Manliness

By Hamza Shehata

In 1940, Saudi Arabian intellectual and activist Hamza Shehata (1910–71) gave a lecture at the Makkah Charitable Aid Association. Over the course of four hours, Shehata shared a staggering number of social and cultural observations and critiques on many facets of contemporary life. Translated into English for the first time, Manliness presents that speech for a new generation of readers.
            Using a framework that was both scientific and philosophical, Shehata convinced his audience that conventional views of virtue and vice were a deceptive simplification and that social and religious reform was necessary. A humble man at heart, he was reluctant to publish his talk in his lifetime, but thanks to Malik R. Dahlan’s expert translation and insightful discussion of the larger historical and geographical context for the speech, readers are now able to appreciate a fascinating snapshot of Arabian history that would otherwise be lost.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Aug 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780956599629

Book preview

A TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY ON HAMZA SHEHATA’S LECTURE: 

AR-RUJULAH IMAD AL-KHULUQ AL-FADEL MANLINESS: THE PILLAR OF VIRTUOUS ETHIC

PROF. DR. JUR. MALIK R. DAHLAN is the Principal of Institution Quraysh for Law & Policy. He read law in Jordan and completed post-graduate degrees in Government, Law and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He holds a Habilitation Doctorate in Public Policy from Al-Azhar University. He teaches law, policy and ethics as a Visiting Professor at several educational institutions in the United Kingdom. He and his wife are from Makkah.

A TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY ON HAMZA SHEHATA’S LECTURE: 

AR-RUJULAH IMAD AL-KHULUQ AL-FADEL MANLINESS: THE PILLAR OF VIRTUOUS ETHIC

Malik R. Dahlin

JUBILEE HOUSE PRESS

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Jubilee House Press

70 Cadogan Place

London SW1X 9AH

Copyright © Malik R. Dahlan 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN 978-0-956599-62-9

eISBN 978-0-956599-62-9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 

Jubilee House Press is an imprint of Haus Publishing Ltd 

www.hauspublishing.com

To my father, who, by example, 

taught me the meaning of manliness. 

&

To my son, my Hamza,

and all of God’s tongue tied prophets.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

The Speech: Manliness: the Pillar of Virtuous Ethic

Appendix I:

Introduction to the Speech, by Aziz Deyaa

Appendix II: 

Shehata the Poet

Appendix III:

Haya’ in the Islamic Tradition

Appendix IV: 

Further Reading

Select Bibliography

Preface

UPON THE PERFORMANCE of my adult religious duty of Hajj in 1996, my father, then, the formidable Lt. Governor of Makkah, handed me a copy of a Tihama Publishing 1940 Manliness Lecture thereby signalling another social aspect of adult life in Makkah: manliness. I am grateful to my patriotic father for introducing me to Hamza and his speech, for helping me translate its text during graduate school and translating its substance into real life.

The following translation and commentary is based on a Masters Thesis I had written at Harvard University. I am grateful to my thesis supervisor Professor William Granara, Director of the Harvard Center for Middle East Studies; Professor Ahmad Atif Ahmad of UC Santa Barbara for his valuable input and review of the commentary; Dr. M P Chase of the Harvard Writing Center for her precision and diligence in reviewing the manuscript; and David Rogers for his input to the commentary and support with style. I am grateful to H.E. Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani for his personal guidance and to his entire establishment, namely Dr. Adnan Al-Yafi for locating valuable materials. I am grateful to my publishers and specifically Dr Barbara Schwepcke and the whole of Haus Publishing and the Gingko Library team as well as Institution Quraysh for Law & Policy for all their logistical help, support and patience.

Above all, I am grateful to God and to all the women who represent the truest meaning of ‘manliness’ in our part of the world and who work towards building future generations of virtuous women and men.

Malik bin Rabea

Makkah

Introduction

In 1940, in the month of Dhu al-Hijjah – the final month of the calendar, when Muslims undertake the Hajj – a thin-faced, bespectacled man called Hamza Shehata gave a lecture at the Makkah Charitable Aid Association,¹ a Makkan group that organised lectures by prominent individuals for the benefit of pilgrims. Shehata’s audience also contained intellectuals and notables from the Hijaz, the region of the Arabia that lies along the Red Sea coast.

The speaker had attracted a large and curious group of listeners. In his 30 years he had been a merchant, a poet, a senior public administrator, a political activist, a prisoner, an exile, a journalist, an ethical philosopher, and an educational theorist. Despite this precocious career, he had also gained a reputation for humility and lack of pretension: he had already refused one request from the Aid Association to present his opinion in public. Although a formal written record of this would be difficult to find today, he is famously quoted saying fame is the heavy tax we pay for our success.

An introduction to the speech was written by a friend and relative of Shehata’s called Aziz Deyaa.² On his account, the lecture was read from 121 sheets of handwritten paper over the course of four hours, during which time the lecturer was interrupted 30 times by applause. What he had to say has become one of the key documents in the eclipsed intellectual history of the Hijaz and the liberal tradition in Saudi political philosophy. It is also one of the lost texts of Islamic modernism – partly because Hamza refused to publish it in book form during his life, either independently or as part of a collection of his poetry or prose.

This translation of the speech, the first into English, is offered with an accompanying commentary to place it in its historical, political and philosophical context, and is intended to put it before an audience once again.

The historical moment

For most of its recorded history, the Hijaz belonged as much to the international worlds of trade, finance and faith as it did to the Arabian Peninsula. The port of Jeddah, where Shehata was educated, was a mercantile city and the point of departure for the traditional Arabian exports of perfumes, leather, shells, mother-of-pearl and spices. And, as with all trading cities, ideologies and philosophies are also imported, circulated and exported, and there were markets and exchanges for ideas as well as the cities several currencies, helped in part by the flow of pilgrims who entered and left the city; an immense quantity of humanity that brought a constant contact with the wider world – a kind of globalisation avant la lettre.

In the age of exploration, the Hijaz as a whole, became a contested area between Portuguese traders operating from their African and Indian factories and the Ottoman overlords who had taken the area from the Egyptian Mameluks in the 16th century. Regardless of which distant city held suzerainty, the area had its traditional ruler in the Sharif of Makkah, an office that stretched back to the beginning of the 13th century, and which for most of that period had been in the possession of the Hashemites, Prophet Mohammad’s clan of the Quraysh tribe.

With the outbreak of the Great War, the modern history of the region entered a tumultuous phase. The holder of the office of Sharif was Hussein bin Ali, best remembered now as the man who initiated the Great Arab Revolt of June 1916, and set in motion a chain of events with consequences which would play a large part in the composition of the modern Middle East. The Revolt would also form a political and nationalist subtext to Shehata’s apparently apolitical speech.

When Sharif Hussein initiated the Revolt, the immediate cause was his fear that the Young Turks were planning to depose him, coupled with reassurances for Arab self-determination from Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, that Great Britain is prepared to recognise and uphold the independence of the Arabs in all the regions lying within the frontiers proposed by the Sharif of Mecca.³ In making this pledge, Whitehall was, to say the least, being economical with truth because the following year it concluded the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement; the second clause of which states that France, and … Great Britain shall be allowed to establish such direct or indirect administration or control [over Arab lands] as they desire and as they may think fit to arrange with the Arab state or confederation of Arab states.⁴

From the Allies’ point of view, the Revolt was a success because it fixed some 20,000 Turkish troops in the Peninsula. However, its grand aim of unifying the Arab world failed, and connoisseurs of counterfactual history can argue over whether such a world ever existed as an imagined community, and what would have happened if the British and French had broken with 200 years of entrenched colonial practice and allowed Sharif Hussein to attempt his project. In the event, the red, black, green and white flag of the Revolt was adopted by many of the successor states to the Ottoman Empire, but the map to which they referred was drawn by the colonial powers, with consequences that continue to the present day.

In the aftermath of the war, the idea of a unified Arab state was brought to an end by the French occupation of Syria, which Prime Minister Clemenceau declared to be the whole of it and forever. There then followed a period of anarchy in which the outlines of the modern Middle East were created in a process that owed as much to desperate improvisation as it did to imperial grand strategy.

Sharif Hussein became the king of the new state of the Hijaz, but his sons continued to press on with the unification project. In the end, Emir Abdulla turned the temporary Emirate of Transjordan into the Hashemite Kingdom we know today, and Emir Faisal – after some adventures in Syria – was installed by the British as King of Iraq.

While these events were unrolling, another story was under way in the centre of Arabia. In the 18th century, Imam Mohammed bin Saud had allied himself with a religious leader called Mohammed ibn Abdel-Wahhab who advocated an uncompromisingly austere, iconoclastic version of Islam. The Saudi house and its Wahabbi partners then engaged in an extraordinary career of territorial conquest that took in the whole of modern Saudi Arabia, and took it the Shi‘a shrines of Iraq, the prisons of Istanbul and, finally, defeat and exile in Kuwait. In 1902, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, or Ibn Saud as he was also known, left that province with a small band of followers and launched a surprise attack on the Masmak fort of Riyadh, the ancestral home of the Saud in the remote highlands of the Najd, and now the property of the rival Rashid house. This marked the successful beginning to a new campaign of conquest, undertaken with the help of the Ikhwan, a nomadic militia that had adopted Wahhabi Islam in 1912. While the Arabs of the Revolt fought their irregular war with the Ottomans over the holy cities and the Hijaz railway, Abdulaziz captured the Rashid’s stronghold of Ha’il, the south-western provinces of Asir, Najran and Jizan, and the eastern province of Hasa where the world’s largest reserves of oil were eventually to be discovered.

So, by the time the Hijaz became an independent country, the forces of Abdulaziz were ready to incorporate it into their domain. The first Saudi-Hashemite military engagement began in 1918 and ended the next year when the British intervened to impose a ceasefire. This lasted until the second engagement of 1924, undertaken after the British had realised that its declining powers were unable to contain the forces that had been unleashed by the fall of the Ottomans, and had come to the conclusion that Imperial policy had found a way to work with them. As a result, the British allowed Abdulaziz and his 55,000-strong Ikhwan army to take over the whole of the Peninsula, apart from the British protectorates of Aden, Oman, the Trucial States (the ancestors of the United Arab Emirates), Qatar and Bahrain. They also fixed the frontier between a future Saudi state and the recently founded nations of Kuwait and Iraq.⁵ However, when it came to the Kingdom of the Hijaz, the most the British would do for their former ally was to help negotiate the surrender of the Hashemite forces and the departure of Sharif Hussein – whom they had come to see as an awkward eccentric – into exile in Cyprus. The reason given was non-intervention in a religious dispute.

The fall of the Hijaz was traumatic. The first invasion was undertaken with exemplary brutality at the city of Ta’if, east of Makkah, in 1924. The Ikhwan had a policy of systematically slitting the throats of their male captives, and this was the fate suffered by hundreds (thousands in some oral accounts) of inhabitants of the city after its garrison fled. Most of the town was then looted then burned to the ground.)

Hafiz Wahba, a former schoolteacher who was in Abdulaziz’s foreign service, commented:

I was told by a friend that when the Ikhwan first entered Ta’if and Mecca, they smashed all the mirrors they found in the houses, not from lust for destruction but simply because they had never seen such things before. Any visitor to Khurma [an oasis on the road between the Hijaz and the Nejd] will see the results of such behaviour: perhaps a fragment of mirror on the wall, or a window acting as a door because the Bedouin do not see the point of windows.⁶

Although Abdulaziz prevented any further looting or murder – apart from the confiscation articles such as of musical instruments and human portraits in Makkah – for many in the Hijaz, falling into the hand of the Ikhwan was a bitter experience. The culture imposed was, in its way, harsher and more alien than that of the Ottomans, with whom many in the Hijaz had long ago made their accommodations, and tended to criticise for its weakness rather than its powers of oppression.

Ultimately, the modern Saudi state was to be founded on an alliance between the British, Jeddah based urban capitalists and elites and Ottoman administrators, and the Saud family, after its evolution into a supra-tribal oligarchy. Furthermore, the