This candidate was Sheikh Tantawi Gawhari, the first Egyptian to be considered for a Nobel Peace Prize. However, Taha Hussein became the first Egyptian to be officially nominated.  

In 2019, a review of Zakaria Al-Iskandarani's book: The Gawhari Charter of the Virtues of Sheikh Tantawi Gawhari, published in Ahram Hebdo, led to a query sent to the Nobel Academy inquiring whether the Al-Azhar sheikh and Islamic thinker had indeed been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1930s, as claimed in an article published in the Egyptian Gazette on 5 December 1939.  

The academy responded promptly confirming that "no record of nomination was found under the man's name."

However, this answer did not entirely close the door, at least for the academy, which initiated a clarification after five years, specifically in June 2024.  

The initial correspondence led to the discovery of some neglected correspondences dating back to 1939, which AO obtained.  

These letters narrate a story of a nomination that almost happened, with seven main letters revealing Egyptian attempts to present the first Egyptian nominee for the Nobel Prize.  

On 31 January 1939, the Egyptian royal mission in Stockholm sent a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in the Norwegian parliament, attached to it a request from Abdel-Hamid Said Bey, a member of the Egyptian House of Representatives, nominating Sheikh Gawhari for the Nobel Peace Prize for the same year, which was received through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo.  

The documents attached to the request included copies of Sheikh Gawhari's books: Where is Man? and Political Reveries, along with Italian and French reviews of the books and letters from sovereigns, eastern officials, literary societies, and European scholars praising his two works.  The documents sent to AO include a letter issued the same year by the Young Muslim Society in Queen Nazli Street, now Ramses in Cairo, and signed by the then deputy Abdel-Hamid Said.  

The letter states that "after having taken cognizance of the conditions required for obtaining the Nobel Prize for Peace, conditions which recognize the right of representative members to propose for the award of this prize" have nominated the scholar, Sheikh, for the prize."

So many obstacles
 

The Nobel committee responded to the letter of the Egyptian royal mission on 8 February 1939 announcing that the deadline for nominations for the prize had ended on 31 January. This was the same date written on the letter sent to the committee. Thus, it said Gawhari's nomination arrived after this date and was therefore ineligible to compete for the prize that year.

There was another challenge, the language dilemma. The Nobel committee at the time did not seriously consider works proposed in languages other than the main European languages.

"The works of the candidate annexed to the letter of the proposal being in Arabic, I regret to draw your attention to Article 8 of the statute. It is stipulated in this article that, if, for the appraisal of the work proposed, the committee finds it necessary to take cognizance of a writing, composed in a language the interpretation of which would cause special difficulties or considerable expense, the committee shall not be bound to proceed with an examination of the proposal," it stated in its reply.

The response of the Nobel committee raised questions within the Egyptian royal delegation, which, 10 months later, on 15 December 1939, sent another letter inquiring about the possibility of proposing writings published several years before the 1940 competition.

It also inquired whether it was stipulated that translations into other languages such as French or English of works written in Arabic be published in the press to be admitted to the competition or if the simple publication in the original language was sufficient.

The committee responded to the questions of the Egyptian delegation on 19 December indicating that the Nobel Prize statutes did not require that a translation of a work be published and that a work written in Arabic could be submitted for the prize provided that it was published and accompanied by a German, English, or French translation.

However, it does not appear from the archival documents reviewed by AO that Egypt renominated Sheikh Gawhari in subsequent years.

Dean of Arabic literature
 

It took a full decade until another Egyptian was nominated for the Nobel Prize, this time in literature, namely the dean of Arabic literature Taha Hussein.

Hussein's nomination was accepted for the first time in 1949 after a request was submitted by Ahmed Lutfi Al-Sayed, former minister of foreign affairs and president of the Arabic Language Academy.

Hussein was nominated on at least eight other occasions until 1973 by 22 individuals and organizations, including the Fouad I Academy, the Arabic Language Academy, the University of Jordan, the University of Kuwait, the orientalist and Swedish linguist Karl Wilhelm Zetterstéen, the French historian Charles Pellat, and Egyptian and Western professors of Arabic language.

This number of nominations was likely to increase, as the Nobel Academy has been unable to reveal information about nominations after 1974 due to a rule of secrecy for nominations that extended for 50 years before being released.

The list of Egyptian nominees reveals the nomination of Tawfiq El-Hakim in 1972 by the then secretary-general of the Arabic Language Academy Ibrahim Madkour, the president of the Jordanian Writers' Club Hasni Fariz, and the Semitic languages professor Gustaf Widengren.

The Egyptian shortlist was completed by Dr. Ahmed Riad Turki, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967.

Strangely, the list of Egyptians in the Nobel archive includes the names of three foreign personalities who resided in Egypt: Arthur Looss, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, who came to Egypt to study the transmission of bilharzia and remained there until the outbreak of World War I; the Greek physician Stephanos Kartalis, nominated for the same prize in 1916, who discovered amoeba in dysentery patients in Egypt; and Felix d'Herelle, the French microbiologist nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1925-1926, who worked for the Egyptian Maritime and Quarantine Health Council in Alexandria.

Behind the doors of the Nobel Prize, stories have lain hidden since 1974, waiting for future chapters to be told.

We know nothing about them except for those who managed to obtain the title: first, late president Anwar Sadat, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978; then, Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988; and last, Ahmed Zewail, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999.