Two Egyptian Romantic Poets and their Curious American Sojourns

Muhammed Osman Al Khalil, whose research explores the interplay between the literary and political in the Arabic modernist poetry movement right after World War II, examines a long-forgotten literary confrontation in Egypt in the early 1930s between Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi (1892-1955), a poet and polymath, then at the height of his literary and professional fame, and a 26-year-old poet-student named Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), who would later become a leading ideologue of political Islam. About two decades later both Abu Shadi and Qutb would travel to America: Abu Shadi immigrating to the US in 1946 and working, for the last five years of his life, for the Voice of America; and Qutb coming on an Egyptian scholarship in 1948-1950 and studying at colleges in Washington DC and Colorado. What brought them to America, how did they experience her, and how did she influence them? Speakers

• Muhamed Al-Khalil, Professor of Practice of Arabic, NYUAD