Ṭāhā Ḥusayn

Fī al-adab al-jāhilī

تعريف القدماء بأبي العلاء

A unique work of fiction in modern Arabic literature. It is a romantic story about the triumph of love over revenge. It describes the social taboos of the time and how one girl eventually overcomes them. Highly poetic style with deep insight into the human heart.

The Call of the Curlew

Ḥadīth al-Arbaʻāʻ

al-Majml-u ʻah al-kl-amilah li-muʻallafāt al-Dūktur. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn

Taha Hussein

Taha Hussein (1889-1973), blind from early childhood, rose from humble beginnings to pursue a distinguished career in Egyptian public life (he was at one time Minister of Education). But he was most influential through his voluminous, varied, and controversial writings. He became known by the unofficial title 'Dean of Arabic Letters,' and the distinguished Egyptian critic Louis Awad described him as "the greatest single intellectual and cultural influence on the literature of his period." Based on the true story of a friend of the author, this novel - unfolding between Cairo and Paris and through vivid personal correspondence - draws a picture of a powerful friendship and of a young man's dilemma: the man of letters of the title finds himself split between - and in love with - two cultures essentially incompatible, East and West. In his desperate struggle to reconcile them his soul is estranged and he is thrown - or escapes - deeper into the backstreet abyss of First World War Paris. In the end it is perhaps the very impracticality of his own morality that destroys him.

A Man of Letters

Taha Husayn

For the first time, the three-part autobiography of one of modern Egypt's greatest writers and thinkers is available in a single paperback volume. The first part, An Egyptian Childhood (1929), is full of the sounds and smells of rural Egypt. It tells of Hussein's childhood and early education in a small village in Upper Egypt, as he learns not only to come to terms with his blindness but to excel in spite of it and win a place at the prestigious Azhar University in Cairo. The second part, The Stream of Days: A Student at the Azhar (1939), is an enthralling picture of student life in Egypt in the early 1900s, and the record of the growth of an unusually gifted personality. More than forty years later, Hussein published A Passage to France (1973), carrying the story on to his final attainment of a doctorate at the Sorbonne, a saga of perseverance in the face of daunting odds.

Ṭāhā Ḥusayn

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