In the footsteps of Taha Hussein

One day, not long ago, I stood with Moenis outside a Left Bank Paris hotel just off the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It was the centenary year of the birth of Moenis' father, Taha Hussein, one of the pioneers of modern Arabic literature. We were retracing the footsteps of the great Egyptian writer, who had lived in Paris in the early years of the century. First stop was the Hotel Beauvoir, where Taha Hussein had stayed during his student days.

I asked Moenis to pose so that I could photograph him in front of each of the two windows which flank the door of the hotel. How, I wondered, could we capture an image of the man who had lived there in those far-off days? Imagine my surprise later, when the photos had been developed and I saw that someone had written the three letters TAH on the wall of the hotel, while elsewhere in the photo the elongated shadow of the bespectacled face of his son seemed to be another hint that the memory of the young student had not entirely faded.

But before beginning our stroll through Paris in search of Taha Hussein let us first make a detour via Montpellier, where he arrived with a bursary from the Egyptian government shortly before the First World War. Why Montpellier? I wondered.

"Perhaps because it was a provincial city," Moenis suggested, and the students might have had less to distract them from heir work there than in Paris. Perhaps someone thought that Egyptian students would feel more at home in Montpellier than in Paris because it was nearer to the Mediterranean. I never asked him. My father was trying to improve his French. He had already learned the rudiments of the language at the University of Cairo, where there was some kind of a course in French studies."

It was in Montpellier during the First World War that Taha Hussein met Suzanne Brisseau, whose family had moved there from Paris to escape the bombing. Suzanne had been preparing to take the entrance exam for the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure de Jeunes Filles, then located in the Paris suburb of Sevres, but had had to interrupt her studies when the family moved to Montpellier.

"Since my father was blind," Moenis went on as we stood outside the Hotel Beauvoir, "he needed someone to help him with his French and to read to him So he put an advertisement in a local paper. Suzanne applied for the job. However, she did more than read to him. She accompanied him to his lectures at the Montpellier Arts Faculty, and later, when they were both in Paris, she would walk hand in hand with him from his lodgings to the Sorbonne."

Moenis and I set off along the route the young couple had taken all those years ago. A few metres off the Boulevard Saint-Michel, they often stopped in front of a statue honouring two nineteenth-century chemists, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaime Caventou, who had done pioneering work in the struggle against tropical diseases. Today the bronze statue has disappeared but a stone monument is still there, adorned with medallions honouring the two scientists. The route they took passes by what is now the Egyptian Cultural Centre.

Taha Hussein and Suzanne Brisseau wished to marry. As we continued our stroll, Moenis described the obstacles to the match and the surprising way in which they were overcome.

"My mother's family was horrified," he said, "at the thought that their daughter should marry an Egyptian student who was not only poor and Muslim but blind as well. My mother refused to yield. It was one of her uncles, a priest who was extremely intelligent and highly cultivated, who took the decisive step. At my grandmother's request he asked for an hour alone with my father. They went for a walk, my great-uncle holding my father's arm, and talked of this and that. When they returned, the priest said to his sister: Don't worry! Instead of opposing this marriage I think you should be delighted. This young man is a genius.' Suzanne already knew this. They were married on 2 August 1917."

Within five years, the student with dark glasses had won a bachelor's degree and a higher diploma (on Tacitus), passed the highly competitive agregation examination for university teachers and been awarded a doctorate for his work on the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. He had mastered Greek and Latin. Taha Hussein professed a boundless admiration for his two teachers, the distinguished Hellenist Gustave Bloch and the historian Charles Seignobos. He also attended lectures by Henri Bergson at the Colloge de France, by the sociologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl and the Orientalist Louis Massignon, for whom he had great respect.

He met Louis Aragon, Jules Romains and above all Andre Gide. His first encounter with Gide took place in Cairo just after the war and initiated a correspondence between the two writers. Their admiration was mutual: Hussein translated Gide's Promdthee mal enchaine (1899) and Thesee (1946) into Arabic, while Gide wrote a preface for the French translation of Taha Hussein's great autobiographical novel al-Ayyam ("The Days").

But of all the French writers he knew, it was Etiembie with whom he had the longest and deepest relationship. When he was Rector of the University of Alexandria in the early 1940s, Taha Hussein asked Etiemble, then in the United States, to head the university's department of French studies. Etiemble arrived in Egypt in 1944 and stayed four years. They remained close friends until Taha Hussein's death in 1973.

After returning to Egypt to become a university teacher, a famous writer, and a government minister, Taha Hussein often visited France- Paris, or for holidays in the Alps, the Massif Central or the Pyrenees.

"He loved France dearly. He loved the French mind, not the earthy, gaulish side. The verve of the chansonniers and their political allusions amused him. I often went with him to a bistrot for a drink and he delighted in listening to the talk going on around him. He had a marvellous sense of fun and was easily moved to laughter. He had a typically Egyptian laugh! At home we always spoke French. My mother never really learned Arabic. She spoke it sufficiently well to go shopping and to handle the situations of everyday life. I think my father was happy to speak French at home. He wrote articles and lectures in French, but less from personal inclination than in response to requests. Arabic was the language in which he thought and felt. It was only later that he transferred his ideas and feelings into other languages."

Like Hussein Fawzi (1905-1988), whose wife, also French, kept an antique shop in Paris, like Kamel Hussein and Tawfiq al-Hakim, and like many other less illustrious Egyptian intellectuals, Taha Hussein followed the path opened by Tahtawi (1 801-1873), the writer who came to France to study in 1 830, one of the first Egyptians to do so.

In Egypt, then under British domination, the cultural ideal was French. Taha Hussein took inspiration from this ideal, notably by developing Sainte-Beuve's critical method and the art of the short novel as practised by Maupassant. This profoundly nonconformist man turned his blindness and humble social origins to good account. For him, writing was a form of self-fulfilment.

But this special link with a country and its culture almost came to an end in 1956. Taha Hussein never forgave the French for their military intervention at Suez. Not that his political opinions were naive or simplistic. He had always been an uncompromising critic of French colonialism. But invading Egypt was for him unpardonable.

"Let's stop there, if you don't mind," Moenis said suddenly. "There's always a certain complicity between a father and his daughter, between a mother and her son. We were no exception. My father loved me very much, I know. There was never any conflict between us. There might have been one had I aspired to play a role in Arab literature. But I have never claimed to be able to write in Arabic, especially since my father was a man named Taha Hussein."

The last rays of the setting sun bathed the city. The fading colours spread out like an artist's palette, in contrasts of light and shade.

(UNESCO Courier, Paris, march, 1990).