Salah Abdel Sabour & Rashad Rushdi

Abstract

Salah Abdel Sabour was one of the most accomplished modern Egyptian poets who wrote verse drama. He glorified the great Sufi martyr al-Hallaj, under the influence of prominent figures of Western drama like Ibsen, Lorca, Eliot and the Greek tragedians. He varied this tendency with his admiration of Eugene Ionesco. Most of his plays implicitly reflected frustration stemming from stagnation and the boiling anger of revolutionaries. Rashad Rushdi was one of the most controversial dramatists in Egypt at his time, swimming against the stream of fashionable left-wing thinking. His most memorable play, My Country, Oh, My Country, drew inspiration from the life of a historical Sufi figure named as-Sayed al-Badawi. He had the skill and experience to emulate images that resembled the contemporary, using the epic form and the narrator, as well as dramatic figures.