Amin Maalouf and the French Academy
Lastly, the Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf managed to develop into everlasting secretary of the distinguished French Academy, an important establishment for thought, tradition and language in France. The Academy, whose founding dates again to the yr 1634, contains 40 of an important figures of thought and literature, enjoys a great repute within the French cultural neighborhood and is taken into account Secretary Normal, one of the crucial outstanding public figures of the nation. Amin Maalouf is the primary individual of Arab descent to be elected to this excessive place, having joined this vital scientific academy in 2011. There isn’t any doubt that his appointment as head of the academy is properly deserved, given his distinguished literary and mental output. which he began within the Eighties.
This manufacturing targeted on the historic and symbolic bridges between the East and the West, embodied by the person himself in his private biography, some scenes of which he offered in his guide ‘The Sinking of Civilizations’. In his novels written in French, which achieved nice worldwide reputation, Maalouf selected characters that symbolize the values ​​of tolerance and humanity, corresponding to Leon the African (Hassan al-Wazzan), an Andalusian who traveled the world and lived in Islamic international locations earlier than settling in Rome, and the Samarkandian sports activities poet Omar Khayyam. He additionally addressed the Crusades that came about within the Center Ages from the angle of Arab historians and journalists, past the logic of non secular battle.
In all his works, Maalouf begins from the picture of the tolerant and numerous East through which he lived his early years in Cairo and Beirut, the place he laments the lack of the open human values ​​that linked individuals and folks in that golden interval. Maalouf himself paid dearly for this decline, which he known as “the drowning of civilizations,” when he was compelled to go away Lebanon after the outbreak of the civil battle. That’s the reason he left his newspaper ‘An-Nahar’ for ‘Jeune Afrique’. in France, and switched from literary writing in Arabic to the French language, which he later grew to become referred to as his most outstanding writers. Though Maalouf is a good novelist, he’s on the identical time a perceptive thinker, as evidenced by his theoretical books ‘Deadly Identities’, ‘The Sinking of Civilizations’ and ‘The Disintegration of the World’.
In these three books, Maalouf addresses the identical drawback, specifically the explosion of identities within the period of globalization, whereas exposing the worldwide context of this harmful phenomenon of Western strategic and cultural hegemony, the lack of the values ​​of progress and freedom. on the earth, and the setback of modernization tasks within the Third World, concluding that that is the one choice accessible to humanity. Right this moment is about holding on to the enlightened and rational beliefs round which nice civilizations come collectively and firmly resisting the dynamics of extremism, hatred and violence.
On this strategy, Maalouf devotes his deep connection to French humanism, which emerged on the idea of the open common thought, at a stage when excessive and closed nationalism was escalating in France itself. Maalouf typically reminds the French that their nation, which found universalism, democracy and the civil state and gave start to Voltaire, Diderot, Zola and Valery, has no proper to shut its doorways to those that search freedom and progress. The truth is, trendy Lebanon, based within the Twenties, was primarily based on the identical human cultural identification, and its non secular and sectarian variety didn’t hinder its nice civilizing position in bringing the nations of the East nearer collectively . between the East and the West.
Nevertheless, this position has utterly collapsed as a result of successive wars that Lebanon has skilled for the reason that Nineteen Seventies, to the extent that in the present day the nation has develop into a combination of clashing identities that don’t have anything in widespread, and its cultural and nationwide picture has utterly disappeared. In all his interviews and texts, Maalouf is eager to cling to his twin identification, consisting of the Arab-Islamic tributary and the Western humanitarian part, and denies that his linguistic and literary selections are indicative of a break along with his historic civilizational origins. It’s no coincidence that Maalouf was succeeded in his seat on the French Academy by essentially the most well-known anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who led an important modern scholarly critique of theories of racial superiority and theses of cultural backwardness and ethnic brutality. In his new place as everlasting secretary of the Academy, Maalouf additionally succeeds the French historian of Georgian descent Hélène Carriere de Nikos, who handed away final August.
It’s clear, then, that the French Academy in the present day is the final bastion of humanistic universalism on this historic European nation, which was the cradle of the Enlightenment, Western philosophical modernity and new literary creativity. establishment is defined by this deep cultural and historic background.
*Mauritanian educational
