Cultural Castration and Contra-modernity in “The Lamp of Umm Hashim” by Yehya Haqqi

“Cultural Castration and Contra-modernity in ‘The Lamp of Umm Hashim’ (1944) by Yehya Haqqi” attempts to read modernity as portrayed in the above-mentioned classic Egyptian novella. The character development of Isma’il, the protagonist, follows three stages where he starts as a simple villager who knows nothing beyond his neighbourhood. However, when he sets foot in England to study Ophthalmology he violently changes and renounces his old Egyptianess in favour of the modern English model. During this stage his deep-rooted Egyptianess is ‘castrated’. The final stage takes place when he returns to his homeland and fails to apply his exclusively English ways in Egypt. He realizes he has to own the local (Egyptian) and the English (international) methods to succeed in curing his patients. Illness and medicine are used, the paper argues, symbolically to refer to the ailments of the Egyptian culture and ways to cure them. Isma’il is able to devise his own peculiar methods that suit his patients’ local beliefs but run contrary to modern science. In so doing, he is able to create his own ‘modernity’. Or to use Homi K. Bhabha’s term, he is an example of “contra-modernity” where progress is not linear or exclusively western. As is clear from the above exposition, the novella is transcultural, therefore, the paper contextualizes “The Lamp” historically and examines the colonial, cultural and imperial state of Egypt. It concludes that Haqqi uses symbolism to discuss the dilemmas of modernization in Egypt and ways to address them.