What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us. Muhammad al-Muwaylihi
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Minister by the Khedive ʿAbbās the Second and replaced for a period of days by Fakhrī Pāshā.13 Ibrāhīm may have been informed about these events through correspondence with his son, but in any case, Muḥammad was a frequent visitor to Istanbul during this period; in 1892, he was there to be decorated as a Bey (second class), and again in 1893 when Blunt went to Istanbul in an unsuccessful attempt to gain an interview with the Sultan. In this same year, Muḥammad delivered a lecture to the Language Academy (al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī) on the acquisition of the talent for creative writing by learning poetry.14
In 1895 Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī decided to leave Istanbul. He had made many friends in the Ottoman capital, including al-Shinqīṭī, Munīf Pāshā, and Ibrāhīm Bey Adham, for whose newspaper, Al-Ḥaqāʾiq, he had written several articles describing state occasions. He had, however, grown tired of the court intrigues and decided to return to Egypt. He was unable to keep this fact a secret from the Sultan’s spies, and Sultan ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd sent someone to find out why he wished to leave. Ibrāhīm sent back the reply that he wished to return to his own country and see his son and friends again. The Sultan seems to have been satisfied and did not prevent him from leaving. In 1896, Ibrāhīm collected the articles which he had written about life in Istanbul and published them at the Egyptian Al-Muqaṭṭam press under the title Mā Hunālik. When copies of the book reached Istanbul and were brought to the Sultan’s attention, however, he dispatched a letter to Egypt with the order that they should all be collected and sent to him in Istanbul. Ibrāhīm had no wish to incur the Sultan’s hatred and set about collecting as many copies of the book as he could, which he duly sent to Istanbul.15
In December 1895 Muḥammad had been appointed Muʿāwin of the province of Qalyūbiyyah and later Maʾmūr of the district of Burullus, but he resigned the latter post after a short while and in 1898 joined his father in producing his new newspaper.16 The first issue of Miṣbāh al-sharq appeared on April 14, 1898, and the paper soon established a high reputation for itself. This was due in no small part to the fact that the majority of the content was written by the Muwayliḥīs and indeed was frequently unsigned, a fact which was later to give some of Muḥammad’s enemies the opportunity to dispute the authorship of the articles that eventually became the book Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām. The paper contained news from Istanbul and items of local interest as well as extracts from Arabic literature, including essays of al-Jāḥiẓ and poems from the Dīwān of Ibn al-Rūmī which Muḥammad had transcribed in Istanbul. The leading articles dealt with such topics as the Pan-Islamist movement, the British occupation of Egypt, the war in the Sudan, the religious reform movement, and the comparison of Oriental and Western customs. Muḥammad also caused a considerable furor in the literary world of Cairo by publishing a series of articles in which he subjected the Dīwān of the famous Egyptian poet, Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932), together with its introduction, to some exacting but constructive criticism.17 Such material as this was rarely found in newspapers of the time, and many writers have acknowledged the effect which its contents and style had on them; Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī says that “Miṣbāḥ al-sharq was the best weekly,” while Salāmah Mūsā tells in his autobiography how he acquired “a taste for artistic beauty” by reading the articles it contained.18
In November 1898, Muḥammad began to publish under the title Fatrah min al-Zaman the lengthy series of articles that form the text of these volumes; later, after much editing, these articles became the book Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām (their precise history is discussed in the section “A History of the Text” below). They appeared each week on the front page of the newspaper. At first they were unsigned, but, when Ibrāhīm began to publish his own story in a series of articles entitled “Mirʾāt al-ʿĀlam,” Muḥammad signed his name with the letter mīm and Ibrahim used an alif. Muḥammad continued to publish these articles until June 1900, when he went to London to cover the state visit of the Khedive to the homeland of Queen Victoria (in whose honor Ibrāhīm composed an ode which was printed in the newspaper). Muḥammad sent back an article describing this visit,19 and then went to Paris to visit the Great Exhibition (Exposition universelle), which he described for the readers of Miṣbāḥ al-sharq in a series of episodes entitled “Paris.”20 In describing his visit to the French capital, al-Muwayliḥī was following the precedents set by such figures as al-Ṭahṭāwī, al-Shidyāq, and ʿAlī Mubārak. Unlike these writers, however, he confined most of his descriptions to the Paris Exhibition of 1900.
Although Miṣbāh al-sharq was officially owned and edited by Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī, Muḥammad gradually took over the management of the newspaper, and Ibrāhīm became a political adviser of the Khedive. In 1902, Muḥammad found himself at the center of a social scandal. While sitting in a café, he appears to have insulted a young nobleman, Muḥammad Bey Nashʾat (whom ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Bishrī—a friend and young protegé of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī—describes as “a frivolous fool”). Apparently the whole thing was intended to be a joke, but it seems to have been misinterpreted because the irate young man slapped al-Muwayliḥī on the face.21 ʿAlī Yūsuf, the editor of the newspaper Al-Muʾayyad, then published a series of reports of the incident which considerably dramatized the whole affair and cast a slur on Muḥammad. Muḥammad wrote a rather stupid and vitriolic reply in Miṣbāḥ al-sharq called “Al-Jarīdah al-ʿĀmmiyyah” (“The Plebeian Newspaper”) in which he declared that Al-Muʾayyad represented the gutter press and was read only by the lower classes of society.22 ʿAlī Yūsuf countered his attack with a regular column in his newspaper called “ʿĀm al-kaff” (“The Year of the Slap”). Al-Bishrī points out that many people in Cairo had suffered from the barbed pens of the Muwayliḥīs and thus there was no shortage of material with which ʿAlī Yūsuf could fill his column. Indeed, the poet Ismāʿīl Ṣabrī (1854–1923) was among those who composed poems for this purpose.23 ʿAlī Yūsuf kept the column going for twelve consecutive daily issues of the newspaper and continued to taunt Muḥammad for not replying to his critics.24 Eventually however, the common friends of both men including, no doubt, many members of the Nāzlī circle which both men attended, appear to have arranged a cease-fire, and no more was heard of the subject—for a while at least.
According to his closest friends, Muḥammad was deeply affected by this campaign against him; based on descriptions of his retiring nature and hatred of crowded places, this seems very likely. To some degree, his generally unsociable temperament can be attributed to the chronic stammer from which he suffered; apparently it was so bad that he would often be unable to finish a sentence at all and would have to resort to an embarassed silence. This fact may not only explain why he preferred to be educated at home as a boy, but also may provide a clue to the drastic effect which this incident in the café had on him. It is certainly true that the gradual decline of Miṣbāḥ al-sharq and Abū Zayd (a satirical magazine started by his father) can be traced to this period. The articles on topical subjects written by the editor, which had been a hallmark of the earlier issues and had accounted for much of the paper’s popularity, became less frequent and were replaced by long extracts from French newspapers, some of which extended over several issues. Advertisements and announcements were allowed to take an ever-increasing amount of space in a paper which had only four pages to fill. It may have been at this time that Muḥammad decided (or perhaps it was suggested to him) to collect the episodes of Fatrah min al-Zaman into book form, so he closed down the newspapers to allow himself more time to concentrate on his revision of the text. Whatever the cause of closure may have been, Miṣbāḥ al-sharq ceased publication on August 15, 1903.25
The Muwayliḥīs continued to write for other newspapers. Ibrāhīm sent articles to Al-Muʾayyad and Al-Muqaṭṭam, and in 1905 even founded a new newspaper called Al-Mishkāt in the name of his son Khalīl and Ḥamdī Bey Yakan.26 Meanwhile, Muḥammad saw revenge taken on ʿAlī Yūsuf. In 1904 the latter was involved in a scandal when he proposed to Ṣafiyyah al-Sādāt, a woman of high birth, and was refused by her father, although the woman herself had consented to marry him and seemed to want to do so. The woman’s