Muhammed Osman Al Khalil, whose research explores the interplay between the literary and political in the Arabic modernist poetry movement right after World War II, examines a long-forgotten literary confrontation in Egypt in the early 1930s between Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi (1892-1955), a poet and polymath, then at the height of his literary and professional fame, and a 26-year-old poet-student named Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), who would later become a leading ideologue of political Islam. About two decades later both Abu Shadi and Qutb would travel to America: Abu Shadi immigrating to the US in 1946 and working, for the last five years of his life, for the Voice of America; and Qutb coming on an Egyptian scholarship in 1948-1950 and studying at colleges in Washington DC and Colorado. What brought them to America, how did they experience her, and how did she influence them?
Speakers
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Muhamed Al-Khalil, Professor of Practice of Arabic, NYUAD
