Culture outside of the state: aesthetics and education in the works of Salama Musa, Taha Husayn, and Ramsis Yunan

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Egyptian definitions of thaqāfa or “culture” from 1922 to 1954 by focusing on three intellectuals: Salama Musa (1887–1958), Taha Husayn (1889–1973), and Ramsis Yunan (1913–1966). It considers how their definitions complicated the European integration of the term into the Arabic language, and how they contrasted with other relevant terms such as tarbiya (moral education) and taʿlīm (institutional instruction). Examining the cultural idioms embedded in these definitions challenges a typography that assumes a radical break between Arab intellectuals before and after the 1950s. By examining how the adaptation of socialist thought nuanced these appropriations, the article shows how the three intellectuals propose a definition of thaqāfa that borrows from transnational aesthetics to produce localized formulations of socialist realism and surrealism and advocate for a local humanism that works to keep literature and the arts outside of state control while educating people to resist fascist movements.

KEYWORDS:

• thaqāfa
• Salama Musa
• Taha Husayn
• Ramsis Yunan
• Surrealism
• Socialist realism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Musa, “Al-Thaqafa wa-l-Hadara,” 171.

2 Ibid.

3 Musa, Al-Tathqif al-Dhati: Aw Kayfa Nurrabi Anfusana, 7.

4 The Arabic root verb th-q-f means to train or straighten a spear and by extension the intellect, usually to win an argument. See the entry for th-q-f in Muhammad ibn Yaʿqub al-Firuzabadi’s al-Qamus al-Muhit, Vol. I, 162. Ibn Khaldun indicts the third generation of having forgotten their Bedouin past with its ḥusn al-thaqāfa and becoming dependent on the dynasty for protection. See Al-Muqaddima, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 71–72.

5 Joseph A. Massad mentions the term thaqāfa as framing cultural borrowing in the nineteenth century. See Desiring Arabs, 53. On the other hand, the Algerian scholar Malik bin Nabi defines the term as a concept rooted in Islamic tradition that encompasses the behavioral and life pattern of a people and determines individual behavior. See Mushkilat al-Thaqafa [1959], 74. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi describes how, in the 1890s, intellectuals swapped Ibn Khaldun’s definition of civilization with society (mujtamaʿ) as an independent term (“The Conceptualization of the Social,” 97, 99).

6 Ahmad Amin (1878–1954), who established two of the most important journals of the period, Al-Risala and al-Thaqafa (1939–1953), opens the latter’s first issue by situating thaqāfa as the confrontation between “Eastern treasures” and Western knowledge, naming his journal the regulator of that encounter.

7 Gasper, The Power of Representation, 188–189.

8 Suzanna Ferguson (2018) argues that tarbiya, no longer bound to religious institutions as of the late nineteenth century, becomes tied to providing measured amounts of reform and stability (59). I differentiate between tarbiya and thaqāfa: tarbiya as moral education transforms in late nineteenth century Egypt with Husayn al-Marsafi to denote a more specialized form of knowledge, but thaqāfa remains the domain of public debate. See al-Marsafi, Risalat al-Kalim al-Thaman.

9 See Florian Zemmin’s Modernity in Islamic Tradition, Chapter 6.

10 Some scholars have proposed a nationalist definition of culture in the 1930s and 40s based on a desire to create a homogenous Egyptian identity. See Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 84–5 and Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs, 191–227. Other accounts have focused on translation efforts as self-orientalizing (Shaden Tageldin), the later Marxists’ radical rejection of the pre-1950s definition of culture (Yoav di Capua), and the institutional roles of pioneering intellectuals like Taha Husayn (Hussam R. Ahmed).

11 Hoda Yousef explores these multiple publics with various literacy levels to complicate the assumed "desires" of the reading public. See Composing Egypt, Chapter 1.

12 See El Shakry, The Social Laboratory, 198–99 and Beinin, “Labor, Capital, and the State in Nasserist Egypt, 1952–1961,” 88.

13 Although Musa initially supported fascism, he quickly turned away from it in the 1930s.

14 Bayna al-ʿAdl wa-l-Huriyya [Between Justice and Freedom], 189–204.

15 These complexities manifest in three ways: the first is the opposition between resisting imperialism, which had drawn many to Marxism, and focusing on workers’ rights, which had brought the surrealists and the socialists to the party. See Joel Beinin’s “The Communist Movement and Nationalist Political Discourse in Nasirist Egypt,” 573. The second involved the Communist Party’s claim to a monopoly over culture and therefore control. These two issues explain why Yunan rejected Leninism and espoused Trotskyism to free the individual from group tyranny through art. The third concerned the role of the intellectual as reformer or revolutionary.

16 See ʿAli Kamil, Al-Thaqafa wa-l-Rajul al-Muthaqqaf, 21–26. I owe the reference to Pepe, “Critics, Moralists and Intellectuals,” 195.

17 The book was a response to the 1936 treaty with the British and Egypt’s entry into the League of Nations. Husayn’s book addressed the League of Nations’ decree that some mandates were more ready to self-govern than others and intended to portray Egypt on par with Europe to achieve more self-determination. See Ahmed, The Last Nahdawi, 21–22.

18 The group started coming together in the late 1930s, organized by the poet George Henein and gradually including Ramsis Yunan, Fuʾad and Anwar Kamil, and Kamil al-Tilimsani. The Group was never exclusively surrealist, although it initially belonged to the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, FIARI, born in Mexico at the home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in 1938 when surrealist poet André Bréton and exiled Leon Trotsky wrote the manifesto “For an Independent Revolutionary Art.” Eventually George Henein broke with Bréton over his attitude towards Palestine. See LaCoss, “Art and Liberty,” 31.

19 Richard Jacquemond finds a lack of cosmopolitanism in the Art and Freedom Group’s review al-Tatawwur, as it was published in Arabic and not French, that continues in Al-Majalla al-Jadida. See Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt, 116.

20 For example, Patrick Kane names Yunan one of the victims of Cold War aesthetic ideology, as he is celebrated as a symbol of a transnational movement against what is labeled extremist ideology, whether the Muslim Brotherhood or Communism.

21 See Barak A. Salmoni, and Amy J. Johnson, Introduction to Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, 1–18.

22 Zimmen, Modernity in Islamic Tradition, 112.

23 See Di-Capua, “The Intellectual Revolt of the 1950s and the ‘Fall of the Udabāʾ,” 89–104.

24 Khuri-Makdisi, “The Conceptualization of the Social in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Arabic Thought and Language,” 109.

25 Musa, Al-Adab li-l-Shaʿb, 20.

26 Ibid., 23.

27 Ibid., 28; 55.

28 Ibid., 62.

29 Ibid., 166–174.

30 Musa, Al-Shakhsiyya al-Najiʿa: Kitab li-l-Shabab, 147–48.

31 Musa collaborated with Shibli Shmayyil on the journal Al-Mustaqbal (The Future) in 1914.

32 The major Arab figures who adapted socialism were the Cairo-based Syrian immigrants Shibli Shumayyil, who wrote a piece in al-Muqtataf in 1913 entitled “al-Ishtirakiyya al-Sahiha” ("Proper Socialism"), and Farah Antun, who began his critique of socialism in his 1903 science-fiction novella al-ʿIlm wa-l-Din wa-l-Mal (Science, Religion and Wealth). For other regional influences, see Abu Jaber, “Al-Ishtirakiyyun wa-l-Ahzab al-Ishtirakiyya al-Arabiyya al-Ula,” 5–21.

33 See D. B. Macdonald, “ʿilm,” Encyclopedia of Islam, quoted in Elshakry, 16.

34 Al-Hilal criticized socialism for disabling “individual initiative” (Elshakry, Reading Darwin, 230–231).

35 Musa borrowed Fabianism’s advocacy for a “New Class” in rule, instead of the traditional authorities of the Marxist proletariat, but failed to recognize the specific conditions of Egyptian history that would make such a project possible. See Egger, A Fabian, 26–28, 227–234.

36 Before the party’s constitution, Musa published “Al-Ishtirakiyya al-Misriyya” in Al-Ahram on August 18, 1921, initiating a debate on Bolshevik communism’s relevance to Egypt. Later Musa’s personal feud with Rosenthal concerned a less radical communism that would limit violence against the land-owning class. Musa believed in compromise towards a more equitable distribution of property. See Ginat, The History of Egyptian Communism, 16–22, and chapter 5.

37 Musa, Al-Adab wa-l-Hayat, 54–56, as quoted in Vernon Egger, A Fabian in Egypt, 90–91.

38 Egger, A Fabian in Egypt, 93.

39 Musa, Al-Ishtirakiyya, 39–40.

40 He used the terms al-adab al-multazim and al-adab al-murtabiṭ interchangeably. In 1956, Musa accused Husayn of producing socially irrelevant books that deliberately alienate their readers. See Al-Adab li-l-Shaʿb, 18, 13, 31.

41 He retracted that statement after 1952, claiming he was always influenced by Marx. See Haʾulaʾ ʿAllamuni (My teachers), 9.

42 Between 1934 and 1938, Musa controversially defended European fascism in his desperate call for bringing socialism to Egypt but was soon put off by the movements’ extremism (Egger, A Fabian in Egypt, 95).

43 Musa, Kitab al-Thawrat, 128. I am not arguing that Musa was not Eurocentric, but rather, that he used such Eurocentrism to offset other contextual concerns.

44 See “Thaqafa Bashariyya am Thaqafa Wataniyya Mutaʿaddida?” ("A humanist or a multiple culture?"), 17–19, as cited in Vernon Egger, A Fabian, 203.

45 Musa, Tarbiyat Salama Musa, 173.

46 Musa, “Al-Thaqafa wa-l-Hadara” ("Culture and civilization") (1 February 1927), 171. He repeats these distinctions in “Al-Thaqafa al-Ḥaditha” ("Modern culture") in Al-Majalla al-Jadida no. 11 (1 November 1930): 32–35.

47 Musa, Al-Adab wa-l-Hayat, 82.

48 Ibid., 12.

49 Ibid., 13.

50 Musa, Al-Adab wa-l-Hayat, 96–97; 123.

51 Musa, Al-Thaqafa wa-l-Hadara, 173–4.

52 Musa, Al-Adab li-l-Shaʿb, 9–10, 197.

53 Ibid., 13–14; 24; 17–18.

54 Musa, Kitab al-Thawrat, 114–115.

55 Ibid., 24–25, 28.

56 Musa, “Ghayat al-Thaqafa” ("The purpose of culture"), 46.

57 Musa, “Ghayat al-Adab al-Insaniyya wa laysa al-Jamal” ("The purpose of literature is humanism and not beauty"), in Al-Adab li-l-Shaʿb, 92–93.

58 For a summary of these literary battles, see Anwar al-Jundi, Al-Maʿarik al-Adabiyya, Volume One, 652.

59 Husayn’s book Fi al-Shiʿr al-Jahili (On Pre-Islamic Poetry, 1926), and his battle for free education also incurred a conservative backlash. The state shut down his periodical al-Katib al-Misri in 1948.

60 Husayn, Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr, Vol 2: 295–296.

61 See Pepe, “Critics, Moralists and Intellectuals,” 189. Husayn was also labeled a communist by state officials and conservative intellectuals when he lobbied to make primary education free in 1944. See Turath Taha Husayn, Al-Maqalat al-Sahafiyya min 1908–1967, Volume 6: Taha Husayn wa-thawrat Yuliu 1952, Dirasat Zakaria Al-Shalaq, 77 and 384.

62 Di Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past, 301.

63 Husayn, Al-Majalla al-Jadida, no. 12 (December 1, 1929): 222–226, 225. Kirsten Scheid describes how the Arabic terminology of cultivation discourses in the early twentieth century differed from civilizational ones in that terms like “tathqif (cultivation), tarbiyya (education), tarqiyya (elevation), tarhif al-ahwas (refining sensibility), and dhawq … focus on personal comportment in comparison to the natural or communal environment” (“Cultivation Discourses in the Arab East,” 76).

64 See Mustaqbal, Vol 1: 234–239. The study of Greek and Latin should only be for those who want it (Vol 2: 299).

65 Ahmed, The Last Nahdawi, 207.

66 Ahmed, The Last Nahdawi, 105–106.

67 Husayn, Mustaqbal, Vol 1: 228; 230–231.

68 Ibid., 105.

69 In Mustaqbal Vol 2 (357, 361), he cites his recommendation to the ministry of education to join these institutions to the university to minimize the separation between theoretical and practical knowledge.

70 Husayn, “Al-Thaqāfa,” 752–756, 754.

71 Ibid., 755.

72 Ahmed, The Last Nahdawi, 22.

73 Husayn, Mustaqbal, Vol. 1, 29; 35; 37–39. Pierre Cachia finds that “the programme [Husayn] delineated in Future of Culture never ceased to be his ultimate aim.” See Taha Husayn: His Place in the Egyptian Literary Renaissance, 122.

74 Husayn, Mustaqbal, Vol 1: 71, 73–79; 85.

75 Husayn, Mustaqbal, Vol 1: 153; Vol 2: 417–20.

76 Higher education implied a superior degree of culture – a route to the practical world (Mustaqbal, Vol 2, 417).

77 Classical Arabic is the only language of thaqāfa, and foreign literature should only serve as preparation for “modern” life (Vol 2, 259, 256). Only Classical Arabic serves the purpose of building our sense of being (Vol 2, 304, 307, 314), but his argument for Greek and Latin comes in the context of using literary education and not just scientific thinking to build an Egyptian modern culture (Vol 2, 219), while regulating the influence of European thought (Vol 2, 283).

78 Husayn, “Athar al-Adab al-Arabi fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya,” 389–401, 394–95.

79 Ibid., 398.

80 Husayn, Mustaqbal, Vol 2: 314–315.

81 Ibid., 247–248.

82 See “Al-Jamiʿa wa-l-Dimuqratiyya” (The University and Democracy) [June 8, 1944], 226, 228, 231.

83 Husayn, Mustaqbal Vol 1: 135–137.

84 Ibid., 163–164.

85 Ahmed, The Last Nahdawi, 16.

86 Tibawi, “The Meaning of ‘al-thaqafa’ in Contemporary Arabic,” 225.

87 Ahmed, The Last Nahdawi, 23.

88 Semah, Four Egyptian Literary Critics, 120–121.

89 The 1955 debate at the UNESCO in Beirut turned on the question of whom the writer should address, with Khuri arguing for writing for the masses and Husayn advocating that the writer address only the elite, under no external directives. See the debate in Al-Adab 5 (May 1955) at https://al-adab.com/volume/1955-v.03/05.

90 Qtd. in Di Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past, 86. The debate was between those who believed knowledge production should remain pure of statist intervention and the socialists who believed this approach endorsed colonial monopoly (86–88).

91 Kane, Politics of Art and Culture in Modern Egypt, 58.

92 Yunan, “Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr,” 10–15. Musa also referred to al-taraf al-dhihnī in Al-Adab li-l-Shaʿb, 18.

93 Yunan, “Al-Taʿlim al-Ilzami” ("Compulsory Education"), Al-Majalla al-Jadida Issue 431 (May 1943): 3–4.

94 The School relocated to Cairo from Alexandria and changed names four times after. Yunan often refers to it as the Academy. See Kane, The Politics of Art, 26–27.

95 David Renton argues that the Art and Freedom Group was the first explicitly socialist group in Egypt since the 1920s. In December 1944–January 1945, they were some of the first socialists to run for open elections. In its further iterations, the group renamed itself Bread and Freedom in 1940, the Socialist Front between 1944 and 1945, the Egyptian Section of the Revolutionary Communist Party or the Egyptian Section of the Fourth International, and finally the International Communist Group (1945–46). See Renton, “Bread and Freedom.”

96 Patrick Kane, Politics of Art and Culture in Modern Egypt, 32–33.

97 By the late 1940s, students united with workers to form a Wafdist Vanguard to reform the Wafd. See Gordon, “The False Hopes of 1950,” 201. For more on the student mobilization, see Abdallah, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt, 39–79. The 1935–1936 student movement repeated “we want bread, we want employment” (nuridu al-khubz, nuridu al-ʿamal). This slogan in addition to “the revolution continues” (tastammir al-thawra) from Kitab al-Thawrat (Book on Revolutions, 1954) resounded in the streets of Cairo after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. A 2012 book review of Musa’s Al-Thawrat in Al-Ahram adds that the slogan “the revolution continues” was taken up by many political parties during parliamentary elections. See “Book Review: ‘Revolution Continues’ by Salama Moussa.”

98 Kane, Politics of Art and Culture in Modern Egypt, 50.

99 Ibid., 69.

100 Ibid. 70. See also Botman, The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 55.

101 The manifesto was an anti-Fascist indictment of Hitler’s totalitarian regime and captured the group’s campaign for artistic freedom. See “Long Live Degenerate Art,” 22 December 1938.

102 Kane, Politics of Art and Culture in Modern Egypt, 59–60.

103 Ibid.

104 Luwis ʿAwad in “Kan Raʾidan Shujaʿan” ("He was a courageous pioneer") describes Yunan’s communism as theoretical and detached from material reality. An enemy of Stalinism, Yunan espoused Trotskyism to advocate for the individual’s freedom from group tyranny. See Idwar al-Kharrat’s Introduction to Rihla maʿa al-ʿAql: Ramsis Yunan, 186, 188.

105 Yunan, “Al-Hilm wa-l-Haqiqa” ("Dream and Reality") [Al-Tatawwur no. 1 (1940)] in Dirasat fi-l-Fann, 36–46, 37–38.

106 Ibid., 13. “Ghayat al-Rassam al-ʿAsri” in Dirasat fi-l-Fann, 28.

107 Yunan, “Al-Yamin wa-l-Yasar fi-l-fann” ("The Right and the Left in art") [Al-Fikr Al-Muʿasir (March 1966)] in Dirasat fi-l-Fann, 265–273, 271–72.

108 Both Mahmud Abbas al-Aqqad and Oum Kalthoum refused to recognize Yunan’s paintings as art.

109 LaCoss, “Degenerate Art,” 92.

110 Yunan, “Harakat al-Suryalism,” 1748–1749.

111 Ibid., 1749.

112 Yunan, “Ghayat al-Rassam al-ʿAsri,” 34.

113 LaCoss, “Art and Liberty,” 58. See Al-Tatawwur no. 1 (1 January 1940).

114 Ibid., 177.

115 Yunan, “Al-Muthaqaffan wa-Nahdatina” ("The Intellectuals and our Renaissance"), Al Ahram (March 30, 1962), in Dirasat fi-l-Fann, 156–158, 157.

116 See Al-Ahram (December 7, 1962), in Dirasat fi-l-Fann, 175–176.

117 Yunan, “Misr Multaqa al-sharq wa-l-gharb” ("Egypt, The Meeting Ground of East and West"), Al Ahram (December 12, 1963) in Dirasat fi al-Fann, 193–196, 196.

118 Despite his earlier attack on Husayn, in 1964, Yunan called Musa, Husayn and the abstract Egyptian painter Mahmud Saʿid (1897–1964) unique in proving that “collective freedom” and “individual personality” are inseparable. See “ʿAlam Mahmud Saʿid [Mahmud Saʿid’s world], Al-Majalla (May 1964), in Dirasat fi-l-Fann, 202–207, 202.

119 Kane, Politics of Art and Culture in Modern Egypt, 59.

120 “Al-Haraka al-Fanniyya bayna al-Mahaliyya wa-l-ʿAlamiyya” ("The Egyptian Art Movement between the Local and the Global"), Al-Fikr al-Muʿasir (July 1966), in Dirasat fi-l-Fann, 274–84, 277, 278.

121 Ibid., 278. On the party’s Trotskyism and its alienation from the people, see Ginat, A History, 222–226 and Botman, The Rise, 12–16.

122 David Renton regrets the lack of scholarly engagement with the Egyptian Trotskysists, citing especially Selma Botman’s view on the group’s lack of tangible impact. See “Bread and Freedom.”

123 In 1948, Yunan published a pamphlet with Henein, “Notes sur une ascèse hystérique” (Notes on a Hysterical Asceticism) denouncing automatism.

124 See Sam Bardaouil, Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group, 155, 121. The group were closer to anarchy than Marxism in their language. In their five exhibitions in Cairo (1940–45), the surrealists challenged canonization by exhibiting “canonical art” alongside the works of new artists. Earlier in the “Manifesto,” George Henein revised surrealist practice to restore agency to the individual (“Manifesto,” 150–51).

125 Yunan, “Al-Sura al-ʾUsturiyya fi Fann Mahmud Saʿid,” ("The Figures of Legend in the Art of Mahmoud Said"), 182, 185.

126 Henri Curiel founded the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation (E.M.N.L.) in 1943 and Marcel Israel, an Egyptian Jew with an Italian citizenship, established the People’s Liberation in 1940. Three Egyptian Jews created the New Dawn in the early 1940s. In May 1947, the groups Iskra, the E.M.N.L. and People’s Liberation merged into the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (D.M.N.L.) (Botman 35, 69). In the 1940s and 50s, the communists operated illicitly, and in 1958 merged into the Egyptian Communist Party (ECP). The party dissolved itself under Nasserite pressure in 1965.

127 For more on how cultivating taste related to the modern subject in 1950s Egypt, see Ramadan, “Cultivating Taste, Creating the Modern Subject,” 27.

128 LaCoss, “Egyptian Surrealism and ‘Degenerate Art’ in 1939,” 110.

129 LaCoss, “Egyptian Surrealism and ‘Degenerate Art’ in 1939,” 115. Also see Awad, Introduction to Dirasat fi al-Fann by Ramsis Yunan, 5–15.

130 Beránek, “The Surrealist Movement in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s,” 210.

131 Glifford, “An Improbably Moveable Mediterranean,” 392–393.

132 Shalem, “Exceeding Realism,” 593.

133 LaCoss, “Egyptian Surrealism and ‘Degenerate Art’ in 1939,” note 19, 112.

134 See Hafez, “Cultural Journals and Modern Arabic Literature,” 18. Hafez represents a dominant view of Ramsis Yunan’s evolution into a “a purely artistic vein” that called for freeing art from society. The Bread and Freedom Group nominated Yunan to be in parliament in the 1944 general election. See Meijer, The Quest for Modernity, Chapter Three.

135 Yunan’s work was exhibited in André Bréton’s surrealist Paris exhibition and in Prague in 1947.

136 Michael Gasper in reference to Talal Asad, The Power of Representation, 207.

137 The educated intelligentsia was already occupying important state positions, but Nasser’s regime institutionally constrained the intellectuals. Under Nasser, cultural policy became a state project in line with visions of state development, and intellectuals were protracted under this new social contract to promote Nasserist cultural socialism precisely as nationalist. In 1966 “Public Culture” or al-thaqāfa al-jamāhīriyya became a state project aiming to propagate cultural literacy under Minister of Culture Tharwat ʿUkasha (1958–62, 1966–70). ʿUkasha promoted cultural policies in line with the state’s developmental policies. See Mudhakkirati fi al-Siyasa wa-l-Thaqafa (My Memories of Politics and Culture), vol. I.

138 Owen, “Conclusion” to Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, 492–502.

139 See Nordbruch, “Defending the French Revolution during World War II,” 224.

140 See ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Muhammad al-Zaki, “Hawl al-Takhtit al-Ishtiraki li-l-Thaqafa” ("On the socialist design for culture"), Al-Majalla, no.103 (1 July 1965): 31–35, 34 (qtd in Crabbs, “Politics, History, and Culture in Nasser's Egypt,” 387). Nasser’s attack on the surrealists was directed and effective as his culture ministry managed to “eradicate the heritage and ideas of the Surrealist movement, exile its creators, and erase its history.” See Naji, “Art and Liberty in Egypt, Today and Yesterday”.

141 Muhammad Hassanayn Haykal called Arab Marxists to Cairo to align their transnational education with state politics. See his Azmat al-Muthaqqafin (The Crisis of the Intellectuals) (Cairo: Dar al-Udabaʾ, 1961).

142 For more on the return of these figures in contemporary discourses on enlightenment, see Kassab, Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution.