Taha Husajn

Dzieła

• 1918Étude analytique et critique de la philosophie sociale d’Ibn Khaldoun (Analityczne i krytyczne studium filozofii społecznej Ibn Chalduna)

  Rozprawa doktorska na Sorbonie (1917), rozpoczęta pod kierunkiem Durkheima: analityczne i krytyczne studium, które umieszcza naukę o organizacji społeczeństwa ludzkiego Ibn Chalduna w jej czasie i mierzy ją socjologią początku XX wieku.

• 1926Fī l-shiʿr al-jāhilī (O poezji przedislamskiej)

  Studium, które zaczyna od przyjęcia metody Kartezjusza – uczony musi odłożyć to, w co wierzy, i wątpić w przekazane źródła – i dochodzi do wniosku, że większość poezji przypisywanej epoce przedislamskiej powstała później z powodów religijnych, politycznych i plemiennych; po skardze prokurator odmówił wniesienia oskarżenia, a Taha Husajn przerobił książkę jako „O literaturze przedislamskiej” (1927).

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Commemoration of Abu l-ʿAlaʾ (Tajdīd dhikrā Abī l-ʿAlāʾ, 1915), his first doctorate
• On Pre-Islamic Poetry (Fī l-shiʿr al-jāhilī, 1926; revised as Fī l-adab al-jāhilī, 1927)
• The Days (al-Ayyām, 1926–67)
• The Future of Culture in Egypt (Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr, 1938)