Wednesday 28/January/2026 – 01:38 AM
Dr. Mustafa Selim, a researcher in literary criticism, participates in exhibition Cairo International Book Fair at its fifty-seventh session in 2026 with the book Shadows of Taha Hussein… An unknown rivalry in the mirrors of interpretation.
The book revolves around the truth about the unknown rivalry that took place between Dr. Taha Hussein and his student Najib Al-Bahbiti, from the 1930s until the latter’s death in the early 1990s, after he wrote a trilogy in which he targeted the orientalists and the dean. Despite the importance of this rivalry in the blog and debates of the literary battles that took place between the pioneers over the past century, it fell out of his narrations.
Mustafa Selim participates in the book exhibition “Shadows of Taha Hussein.. An unknown rivalry in the mirrors of interpretation”
The Egyptian critic Naguib Al-Bahbiti is considered one of the first theorists of Arab history and literature due to the encyclopedic effort he presented on issues and issues of heritage, although his work remained a folded page in the cultural history of this turbulent era, with the colonialism and orientalism it included. This is due to multiple reasons, the most important of which is the dispute that occurred between him and his teacher Taha Hussein. Al-Bahibiti was his student.
The importance of the critical blog of Al-Bahibiti 1908 – 1992 is represented in the pioneering attempt to reconsider ancient Arab literature and history, and the effort to present an Arab narrative of the facts in confronting its Western counterpart, including its incorrect results. Some orientalists, led by Noldeke and Margaliot, were intolerant of it. The beginning of the twentieth century was characterized by little knowledge and many perceptions, as Dr. Abdel Moneim Talima observed during his book on pre-Islamic poetry. And the case.
The study also includes a critical review of Al-Bahbiti’s allegations that the scholar Nasser Al-Din Al-Assad plagiarized his book Al-Umdah, Sources of Pre-Islamic Poetry and its historical value, from the book The History of Arabic Poetry until the End of the Third Century AH, which Al-Bahbiti presented five years earlier. These are allegations that remained silent in the history of modern literature for a quarter of a century, as we will see.
