Taha Hussein

Works

• 1918Ibn Khaldun’s Social Philosophy: An Analytical and Critical Study

  Doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne (1917), begun under Durkheim: an analytical and critical study that places Ibn Khaldun’s science of the organisation of human society in its time and measures it against the sociology of the early twentieth century.

• 1926On Pre-Islamic Poetry

  Study that begins by adopting Descartes’ method – the scholar must set aside what he believes and doubt the transmitted sources – and concludes that most poetry ascribed to the pre-Islamic period was composed later for religious, political and tribal reasons; after a complaint the prosecutor declined to bring charges, and Taha Hussein revised the book as On Pre-Islamic Literature (1927).

Position

Taha Hussein is on the map as a leading voice of modern Arab rationalism and humanism and as an early Arab reader of French sociology. His Paris thesis on Ibn Khaldun, begun under Émile Durkheim, examined the Muqaddima as a social philosophy and measured it against the sociology of his own day. In “On Pre-Islamic Poetry” (1926) he stated his method at the outset: like Descartes, the scholar must free himself of everything he knows and believes and approach the sources with doubt. Applying this to the poetry attributed to the Arabs before Islam, he concluded that most of it had been composed or reworked later for religious, political and tribal reasons – and added that the Qur’anic accounts of Abraham and Ishmael do not by themselves establish their historical existence. The book provoked protests from al-Azhar and in parliament; the public prosecutor examined it and declined to bring charges, finding no intent to offend religion, and Taha Hussein issued a revised version as “On Pre-Islamic Literature” (1927). In “The Future of Culture in Egypt” (1938) he argued that Egypt belongs by its history to the Mediterranean world of Greek reason rather than to the East, and that a modern, free and universal education is the basis of national independence – education, he later said, should be like water and air. His autobiography “The Days” (1926–67), the story of a blind village boy finding his way through al-Azhar and beyond, became one of the most widely read books of modern Arabic literature.

Life & context

Taha Hussein was born on 14 November 1889 in ʿIzbat al-Kilu near Maghagha in Upper Egypt, the seventh of thirteen children of a minor employee of a sugar company; a badly treated eye infection left him blind at the age of three. He learned the Qur’an by heart in the village school and from 1902 studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, where he grew impatient with traditional teaching and was drawn to the circle of Muhammad ʿAbduh’s followers. In 1908 he enrolled at the newly founded Egyptian University, which in 1914 awarded him its first doctorate, for a study of the poet Abu l-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri. A scholarship took him to Montpellier and Paris, where he studied history, sociology and classics at the Sorbonne, married Suzanne Bresseau, and took a second doctorate with a thesis on Ibn Khaldun (1917, printed 1918). From 1919 he taught ancient history and then Arabic literature at the Egyptian University and became dean of its faculty of arts; in disputes with the government he was dismissed in 1932 and reinstated in 1934. As minister of education in the Wafd government of 1950–52 he made primary and secondary schooling free. He died in Cairo on 28 October 1973.

Further main works

• Commemoration of Abu l-ʿAlaʾ (Tajdīd dhikrā Abī l-ʿAlāʾ, 1915), his first doctorate
• Étude analytique et critique de la philosophie sociale d’Ibn Khaldoun (1918)
• The Days (al-Ayyām, 1926–67)
• The Future of Culture in Egypt (Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr, 1938)