The Italian poet and literary critic Antonio Catalfamo said that the Arab presence in the Italian island of Sicily was influential on several levels, including cultural, economic and scientific; describing the general state of Egyptian culture as being lively.
Catalfamo said in an interview with the the Middle East News Agency (MENA): “My relationship with Arab culture is deep as I was born and lived in Sicily, which witnessed several types of foreign dominance, among them the Arab presence, which was influential on several levels.”
“The Arab presence has affected the economic aspect, due to the Arabs’ introduction of new types of crops and different mechanisms for cultivating the land. The Arabs’ influence also extended to the scientific and arithmetic aspect, as well as to the level of trade,” he added.
He continued, “Sicily prospered economically as a result of all this, to the extent that Palermo became a new Arab capital. and we should not forget the cultural influence of the Arabs, which was not limited to the introduction of new linguistic terms, but extended to the depths of the way of thinking of the inhabitants of the island.”
“The Arab culture brought hope and enthusiasm, unlike the Greek culture, which carried the concept of submission and passive submission to fate.”
The Italian poet said that the Egyptian culture ‘seems lively. I have strong relations with Egyptian university professors who cooperate with the Pavese Observatory. I also see through my various relations that the teaching of Italian literature in Egypt is widespread, in addition to the volume of translation from Italian to Arabic’.
“Certainly, the Arab cultural influence was so great, mentioning Arab-Sicilian poet Ibn Hamdis, who was born in Noto in Sicily in 1056 and died in Mallorca in 1133. He wrote 360 poems, with a total number of 6000 verses,” Catalfamo added.
After the Normans seized Noto, Ibn Hamdis was forced to leave and sought refuge in Seville in Spain, then went to Tunisia and Algeria, then settled in Mallorca, where he died. He wrote poetry in Arabic showing a strong nostalgia for Sicily, where he was born. His love poems are a meeting point between Arabic thought and the poetry of the Sicilian school that arose in the court of Emperor Frederick II.
The writer Leonardo Sciascia believed that Ibn Hamdis influenced the Sicilian writer Salvatore Quasimodo, the Nobel Prize winner, with regard to the theme of nostalgia for the love of the homeland, despite eight centuries difference in timeline.
Catalfamo asserted that Frederick II, King of Sicily, a man of first-class culture, fluent in several languages, and interested in literature, philosophy, and science was very interested in Ibn Rushd, pointing to his influence on Italian culture in general, and Sicilian in particular.
Frederick ordered the translation of Ibn Rushd’s works into Latin, and the emperor’s poems himself were influenced by Ibn Rushd’s thought about love and the unlimited imagination that the sight of women in the poems provokes, which characterised the poetry of the Sicilian school.
