ABSTRACT
Foreign students of contemporary Egyptian affairs believe there has been a marked decline in the civility of public discourse in recent years, particularly when two opposing points of view contend over an issue of public concern. I have given a great deal of thought to this phenomenon, which I tried to place in a historical perspective by comparing the language of debate in use today with that used earlier this century. My research centred on the now-defunct review Al-Kashkool, and specifically on the issues that appeared in the period between 1923 and 1927. To my surprise, I discovered that the scurrilous language I thought was the product of the last few decades was already in use in the 1920s. But further readings of the political and cultural writings of the period revealed that, side by side with the unfortunate tendency to resort to name-calling and slander, a tendency we suffer from to this day, was a sophisticated debating style that resembled that of the West. When Taha Hussein published his controversial book on pre-Islamic poetry, he came under attack from many critics. Some argued their case soberly, using civilized language and confining themselves to an objective critique of the book, but others stooped to unacceptable depths of calumny and personal attacks. One such was Mustapha Sadeq al-Rafei, whose book On the Grill overstepped the bounds of decency in the virulent personal attack he directed at Abbas al-Aqqad.
