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.

Taha Husein is rightly regarded as the father of modern Arabic literature and his work is widely used as introductory texts for students of the language. In this highly original book, Dr Mahmoudi describes Husein's cultural and intellectual journey through his education in Egypt and France. Husein's humanism and modernism can be traced from his time at the al Azhar through his time in the influential circle of Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid to his famous study mission to France, where he witnessed the twilight of positivism. Taha Husein's Education will add to our understanding of this great Egyptian author and the contexts that shaped and informed his thought.

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.

Taha Hussein (1889-1973), blind from early childhood, rose from humble beginnings to pursue a distinguished career in Egyptian public life, but he was most influential through his voluminous, varied, and controversial writings. The stories in The Sufferers were first published in the periodical al-Katib al-Masri in 1946, but were banned by the government when collected in book form in 1947. The collection was finally published in Lebanon, and was only published in Egypt after the 1952 Revolution.

The Nasserist revolution of 1952 had a massive impact on the Egyptian educational system. For the first time, the doors of university education were opened to masses of people in a Third World country, and hundreds of thousands of the sons and daughters of peasants, workers, and lower-middle-class employees seized the opportunity. But quantitative growth was not matched by qualitative advance, and the gap between expectations and reality has rarely been so wide. The result was one of the world's most turbulent student movements. This history of that movement's most critical years, first published in 1985, was written by a young Egyptian who was a participant in many of the events and was intimately acquainted with them. Ahmed Abdalla describes the sociological composition of the student body, the physical and social conditions in the universities, the shifts in government education policy, and the attempts of the students to influence the direction of national development in both domestic and foreign policy. The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt is an important contribution to our understanding of Egypt's modern history, and will also be of interest to anyone concerned with the more universal issues of higher education, social change, and state politics in the Third World.

Created by the Prophet Muhammad and his twelve Imams, the Hadith is an ancient and profoundly influential body of religious texts in Shi'ite Muslim literature, second in importance only to the Holy Koran itself. Texts on the practical aspects of life and pure metaphysics are included in this first English translations of excerpts from the Hadith. Especially selected for the Western reader by the renowned Islamic scholar Tabataba'i, the passages from the Hadith shed light on the culture, history, law, and theology of the Shi'ite community and provide direct translations of some of the most famous of Islamic prayers.

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.

First published in the 1940s and widely condemned as obscene, The Egyptian outsold every other American novel published that same year, and remains a classic; readers worldwide have testified to its life-changing power. It is a full-bodied re-creation of a largely forgotten era in the world’s history: an Egypt when pharaohs contended with the near-collapse of history’s greatest empire. This epic tale encompasses the whole of the then-known world, from Babylon to Crete, from Thebes to Jerusalem, while centering around one unforgettable figure: Sinuhe, a man of mysterious origins who rises from the depths of degradation to get close to the Pharoah...