Taha Hussein

Taha Hussein (1889–1973) was an Egyptian writer, historian and politician, and one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth-century Arab world. Known as the "Dean of Arabic Literature", he helped drive the Arab cultural renaissance and the move toward modern methods of criticism. His education blended the religious and literary traditions of Islam with European academic scholarship, and that double inheritance shaped both his subjects and his controversies.

He was born into a modest family in Upper Egypt and lost his sight in childhood after an eye infection that was badly treated. He attended a kuttab, a traditional Qur'anic school, and then studied at Al-Azhar, but he soon grew dissatisfied with its old-fashioned teaching. When the secular Egyptian University opened in 1908, he enrolled and in 1914 earned a doctorate with a thesis on the poet and philosopher Abu al-Ala al-Maarri. He later studied at Montpellier and the Sorbonne, where he earned a second doctorate in 1917 on the historian Ibn Khaldun. In France he met Suzanne Bresseau, who read to him, and he married her.

Back in Egypt he taught history and then Arabic literature. In 1926 he published a study of pre-Islamic poetry that questioned the authenticity of much of that verse and hinted that parts of the Qur'an should not be read as objective history. Religious scholars at Al-Azhar reacted with fury, and in 1931 he lost his university post, although the public prosecutor treated the book as the view of an academic researcher. His essay The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938) argued for a distinctly Egyptian identity separate from pan-Arab nationalism. His autobiography, The Days, recounts his childhood and his determined education despite blindness, and it appeared in parts over several decades. As Minister of Education in 1950, he championed free schooling and converted many Qur'anic schools into primary schools. He also translated numerous European works into Arabic.

His reach extended well beyond Egypt. In 1973 he received the United Nations Human Rights Award, and in 1950 he helped found the Faruq I Institute of Islamic Studies in Madrid, which aimed to study the Hispano-Muslim cultural legacy in collaboration with Spanish and European Arabists. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twenty-one times. He is remembered as a writer who defended public education and critical thought during a period of intense tension between tradition, nation and modernity.