Arabian Essays

128 Pages·1982·1.73 MB·English

by  Ghazi A. Algosaibi

Arabian essays
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Arabian essays
Ghazi A. Algosaibi
R
OU Routledge
TLEDG Taylor & Francis Group
E

LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published in 1982
by Kegan Paul International Ltd
This edition first published in 2009 by
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© G. A. Algosaibi 1982
Transferred to Digital Printing 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN10: 0-7103-0019-0 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-7103-0019-5 (hbk)
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be
apparent. The publisher has made every effort to contact original copyright
holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been
unable to trace.
Contents
Preface vii
1 On poetry and poets 1
2 A view of education 6
3 Arabs and Western civilization 11
4 So what do you think will happen? 18
5 On bribeocracy 23
6 King Faisal's foreign policy 26
7 The philosophy of university education 37
8 Open letter to Dr Henry Kissinger 42
9 Dialogue about myself 48
10 A short and quite imaginary story about a bureaucrat 53
11 By the way . . . 60
12 The new map of the world 63
13 Is there a place for poetry in the Arabs'
twentieth century? 70
14 The minister and the administrative challenge 82
15 The crisis of modern Arabic poetry 98
16 The new Arab world 112
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Preface
What follows are not formal essays. Mostly they are talks I've
given to people who know me best as a poet, minor academic,
and major bureaucrat. They also know me as someone unable to
resist an invitation to talk about anything.
Most of these talks have been to Saudi Arabian audiences, and
speak from an Arab point of view – whether about poetry, edu-
cation, or the social problems of a rapidly developing environ-
ment. While the reader should keep this in mind, I hope that
these essays may prove interesting as one man's perspective from
his vantage point in the Middle East.
If you find the essays somehow incomplete or my assertions far
from proved, you may infer, correctly, that I enjoy the challenges
of being provocative and polemical more than presenting perfectly
balanced ideas. Logic and useful ideas may on occasion, of course,
co-exist. But such co-habitation, exceedingly rare, tends to en-
courage cerebral quietness, when nowadays adventurous thinking
may be of a far greater value.
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For those who disagree