Ed C. M. de Moor in memoriam*

by Stefan Wild

* first published in Quaderni di Studi Arabi, n. 18 (2000): 3-6.

* 28 April 1936 in Zevenaar    † 19 March 2000 in Millingen a/d Rijn.

It was in summer 1962 that I first met Ed. The place was Lebanon, not far from Beirut. He was at the time twenty six years old, had already spent almost a year in Lebanon and was preparing himself for a monastic life in the Jesuit order. I remember distinctly his young engaging smile over his black cassock – or was it a light-brown one? –, his enthusiasm for the Arabic language, and his unfeigned love of the sturining beauty of the mountains around us and of the Mediterranean sea. We were sitting on a rock near Bekfayya, we had barely met, and were already chatting about God and his world. The fleeting memory of this first short meeting is lingering, it has never left me. It catches something of Ed’s character which did not change: his strongly religious Weltanschauung, his enchantment with the Arabic language and later with its literature, and his deep sense for beauty and art. All this was inextricably bound up with his interest in other people, with his gift for spontaneous friendship.

The fact that Ed was born and grew up in Dutch Zevenaar in a family with nine children and that he was a twin may have made him a naturally companionable person. For a gifted boy in a catholic family of modest means it was at the time not unnatural to aspire to a religious calling. However, biography is not destiny. After his training in philosophy in Nijmegen, he chose to go to Lebanon and to follow intensive Arabic-courses at the Centre de Recherches et Etudes Arabes (CREA) in Bekfayya. Among his teachers were Andre d’Alverny and Louis Pouzet, with both of whom he kept a life-long friendship. Later, he spent years in the service of the Coptic Catholic Seminary in Cairo. His acquaintance with the Arabic language, in its written form and in the spoken vernacular which started in Lebanon and was perfected in Egypt grew to become his major interest. He learned to speak the Cairene dialect with an almost uncanny fluency. And he genuinely loved the people he talked to.

After two years of further theological studies in La Fourviere and Lyon, he came back to the Netherlands in 1967 and started following art-courses at an Academy in Utrecht. Meanwhile, he had decided to leave the Societas Jesu, but he never lost touch with his many friends in the order. For a while, it seems, he was torn between an academic career and the life of an artist. Ed was a multi-talented man. Music, painting, drama attracted and enchanted him. He finally opted for scholarship and finished his study of Arabic in Leiden. But his first job was still that of a Cultural Civil Servant in the Dutch province of Groningen. In 1973, however, he became a member of the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Middle East at the Catholic University of Nijmegen.

Students found in him an excellent teacher of Arabic language and Arabic literature, especially modern Arabic literature. His enthusiasm was contagious. He wrote an Arabic Grammar for (Dutch) beginners and he was constantly on the lookout for improvements in teaching material and teaching methods. He also never tired of making issues of specialised scholarship available to the general public in the Netherlands. His main topic of research was modern Egyptian literature. When he defended his dissertation, Un oiseau en cage, on the Egyptian dramatist Muḥammad Taymūr (1892-1921) at Nijmegen University, he had not only written an important contribution to the study of the dramatic œuvre of a well known Egyptian writer of early modernity. He had also made a point of employing the methodology of literary studies outside the Arab world to the study of Arabic literature, be it classical or modern. As this book shows, his preferred academic language was French, not English.

The bird in a cage in the title of his dissertation was perhaps more than the title of a comedy by Muḥammad Taymūr and moreover a symbol for the Egyptian author. It might also have been a metaphor for Ed himself who came to find some parts of academic routine more and more boring. In 1994, he left the department of Languages and Cultures of the Middle East in Nijmegen and was offered the directorship of the Institute for Oriental Christianity at the same university. In Egypt and Lebanon, Ed had acquainted himself with the Orthodox Oriental communities. The Byzantine rite had already attracted him immensely, when he was a student. When you went to see him and his wife Anneke Nijenhuis in their home in Millingen, more often than not the house would be filled with the sounds of the Byzantine Eastern liturgy, sung in Arabic by sister Marie Keyrouz. His sense for the spirituality of the Orthodox Churches, of their icons and their music, made him devise a program to bring students and teachers from Russia, the Ukraine and White Russia to the Netherlands, and to the Institute for Oriental Christianity, in order to strengthen the ties between the different communities. Even then, he did not completely abandon his interest in modern Arabic literature. He developped a plan to do research on the numerous important modern Arabic writers with a Christian cultural background, such as the Egyptian Idwār al-Kharrāṭ and the Lebanese Tawfīq Yūsuf ʿAwwād.

Ed had always been a gifted and enthusiastic organiser of symposia and colloquia. He was active for a long period in the Dutch Association for the Study of the Middle East and Islam and in the Arabic Circle. His excellent personal connections with numerous colleagues in Europe and in the Middle East made him an early and faithful member of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants (UEAI). This experience in international scholarly cooperation made Ed also a natural pioneer for the establishment of a new group, the European Meeting of Teachers of Arabic Literature (EMTAR). To bring together people academically interested in Modern Arabic literature made only sense in a transnational European setting. EMTAR always was, and still is, a small group of people. Ed who had an almost Near Eastern sense of family and family loyalty saw in the members of EMTAR more a family than an association. He was one of its founding members in 1991/1992 and immediately became its first secretary, a post which he held until he died. To say that Ed was one of the founding members of EMTAR is true, but only as an understatement. EMTAR became part of his life. He became EMTAR’s soul. The first meeting of EMTAR in Nijmegen in 1992 devoted to the topic “Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature” was Ed’s work.

Ed died suddenly – full of plans and full of energy, and without forewarning. We will miss him badly.

Stefan Wild

Selected publications

Books

• Un oiseau en cage: Le discours litteraire de Muhammad Taymur (1892-1921). Amsterdam 1991
• Arabisch voor beginners. Nijmegen 1996

Editorial work

• De arabische roman: identiteit en sociale werkelijkheid, edited by Ed de Moor & Richard Leeuwen. Bussum 1994
• Eastward Bound: Dutch Ventures and Adventures in the Middle East, edited by Geert Jan van Gelder & Ed de Moor, Amsterdam 1994
• Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, edited by Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick & Ed de Moor. London 1995
• Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, edited by Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor & Stefan Wild. London 1998.
• Orientations, edited by Geert Jan van Gelder & Ed de Moor. 1992ff.