The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt

By Hussam R. Ahmed

Taha Hussein (1889–1973) is one of Egypt's most iconic figures. A graduate of al-Azhar, Egypt's oldest university, a civil servant and public intellectual, and ultimately Egyptian Minister of Public Instruction, Hussein was central to key social and political developments in Egypt during the parliamentary period between 1922 and 1952. Influential in the introduction of a new secular university and a burgeoning press in Egypt—and prominent in public debates over nationalism and the roles of religion, women, and education in making a modern independent nation—Hussein remains a subject of continued admiration and controversy to this day.

The Last Nahdawi offers the first biography of Hussein in which his intellectual outlook and public career are taken equally seriously. Examining Hussein's actions against the backdrop of his complex relationship with the Egyptian state, the religious establishment, and the French government, Hussam R. Ahmed reveals modern Egypt's cultural influence in the Arab and Islamic world within the various structural changes and political processes of the parliamentary period. Ahmed offers both a history of modern state formation, revealing how the Egyptian state came to hold such a strong grip over culture and education—and a compelling examination of the life of the country's most renowned intellectual.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781503627963

Book preview

THE LAST NAHDAWI

Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt

HUSSAM R. AHMED

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ahmed, Hussam R., author.

Title: The last nahdawi : Taha Hussein and institution building in Egypt /Hussam R. Ahmed.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021011024 (print) | LCCN 2021011025 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503615342 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503627956 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503627963 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā, 1889-1973—Political and social views. | Education ministers—Egypt—Biography. | Intellectuals—Egypt—Biography. | Education and state—Egypt—History—20th century. | Egypt—Cultural policy—History—20th century. | Egypt—Politics and government—1919-1952.

Classification: LCC DT107.2.T3 A46 2021 (print) | LCC DT107.2.T3 (ebook) | DDC 962.05/2092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011024

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011025

Cover design and illustration: Rob Ehle

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/14 Minion Pro

For my mother, Naglaa.

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation and Transliteration

INTRODUCTION

1. Egyptian Cultural Expansionism: Taha Hussein Confronts the French in North Africa

2. Nahda Goes to University: Taha Hussein and the Mission of the Private Egyptian University

3. Democratizing Education: Taha Hussein, Institutions, and Unstable Parliamentary Politics

4. Democratizing the Language: Taha Hussein and Diversifying Authority over Classical Arabic

5. Winds of Change: Taha Hussein and the End of a Political Project

CONCLUSION

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 Sketch for the redesign of Ismailiyya (Tahrir) Square

Figure 2 Taha Hussein’s family

Figure 3 Taha Hussein’s desk in the Museum of Education in Cairo

Figure 4 Inauguration of Farouk I (Alexandria) University, 1943

Figure 5 Taha Hussein’s trip to Tunis, 1957

Figure 6 Taha Hussein’s trip to Nice, 1950

Figure 7 Inauguration of the Egyptian University, 1908

Figure 8 Faculty members at the Egyptian University, 1925

Figure 9 Al-Azhar, 1906

Figure 10 Taha Hussein in his study

Figure 11 Postcard photo of the New University Campus from the 1930s or 1940s

Figure 12 Amina Taha Hussein’s Wedding, 1948

Figure 13 Suhayr al-Qalamawi

Figure 14 Meeting at the Arabic Language Academy, 1934

Figure 15 Taha Hussein at an Arabic Language Academy meeting, shortly before his death

Figure 16 Taha Hussein being carried from the Arabic Language Academy, shortly before his death

Figure 17 Nasser decorating Taha Hussein, 1959

Figure 18 Taha Hussein’s grave under a mimosa planted by his wife

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Taha Hussein is a familiar household name in Egypt and much of the Arab world. Many first editions of his books were available in my late grandfather’s personal library with its many shelves of hardbound volumes by al-Isfahani, al-Jahiz, and al-Zamakhshari along with other classics that reflected my grandfather’s scholarly interest in the Arabic language, sciences, and literature in which he was trained and which were his passion. Like many people in our region, I also watched the television series and the film depicting Hussein’s life. In Cairo, I repeatedly walked down a street bearing his name, and as a teenager I read his autobiography, probably because I felt that I should. Today, we are still overwhelmed by references to Hussein in school, public life, and the media. Such proximity is informative in its own way, but it is also challenging to work with (and against), as it forcibly nurtures the misleading feeling that we know the man or that we have figured him out. Working on this book has introduced me to a different Taha Hussein, however. There was the famous writer and critic, of course. But I slowly came to see him as someone who not only wanted to change the existing order but also proposed an alternative, which he labored to build under unpropitious circumstances. In the aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its pressing question of where do we go from here, Hussein’s project became a thought-provoking precedent as I realized that many questions that he struggled with were still pertinent.

Researching and writing this book has taken me to a variety of places and allowed me to meet and work closely with many dear people, whom I wish to thank here.

I am especially grateful to the family of Taha Hussein in Egypt and France: Amina Taha Hussein-Okada, Sawsan El Zayyat, Hassan El Zayyat, and especially Maha Aon. They received me kindly, and graciously answered all my questions about Taha Hussein. They generously provided me with Hussein’s private papers, which have been immensely helpful in navigating his life and giving me a better sense of the official and family man that he was. Moreover, many of the photographs in this book come from their family collection, which they shared with me and amiably allowed me to publish. They know they have all my gratitude.

Thanks are also due to the helpful and hardworking archivists and librarians at the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaʾiq al-Qawmiyya), the Egyptian Registry and Property Records Archive (Dar al-Mahfuzat al-ʿUmumiyya), the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub), the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, the Museum of Education in the Egyptian Ministry of Education, the library of the American University in Cairo, and the library of the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies. In France, I would like to thank the staff at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères in La Courneuve, and at the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève in Paris. In Montreal, I would like to thank the amazing staff in the Islamic Studies Library and the McLennan Library at McGill University.

The researching and writing of this book has benefited from the facilities and support I received at McGill University, KU Leuven, the University of Cambridge, and Maynooth University. Financial support came from several institutions: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), through the Joseph Armand Bombardier Fellowship and the Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement; the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture (FRQSC), with a postdoctoral fellowship; the European Research Council, through a grant associated with the project Muslims in Interwar Europe at KU Leuven; and the History Department and the Faculty of Arts at McGill University, in the form of several fellowships.

I feel tremendous gratitude for having had the support of many mentors, colleagues, and friends over the past years. I thank my mentor Laila Parsons for her thoughtful guidance and unmistakable enthusiasm for this project. She gave me confidence and encouraged me to take an interest in the genre of social biography and in Taha Hussein. Her scholarship, attention to detail, and commitment to her colleagues and students will always inspire me. She has been incredibly generous with her knowledge and her time. She pushed me to think in new and deep ways about my project, and always encouraged me to try to do justice to the complexity of people’s lives and their choices. Laila has changed the way I think about, write, and teach history, and without her I could not have completed this work. I am forever grateful.

I am fortunate to have had Khaled Fahmy as a mentor for many years now. His deep knowledge and supportive advice have informed all stages of the researching and writing of this book. In Cairo, he helped me gain access to and make sense of state and university archival documents. Then our numerous discussions on Egyptian history and present-day concerns have been a wonderful guide and a constant reminder to always keep my work relevant to Egyptians and people in the region. He knows how much I appreciate and value his scholarship, public engagement, and friendship.

Zachary Lockman, Tassos Anastassiadis, Will Hanley, and Lorenz Lüthi have read earlier versions of this work and their insightful comments, suggestions, and critiques have been invaluable. In addition to his feedback and our many cheerful conversations, Tassos offered me the opportunity to go on a research trip funded by the Fonds Québécois de Recherche Société et Culture, which allowed me to visit the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris and retrieve valuable material for my research. Likewise, my discussions with Will have been important, informative, and much fun. I am also indebted to him for the title of this book.

I would also like to thank Michelle Hartman and Nancy Partner for many memorable discussions on the history of Arabic literature, historiography, and biography writing. Special thanks are due to Orit Bashkin, who showed hearty enthusiasm for the project from the start, supported me with her thoughtful comments, and eventually helped me find a publisher. Dyala Hamzah and Yoav Di-Capua made key observations that forced me to think in new ways about Taha Hussein and his world, and I have learned a lot from them. Over the years, I have also benefited from discussions with various scholars and friends in Egypt, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. I am especially grateful to the late Madiha Doss and to Robert Wisnovsky, Jens Hanssen, Anthony Gorman, Malika Zeghal, William Granara, Israel Gershoni, Sherene Seikaly, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Elizabeth Kassab, Hosam Aboul-Ela, Malek Abisaab, Brian Lewis, Setrag Manoukian, Paul Sedra, Khalid Medani, Richard Jacquemond, Donald Reid, Joel Gordon, Umar Ryad, Anaïs Salamon, Vincent Romani, Shokri Gohar, Mark Sanagan, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Jessica Winegar, Angela Giordani, Sean Swanick, Hussein Omar, and Raphael Cormack for all their encouragement, insightful comments, and suggestions.

Audiences at various conferences and workshops provided valuable feedback, and I would like to thank the organizers of the annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association, the American Historical Association, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, the Institute of Islamic Studies Graduate Students Symposium at McGill University, and the Middle East History and Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago. I am also grateful to William Granara, Ari Schriber, Youssef Ben Ismail, and Chloe Bordewich, and the organizers of the 2017 Middle East Beyond Borders Workshop at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, not only for having invited me to share my research with them but also for their constructive feedback and suggestions. Similarly, I would like to thank Khaled Fahmy, Hazem Kandil, Assef Ashraf, Charis Olszok, and Hana Sleiman, and the organizers of the Modern Middle East Reading Group at the University of Cambridge in 2019, for inviting me to discuss my work and for the thoughtful questions and suggestions I received from them.

I would like to thank Kate Wahl, editor-in-chief at Stanford University Press, for her support of this book project from the very initial contact and her gracious, smooth guidance as the book made its way to press. It has been a great pleasure working with her and the entire staff at Stanford. My thanks also to the two anonymous readers for their encouragement and invaluable commentary on the manuscript.

I am eternally grateful for many friends and their support over the years, both intellectual and emotional, especially Kathryn Kalemkerian, Steve Paugh, Araxi Kalemkerian-Paugh, Vilelmini Tsagaraki, Shirin Radjavi, Pascale Graham, Pascal Abidor, Sarah Ghabrial, Jimmy Leiser, Pierre Portier, François Riquebourg, Véronique Samson, Éric Martinet, Ludovic Fouquet, and Maxime Philippe.

Finally, I would like to thank Kevin Jones for his unfailing support and critical reading of my work over the years. His intelligence, knowledge, and encouragement are an endless source of inspiration. I thank my sisters, Sarah and Hend, for their love, kindness, thoughtfulness, wisdom, and humor. I am proud to be their brother. My deepest gratitude goes to my mother, Naglaa, who insisted, despite the distance and time difference, on being there every step of the way with her love, grace, reassurance, and support. Without her, none of this work would have been possible, and I dedicate it to her, together with my deep love and appreciation.

NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

All translations from Arabic and French into English, including the titles and descriptions of archival materials cited in the notes, are mine, unless otherwise indicated. In my translations from Arabic, especially of Taha Hussein’s writings, I have opted for resistant translation, to give the reader a better sense of Hussein’s style and sentence structure.

I have transcribed Arabic words and proper names according to a simplified system based on the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) style guidelines, whereby all diacritical marks have been omitted except for the ayn (ʿ) and the hamza (ʾ). I have used accepted English spellings for place names like Cairo and Beirut as well as familiar English spellings for famous people like Taha Hussein, Fouad I, and Nasser.

INTRODUCTION

ON JANUARY 25, 2011, thousands of young Egyptians took to the streets in peaceful protests demanding freedom, justice, and human dignity. Escalating events marred by state violence quickly fixed the world’s eyes on Tahrir Square, lying at the heart of modern Cairo, on the east bank of the River Nile. Tahrir Square quickly became the symbol of the Egyptian Revolution that was to topple President Husni Mubarak’s regime on February 11, 2011, after thirty years in power. Until General ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi deposed the democratically elected President Muhammad Mursi on July 3, 2013, the square continued to attract protesters angry with successive military and civilian governments. Ruling the country with an iron fist, Sisi reclaimed the square in the name of stability, as he skillfully diverted attention from citizens’ demands for justice to the survival of the Egyptian state during the so-called Arab Spring, arguably the most devastating period in modern Arab history, with millions of casualties and displacements.

Historian Leyla Dakhli has described how the protesters in Tunisia who triggered the Arab Spring in late 2010 drew upon a legacy of Tunisian social movements. She remarks that only some of those protestors saw a continuity with earlier battles fought by their parents. In the absence of what she describes as handbooks of the struggles of 1968, 1978, or 1983, protesters waved old combat flags and chanted fiery slogans without realizing their historical meaning.¹ Similarly, most Egyptians in Tahrir Square saw the 2011 revolution as an unprecedented protest, and not as one in a series of historical moments in which generations of Egyptians had demanded freedom and accountability. Such moments are often obscured by a potent nationalist narrative pitting the nation against conspiring foreign powers and their local collaborators while infantilizing citizens and dismissing their ability to fathom, let alone deal with, challenges facing the country.

Ironically, as protesters gathered in the square in front of the headquarters of the Arab League and the square’s five-star hotel, demanding involvement in decision making, they did not realize they were standing in front of the site where there should have been a new Egyptian Parliament building. The story of that unrealized project goes back to the massive demonstrations that broke out in 1946 demanding an end to British occupation. In the aftermath of those demonstrations, Britain returned Qasr al-Nil barracks, an all-time constant symbol of British occupation in the heart of the capital, to Egypt in 1947. In the same year, Muhammad Dhulfiqar proposed revamping the square to be the showpiece of modern Egypt’s state and cultural prowess, and a constant reminder of the supremacy of the people over the executive. He proposed building new headquarters for the Council of Ministers, Cairo Municipality, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and several museums, which would adjoin the already existing Museum for Egyptian Antiquities. In his sketch shown here, Dhulfiqar assigned this prime location on the Nile to a new parliament, a gigantic neoclassical design inspired by the Capitol building, to be dedicated to the sovereignty of the people.² The post-1952 regime discarded the proposal, however, and the Egyptian Parliament remains tucked away between Qasr al-ʿAini and Sheikh Rihan Streets, impossible to see from the square.

Demonstrators in front of the British barracks in 1946 would have recognized the iconic writer and educator Dr. Taha Hussein (1889–1973). By the mid-1940s, he had written dozens of literary classics and hundreds of articles. His stature as the Dean of Arabic Literature and leading intellectual in the modern Arab world was, and still is, beyond dispute. Yet, these demonstrators would have also known him as a fearless public voice calling for full independence, sound democracy, and social justice. The well-respected academic was also a senior civil servant and an active politician associated with Egypt’s most popular nationalist party, the Wafd. In 1950, his decision as the Wafd’s minister of public instruction to introduce universal free secondary education would go down in history as one of his greatest achievements. As this study will show, this famous executive decision was one of many such that he made and was the culmination of a much larger, coherent three-decade project of institution building, the implementation of which mocked clear-cut distinctions between thought and action, and between culture and politics, despite Hussein’s public claims that art and culture should remain above political motives.

FIGURE 1. Sketch for the redesign of Ismailiyya (Tahrir) Square. Source: Al-Musawwar, no. 1173 (April 4, 1947): 8. (Creative Commons - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

Hussein restructured and built the institutions he believed were necessary to engage with both the Arab-Islamic classical tradition and new western ideas, produce the knowledge required to achieve intellectual parity with Europe, and force European powers to recognize Egypt’s full independence. All these institutions, including universities, a language academy, and several technical councils, persisted under the postcolonial state, pointing to significant continuities between parliamentary and Nasserite Egypt. After Hussein’s exclusion from decision-making circles in the 1950s, critics and scholars considering the earlier period focused exclusively on his thought, and his reception today continues to be overdetermined by passages in some of his published work in which he pushed for a deep intellectual cooperation with Europe while idealizing culture as more noble and more enduring than politics. This book shifts the focus to Hussein’s action and his role in building Egypt’s educational and cultural institutional infrastructure within a challenging colonial context. Understanding his political career is essential not only to making proper sense of his extended and often controversial legacy but also to opening up an important moment in modern Egyptian history, a pertinent precursor to 2011.

That important moment was Egypt’s parliamentary period, between its nominal independence from Great Britain in 1922 and the army coup in 1952, which ended the rule of the Muhammad Ali dynasty (1805–1953). As it ushered in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s authoritarian rule (1954–1970), the coup betokened the end of serious attempts to configure a durable Egyptian democracy. An overly familiar colonial trope describing Egypt’s soil as inhospitable to democracy then became an enduring postcolonial one. In an interview with Christiane Amanpour in 2011, ʿUmar Sulayman, Mubarak’s chief intelligence officer and vice president, warned that Egyptians did not have what he called the culture of democracy and cautioned that chaos might arise if Mubarak were to make a hasty departure (despite his thirty years in power).³ The military coup in 2013 and the toppling of Muhammad Mursi seemed only to confirm that democracy was foreign to Egyptian society. International media, using what veteran historian Thomas Philipp has described as hyperbole, sensationalized these events by describing Mursi as Egypt’s first freely elected president in 5,000 years, ignoring, as Philipp points out, that the rule of law and constitutionalism have been debated, developed, and even temporarily implemented in the Middle East for over 200 years, and that in the 1920s and ’30s, Egypt established a fully-functioning freely elected parliament with well-organized parties.⁴ Taha Hussein was actively involved in this parliamentary system. To develop his projects and ensure the efficient operation of various institutions and policies, he successfully won voters to his views and insisted all governments must be held accountable to parliament, the legitimate representative of the Egyptian people. This book is the story of institutions of culture and education and their ties to emergent democratic practices in Egypt’s parliamentary period, viewed through the life and work of Taha Hussein.

Taha Hussein

Taha Hussein was born on November 15, 1889, in the village of ʿIzbat al-Kilu, near the town of Maghagha in the Upper Egyptian province of al-Miniya. He lost his eyesight at the age of three, due to a maltreated ophthalmia. While his blindness caused him much distress throughout his life, it also added an aura of heroism and even genius to his exceptional intellectual accomplishments. His disability did not stop him from pursuing his studies at the village kuttab (elementary school), in a traditional educational system that had long accommodated the blind. He had memorized the Qurʾan by the age of nine, and in 1902, went to continue his studies at the prestigious mosque-university of al-Azhar in Cairo, where, mostly through his brother Ahmad and Ahmad’s friends, he came under the influence of the religious scholar and modernist reformer Sheikh Muhammad ʿAbduh. It was also at al-Azhar that he was introduced to the classics of Arabic literature by Sheikh Sayyid ʿAli al-Marsafi (1862–1931). Disappointed with al-Azhar’s teaching methods emphasizing memorization and verbal analysis, however, he was among the first students to register at the new Egyptian University, which opened its doors in 1908. He was also the first to earn a doctoral degree from the new university, in 1914, with a dissertation on the blind Abbasid poet and philosopher Abu al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri (973–1057), famous for his pessimism and for having described himself as a double prisoner of blindness and solitude. Hussein then went on a scholarship to France, first to Montpellier then to Paris, where he earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne, writing his thesis on the social philosophy of Ibn Khaldun. While in France, he also met and married Suzanne Bresseau, and in 1919, she returned with him to Egypt, where she lived until her death in 1989. The family photograph displayed on the next page shows them with their two children, Amina-Marguerite and Moenis-Claude. Back in Cairo, Hussein started teaching ancient history and then Arabic literature in the Faculty of Arts at the Egyptian University. His long academic career overlapped with a steadfast commitment to writing as he authored dozens of books and articles on Islamic history and Arabic literature. His work enjoyed wide readership throughout the Arab world, and his readers followed his avid participation in the intense and often controversial debates animating a lively Egyptian literary scene in the first half of the twentieth century.

A few months after Hussein’s death on October 28, 1973, the Egyptian Marxist critic Ghali Shukri (1935–1998) wrote:

I do not believe there is a single intellectual in the last four decades in Egypt, or in the Arab world in general, who has not been influenced by Taha Hussein. This was, and will continue to be, what sets him apart from the rest of his generation. Some will say they have been influenced by al-ʿAqqad, Salama Musa, or al-Mazini, but in addition to their favorite writer, you will find that they have all been influenced by Taha Hussein.⁵

FIGURE 2. Taha Hussein’s family. Courtesy of the Taha Hussein family.

This laudatory remark from Shukri stands out against the background of intense debates that had pitted Hussein against many young leftist intellectuals in the 1950s and ’60s. These debates echoed across the Arab world and distanced Hussein from younger intellectuals like Shukri, Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim, ʿAbd al-ʿAzim Anis, Raʾif Khuri, and others. Faced with a new generation of writers who promoted committed literature, Hussein defended his views calling for the total freedom of writers to choose both the literary form and the content of their work. Hussein, by then a veteran who had championed the cause for social justice under the monarchy in his literary works and political chronicles, disheartened the enthusiastic leftist writers, who had expected his encouragement and blessings. Believing that literature must support the new anti-colonial struggle and become a vehicle for decolonization and social change, they saw Hussein as a bourgeois and liberal intellectual, a defender of art for art’s sake, and a representative of an older generation of writers that failed to grasp the new role literature had to play in society. Their critique of Hussein was part of their overall discontent with Egypt’s parliamentary experiment between 1922 and 1952. In support of the new regime, these leftist critics argued that a corrupt monarchy and petty partisan politics had destroyed the potential of Egypt’s 1919 revolution and failed to achieve full independence or the necessary social reforms.⁶ Nevertheless, during and after the debate, Shukri, Amin, Khuri, and others never hid their admiration and respect for Hussein. Shukri, for example, emphasized the impact Hussein had had on the intellectual formation of several generations of writers and critics, including the younger ones who were now challenging him. Shukri even credited Hussein’s famous periodical al-Katib al-Misri (1945–1948) with having introduced Shukri’s generation to Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Franz Kafka in the first place.⁷ In Shukri’s view, the influence of Hussein’s ideas, and his long fight for intellectual freedom and critical scholarship, could not be denied.⁸

Yet, promoting critical thinking and subjecting the canonical works of the Arab-Islamic tradition to academic scrutiny earned Hussein many enemies over the years. Decades after his death, he is glorified by some and vilified by others as if he were still alive and as if his work had just been published. In November 2016, for example, the media reported that al-Azhar had suspended the scholar Yusri Jaʿfar, professor of philosophy and theology in the college of the principles of religion, for three months. Among several other allegations, he was accused of adopting Taha Hussein’s critique of al-Azhar’s curriculum and reviving Muhammad ʿAbduh’s thought.⁹ The media did not elaborate on what the critique and the thought in question were. Yet, readers implicitly understood that if Jaʿfar’s work was associated with ʿAbduh and Hussein then it must have been deemed unorthodox and controversial. Ironically, around the same time, the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmad al-Tayyib, praised Hussein, saying that he was extremely polite with the Islamic heritage, with the Prophet, and [with his companions] Abu Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthman.¹⁰ Al-Tayyib’s measured statement, however, does not reflect the opinion of other religious groups and their followers. As I explain later, they blame Hussein for having westernized Egyptian thought and for having collaborated with Orientalists and missionaries. Some go even further and accuse him of having secretly converted to Christianity and of undermining Islam from within.

Hussein also has his ardent supporters in these debates. One of the many protests that paved the way to the 2011 revolution was the peaceful demonstration organized by the Writers and Artists for Change Movement in downtown Cairo in August 2005, in which the protesters held banners calling for political change. Some of these banners carried images of Hussein as the symbol of a long and still unfinished battle for freedom of thought and expression.¹¹ In addition, following Mubarak’s overthrow, some leftists forgot the art for art’s sake debate and appealed to other aspects of Hussein’s legacy as they addressed Egypt’s volatile political situation. For example, writing in 2012, during the battle that raged between religious and non-religious political parties over drafting a new Egyptian constitution, leftist Nasserist journalist Majida al-Jindi argued that the road Hussein had charted for freedom, culture, and education in his classic book The Future of Culture in Egypt (Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr, 1938) was more relevant now than ever.¹² In a more recent statement, the poet Muhammad Ibrahim Abu Sinna called for adopting that book in its entirety as the official program for reforming the country’s ailing educational system.¹³

Abu Sinna’s statement speaks to another heated debate on the economic viability of free education in Egypt. In recent years, free education has come under sharp criticism. Recent local and international reports on the declining quality of Egyptian public schooling are fueling debates over the utility of costly state support for these schools and universities. Leftists use Hussein’s name and his famous view of education as a fundamental right for every citizen to counter arguments by neoliberals who insist education is a commodity for which people must pay.¹⁴ References to Hussein abound in Egyptian public life, and the passage of time has so far denied him the dispassionate debates granted to most intellectuals of his generation.

But Hussein’s legacy does not stop with the intellectual disputes it continues to stir. Visitors to Cairo University and Egypt’s Ministry of Education are visually reminded that Hussein, more than any other intellectual in Egypt’s modern history, is associated with the country’s modern secular educational system. Visitors see busts of the Dean of Arabic Literature, in his familiar glasses, sternly scrutinizing both institutions whose names remain invariably tied to his. Students and employees attend classes and hold meetings in various classrooms and conference halls bearing his name, not only at the university and the ministry but also at the National Council for Translation. His ministerial oak desk (shown in the photo here) is the only desk on public display at the museum of the Ministry of Education, a statement to his long career as Cairo University’s Dean of Arts (1928, 1930–1932, and 1936–1939), a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Public Instruction—first as controller of general culture (1939–1942), then as technical advisor to the minister of public instruction (1942–1944), and finally as minister of public instruction himself (1950–1952)—and also a member and then president of the Arabic Language Academy until his death (1940–1973).

In these polarized and passionate debates, Hussein’s political career and the context in which he wrote his books are usually absent. Compared to his better-known career as a writer and critic, Hussein’s role as a statesman, politician, and civil servant has received little attention. Unlike many intellectuals who were active between the two revolutions, such as Salama Musa (1887–1958), Ibrahim al-Mazini (1889–1949), or Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987), Hussein had a long and dynamic political career. The 1919 revolution had triggered Great Britain’s unilateral declaration of Egypt’s nominal independence in 1922, followed by the adoption of the nation’s constitution in 1923, and the beginning of its parliamentary life in 1924. While the independence of 1922 was famously hampered by four reservations maintaining Great Britain’s political and military control over Egypt, education was one of the areas over which the Egyptian government reassumed full control.¹⁵ This period thus became dominated by reform efforts and by political debates on how to turn nominal liberty into full independence, and Hussein became actively involved. For him, the real battle for full independence was about building strong institutions of learning and knowledge production. His political activities began in a serious way when he aligned himself with the popular Wafd Party in the 1930s and used the Wafd as a platform to pitch his ideas on culture and education while responding to his adversaries on the pages of widely read journals and periodicals. In this book, Hussein’s under-studied public career becomes a lens for understanding not only the history of the institutions he fought for, which exist to this day, but also the history of the parliamentary era in which he was a main player.

FIGURE 3. Taha Hussein’s desk in the Museum of Education in Cairo. Source: Hussam R. Ahmed.

A Social Biography

Using the life and work of Taha Hussein to examine various social, political, and cultural transformations in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century makes this book a social biography, which is not a biography in the usual sense. Historian Nick Salvatore sums up nicely the various reservations historians have had about traditional biographies, and how a social biography, when rigorously done, may address those concerns. Biography, he argues, has traditionally been seen as a lesser form of history, a genre in which the historian’s main task of periodization is predetermined by the birth and death of the biographical subject.¹⁶ Another concern is that a strong focus on individual agency may obscure the wider historical context and flatten other forces at play.¹⁷ Historians who contributed to the American Historical Association’s forum on biography in 2009, for example, take these criticisms seriously. Their papers all start by explaining the ways in which their biographies and methodologies differ from the usual biographical approaches, leading David Nasaw, the well-known American historian and biographer, to remark on the apologetic tone in these essays.¹⁸ Yet, all these historians agree that there has been a recent revived interest in biography and a turn toward examining the capacity of an individual life to enhance our understanding of broader historical changes.¹⁹

A good social biography, therefore, does not take the individual alone as its subject but focuses on that individual within a particular historical context.²⁰ This double focus, as Salvatore argues, results in a valuable perspective by allowing the historian to ask this question: How, in what ways, with what success, does an individual interact with, create life from, and possibly alter a culture and a society not of their own making, one which they largely inherit?²¹ Such an approach turns the historian’s attention away from romanticizing and applauding the ways in which the biographical subject rose above various societal challenges, and focuses instead on an individual’s response to the choices available to them and the transformations happening around them. This broad and deep agenda allows the biographer to explore the particular response of one individual who occupies a specific social and cultural space without losing perspective on those transformations. Indeed, it is precisely the play between the two that is the crux of the matter.²² In this way, and similar to microhistory and memory studies, a social biography helps us gain a greater understanding of particular institutions and forms of social change by analyzing how they have been understood and negotiated by particular individuals, allowing us to work with and against the grand narratives that usually fail to match the experience of individuals on the ground.

The extent to which biographical subjects can be said to be representative of their context becomes critical here. Taking Taha Hussein as an example of his times might be tempting in order to justify the focus on one individual. Yet, as Salvatore, Hans