Between 1960-70, more than at other times, I had the opportunity to indulge my passion for reading. During that period, I read the Russian classics, masterpieces of German literature, Italy’s sublime works, as well as prose and poetry penned in English, French, Spanish, Norwegian, and other languages.

The 1960s were formative years, when the prevailing cultural climate allowed unfettered access to world literature. Two factors were instrumental in creating this climate: the existence of a strong school of literary criticism and an equally strong translation movement, with its fountainhead in Lebanon. From the former we learnt which classics of world literature we should read, while the latter made those works available to us in our mother tongue when our mastery of European languages was inadequate to capture the richness of this human legacy.

The leading critics of the ‘60s, such as Mohamed Mandur³⁹ and Louis ‘Awad,⁴⁰ Abd al-Qadir al-Qutt⁴¹ and Raja al-Naqqash,⁴² served as our navigators through the uncharted waters of European culture, guiding us in our choice of reading material not only in the field of literature but also in Western philosophy, history, political economy, psychology, sociology, and so on. Other luminaries included the philosophers and intellectuals Abdel Rahman Badawy, Youssef Mourad, Zaki Naguib Mahmoud and Mourad Wahba.

During those years I had no inkling of the dichotomous course my life would later take, as my interests proceeded along two divergent paths: my career (in the economic sphere of petroleum, specifically, as a senior executive in the oil industry) and my avocation (an insatiable appetite for literature, philosophy, music and art).

It never occurred to me then, nor to others of my generation who loved knowledge and culture, to question the nationality of what we read. We devoured the works of Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Idriss, Badr Shaker El Seab, Nizar Qabani, Ahmed Abdel Moaty Hegazy, Salah Abdel Sabour, Soheil Idriss, Mohamed Deeb and Yehia Hakki as fervently as we did those of the countless foreign authors, poets and playwrights. It was never relevant to us that Youssef Idriss was Egyptian, Soheil Idriss Lebanese, Mohamed Deeb Algerian, Eugene Ionesco Romanian, Graham Greene English, that Albert Camus was French, Alberto Moravia Italian, Henryk Ibsen Norwegian or Eugene O’Neill American. The issue simply did not arise because we had been raised in a cultural climate in which creativity was presented to us as the ultimate expression of human genius, its fruits part of the common legacy of humanity taken as a whole. Egypt still unsullied by chauvinism or a fear of the jingoistic expression, “cultural invasion,” that was beginning to rear its ugly head in the late 1960s.

Unfortunately, the irresponsible use by some of this distasteful expression fell on willing ears, coinciding with the emergence of a regressive trend that did not affect intellectuals in the ‘60s: the new theory of cultural invasion began to take hold as Egypt fell prey to regressive ideas which were totally incompatible with the age and which rejected the notion that human civilization is an amalgam of many different civilizations and cultures. The numbers of those who subscribed to the cultural invasion theory continued to swell.

Then came the tremendous decline in educational and cultural standards in the latter half of the 1970s, which further promulgated the idea that we were the targets of a cultural invasion. In a misguided attempt to resist the “invasion” without forgoing any of the benefits of Western civilization, some of the theory’s proponents came forward with the absurd idea that Western civilization could be broken down into two distinct components: a material component, represented in the applied sciences, technology, machinery and equipment, and a moral component—culture, art and ideas. They proposed that we adopt from the West only the material component and discard the rest. However, they overlooked two important issues:

The material component of Western civilization is the natural result of its non-material, i.e. cultural, component. “Western civilization” began with ideas, art and literature and it was only after these had created a climate in which creativity could flourish that the applied sciences could produce their successive inventions and discoveries.

“Western civilization” is not exclusively Western, but is made up of two elements, one derived from the cumulative experience of other civilizations and cultures, the other from the experience built up in a purely Western context. In other words, it has a dimension attributable to humanity in general (being the end-product of the civilization process experienced by all humankind) as well as a Western dimension (linked to the history of western Europe from the late Middle Ages and the onset of the Renaissance).

Every effort must now be made to ensure that this and future generations understand that the fruits of human creativity and endeavor are humanity’s public domain and that partaking of those fruits in no way represents a surrender of our specificity. They must be encouraged to emulate the example of a whole generation of Egyptians—Loutfy El-Sayed, Taha Hussein, Ahmed Amin, Abbas El Aqqad, Tewfik El-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz—who remained ardently Egyptian despite their extensive forays into world culture and their profound appreciation of its masterpieces. Mahfouz, widely considered the father of the modern Arabic novel and the only Arab Nobel Prize Laureate, does not hesitate to criticize aspects of Egyptian society or to adopt unpopular or defiant standings, such as his support for Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or his objection to the Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt, which caused an attempt on his life. All the while, like his peers, his passion for Arabic literature and culture remains resolute.

Standing on the threshold of the 21st century, then, Egypt needs to generate a cultural reconciliation between what is “human,” in the broad sense of the word, and what is “specific.” If the will is there, such a reconciliation is not only feasible but perhaps even easily attained, and this will provide a better and more effective stage from which to deal with the requirements and challenges of the age, locally and globally.