Tuesday's Read: The Education of Salama Musa

Musa, Salama. The Education of Salama Musa. (Leiden: Brill, 1961)

Salama Musa (سلامة موسى)

Salama Musa's (1887-1958) sweeping autobiography The Education of Salama Musa (تربية سلامة موسى, written 1947, translated by L.O. Schuman in 1961) is poetic, self-aware, and often tongue-in-cheek, the able expression of a complex man, a journalist who was an avid proponent of secularism and socialism and an apologist for European culture. Musa is an absolute joy to read. Early on he states:

The main motive for my writing this autobiography may well be that I am aware of standing, to a large extent, isolated from the society in which I live, aware of being out of step with the trend of its beliefs, its sympathies, and its prospects. In this respect, therefore, this life story will be the justification of my attitude of protest and opposition. I am writing in order to settle my account with history (5).

 
Musa was born into a landed Coptic family and educated at a British-run Coptic school. At the age of 20 (1907) he traveled to France, where he learned French in part by voraciously reading inexpensive periodicals. Through this exposure to French culture, he became enamored of evolution, socialism, women's liberation, and other ideas in currency there. He returned to Egypt after a stint in England, and in 1914 founded a short-lived magazine exploring the ideas he first learned in Europe, Al-Mustaqbal (The Future) with friends Farrah Antun and Yaqub Sarruf.

He describes his early life in vivid detail, paying special homage to his mother, the only parent he knew since his father died tragically when he was just a toddler. He did not marry until the age of 36 in 1923, several years after his mother's passing, and he reflects on the poignancy of her absence, and how keenly he felt it during his wedding celebrations.

Throughout the narrative Musa makes many observations in passing, some of which are chilling in retrospect. Describing his trip from Paris to London onboard a steamer already filled with British officers returning from India, he notes their racism and pointed, icy avoidance of him. He states offhand:

I must say that the English were indeed past masters in the practical application of the theory of the 'master race' in a time when the Germans were only developing its meaning theoretically (60).

This is significant, given that this was written from Egypt in 1947, from an author who transitioned from initial support of fascism to outright disdain for it through the course of the 1930s; Musa did not abide Nazi racism, among other things (see here for a deeper discussion). Nevertheless, his broader point expands upon his description of his overall sense of Frenchness: he states that, when researching, he always turned to English sources if he wanted assured rational, empirical foundations, but that it was France where he felt truly a citizen, fully absorbed by dint of his embrace of mutual socialist, secular ideals.

Musa describes his feelings of discontent toward the governments of the Middle East and North Africa. After becoming sick after only a few months in London, he takes some R&R in Tangier in 1908, which he romantically calls the "town of Ibn Battuta." He is disgusted by the corruption he witnesses there, surrounded by people whom he describes as "sickly" as a result of regularly smoking government-subsidized hashish; and being invited to a nude burlesque show that was touted to him as a performance of "Maghribi singing and dancing," which he describes as "a loathsome performance of abject banality" (63).

After his return to England in 1909, Musa fell for an Irish woman named Elizabeth, his first love. They were attracted to each other through the common ground of their mutual antipathy toward the British, and "spent nights together" during their courtship. Yet, Musa states in his perfunctory, offhand way, this Elizabeth aroused in him an Oedipal complex, so he broke it off entirely and felt inspired to study Freud. His immediate acceptance of Freudian psychoanalytics and of the idea of the Oedipus complex is striking now, given our general social distancing from the incestuous overtones of Freud's theories, and brings to mind one of my other research interests: I am quite curious about how, why and to what extent Freudian psychoanalysis was accepted throughout the Middle East, as well as by whom and for how long.

In the chapter "My Literary Education," Musa makes the rather extraordinary claim that he was exposed to all ideas that were ever of importance to him by his 20s, and that everything he learned subsequently was just an elaboration on an already existing kernel. Thus, his time in London between 1909-1911 was the pinnacle of his intellectual formation. He describes an exciting atmosphere, permeated by women's liberation, socialism (the Fabian Society), and great Russian authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Later, upon his return to Egypt, Musa translated and self-published portions of Crime and Punishment into Arabic, though it did not take off, financially speaking. Significantly, Musa explains "in speech and writing I kept mentioning the Russian authors, so that many readers would at least get a faint impression of their importance. Ibsen, Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw and Wells - those were the towering figures I took my bearings by in these days" (71).  Like many of his compatriots among the early Fabians and the effendiyah, Musa was concerned with sharing the cultural and intellectual achievements of Europe with the average Egyptian.