Knowledge and Attainments in the Mediterranean

Extract

In a book which appeared some thirty years ago under the title: The Future of Culture in Egypt, our learned friend Taha Husein put forward a seductive thesis which was as hard to accept in toto as it was to reject: the relation of the culture, literature and science of his country to the West, or more exactly to that Mediterranean culture which is the meeting-point of East and West. Ancient Egypt, the Hellenistic, even the Arab and the Moslem, all subscribed to this “Mediterraneanism,” to coin a phrase, instead of being linked purely and simply to the East, where a scholarly and traditional attitude delighted in classifying it. This abrupt turn to the West is quite justified as far as the Hellenistic period of the country is concerned; but with regard to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Fatimids and the Mamelukes, and without under-estimating its ties with the other Mediterranean countries, one cannot overlook all the aspects which linked it to the Near East, to Babylonian Mesopotamia, to the Arabia of Mahomet, and to the Persia of the Abbassids. But the merit of this paradoxical book, as is often the case in Taha Husein's work, is its vigourous insistence, albeit in a manner which is too rigid and exaggerated, on this undeniable fact: the unity of Mediterranean culture in Antiquity and even in the Middle Ages, although this is contrary to the opinions of Henri Pirenne, which, beyond the differences of religious creed and political allegiance, of language and custom, touches the intellectual heart of man, touches, as it were, his mental predicaments, touches a common spiritual patrimony. More than in literature and art, this “common” quality (or community) is well illustrated in the appreciation of knowledge, in the study and elaboration of knowledge down the centuries.