by Dr Morsi Saad El Din
Since my university years, my life has been closely associated with the British Council, one way or another. During this close relationship, I have never experienced a feeling of inferiority for being dependent on a foreign culture. I personally, do not believe in the newly coined expression "cultural invasion". It is a reflection of uncertainty and of lack of confidence in one's own national culture. The culture of both the ancient Egyptians and the Arabs, to which Egypt belongs, can stand up to and even challenge other world cultures.
We, that is the pre 1952 revolution generation, opened our arms and our minds to foreign cultures, having first imbibed and perfected our own. Both the Latin and Anglo-Saxon cultures found fertile soil in Egypt. Egyptian intellectuals were deeply influenced by these two cultures, an influence which can by perceived in the writings of Taha Hussein, Yehia Hakki, Mahmoud Teymour, as well as those of younger intellectuals like Lewis Awad, Aly El Raey and others. Our quaffing from the source of world culture did not emanate from a feeling that our own was not satisfactory. It was simply a sincere and deep desire to get acquainted with them and to compare them to our own, then to adopt whatever we felt could be applied to us, whether it was literary forms, artistic principles or canons of criticism.
I may be repeating a hackneyed phrase when I say that culture knows no boundaries. Men of science claim that science is accumulative and that any research in any country can be useful to the whole world. I claim the same in culture with its literary and artistic manifestations. For the reasons I believe that complaining of cultural invasion is a confession of the ineffectiveness of our cultural. Our embracing foreign thought, be it from the East or the West, does not, in any way imply that we have become mere followers in the domain of culture. We have many example of Egyptian writers who came under the influence of one culture or another: Taha Hussein, Tewfik El-Hakim, Zaki Naguib Mahoud, Salah Abdel Sabour, Aly El-raey, Rashad Roushdy and many more. No one can accuse these thinkers of losing their national roots. Indeed their writings are as Egyptian as the Nile and the Egyptian landscape.
Cultural relations are one of the important means which help in enriching local cultures. There in Egypt, we have been subjected to many a foreign cultural influence: French, English, German, Italian, not to mention the ancient influences of Greece and Rome. We have no doubt, extracted from them forms and patterns, but never at the expense of our national culture.
