A Child From the Village (Middle East Literature In Translation) Hardcover – November 1, 2004

The cachet of this book is its author's later career (after 1948) when he transformed into the "Karl Marx" of modern Islamism. But in this earlier work from the 1930s, he is a modernity-loving observer/memoirist who writes with both talent and compassion about the wretched of Egypt's earth. These are the people of his village in Upper Egypt, along with even poorer migrant farm laborers who pass through and help from time to time. The story is told through the eyes of an unnamed young boy, referred to in the text as "our boy" or "our friend" and who is a thinly veiled version of Qutb himself, relating his own real-life memories in the third-person about life and living conditions in the middle to late 1910s.The book is not only poignant and educational, it is funny. The tale where the village kids are given 30 minutes or so by the public health doctor to produce stool and urine samples -- something strange they had no experience of, and to do so for a doctor they only knew from his previous visits to perform autopsies -- is laugh-out-loud funny as the kids instantly develop a barter and hunt system for "samples" to be produced for those of the kids who could not "produce" in time. The story and book are narrated with a constant dry wit embedded.But something even better is done here and elsewhere: Qutb uses this and other stories as occasions to seamlessly introduce details of the less colorful and more academic parts of village life such as the town's sewage systems, social relations, farming practices and so forth. It is as if Mark Twain had become an Egyptian anthropologist. And without the real Twain's condescension towards such people. (A Twain analogy for Qutb here in terms of wit, style, and content-- or perhaps better still to Yiddishist Sholom Aleichem -- is only slightly an exaggeration, if at all. Qutb is quite the cutup.)Again, author Qutb's later descent into darkness is worthy of deep curiosity and puzzlement. His expressed sensitivity in this volume to the secondary and lonely place of women in traditional society is strong, and yet... later in life Qutb will reverse himself and fall back onto advocating a dark variation of this kind of tradition, and do so in a form that has become increasingly armed and extremely dangerous. But here, he is a voice crying for fairness to the lowly, to women and men, and singing the praises of modern thought and education, while cursing the harshness of tradition, superstition, and the cruelties of government tyranny.And he does so with a literary aim that effectively eviscerates the troubling traditions and the poverty, but does not eviscerate the people who live under them.An amazing, informative, enjoyable -- and eminently readable -- work by a paradoxical figure.

Really interesting book about every-day realities and social dynamics in an Egyptian village at the beginning of the 20th century. Very different aspects of village life are brought to life in an account that is hilarious and moving at times. The author creates empathy with the poorest, explains village politics, and exposes how the government fails to connect to the people with disastrous consequences. It does so in a very insightful day and anyone trying to understand third-world realities could take an interest in this book.The book can be read as a response to Taha Husayn's "Days" to which it explicitly refers (I used it in classroom to let students explore these authors, initially without uncovering Sayyid Qutb's identity and background). A Child from the Village contains more details about the countryside, and is more empathic towards the villagers. The fact that Sayyid Qutb became an icon of Islamism afterwards adds a special flavor to reading this book. This book shows us an author with a great social concern (nothing is hidden) and love for those who are poor and ill-treated.

A Child From The Village by Sayyid Qutb, edited, translated, and with an introduction by John Calvert and William Shepard (Middle East Literature in Translation: Syracuse University Press) Although the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb is not a household name in the United States, he is well known throughout the Islamic World as a seminal thinker in the Islamist movement, influential as far away as Pakistan and Malaysia. A member of the Islamic Brotherhood, he was jailed by Gamal Abdul Nasser's government as early as 1954. He became one of the most uncompromising voices of the movement we now call Islamism and is best known perhaps for his book, Ma'lam fi al-tariq (Milestones, 1965), after publication of which he was accused of conspiring against Egyptian president Nasser and arrested. He was executed in 1966.This memoir tells of Qutb's childhood in the village of Musha in Upper Egypt. Qutb documents the era between 1912 and 1918, a time immensely influencial in the creation of modern Egypt. Written with much tenderness toward childhood memories, it has become a classic in modern Arabic autobiography. Qutb offers a clear picture of Egyptian village life in the early twentieth century, its customs and lore, educational system, religious festivals, relations with the central government, and the struggle to modernize and retain its identity. In their rendering of the work into English, translators John Calvert and William Shepard capture the beauty and intensity of Qutb's prose.A Child from the Village was written just prior to Qutb's conversion to the Islamist cause and reflects his concerns for social justice. Interest in Qutb's writing has increased in the West since Islamism has emerged as a power on the world scene.message. Despite its tone of nostalgia, A Child from the Village paints a picture of the Egyptian countryside that is not entirely happy. The specter of peasant indebtedness and loss of land haunts the pages of the autobiography, as does disease caused by unhygienic conditions and the peasants' recourse to folk remedies and barber-surgeons rather than scientifically trained physicians. The joys of Ramadan, birth ceremonies, and other festive occasions are juxtaposed to death, tragedy, and the laments of women whose families patiently endure hard lives. Captives of poverty and ignorance, the peasants of Qutb's autobiography toil endlessly in their fields with little expectation that their lives will improve. They are the victims of the few large landowners and politicians who controlled Egypt's wealth. According to Tetz Rooke, who examined a wide range of Arabic childhood autobiographies, the critical portrayal of rural life found A Child from the Village represents a "break with the tendency towards pastoral idealization which dominated much of the first Egyptian creative writing concerned with country life." lt may thus be seen as a "precursor of the later Egyptian novel that embraces the subject of the village with a true-to-life, descriptive intent such as al-Ard [The earth, 1953] by 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi (1920-1987)."4 In the context of the mid-1940s, Qutb's book manifests a growing awareness among Egypt's intelligentsia of socioeconomic issues. It was during this period, for example, that dissident elements within the Wafd founded the Wafdist Vanguard in order to influence the party leadership in a leftist direction.Implicitly and sometimes explicitly in the book, Qutb advocates the need for reform and modernization at the village level. Qutb believed that the introduction of modern schooling in Musha was a step in the right direction, but he also believed that there was need for many more improvements, especially in the areas of land reform and health care. In his view, the Egyptian government was the obvious agent to undertake the necessary reforms, but too often the state's ameliorative efforts were imposed with a heavy hand or else were ill conceived. Qutb provides a harrowing account of a government operation, probably staged shortly after World War I, to confiscate all weapons belonging to the villagers of Asyut Province as a precondition for its integration into the structure of the State on a more thorough basis. He describes how soldiers, having surrounded the village, brutally interrogated the peasants, at one point firing bullets over the heads of the assembled village elders. Events such as this reinforced the peasants' traditional distrust of a governmental authority that in the past periodically subjected them to corvée labor. Elsewhere in the book, Qutb documents, sometimes with humor, the unwelcome and often inexpert intrusions of various government officials into the affairs of the community. We are introduced to medical officials, coroners, judges, and others, all of whom attempt to order and police the countryside in ways that make sense to the State but not to the villagers. In much the same way as the Egyptian writer Tawfiq al-Hakim's novella Diary of a Country Prosecutor, A Child from the Village documents the gulf in understanding that existed between urban officialdom and the dwellers of the countryside, the difference being that in Qutb's book we are provided with the perspective of the peas-ants rather than that of a government official. Qutb appears to argue that if modernization in Egypt's countryside is to be effective, it must take into account the sensibilities and social and economic realities of its inhabitants.Within two years of the publication of A Child from the Village, Qutb adopted the Islamist position upon which his fame rests. Whatever the exact reasons for his ideological change, the significant point is that Qutb's early Islamist writings display many of the same basic concerns for social justice and national community that figure in his secular writings, including A Child from the Village. A discussion of the ways in which Qutb grafted the symbols and doctrines of the Qur'an is beyond the scope of this introduction. What can be said is that A Child from the Village illuminates an important element of the context out of which Qutb's Islamism emerged.

It came in good time. Good quality and even with some annotations and notes in the book.