Salama Musa, An Appreciation of His Autobiography

Abstract

Writing an autobiography is a difficult undertaking, if only because it requires intellectual maturity. I mean by autobiography the kind of writing through which a man, arrived at a certain age, would look at his life and try to understand himself as he was at the age of ten, twenty and so on, in the light of his experience as a whole. In this sense, Taha Husain has not, I think, written an autobiography, but merely the story of a blind boy who happens to be himself, a story which presents not so much a compact unity, as a succession of lyrical sketches with the author himself as the central hero. The writing of an autobiography is, moreover, different from the writing of memoirs and the keeping of day-to-day diaries, because the events and accidents of one's life, although important in themselves, can only make sense when they are linked together by an effort of the intelligence and the imagination to make elements of a pattern which can be clearly discerned. To write an autobiography, then, is to make a sustained effort to reflect on the incidents of one's life, in order to distil from them a meaning and a sequence. It is with this definition in mind that I consider Salama Mius's book of great significance and importance for Arabic literature and thought. Salama Miisa, although well aware of the difficulties of writing