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Taha Hussein is considered one of Egypt's most influential intellectuals and cultural politicians. With his biography "The Last Nahdawi", historian Hussam Ahmed provides a profound insight into the contradictions in the life of the great pioneer of Egyptian modernity. By Shady Lewis Botros. So why bother with a new biography about the man?

Maybe the question should rather be: how can one write a biography at all that does justice to its protagonist and his time? In the introduction to his book The Last Nahdawi , Hussam Ahmed, assistant professor of history at Maynooth University in Ireland, acknowledges the apologetic tone in which historians typically present their autobiographical works, as if biography were a particular kind of history, of lesser significance.

After all, biographies are governed by dates of birth and death, and this prohibits authors from analysing the wider history. By focusing on the personal, biographies often either neglect the context or fall into the trap of misrepresentation, as if the subject of a biography is representative of an era, an institution, or an entire generation.

This book overcomes these shortcomings by presenting a socio-political narrative; it focuses on the inter-relationship between the personal and the historical; it subsumes the institutional and the structural, without making the mistake of spending too long on the wider context at the expense of the individual. In addition to the general lack of Arab biographies, The Last Nahdawi puts forward a number of reasons which justify revision of Taha Hussein's story.

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Taha Hussein's story has always fallen between sharply dichotomous poles. Either he is the cultural giant carrying the torch of enlightenment, or he is a writer of "pre-Islamic poetry" and a traitor to his faith and his society. The book introduces us to this so-called "thread of criticism". It began with a generation of young left-wing writers who saw Hussein as a bourgeois, liberal intellectual in the negative sense of the word , and it continues through to more recent post-colonial analyses, the authors of which blame Taha Hussein for giving in too easily to Western allure.

There is also a vast gap between his ideas about culture and his cultural practices. The Last Nahdawi does not present a history of ideas, like most works dealing with Arabic cultural history, but rather a history of the cultural practices advanced by Taha Hussein, statesman, bureaucrat and politician, member of the Academy of the Arabic Language, pioneer of free education, dean of Alexandria University, founder of academic and cultural institutions and of a number of higher councils.

In its chronicling of events, therefore, the book relies on the minutes of administrative sessions, cabinet meetings, official and university meetings, payrolls and budgets in dozens of government agencies and departments, in addition to Hussein's personal papers.