Pierre Cachia 1921-2017

Pierre Cachia slipped away peacefully on 1st April, a few days shy of his 96
th birthday, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. With the passing
of this key architect of Arabic studies who made modern Arabic literature a
serious academic subject in both the UK and US, those of us who have
studied and worked with him will not only mourn the loss of a friend,
teacher, and mentor, but also the irretrievable era in which a first
generation of post-War American and European Arabists and Orientalists made
tremendous strides in fashioning academic studies of modern Arabic
literature into what it is today: grounded in native fluency of the Arabic
language, informed by real experiences lived in close proximity with Arab
writers and storytellers, and took seriously the concerns and priorities of
Arab scholars, critics and intellectuals.

Born in Faiyum (Fayyum) on 30 April 1921 to Maltese father and Russian
mother, Pierre grew up in Upper Egypt. He successively attended French,
Italian, Egyptian and American schools before he enrolled at the American
University in Cairo, where he earned his BA degree. After war service with
the British 8th Army in North Africa, Italy and Austria, he moved to
Scotland. He received his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh in 1951
and joined its Faculty. He was appointed Professor of Arabic Language and
Literature at Columbia University in 1975 and would remain there until he
retired in 1991. However, he continued to teach and write, and in fact he
published many of his important works after retirement. He wrote scholarly
articles and books on a variety of subjects, translated classical and
modern literary and critical works, and published other scholars in *Journal
of Arabic Literature*, which he co-founded and on whose editorial board he
served for many years.

His first book, *Taha Husayn: His Place in the Egyptian Literary
Renaissance* (1956), epitomises Pierre’s approach to research and scholarly
writing. Based on extensive readings in Taha Husayn and the literature
around him and his era in Arabic and European languages, and informed by
extensive fieldwork as well as interviews with those who knew Taha Husayn,
this comprehensive literary biography gives us a complex portrait of the
man behind his gargantuan legacy and, more importantly, it comes to terms
with the urgent and critical issues that shaped the thought and writing of
Taha Husyan as well as his generation of Egyptian intellectuals. It is
written in Pierre’s infinitely readable prose, elegant, clear, terse and
fluid all at the same time, and grounded in his profound knowledge of the
classical Arabic literary tradition. His subsequent books on Arabic
literature, *An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature* (1990) and *Arabic
Literature: an overview* (2002), the first based on his various articles
and book chapters and the latter on his life-long contemplation on how to
write a concise history of Arabic literature for American and British
university students, are eloquent expressions of his views of himself as a
scholar and, above all, teacher.

Pierre always put his students first. He wrote with them in mind. His
published works on Arabic literature are meant to provide them with the
necessary foundation and key concepts that would allow them to pursue their
interests in depth. He translated Arabic literary and critical works with
the same purpose in mind. *The Monitor: a Dictionary of Arabic Grammatical
Terms* (1973) and *The Arch Rhetorician or The Schemer’s Skimmer: a
Handbook of Late Arabic Badi‘ Drawn from ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi’s Nafahat
al-azhar ‘ala nasamat al-ashar* (1998) are intended for students of Arabic
language and literature and to give them access to Arabic grammatical terms
and rhetorical devices.

But Pierre’s single most important contribution lies in his work on
Egyptian folk literature. *Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt*
(1989) and his various essays now collected in *Exploring Arab Folk
Literature* (2011) are a testimony to his life-long interest in and
commitment to colloquial literary expressions. He put ‘folk’ literature,
orally transmitted in the colloquial register, on the map of literary
studies, and made it not only legitimate but also fashionable to pursue
academic studies of folk literature. He is matchless in his knowledge of
Egyptian folk ballads and in his keen understanding of the rhetorical
devices of the Egyptian colloquial. He was able to unravel and decipher any
complicated, multiply layered pun at the drop of a hat.

Pierre taught many students. All of us who had the privilege of working
closely with him will remember him as a gentleman scholar, who spoke
impeccable Arabic and English, and who loved to tell stories, but whose
sharp wit made his humorous stories even more memorable. He was generous to
a fault to anyone who sought his help, but always gave us ample space to
develop our own ideas and projects. He was more interested in showing us
how to be a rounded human being than an ambitious scholar, and taught us
that honest work would always make a difference. He was like a father to
me. He took me in when I arrived alone in New York in 1982, leaving behind
my family in Tripoli, Libya. Since then, and wherever I go, I carry with me
the warmth of his welcome, and of his office and living room, where we
spent long hours talking and bantering and exchanging stories.

His children, Susan, Philip and Helen, have set up a charity fund in his
memory to support what Pierre cared about the most—the next generation of
scholars of Arabic literature. https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/Cachia

Wen-chin Ouyang