LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

arabic poetry, nationalism and social changealignments, conscious that power and influence within the Congress were atstake. Meanwhile, parties and factions formed (particularly around the adherentsor affiliates of two religious sectarian groups, the Ansar or neo-Mahdists and theSufi Khatmiyya). Sectarianism in turn eroded the ideal of Sudanese unity thatnationalist poets had espoused, in the days when political repression andopposition to the British had drawn the graduates, inevitably, together (AbuHasabu 1985).In any case, after the foundation of the Graduates General Congress, thequestions for debate had changed. Leading thinkers were no longer asking,‘What was the Sudan, as a nation?’ (a question that poets had broached), butrather, ‘Who should lead the Sudan, as a state?’ The latter question gainedcurrency during and after World War II, as British policy makers began todiscuss plans for administrative devolution (foreshadowing the final transfer ofpower that occurred in 1956). As colonial government employees who werestuck on bureaucracy’s middle rungs, nationalists stood to benefit from thesechanges.Illustrative in this regard is the career of Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub, thepoet, essayist and short story-writer who had argued in the early 1930s that theSudan’s Arabic literary movement and nationalist movement were one and thesame. First a government engineer, then, after 1938, a civil judge, Mahjub threwhimself into Graduates General Congress politics and became a leadingsupporter of the Umma Party and its affiliates, which had links to the neo-Mahdists and opposed ideals of union with Egypt. Mahjub became a ForeignMinister in 1956, the year of independence, Prime Minister in 1965, and UNdiplomat in 1967 (Abu Salim 1991: 9–61; Bashiri 1991: 291–3). For Mahjub asfor others, poetry had been a passion of youth, but careers and party politics tookprecedence as time went on.The sidelining of poetry was in some sense inevitable: by the late 1930s,prose was clearly taking over. Young, leading thinkers were beginning to framemany of their best ideas in essays rather than verse – a natural development in acontext where cheap printed materials and office supplies (and even the personaltypewriter) made writing (as opposed to oral communication) so important.The periodical press had, of course, contributed significantly to this change, byproviding a regular forum for printing and disseminating news and opinioneditorials.By the late 1930s, too, poetry’s social functions had changed among thelearned. For an older generation of educated men, who had reached adulthoodbefore the British conquest, poetry had been a mnemonic tool for record-keeping.Babikr Bedri, for example, a Mahdist army veteran and educator, recalled thatwhen he opened a small-town school around 1910, he set all his lessons to verse,so that his students could retain them (Bedri 1980: 115). His school, in other— 173 —www.taq.ir