Salama Moussa

Salama Moussa (4 February 1887 – 4 August 1958) was an Egyptian journalist, writer and thinker, a pioneer of socialism in Egypt and an avowed secularist who introduced Egyptian readers to Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud. He edited a succession of influential magazines, wrote some forty-five books including the autobiography Tarbiyat Salama Musa, and was a formative influence on the young Naguib Mahfouz, who called him his spiritual father. ^{1 2}

He was born on 4 February 1887 in a village near Zagazig — the Arabic article names it Bahnaba'i — into a Coptic family originally from al-Bayadiyya in Asyut; his father, a government employee, died when he was a small child. ^{2 1 3} He attended a Muslim kuttab, a Coptic school and a government school, then moved to Cairo in 1903 for secondary education at the Khedivial school, where he encountered the writings of Farah Antun, Jurji Zaydan and Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, to whom he later acknowledged an intellectual debt. ¹

In 1907 he travelled to France, where at Montlhéry he studied socialism and evolution and learned French; in 1909 he moved to England, briefly studied law at Lincoln's Inn, and joined the Fabian Society in July 1909, absorbing its programme of gradual socialism. ¹ The Arabic article adds that in England he also joined the Rationalist Association and met George Bernard Shaw. ²

Returning to Egypt, he published his first book, Muqaddimat al-Superman, in 1910, comparing European life with Egyptian social injustice, and in 1913 started the weekly al-Mustaqbal with Farah Antun and Yaqub Sarruf; the authorities closed it after sixteen issues. ¹ In the 1920s he formed a socialist party that was promptly dissolved under government pressure, and founded an Egyptian academy for scientific education that was likewise closed after ten years. ¹ He was managing editor of Kull Shayy from 1925 to 1927 and in 1929 founded al-Majalla al-Jadida, which ran until 1944; the Arabic article adds that he edited al-Hilal for six years from 1923. ^{1 2} In 1935 he founded the Society of the Egyptian for the Egyptian, applying Gandhi's idea of national self-sufficiency, with whom he had corresponded, to Egyptian industry. ¹ He was jailed in 1946 for criticising the monarchy, and after the 1952 revolution he supervised the science section of Akhbar al-Yawm until his death. ¹

Moussa campaigned for secularism, democracy, liberalism and the emancipation of women, popularised the theory of evolution, and argued that Egypt should embrace European thought and abandon inherited religious traditions and customs. ¹ The Arabic article, summarising his own books — among them his 1912 Nashu' Fikrat Allah ("The Origin of the Idea of God") — records his doctrine that religion is a human product and that nothing in it is sacred, while also recording that he preached a natural unity of God and the universe and rejected Nietzsche's "death of God". ² He advocated teaching the Egyptian dialect as the official language and saw the roots of the Egyptian personality in its Pharaonic past. ^{1 2}

He died at Cairo on 4 August 1958. ^{1 4} He wrote or translated some forty-five books, among them Treatise about Socialism (1913), Freedom of Thought and Its Representatives (1927), The Education of Salama Moussa (1947), These Are My Mentors (1953) and The Woman Is Not the Plaything of the Man (1956); his writings remain influential in Egypt. ¹