Hassan Hosni Abdelwaheb

Hassan Hosni Abdelwaheb (1884–1968) was a Tunisian historian, linguist and writer, born at Tunis on Monday 27 Ramadan 1301 AH / 21 July 1884.¹² He came from a family of tribal dignitaries of the Kef region allied to the Husseinites, the Charni, descended from the Banu Sumadih of al-Andalus; his father Salah, trained at the Zaytuna, was a caïd-governor at Mahdia and translator to General Husseïn.³¹ After a kuttab and the Mahdia primary school, he attended the French school in Tunis, gained the primary certificate in 1899, continued at Sadiki College, and finished his studies at the Paris School of Political Sciences, returning to Tunisia on his father's death in 1904.³

He worked as a civil servant in the agriculture and commerce administration, then at the head of the forestry administration from 1910 and of the national archives, whose holdings his post gave him the means to study, archive and catalogue.³ Between 1905 and 1924 he taught history at the Khaldounia; in 1928 he was named caïd-governor of Mahdia and in 1935 of the Cap Bon, and in 1943 he became Minister of the Pen under Lamine Bey, a post he gave up in July 1947.³⁴ He was a corresponding member of the Arab Academy of Damascus and of the Academy of Arabic Language in Cairo and a foreign correspondent of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.³

After independence he was appointed in 1957 to head the antiquities service and founded several museums, among them those of Assad ibn al-Furat at Sousse and the Islamic museum of Dar Hussein at Tunis, for which he is sometimes called the 'baron of Tunisian history'.³ His works include Bissat al-Aqiq (1912), the Résumé de l'histoire de Tunisie (1918), Shahirat Tunisiyyat (1934), Kitab al-'Umr (1947), al-Imam al-Mazari (1955) and Waraqat (1965–1966), as well as editions of classical texts from Ibn Sharaf to al-Jahiz.³¹ He died at Tunis on 9 November 1968 and was buried at the Djellaz cemetery, bequeathing his rich library of Arabic manuscripts to the National Library of Tunisia.³¹