Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi'i

Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi'i (January 1880 – May 1937) was an Egyptian poet and prose writer, nicknamed the "Miracle of Arabic Literature". Born at Bahtim in al-Qalyubiyya and deaf from the age of thirty, he became the leading voice of the conservative school of modern Arabic letters: he wrote the words of Egypt's anthem Islami ya Misr and of most of Tunisia's Humat al-Hima, and his Wahy al-Qalam and Tarikh Adab al-Arab remain landmarks of Arabic prose. ^{1 2}

He was born in January 1880 at Bahtim, a village of al-Qalyubiyya, in the house of his maternal grandfather, Sheikh al-Tukhi, a merchant from Aleppo whose caravans traded between the Levant and Egypt. ^{2 1} His father was a sharia judge whose last post was the presidency of the Tanta sharia court, and al-Rafi'i lived his life at Tanta, working as a state official. ^{2 3} At the age of thirty he lost his hearing — the French article attributes it to typhoid fever — a turning point he turned into a literary career pursued entirely in writing. ^{1 3}

A self-taught scholar, he rose to prominence as one of the most revered Arab poets of the early twentieth century, though he could not eclipse Ahmed Shawqi and Hafiz Ibrahim. ¹ He composed the words of the Egyptian national anthem Islami ya Misr, in use from 1923 to 1936, and the words of the Tunisian national anthem Humat al-Hima are largely his. ^{1 3} In 1926 he was named poet laureate of King Fuad I. ³

He largely gave up poetry for prose, protesting that the limitations of metre and rhyme prevented Arabic poetry from expressing everything a modern writer needs to say, and pioneering poetic prose freed from those constraints. ¹ His Tarikh Adab al-Arab ("History of Arabic Literature", first volumes 1911) was among the first modern books on its subject; Hadith al-Qamar appeared in 1912 and al-Masakin in 1917, and his collected essays Wahy al-Qalam became his most famous work. ¹ As the standard-bearer of the conservative school he answered Taha Hussein's Fi al-Shi'r al-Jahili with his book Tahta Rayat al-Qur'an, and he attacked Salama Moussa as an enemy of Islam — a judgement of his opponent recorded here as his own polemic. ^{4 5}

He died at Tanta in May 1937, aged fifty-seven — Wikidata gives the day as 10 May, while the English article's infobox gives 1 May. ^{3 6 1}