Taha Husayn

Taha Husayn (sometimes spelled Hussein)(1889-1973) is considered one of Egypt's leading men of letters. Blind from early childhood, he devoted his life to intellectual freedom for the writer, critic, and scholar and to the introduction of Western learning into his country.

Taha Husayn was born on Nov. 4, 1889, in Maghagha, a mill town in Minya Province, Egypt. One of 11 children, he became blind at the age of three from a combination of eye disease and folk medicine. After completing studies at the village mosque school, Taha was sent to Cairo (1902) to attend al-Azhar, the mosque university that served as a theological seminary to much of the Moslem world. Because of his outspoken opposition to the school's teaching system at al-Azhar, Husayn was failed in his final examinations. He enrolled in the new, secular Egyptian University, where he studied with some of the leading scholars of the time, Egyptian and European, in the field of Arabic and Islamic studies. In this heady new atmosphere, Husayn received the first doctorate awarded by the university (1914) for his thesis on Abu-l-Ala al-Maarri, the blind Syrian philosopher of the 11th century.

Study in France

In 1915 Husayn won a scholarship for study in France, first to Montpellier and then to Paris. In Montpellier he employed a young Frenchwoman and student, Suzanne Bresseau, as his reader, and she later became his wife. His fields of study were literature and philosophy, including classical, and he became deeply interested in contemporary French literature.

Upon his return to Egypt after earning his doctorate in 1919, Husayn became a lecturer in ancient history at Egyptian University, and in 1925 he was given the chair in Arabic language and literature. Soon after he was elected dean of the faculty, the first Egyptian to hold the post.

A Provocative Career

In 1926 the young professor caused a public uproar with his work on pre-Islamic poetry that scandalized conservative Moslem opinion by criticizing traditional assumptions. The outcry almost caused the fall of the government, and the book was eventually withdrawn and reissued in a less provocative version.

Husayn's boldness and fervent support of academic freedom were not forgotten, however, and in 1932 he was dismissed. He wrote prodigiously for literary magazines and newspapers, as well as more substantial works. He became a prime mover in the founding of Alexandria University, and was minister of education and chairman of the cultural committee of the League of Arab States. In later years he was awarded many domestic and foreign honors.

Publications

Hasayn retired from academic life in 1952 to continue his writings, which he did until his death in 1973. The vast body of his works places him at the forefront of the Egyptian literary renaissance of the 20th century. He worked on the edition of classical Arabic texts and translated ancient Greek and modern French classics into Arabic.

Husayn's more purely literary studies were, on classical Arabic poetry, Ma al-Mutanabbi (1937; With al-Mutanabbi); and on modern Arabic poets, Hafiz wa-Shawqi (1933; Hafiz and Shawqi). His studies of the political and social history of early Islam include Al-Fitnah al-Kubra (The Great Time of Troubles), an interpretation of major political and ideological clashes.

Husayn's fiction includes numerous short stories as well as novels such as Ala Hamish al-Sirah (3 vols., 1933-1943; On the Margin of the Prophet's Life) and novellas with modern, often Upper Egyptian settings such as Dua al-Karawan (1934; The Appeal of the Caravan) and Shajarat al-Bus (1944; The Tree of Despair).

Husayn's fiction often became a vehicle to attack the Egyptian "system" that he knew. One of his most important works on educational and cultural policy is the major study Mustaqbal al-Thaqafah fi Misr (2 vols., 1938; The Future of Culture in Egypt), in which he developed his thesis that Egyptian culture was part of Mediterranean culture and hence any attempt to "orientalize" it was a dangerous error.

In his moving autobiography, Al-Ayyam (3 vols., 1929-1955; The Days), Husayn retells in simple language his own story, from village life and childhood blindness through educational trials and maturity. The value and appeal of this work are suggested by the fact that it has been translated into at least nine languages, including Chinese, English, Hebrew, and Russian.

Further Reading

The major critical study of Husayn is Pierre Cachia, Taha Husayn: His Place in the Egyptian Literary Renaissance (1956). Recommended for general background is Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (1962).

1889 - 1973

Egyptian critic and writer of fiction; Egypt's minister of education, 1950 - 1952.

Taha Husayn was born in an Egyptian village in the Nile delta. His life was transformed at the age of two, when he was blinded by the village barber's attempt to treat ophthalmia. The course of his early education, with its many frustrations and occasional triumphs, is recorded in one of the major monuments of modern Arabic literature, Al-Ayyam (1925; published in English as An Egyptian Childhood, 1932). In two later volumes under the same title, Taha Husayn traces his transition from the village Qurʾan school to the Azhar mosque-university in Cairo (AlAyyam, 1939; The Stream of Days, 1948) and his sense of acute frustration at the kind of education being offered there. The third volume (Al-Ayyam, 1967; A Passage to France, 1976) describes his transfer to the new secular Egyptian University (now the University of Cairo) from which he obtained the first Ph.D., with a dissertation on the renowned classical Arabic poet, Abu al-Ala al-Maʿarri, whose blindness clearly led to feelings of close affinity between author and subject. In 1915, Taha Husayn traveled to France. Arriving at the University of Montpelier, he hired a young French woman to read to him. The two fell in love and were married in 1917. Husayn moved to Paris in 1915 where he became a student at the Sorbonne and, in 1918, completed a second doctoral dissertation, this one on the famous historian Ibn Khaldun (1332 - 1406).

Upon his return home, Husayn set himself, both as author and teacher, the task of introducing to his fellow countrymen and, by extension, to the Arab world as a whole, many of the ideas and ideals he had encountered in Europe. Appointed professor of ancient history immediately following his return from France, he assumed the chair of Arabic literature in 1925. It was at this time that he contributed to the newspaper al-Siyasa a series of articles on early Arabic poetry, which were to be published later in three volumes as Hadith al-Arbaʿa (1954, n.d., 1957). His lecture references on the debt of Islam to Hellenistic ideas were already controversial, but when in 1926 he published in book form Fi al-Shiʿr al-Jahili, his views on the authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry, and suggested that certain stories recorded in the text of the Qurʾan might be fables, he was accused of heresy. He offered to resign but was vigorously defended by the president of the university, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872 - 1963). Eventually a compromise was reached whereby the work was withdrawn. A revised version, Fi al-Adab alJahili, was published in 1927, with the offending passages removed but the remainder of his argument expanded.

Taha Husayn was not afraid to provoke and confront controversy during the remainder of his career. Appointed dean of the faculty of arts in 1929, he soon clashed with governmental authorities and was dismissed from that position in 1932 amid strikes and resignations. He now became more active in both journalism and politics while continuing his career as a university teacher, administrator, and writer. In 1938 he published another controversial work, Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr, laying out a broad and ambitious program of educational reform that involved a process of modernization on the model of Europe. During the 1940s he was accorded increasing recognition as a scholar and writer both in Egypt and abroad; in 1950 he was appointed minister of education in the Wafd government. He was in the process of implementing his reforms when a series of events began that were to culminate in the Egyptian revolution of July 1952.

During the final decades of his life, as the pace of development in the literary tradition that he loved began to accelerate, he became a more conservative figure, bent on preserving the great heritage from what he came to regard as the wilder excesses of some of its contemporary inheritors - not least in the call for literature of commitment that so predominated in the critical environment of the 1950s.

Taha Husayn made several contributions to modern Arabic fiction, of which the novels Duʿa alKarawan (1932) and Shajarat al-Buʾs (1944) and the short-story collection Al-Muʿadhdhibun fi al-Ard (1949) are the most notable. It is, however, in the realm of literary criticism that his contribution to modern Arabic cultural life is most significant. He played a major role in the formulation of a modern approach to the issues of Arabic literary history; he applied critical methods to the canon of both poetry and artistic prose through a series of studies on genres and various writers. From his early study of alMaʿarri, mentioned above, via his work on Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi (died 965), generally acknowledged as the greatest of the classical poets, to contemporary poets such as Ahmad Shawqi (1868 - 1932) and Hafiz Ibrahim (1871 - 1932), it is possible to detect a determined effort to introduce into the world of Arabic literature a critical approach based on a recognizable methodology. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of critics, most notably his own student, Muhammad Mandur (1907 - 1965).

Taha Husayn was known during his lifetime as the dean of Arabic literature - the title is appropriate. Not only did he write creative works and critical studies, but his sense of mission led him to play a major role in the difficult process of cultural adjustment and change that the Arab world had to face during the course of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Brugman, J. An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1984.

Cachia, Pierre. Taha Husayn: His Place in the Egyptian LiteraryRenaissance. London: Luzac, 1956.

Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Blindness and Autobiography: "Al-Ayyam" of Taha Husayn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Semah, David. Four Egyptian Literary Critics. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1974.

— ROGER ALLEN