From our contemporary literature

We have not yet finished - and it appears that we will not soon - of the problem of colloquial and classical Arabic and the related realism, with which its owners apologize for laziness and shortcomings. Laziness, which prevents us from reading, understanding, mastering the means of expression and photography, and adopting the principles of high literature. We hardly call on our young writers to recognize for themselves their right to diligence, patience, research, study, investigation, and mastery, and to rise to what befits them and their country, and what it should be of high, excellent literature, free of vulgarity and free from this much absurdity that is common in it. Until their rebellion revolted, and their pride took them to sin, so they denied all truth and denied all knowledge, and they received us and others whom they did not show and did not think about them in whatever forms of insult and harm they could, and their speaker said: We have deviated from Egypt and been ignorant of the right of our homeland upon us, and we sought our literature in the depths of books and the depths of the earth. The eras whose era has passed, and which do not touch modern Egypt from near or far. Taha Hussien