Taha Hussein

Taha Hussein lost his sight to ophthalmia at three years old. He was sent to a village kuttab to memorise the Qur'an, then to the venerable al-Azhar mosque-university in Cairo, where he chafed against rote learning and was eventually thrown out. He earned the first PhD ever awarded by the new secular Egyptian University in 1914 with a dissertation on the freethinking poet al-Ma'arri, then continued in Paris at the Sorbonne — where he met his French wife Suzanne, a constant presence in his memoirs.

His fame in Arabic letters rests on two very different books. The first, Fi al-Shi'r al-Jahili (On Pre-Islamic Poetry, 1926), applied European philological methods to the canonical pre-Islamic odes and concluded that much of the corpus had been forged in early Islamic centuries to provide a pedigree for Qur'anic vocabulary. The book provoked a public storm in Egypt, was withdrawn under government pressure, and reissued in a softer form. It made Hussein both a hero of the secular intelligentsia and the permanent enemy of the religious establishment.

The second is Al-Ayyam (The Days, 1929 onwards), a three-volume autobiographical novel that begins with the blind boy in the village, follows him through al-Azhar, and ends with him as a young scholar in Paris. It is one of the foundational texts of modern Arabic prose — clear, mournful, ironic — and the first place many Arabic students still encounter the rhythms of literary modern Arabic.

As Minister of Education in the 1950s he pushed through universal free schooling in Egypt, declaring that "education is like the air we breathe and the water we drink." He died in 1973 having been editor of every major Arabic literary journal, rector of two universities, and the public conscience of secular Arab modernity for half a century.