Taha Hussein

Taha Hussein (14 November 1889 – 28 October 1973) was among the most influential Egyptian writers and intellectuals of the twentieth century, a leading figure of the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) and of the modernist movement in the Arab world, known by the sobriquet "the Dean of Arabic Literature". ^{1 2}

The English article records that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twenty-one times. ¹

Blind from the age of two, he rose from a village kuttab to al-Azhar, to the first doctorate of the new Egyptian University, to the Sorbonne, and ended as professor, dean, founding rector of Alexandria University and Minister of Education, in which office he made Egyptian schooling free. ^{1 2}

He was born at Izbet el Kilo, a village in the Minya Governorate in central Upper Egypt — Britannica places the birth at Maghagha, the district town — the seventh of thirteen children of lower-middle-class Muslim parents. ^{1 2}

The sources disagree on his birth day: the English article's lead and the Arabic tradition give 15 November 1889, while the English article's infobox and Britannica give 14 November, and Wikidata carries both dates; this record follows 14 November and records the variant. ^{1 2 3}

He contracted ophthalmia at the age of two and became blind as a result of malpractice by an unskilled physician, an affliction that shaped his whole life and his autobiography. ^{1 2}

After the village kuttab, where he memorised the Qur'an, he entered al-Azhar in 1902 to study religion and Arabic literature; the Arabic article names his teachers there, among them Sayyid al-Marsafi, Mustafa al-Maraghi, Muhammad Bakhit and Muhammad Abduh, whose reformist ideas he at first greatly admired. ^{1 4}

From an early age he was dissatisfied with the traditional education system, and when the secular Egyptian University opened in 1908 he was among its first students, studying modern sciences, Islamic civilisation, history, geography and Oriental languages while still attending lessons at al-Azhar. ^{1 4}

In 1914 he received the university's first doctorate, for a thesis on the sceptical poet and philosopher Abu al-Ala' al-Ma'arri; the thesis provoked an uproar in religious circles and a charge of deviation in parliament, and an Azhar committee refused him the 'alamiyya degree — he became, as the Arabic article puts it, a man of the university rather than a man of the mosque. ^{1 4 2}

In 1914 the university sent him to Montpellier, where he studied French literature, psychology and modern history; recalled to Egypt in 1915 amid poor conditions at home, he lost his grant in the ensuing controversies, had it restored through Sultan Hussein Kamel's intervention, and returned to France, this time to Paris. ^{1 4}

At the Sorbonne he hired Suzanne Bresseau (1895–1989) to read to him, and subsequently married her; she remained his reader, companion and, in his phrase as the sources report it, his "sweet voice" for the rest of his life. ¹

In 1917 the Sorbonne awarded him a second doctorate, for a dissertation on the Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun, regarded as one of the founders of sociology; the Arabic article dates the Ibn Khaldun doctorate to 1918 and adds a diploma in Roman law taken with distinction. ^{1 4}

He returned to Egypt in 1919 and was appointed professor of history at Cairo University, then professor of Arabic literature and of Semitic languages, and in time the first Egyptian dean of the Faculty of Arts. ^{1 2}

He was the founding rector of the University of Alexandria, and at the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo — of which he later became president — he was charged with completing Al-Mu'jam al-Kabir, the academy's great dictionary. ^{1 4}

He was a member of several scientific academies in Egypt and abroad, and wrote for the Egyptian press from an early age until shortly before his death, often daily. ¹

His book On Pre-Islamic Poetry (1926) brought him fame and notoriety together: applying Cartesian doubt and modern critical method, he argued that a great deal of the poetry reputed to be pre-Islamic had been forged by Muslims of a later age, for tribal pride, inter-tribal rivalry and other reasons, and that the religious life of pre-Islamic Arabia is better mirrored in the Qur'an than in that poetry. ^{1 4 2}

The book aroused the intense anger of religious scholars at al-Azhar and of traditionalists, and he was accused of insulting Islam; Britannica records that he was tried for apostasy but not convicted, while the English article records that the public prosecutor held his words to be the opinion of an academic researcher and took no legal action, and the Arabic article records that Azhar scholars sued him and the court acquitted him for want of proof of deliberate insult. ^{2 1 4}

He lost his post at Cairo University in 1931, and the book was banned, then republished the following year with slight modifications under the title On Pre-Islamic Literature, the Arabic article adding that four passages objected to were removed. ^{1 4}

In The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938) he argued that Egypt belongs by heritage to the same wider Mediterranean civilisation that embraces Greece, Italy and France, and advocated assimilation of modern European culture; a proponent of Egyptian nationalism, he rejected pan-Arabism and held that Egyptians were in the main descendants of the ancient Egyptians. ^{1 2}

During the Second World War he criticised Nazi Germany in print — its people, he wrote, "live like a society of insects" — and urged the Egyptian government to reject neutrality and fight the Germans. ¹

In 1950 he was appointed Minister of Education in the last Wafd government formed before the overthrow of the monarchy, and led the call for free education and the right of everyone to be educated, vastly extending state education and abolishing school fees. ^{1 2}

He transformed many Qur'anic schools into primary schools and converted a number of high schools into colleges, among them graduate schools of medicine and agriculture, and is credited with establishing a number of new universities. ¹

After his tenure ended he proposed, in 1955, that al-Azhar University should be closed down. ¹

This section reports what the sources record of Hussein's belief, without a verdict from the museum.

No source consulted names a legal school for Taha Hussein, and this record therefore leaves his faith segment as unknown with the attestations stated. The English article records that he was born to Muslim parents, memorised the Qur'an at the kuttab and studied religion at al-Azhar. ¹

The Arabic article records his own words on his later visit to the Hijaz, where he spoke of Mecca and Medina as the two holy cities "to which the hearts of the Muslims incline", counting himself among them, and of the Hijaz as the place from which the light of Islam shone forth; at al-Hudaybiyya he was seen to take a handful of earth and kiss it, saying that the Messenger may have trodden there. ⁴

Britannica's description of al-Azhar as "the leading Sunni centre of higher Islamic education" describes the institution, not the man, and Wikidata records his religion only as Islam in general, so under the museum's two-source rule no school is recorded. ^{2 3}

He was the author of more than sixty books, including six novels, and some 1,300 articles, as the English article counts them. ¹

In the West he is best known for his autobiography Al-Ayyam (The Days), published in three parts between 1929 and 1967 — the first part rendered in English as An Egyptian Childhood (1932) and the second as The Stream of Days (1943) — which Britannica calls the first modern Arab literary work to be acclaimed in the West. ^{1 2}

Among his major works the English article lists The Memory of Abu al-Ala' al-Ma'arri (1915), On Pre-Islamic Poetry (1926), Wednesday Talk (1925), Hafez and Shawki (1933), The Prophet's Life (Ala Hamish al-Sira, 1933), Curlew's Prayers (1934), The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938), The Voice of Paris (1943), Tree of Misery (1944), Al-Fitna al-Kubra (The Great Upheaval, 1947), Mirror of Islam (1959) and Al-Shaykhan, on Abu Bakr and Umar (1960), together with translations from Greek drama and French literature, among them Racine's Andromaque and Voltaire's Zadig. ¹

The Arabic article records that the Egyptian government nominated him for the Nobel Prize, that Algiers (1964), Palermo (1965) and Madrid (1968) gave him honorary doctorates, that he received the Order of the Nile in 1965, presided over the Academy of the Arabic Language and, in 1971, over the union of the Arab language academies, and that UNESCO honoured him at a ceremony in Uruguay. ⁴

He died in Cairo on 28 October 1973, aged eighty-three. ^{1 2}

On 14 November 2010 Google marked his 121st birthday with a Google Doodle, and his Cairo house is preserved as the Taha Hussein Museum. ¹

• English Wikipedia article "Taha Hussein" (revision 1380567331); Arabic Wikipedia article «طه حسين» (revision 76989454); Urdu Wikipedia article «طہ حسین» (revision 9909485); Wikidata item Q328765; Encyclopaedia Britannica entry "Ṭāhā Ḥusayn" (last updated 24 October 2026).
• Conflicts recorded, not resolved: the birth day is 14 November in Britannica and the English article's infobox, 15 November in the English article's lead; the birthplace is Izbet el Kilo in the English article's text, Maghagha in Britannica and the infobox. The Ibn Khaldun doctorate is dated 1917 by the English article and 1918 by the Arabic. The 1926 prosecution is described as an apostasy trial ending without conviction (Britannica), a prosecutor's refusal to act (English article), and a law suit ending in acquittal (Arabic article); all three accounts are carried above as the sources give them.