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Biography of Taha HusaynName: Taha HusaynBirth Date: November 4, 1889 Death Date: 1973 Place of Birth: Maghagha, Egypt Nationality: Egyptian Gender: Male Occupations: writer, scholar Taha Husayn Taha Husayn (sometimes spelled Hussein) (1889-1973) is considered one of Egypt's leading men of letters. Blind from early childhood, he devoted his life to intellectual freedom for the writer, critic, and scholar and to the introduction of Western learning into his country.Taha Husayn was born on Nov. 4, 1889, in Maghagha, a mill town in Minya Province, Egypt. One of 11 children, he became blind at the age of three from a combination of eye disease and folk medicine. After completing studies at the village mosque school, Taha was sent to Cairo (1902) to attend al-Azhar, the mosque university that served as a theological seminary to much of the Moslem world. Because of his outspoken opposition to the school's teaching system at al-Azhar, Husayn was failed in his final examinations. He enrolled in the new, secular Egyptian University, where he studied with some of the leading scholars of the time, Egyptian and European, in …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…became a vehicle to attack the Egyptian "system" that he knew. One of his most important works on educational and cultural policy is the major study Mustaqbal al-Thaqafah fi Misr (2 vols., 1938; The Future of Culture in Egypt), in which he developed his thesis that Egyptian culture was part of Mediterranean culture and hence any attempt to "orientalize" it was a dangerous error.In his moving autobiography, Al-Ayyam (3 vols., 1929-1955; The Days), Husayn retells in simple language his own story, from village life and childhood blindness through educational trials and maturity. The value and appeal of this work are suggested by the fact that it has been translated into at least nine languages, including Chinese, English, Hebrew, and Russian. Further Reading The major critical study of Husayn is Pierre Cachia, Taha Husayn: His Place in the Egyptian Literary Renaissance (1956). Recommended for general background is Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (1962). |