AIDA IMANGULIYEVA
(AIDA NASIR IMANGULIYEVA)
Aida Nasir Imanguliyeva was born in Baku in October 10, 1939, to an educated family. Her father Nasir Imanguliyev was a journalist, pedagogue, honorary scholar as well as one of the important founders of Azerbaijan’s media. He was the long-time chief editor of newspapers «Baku» (in Russian) and “Bakı” (in Azeri). Her mother, Govhar Imanguliyeva, was born in Shamakhy to a distinguished family.
Aida Imanguliyeva received a golden medal in secondary school №132 of Baku city in 1957. The same year, she entered Azerbaijan State University. After graduating from the Arabic philology department of the University’s Oriental Studies faculty in 1962, she started her post-graduate study in the Department of History of Near Eastern Literature. After that, she worked at the Asian People Institute at the former USSR Academy of Sciences.
After delivering her Candidate thesis, she started working at Azerbaijan AS Oriental Studies Institute as a junior researcher (in 1966), next as a senior scholar (in 1973), promoted to Head of Arabic Philology Department (in 1976), next to Deputy Director on Science (in 1988) and ultimately as the Director of the Institute from 1991 until her death.
In 1989, Aida Imanguliyeva successfully defended her Ph. D. thesis in Tbilisi becoming the first Azerbaijani woman Arabist holding a Ph.D, and then obtained the title of Professor on the specialty.
A.N. Imanguliyeva edited numerous scientific works dealing with oriental philology. She was a member and Deputy Chairman and Chairman of Defense Council in “Asian and African Countries’ literatures” specifically in Azerbaijan AS Oriental Studies Institute. Under her guidance and authorship more than 70 scientific articles and many monographs were published, such as “Mikhail Naimy” and “Pens Association” (in Russian, Moscow, 1975); “Gibran Khalil Gibran” (in Azeri, Baku, 1975); “New Arabian Literature Coryphaei” (in Azeri and Russian, Baku, 1991).
Aida Imanguliyeva was a member of All-Union Arabists Society Board, All-Union Coordination Council for Oriental Literature Research, and The Writers Union. She devoted herself to scientific as well as organizational activities, dealing with the training of highly skilled Arabists. She effectively dealt with pedagogical activity, delivering lectures at Azerbaijan State University on Arabic philology, as well as presenting contemporary Azerbaijani oriental studies in many scholarly meetings abroad such as in Moscow, Kiev, Poltava, Saint-Petersburg, Hamburg, Halle, etc.
Aida Imanguliyeva died in September 19, 1992.
A Treasure of Azeri Literary Thought
In times of changing values and the emergence of new social relations, the societal norms and ethical and moral values that have so far provided a basis for the existence and functioning of society have, throughout history, found themselves striving to win the right to their continued existence.
What values should be preserved in an evolving society, and what values can such a society be based on?
In our present era is it possible for literature to serve as a criterion for the values on which we are to build our lives and our way of life? And will those values pass through the filter of literary artistic thought?
If one answers these questions in the negative, one may refute the significance of the perennial values that ensure the integrity and continuity of life, of society and of history. In such a case, the significance of human life and of humaneness in society would be lost in a society of permanent contradictions, in which good clashes with evil, light with darkness and life with death.
There is much discussion today over the role, position and responsibility of the Arts, both of the written word and of literary thought, which form the criteria of literature, literary criticism and literary studies. And the criteria, like all things, are measured and selected. It is natural that different tendencies give rise to different ideas. Solutions to these issues are found in literary–critical works and in recent examples of literary thought – and even in many that are decades old but have not lost their scholarly and historical importance. It is true that historical upheavals or social and political crises can, during the period of turmoil, keep thinking minds at the level of basic survival. As time passes, however, the moral and aesthetic values that are the requirements of the soul, and which form the conditions for our common survival, together with examples of literary–critical thought that provide the criterion by which “the written word will be enriched” within the existence of a society, as well as works on literary study, all need to be found among the broader mass readership – and equally in the interest of each person who has at least some level of a given social culture.
Aida Imanguliyeva’s book Gibran, Rihani and Naimy is a timeless example of literary–critical thinking, classical literary studies, and first-class Oriental studies. Of immense academic importance, this work is that of a master and a great mind, a work of intensive criticism devoted to the problems of interaction between Eastern and Western literature in the early twentieth century.
In her study of the reception and mutual influence of the English Romantic traditions, with which a considerable part of this study is concerned, together with that of the American Transcendentalists, and of the Critical Realism of the Russian tradition on the new Arab literature of X century forward the time, Aida Imanguliyeva has examined many philosophical, literary and sociopolitical systems of thought and currents of ideas, their origins and importance, and the extent of research carried out on them. Along with the general conclusions she reached, this forms an immense contribution to Azeri and international literary studies. Like all spheres of scholarship and culture, the study of Azeri literature was in a state of change and development in the twentieth century and had achieved substantial progress.
However, the fetters imposed by totalitarianism limited that development to a certain degree – to the point, in fact, at which it began to pose a threat to the existence of the regime. The primary goal and source of development for scholarly literary studies, as with other humanitarian and social sciences, is to gradually give expression to universal values and ideals, at the same time as developing a national consciousness. In the prevailing historical conditions, it was only those literary scholars whose thought did not fit within the ideological framework imposed by the regime who were able to broaden the horizons of their thinking; in other words, only those with the gifts and talent and an advanced scholarly and philosophical world-view were able to preserve the essence, meaning, direction and goals of that scholarship.
Aida Imanguliyeva’s book Gibran, Rihani and Naimy is an achievement of scholarship that has been applied at a contemporary and perfected level of a systematic approach gained during the course of historical development; it also reflects the most recent level of development of Azeri literary studies and thereby gives rise to a new tendency and a new school.
A century after the emergence of the questions that the book addresses, and hand in hand with the positive aspects of political and economic growth and globalization that characterize the world at the start of the twenty- first century, the far-sightedness and perspicacity of thinkers such as Aida Imanguliyeva are once again striking: unity, integration and globalization must occur to the same degree as cultural and literary development. Ms Imanguliyeva asserts that the national literature of every society is linked indissolubly and inherently by its character to universal human achievement. Were the unity of the national with the universal to be fractured, no literature could develop; there would be no literary development in any upward direction.
Her scholarly achievement is not so much an affirmation of this established fact as her own examination of the mechanism by which national literatures influence one another, together with the points of contact between them, and her identification of the links between the national and the universal. By considering the effect of the smallest unit that links national literatures to the individuals who created it, Ms Imanguliyeva reveals the complex threads
between the literatures of different peoples and shows, through a philosophical prism, the correlation of artistic thought to life, and that of literary directions to historical periods.
Ms Imanguliyeva was supremely aware of the sociopolitical nature of her time, and it was not simply through an accident of academic interests that a treasure of Azeri literary XI century thought she arrived at these topics of research.
Appealing to a diversified circle of interest that itself expresses the mutual influence of the idea-currents of East and West, which she studied in depth, she sought to raise the level of Azeri social consciousness to one that would embrace universal ideas and values, thus releasing it from the moral and ideological fetters prevalent at that time.
With feelings of patriotism and social conscience, the author characterizes the roles of the prominent Arab writers Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Rihani and Mikhail Naimy in the following way: “Their literary activity served, as it were, as the channel of communication that enabled Western and Eastern literatures to exchange their intellectual achievements.” Using her research as an information channel, Ms Imanguliyeva enriched the flow with universal ideas to provide a continuity and longevity for the development of Azeri social consciousness and national self-consciousness.
Not merely as a scholar and researcher, but also as a deep-thinking philosopher and a fine writer, she expresses her own ideas through references to numerous writers and philosophers from the East and West. During the ban on free speech and thinking in her time, she managed to find a scholarly literary method of freely expressing her thoughts on ideas that have been the source of unbounded and endless speculation, ideas which have occupied humankind for millennia: God, Freedom, Beauty, Literature, and so forth.
Gibran, Rihani and Naimy is a monumental work in terms of its theoretical importance, its richness of information, the breadth of scope of its topics, the depth of its ideas, the formulation of its questions, the systematic approach to its subject, and its stylistic and expressive qualities. The author presents the conditions that precipitated the emergence of a new literary school as a response to the “needs of an awakening people”; this was given the representational name of “Syro-American”, and the activities of this school as a new historical phase that was being embarked upon. She further describes how, through the protagonists of this school, the national literature moved into a new developmental stage, drawing upon the achievements of Western culture and literature. This new movement embodied the ideas
and forms of a new historical reality, creating various literary tendencies and methods as the literary process developed, each one being transformed and replaced by another and, parallel with this, how the literary genres evolved and were refined.
While it combines elements of both Oriental and literary studies, this book does not fit neatly into the usual mould in terms of its ideas or aims, nor does it express the sociopolitical views, ethical and moral opinions, or philosophical position of its author. As well as preserving its theoretical importance and immense scholarly value, the work also reveals traits of creative styles. It portrays the wealth and unlimited range of ideas and expressive possibilities that are the product of an innate talent, in addition to the author’s intensive research. Ms Imanguliyeva has thoroughly assimilated models of both art and literature from many centuries in both East and West, along with their philosophical and ethical views and sociopolitical XII century foreword attitudes, and has studied the works of the various writers and thinkers in their original languages – Arabic, English and Russian. The structure of the book is in conformity with its style and content.
In the first chapter questions are addressed concerning the influence – general and specific – of both Arab literature (in the USA) and foreign literature on the writers of the Syro-American School. This is followed by a discussion of the historically existing sociopolitical conditions for Arab literature, the cross-influence of literatures, East–West cultural links and their history, the evolution of types of artistic thought and of literary tendencies – Enlightenment, Sentimentalism, Romanticism, Critical Realism – and the dynamics of their development. Each of the following three chapters is devoted to the works of one of the three principal exponents of the new Arab literature.
These chapters are an attempt to comprehend the subject along with questions of literary theory; yet there is no duplication, as in each case these are seen differently, in terms both of each author’s exposure to foreign literature and of an analysis of their tendencies and methods, forms and genres.
Chapter 2 examines the work of Kahlil Gibran, and outlines the writer’s progression from Sentimentalism to Romanticism together with the basic characteristics of this artistic method, its stages of development, and application in specific examples and details. The principle, form and content of such genres as the poem, short story, essay and prose poem are analyzed.
The chapter also looks at the wider influence of English and American Romanticism on Arabic literature through the example of Gibran’s work.
Chapter 3, whose theme is the role of Ameen Rihani in the formation of Arab Romanticism, examines the development of the ideas and conceptions of Romanticism as a full artistic method, as well as that of artistic thinking in Rihani’s works. It also discusses how his world-view accords with the spiritual and intellectual foundations of American Transcendentalism.
Using Rihani’s work as its basis, the chapter analyses various poetic genres – poems, narrative poems, stories with multiple plots, and short prose genres. The fourth and final chapter examines the mutual interactions of Arabic and Russian literatures, and the way in which Mikhail Naimy was influenced by leading exponents of Russian literature in the twentieth century: Vissarion Belinsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov. Interestingly, Ms Imanguliyeva explores this influence from the perspective of different literary genres to those referred to in earlier chapters: critical articles, plays, novels and stories.
As can be seen, each chapter possesses a completeness of form and content, a committed structure, and a free subject. In addition, the cohesion of inner content and ideas, the logical integrity and affinity of the author’s aims, in terms of covering all the literary tendencies and the forms and genres that were characteristic of the period under investigation, the philosophical schools, movements of ideas, and sociopolitical outlooks – all form part of an integral whole. Seeking to capture certain historical moments in the work of the three writers, and registering the spiritual values of a treasure of Azeri XIII century literary thought and literature that are one of the fundamental conditions for human existence, Imanguliyeva describes Gibran’s The Prophet and Naimy’s The Book of Mirdad as an ethical and moral credo in which the author’s own philosophical and religious thoughts and ideas are gathered.
On the same basis, this book may likewise be referred to as both a philosophical–ethical and a moral–ethical credo that contains a valuable scholarly legacy. Gibran, Rihani and Naimy is the product of a lifetime’s work. While preserving its complete originality, the author’s personal approach and position, and her unique qualities of analysis and expression, it also embraces its subject from a broad canvas down to the smallest details – but not before having “squeezed the juice from the fruit” and imbibed of the essence, substance and spirit of hundreds of scholarly, literary, artistic and philosophical books, works of research, articles, and other documents. Ms Imanguliyeva is well aware of the responsibility she bears: in her scholarly activity she follows the words of Leo Tolstoy that she cites in the present book: “In order to find gold in art it is necessary to collect a lot of material and sift it through the sieve of criticism.” Thus she selects the very essence, just as she makes her comparative analysis of Belinsky and Naimy and considers carefully the material, opinions and positions on the topic in question.
Aida Imanguliyeva is a scholar and an innovator. Her innovativeness consists not only in her choice of topic, the way she formulates questions, and her original approach to the subject, but also in the academic method she develops in this book. In her systematic approach to research she generally uses comparative methods more than is strictly called for by the subject matter. After all, within the study of literature, a comparative study of the works of different writers and of national literatures within literary studies, and the analysis of literary connections, is a broad domain with a particular history. The use, influence and adoption of literary connections are, for Ms Imanguliyeva, not merely a literary event, but one of the methods for better disclosing the artistic characteristics of the subjects of the process of influence and adoption. For her, the assimilation of other literatures in order to understand oneself through art is a perspective that reveals the comparison, mutual influences and connections between different writers and between the literatures of different peoples; the same applies to the artistic character of particular individual writers and, indeed, the more general, global questions of literature. In this way Ms Imanguliyeva was able to reconstruct
the theoretical problems of literature, as well as the sociopolitical, cultural and philosophical substance and vista of one historical epoch that played a crucial role in the development of humanity.
As a research scholar, the author bases her opinions, abstractions and conclusions on the criteria of scientific nature, veracity and objectivity. She exposes causes and motives, recording both the general and the necessary. She boldly engages in polemics with other scholars, regardless of their authority or reputation, who file their claims on the basis of outer appearance or association. As an academic Ms Imanguliyeva seeks the triumph of XIV century foreword facts, just as the aesthete seeks the triumph of beauty, and the philosopher that of reality. Nevertheless, in comparisons between East and West, one can detect a subtle Eastern bias, the result of her immense love of the East and of its history and literature, which is linked to the spiritual roots of her own people.
Gibran, Rihani and Naimy is a valuable example of a literary–philosophical work in twentieth-century Azeri social thought. This work is a treasure of scholarship that has not yet found due recognition in the history of social thought. A proper assessment of this work, and more broadly of Aida Imanguliyeva’s achievements as a whole, may be given in other works that examine and analyze her scholarly and theoretical legacy in a comprehensive manner and from various theoretical perspectives. A study of her work is also valuable from the viewpoint of determining the level of the Azeri literary and philosophical world-view in the twentieth century.
This book offers a fresh view by a late twentieth-century scholar of the world existing at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. Yet really this is a view of our own time, in that the basis of today’s scientific world-view – along with many of our global problems – were established in the period covered by the book. In Gibran, Rihani and Naimy, Aida Imanguliyeva discusses the mutual influences and links of American and English cultures with Arab culture and the synthesis of Western and Eastern thinking; she also explores the thought of those geniuses who founded modern Arabic literature and who, at the start of the twentieth century, sought to modify Eastern thought in accordance with the demands of the modern world, thus throwing light equally onto modern perspectives and approaches to problems.
As Ameen Rihani says in his bitingly ironic question:
“I am the East.
I have philosophies and religions.
Who would exchange them for aircraft?”
And as Mikhail Naimy says, expressing the pain in his heart:
“Many critics evade the truth by means of ‘patriotic’ phrases such as ‘Our country is the cradle of inspiration and humanity and the homeland of the prophets.’
Centuries passed, and still we knock our foreheads on the threshold of churches … a thick layer of rust has covered our hearts and minds.”
And here, finally, is the sublime image of Gibran, who “embodied all epochs, ideals and great deeds, the undying voice of the ages”:
“The sight of the ruined city [of the Past] brings the poet to despair, but Life tells him he must depart and look instead for the City of the Future:
Come, for only the coward tarries, and it is folly to look back on the City of the Past.”
The many political, economic, social and ecological problems facing the world today dictate the necessity and importance of the works and activity of such intellectuals as Aida Imanguliyeva. The solution to all such problems lies in the transformation of the cultural values of the world’s peoples, East and West, into universal values for all humanity.
A treasure of Azeri literary XV century thought following the words of the Russian genius Dostoevsky, who declared in the nineteenth century that “Beauty will save the world”, many great thinkers of the twentieth century have been of the same view. The American philosopher–poet Emerson, to whom Ms Imanguliyeva makes frequent reference, also believed that beauty is the “creator of the universe”.
In researching links between American and Arabic literature, Ms Imanguliyeva remarks on how close Gibran’s conceptions of the beauty that “saves the world” are to those of Emerson: “Beauty is literature that regards itself in the mirror.”
If indeed these great thinkers are correct in saying that beauty will save the world, then Gibran, Rihani and Naimy – as bestowed upon the treasury of universal thought by the prominent scholar, Orientalist, philosopher and thinker Aida Imanguliyeva – will portray literature as “the mirror of beauty”.