La Prima Guerra Mondiale e il nuovo corso del pensiero modernista in Egitto: uno scritto di Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal
(The First World War and the new course of Modernist thought in Egypt: An article by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal)
in La rivista di Arablit, a. VII, n. 14, dicembre 2017, pp. 7-18.
This article centres on the analysis of a long journalistic piece by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal: al-Šarq fī ṭawr ba‘ṯihi (The East in its Renaissance Phase), published in 1928 in a Syrian and an Egyptian magazines. The text represents a significant testimony of the Egyptian and Arab debates on the First World War at the time of the tenth anniversary of its conclusion, but it also constitutes one of the first examples of Haykal’s transition from the intellectual trend of Pharaonism to the Orientalist discourse.
Scholars have often explained these two intellectual traditions in oppositional terms. The article challenges the idea of such an antithesis by emphasizing the continuity in the ideological tenets of al-Šarq fī ṭawr ba‘ṯihiwith respect to Haykal’s Pharaonic writings and sets out to demonstrate the coherence of the author’s modernist project.
