The Carleton University historian Hussam R. Ahmed’s work on Taha Hussein (1889-1973) focuses on a wholly new aspect of his achievement. The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt (Standford University Press) is a meticulously researched exploration of how the values and principles championed by this man of letters played out in his professional life as a university professor and the Cairo University faculty of arts’ dean (1927, 1930-32, and 1936-1939), an education-culture minister (1950-1952), and a member, then head of the Arabic Language Institute (1940-1973), among other major official positions. His modus operandi is to check Hussein’s convictions against his performance in public life using archives and documents — meeting minutes, administrative rulings, etc. — as well as private papers. The ultimate effect is a stunning picture of Hussein’s role as a Nahdawi or champion of the Nahda, the Arab cultural renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an essential component of which was enlightenment thought in the French sense.
“My book is based on the PhD thesis I submitted at McGill University in Canada, in which having chosen to write ‘a social biography’ I decided to focus on the life and work of Taha Hussein because he is among the most pivotal and influential figures in modern Egyptian history.” In an attempt to parse social and cultural transformations in Egypt through the first half of the 20th century and until the early 1960s, Ahmed questions the dominant historical narrative, using one man’s experience to illuminate a whole era. “After reviewing the literature I found that scholars had not sufficiently dealt with Taha Hussein’s political and professional life, especially not in Western universities which did not produce sufficient specialised research on his life and work despite frequent references to his work, especially [his autobiography] The Days.”
Ahmed’s question is how the author relates to the statesman, how his politics affects our view of his published work, and how his role in institution building expands and deepens our understanding of “the liberal or parliamentary epoch” (1922-1952), reconsidering narratives that focus on colonialism, nationalism and modernism. He relied not on Hussein’s work but on the Egyptian national archives and Cairo University’s faculty of arts archives as well as those of the Egyptian ministry of education and the French foreign ministry. These documents, Ahmed explains, reveal a previously unknown picture.
“After a long and careful study of all these documents I came out with a new concept of Taha Hussein, for like many my principal impression had been that Taha Hussein was the famous author who enriched Arab literary life with numerous writings, and that he was at the centre of many intellectual and literary battles including his famous battle with engagement authors in which he refused to politics on literature and so was accused of being a proponent of art for art’s sake. But in my following Taha Hussein in his official meetings and political negotiations and the projects he showed a preference for and defended against political rivals I arrived at a different picture of him. He was a politician of the finest order, and a shrewd civil servant with an understanding of the most precise details of administrative and government work. On the other hand, studying these documents opened up to me a wide window on a moment in modern Egyptian history when reformers like Taha Hussein believed in the possibility of effecting real change to the better in the life of Egyptians, and saw that focusing on the mechanics of producing knowledge and making it available to the Egyptian masses through state support were the only means to making the democratic process a success and facing colonialism.”
Ahmed studied the process whereby education was made free, how reformers like Hussein and Naguib Al-Hilala deployed popular pressure — people demanding exemption from school fees — to overcome bureaucratic and economic obstacles in the way of reforms. Ahmed’s feeling is that an understanding of this side of Hussein’s work illuminates his literary achievement. His monograph The Future of Culture in Egypt, for example, turns out to be the blueprint for a plan of action he actually sought to implement. His interest in institutional reform began right after Egypt earned its nominal independence in 1922, when he called for reforming the ministry of education-culture and freeing it of British influence which he believed to behind the small number of schools and the imposition of school fees and the spread of traditional religious at the expense of higher education. He sought to turn the faculty of arts into a hub producing the kind of “thinking elite” needed by the country. He also restructured the Arabic Language Institute and his efforts to make classical Arabic more accessible and easier to teach and learn. As minister he would found numerous Egyptian academic institutes and chairs all over the Mediterranean.
“Taha Hussein had a broad and detailed vision for the future of his society, which he drew up and exerted himself to implement,” Ahmed says. “By the eve of the Free Officers coup d’etat in 1952, he was convinced that the institutional study of the humanities in both their Arab-Islamic and European versions had managed to push the renaissance project forward. Indeed he attributed the whole of ‘Egypt’s modern renaissance,’ as he called it, to faculty of arts that it produced and the knowledge it spread through schoolbooks, lectures, conferences, theses and public seminars. In 1950, to the Arab states’ delegations in Alexandria, he had expressed the extent of his pride and self-esteem in introducing free education to Egypt following a democratic process he called ‘the Egyptian experiment’ which he hoped the Arab states could benefit from in their struggle for freedom and independence. As I demonstrate in the book, he developed so much confidence in his institutions and the experience of Egyptian scholars within them that he felt Egypt was ready to export this knowledge across its borders and to work to resist French colonial policies in North Africa.
“Indeed in 1952,” Ahmed goes on, “he saw the people’s embrace of the coup as more evidence of the success of his educational and cultural policies, for he believed that the knowledge produced in the decades preceding the coup made people aware of their rights and so they supported the army’s move because it promised to give them back those rights. At this decisive point in his career, did Taha Hussein believe his project had succeeded? I don’t think so, because he always believed that the road ahead was still long and that the field of progress was limitless. But perhaps he believed at that point that he project was moving in the right direction. Perhaps he also felt huge optimism when he saw his planning and hard work pay off in the form of the people supporting and expressing confidence in a better future which his Nahdawi project helped them envision and work towards. Of course in reality things did not go as he had hoped, for by the time he received the letter that dismissed him from his job at Al-Jumhuriya newspaper in 1964, he had already witnessed the subversion of both the institutions on which his Nahda project was built: parliament, and the university. Taha Hussein died after he told [the critic] Ghali Shoukri that he was leaving us with ‘much pain, and little hope.’”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 October, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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