literate elite of the city. There is perhaps an irony in the fact that another of el-Hakim's plays of the 1960s, Ya tali el-Shagarah (1962; The Tree Climber, 1966), was one of his most successful works from this point of view, precisely because its use of the literary language in the dialogue was a major contributor to the non-reality of the atmosphere in this Theatre of the Absurd
style involving extensive passages of non-communication between husband and wife. El-Hakim continued to write plays during the 1960s, among the most popular of which were Masir Sorsar (The Fate of a Cockroach, 1966) and Bank el-Qalaq (Anxiety Bank, 1967).
Hakim's 1956 play Death Song was the basis of the libretto
to Mohammed Fairouz
's 2008 opera Sumeida's Song.
for an unusually long period of time; he was given the laqab (i.e. epithet
) of عدو المرأة ('Aduu al Mar'a ), meaning "Enemy of woman." However, he eventually married and had two children, a son and a daughter. His wife died in 1977; his son died in 1978 in a car accident. He was survived by his daughter after his death in 1987.
Egyptians
Egyptians are nation an ethnic group made up of Mediterranean North Africans, the indigenous people of Egypt.Egyptian identity is closely tied to geography. The population of Egypt is concentrated in the lower Nile Valley, the small strip of cultivable land stretching from the First Cataract to...
writer. He was born in Alexandria
Alexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
, Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, the son of an Egyptian wealthy judge and a Turkish
Turkish people
Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...
mother. The triumphs and failures that are represented by the reception of his enormous output of plays are emblematic of the issues that have confronted the Egyptian drama genre as it has endeavored to adapt its complex modes of communication to Egyptian society.
Egyptian drama before Tawfiq el-Hakim
The cause of 'serious' drama, at least in its textual form, was in the process of being given a boost by one of the Egypt's greatest littérateurs, Ahmed ShawqiAhmed Shawqi
Ahmed Shawqi was the great Arabic Poet-Laureate, an Egyptian poet and dramatist who pioneered the modern Egyptian literary movement, most notably introducing the genre of poetic epics to the Arabic literary tradition...
, "Prince of Poets," who during his latter years penned a number of verse dramas with themes culled from Egyptian and Islamic history; these included Masraa' Kliyubatra (The Death of Cleopatra, 1929), Magnun wa Layla (Driven mad by Layla
Layla and Majnun
Layla and Majnun, also known as The Madman and Layla – in Arabic مجنون ليلى or قيس وليلى , in , Leyli və Məcnun in Azeri, Leyla ile Mecnun in Turkish, in Urdu and Hindi – is a classical Arab story, popularized by Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi's...
, 1931), Amirat el-Andalus (The Andalus
Andalus
Al-Andalus Ensemble is an award-winning husband and wife musical duo that performs contemporary Andalusian music. The ensemble features Tarik Banzi playing oud, ney and darbuka, and Julia Banzi on flamenco guitar...
ian Princess, 1932), and Ali Bey el-Kebir (an 18th-century ruler of Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
), a play originally written in 1893 and later revised. However, between the popular traditions of farcical comedy and melodrama and the performance of translated versions of European dramatic masterpieces, there still remained a void within which an indigenous tradition of serious drama could develop.
Plays
The publication and performance of his play, Ahl el-Kahf (The People of the Cave, 1933) was a significant event in Egyptian drama. The story of 'the people of the cave' is to be found in the eighteenth surah of the Qur'anQur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
as well as in other sources. It concerns the tale of the seven sleepers of Ephesus who, in order to escape the Roman persecution of Christians, take refuge in a cave. They sleep for three hundred years, and wake up in a completely different era - without realizing it, of course. In its use of overarching themes - rebirth into a new world and a predilection for returning to the past - el-Hakim's play obviously touches upon some of the broad cultural topics that were of major concern to intellectuals at the time, and, because of the play's obvious seriousness of purpose, most critics have chosen to emphasise such features.
Within a year el-Hakim produced another major work, Shahrazad (Scheherazade, 1934). While the title character is, of course, the famous narrator of the One Thousand and One Nights collection, the scenario for this play is set after all the tales have been told. Now cured of his vicious anger against the female sex by the story-telling virtuosity of the woman who is now his wife, King Shahrayar abandons his previous ways and embarks on a journey in quest of knowledge, only to discover himself caught in a dilemma whose focus is Shahrazad herself; through a linkage to the ancient goddess, Isis
Isis
Isis or in original more likely Aset is a goddess in Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. She was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife as well as the matron of nature and magic...
, Shahrazad emerges as the ultimate mystery, the source of life and knowledge.
When the National Theatre Troupe was formed in Egypt in 1935, the first production that it mounted was The People of the Cave. The performances were not a success; for one thing, audiences seemed unimpressed by a performance in which the action on stage was so limited in comparison with the more popular types of drama
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
. It was such problems in the realm of both production and reception that seem to have led al-Hakim to use some of his play-prefaces in order to develop the notion of his plays as 'théâtre des idées', works for reading rather than performance. However, in spite of such critical controversies, he continued to write plays with philosophical themes culled from a variety of cultural sources: Pygmalion (1942), an interesting blend of the legends of Pygmalion and Narcissus; Sulayman el-Hakim (Solomon the Wise, 1943), and El-Malik Udib (King Oedipus, 1949).
Some of el-Hakim's frustrations with the performance aspect were diverted by an invitation in 1945 to write a series of short plays for publication in newspaper article form. These works were gathered together into two collections, Masrah el-Mugtama (Theatre of Society, 1950) and el-Masrah el-Munawwa (Theatre Miscellany, 1956). The most memorable of these plays is Ughneyyet el-Mawt (Death Song), a one-act play that with masterly economy depicts the fraught atmosphere in Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt is the strip of land, on both sides of the Nile valley, that extends from the cataract boundaries of modern-day Aswan north to the area between El-Ayait and Zawyet Dahshur . The northern section of Upper Egypt, between El-Ayait and Sohag is sometimes known as Middle Egypt...
as a family awaits the return of the eldest son, a student in Cairo, in order that he may carry out a murder in response to the expectations of a blood feud.
El-Hakim's response to the social transformations brought about by the 1952 revolution, which he later criticized, was the play El Aydi El Na'mah (Soft Hands, 1954). The 'soft hands' of the title refer to those of a prince of the former royal family who finds himself without a meaningful role in the new society, a position in which he is joined by a young academic who has just finished writing a doctoral thesis on the uses of the Arabic preposition hatta. The play explores in an amusing, yet rather obviously didactic, fashion, the ways in which these two apparently useless individuals set about identifying roles for themselves in the new socialist context. While this play may be somewhat lacking in subtlety, it clearly illustrates in the context of el-Hakim's development as a playwright the way in which he had developed his technique in order to broach topics of contemporary interest, not least through a closer linkage between the pacing of dialogue and actions on stage. His play formed the basis of a popular Egyptian film by the same name, starring Ahmed Mazhar
Ahmed Mazhar
-Biography:Ahmed Hafez Mazhar was an Egyptian actor. He graduated from the military academy in 1938 and his colleagues included Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat...
.
In 1960 el-Hakim was to provide further illustration of this development in technique with another play set in an earlier period of Egyptian history, El Sultan El-Ha'er (The Sultan Perplexed). The play explores in a most effective manner the issue of the legitimation of power. A Mamluk
Mamluk
A Mamluk was a soldier of slave origin, who were predominantly Cumans/Kipchaks The "mamluk phenomenon", as David Ayalon dubbed the creation of the specific warrior...
sultan at the height of his power is suddenly faced with the fact that he has never been manumitted and that he is thus ineligible to be ruler. By 1960 when this play was published, some of the initial euphoria and hope engendered by the Nasserist
Nasserism
Nasserism is an Arab nationalist political ideology based on the thinking of the former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was a major influence on pan-Arab politics in the 1950s and 1960s, and continues to have significant resonance throughout the Arab World to this day. It also...
regime itself, given expression in El Aydi El Na'mah, had begun to fade. The Egyptian people found themselves confronting some unsavoury realities: the use of the secret police to squelch the public expression of opinion, for example, and the personality cult surrounding the figure of Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein was the second President of Egypt from 1956 until his death. A colonel in the Egyptian army, Nasser led the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 along with Muhammad Naguib, the first president, which overthrew the monarchy of Egypt and Sudan, and heralded a new period of...
. In such a historical context el-Hakim's play can be seen as a somewhat courageous statement of the need for even the mightiest to adhere to the laws of the land and specifically a plea to the ruling military regime
Military dictatorship
A military dictatorship is a form of government where in the political power resides with the military. It is similar but not identical to a stratocracy, a state ruled directly by the military....
to eschew the use of violence and instead seek legitimacy through application of the law.
Style and Themes
The theatrical art of al-Hakim consists of three types:1- Biographical Theatre:
The group of plays he wrote in his early life in which he expressed his personal experience and attitudes towards life were more than 400 plays among which were "al-Arees", (The Groom) and "Amam Shebak al-Tazaker", (Before the Ticket Office). These plays were more artistic because they were based on Al Hakim's personal opinion in criticizing social life.
2- Intellectual Theatre:
This dramatic style produced plays to be read not acted. Thus, he refused to call them plays and published them in separate books.
3- Objective Theatre:
Its aim is to contribute to the Egyptian society by fixing some values of the society, exposing the realities of Egyptian life.
Al-Hakim was able to understand nature and depict it in a style which combines symbolism, reality and imagination. He mastered narration, dialogue and selecting settings.
While el-Hakim's earlier plays were all composed in the literary language, he was to conduct a number of experiments with different levels of dramatic language. In the play, El-Safqah (The Deal, 1956), for example - with its themes of land ownership and the exploitation of poor peasant farmers - he couched the dialogue in something he termed 'a third language', one that could be read as a text in the standard written language of literature
Literary Arabic
Modern Standard Arabic , Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standard and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech....
, but that could also be performed on stage in a way which, while not exactly the idiom of Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
, was certainly comprehensible to a larger population than the literate elite of the city. There is perhaps an irony in the fact that another of el-Hakim's plays of the 1960s, Ya tali el-Shagarah (1962; The Tree Climber, 1966), was one of his most successful works from this point of view, precisely because its use of the literary language in the dialogue was a major contributor to the non-reality of the atmosphere in this Theatre of the Absurd
Theatre of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...
style involving extensive passages of non-communication between husband and wife. El-Hakim continued to write plays during the 1960s, among the most popular of which were Masir Sorsar (The Fate of a Cockroach, 1966) and Bank el-Qalaq (Anxiety Bank, 1967).
Influence and Impact on Arabic Literature
Tawfiq el-Hakim is one of the major pioneer figures in modern Arabic literature. In the particular realm of theatre, he fulfils an overarching role as the sole founder of an entire literary tradition, as Taha Hussein had earlier made clear. His struggles on behalf of Arabic drama as a literary genre, its techniques, and its language, are coterminous with the achievement of a central role in contemporary Egyptian political and social life.Hakim's 1956 play Death Song was the basis of the libretto
Libretto
A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...
to Mohammed Fairouz
Mohammed Fairouz
Mohammed Fairouz is an Arab American composer.Having fulfilling many commissions and created a substantial body of frequently performed works, he is considered one of the most sought after composers of the young generation. Fairouz began composing at an early age and studied at the New England...
's 2008 opera Sumeida's Song.
Personal life
Hakim was viewed as something of a misogynist in his younger years, having written a few misogynistic articles and remaining a bachelorBachelor
A bachelor is a man above the age of majority who has never been married . Unlike his female counterpart, the spinster, a bachelor may have had children...
for an unusually long period of time; he was given the laqab (i.e. epithet
Epithet
An epithet or byname is a descriptive term accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, divinities, objects, and binomial nomenclature. It is also a descriptive title...
) of عدو المرأة (
List of works
- A Bullet in the Heart, 1926 (Plays)
- Leaving Paradise, 1926 (Plays)
- The Diary of a Prosecutor Among Peasant, 1993 (Novel) (translation exists at least into German and Swedish)
- The People of the Cave, 1933 (Play)
- The Return of the Spirit, 1933 (Novel)
- Sharazad, 1934 (Play)
- Muhammad the Prophet, 1936 (Biography)
- A Man without a Soul, 1937 (Play)
- A Sparrow from the East, 1938 (Novel)
- Ash'ab, 1938 (Novel)
- The Devil's Era, 1938 (Philosophical Stories)
- My Donkey told me, 1938 (Philosophical Essays)
- Braxa/The problem of ruling, 1939 (Play)
- The Dancer of the Temple, 1939 (Short Stories)
- Pygmalion, 1942
- Solomon the Wise, 1943
- Boss Kudrez's Building, 1948
- King Oedipus, 1949
- Soft Hands, 1954
- Equilibrium, 1955
- Isis, 1955
- The Deal, 1956
- The Sultan's Dilemma, 1960
- The Tree Climber, 1966
- The Fate of a Cockroach, 1966
- Anxiety Bank, 1967
- The Return of Consciousness, 1974