Suzanne Taha Hussein's memoir of her marriage to Egyptian intellectual Taha Hussein has now been published in its original French version, writes David Tresilian The story of how Taha Hussein, one of the major figures in the Arab literary renaissance of the last century, married a young French woman while a scholarship student in France during the First World War, depending on her to read and write for him because of his blindness, has been told many times before. Taha Hussein himself recounted it in the last volume of his autobiography. Published just a few months before his death in 1973, this looks back across a marriage that by then had lasted more than 50 years to the "friendly knock" on the door of his student room in Montpellier that had first introduced him to --the girl with the sweet voice," Suzanne Bresseau, who was to be essential to his academic success in France, lifting the "heavy curtain of blindness that from my boyhood had shut me off from the world." At first just the latest in a series of young French women employed to assist a blind Egyptian student in his studies, Bresseau swiftly became indispensable to Taha Hussein, "turning my brooding darkness into joyous light." She taught him ancient Greek and Latin, essential for students studying for a French degree in literature at the time but not covered by an education at Al-Azhar, and she wrote out the whole of his doctoral dissertation on the social thought of Ibn Khaldoun. "I would say what I had in mind," Taha Hussein wrote, "and my fiancée would write it down, correcting as she did so my distortions of the French language. Here were a youth and a girl in the first days of their engagement, filling most of the day with study, Latin in the morning, reading the French translation of Ibn Khaldoun's Muqaddimah in the forenoon and then, after a break for lunch, Greek and Roman history." However, Taha Hussein's account of their engagement and later marriage does not seem to extend much further than a few pages in his autobiography, while his wife, Suzanne Taha Hussein, wrote a long memoir after his death, even seeing it published in Arabic before her own death in 1989. To anyone interested in the life of one of the Arab world's greatest writers and the remarkable story of Suzanne Bresseau's marriage to Taha Hussein, the recent publication of the original French version of Bresseau's memoir, simply entitled Avec Toi, will be very welcome. The memoir has been expertly annotated and prepared for publication by French academics Zina Weygand and Bruno Ronfard, and in her preface to the book Taha Hussein's granddaughter, Amina Taha Hussein-Okada, explains that the family had always hoped that the memoir would eventually appear in French, since this was the language in which it was written. As well as being a moving chronicle of family life, it also contains a wealth of detail about the Egypt of the l'entre-deux-guerres and the relationship between the south and north of the Mediterranean, as reflected in the life of Taha Hussein. Quoting from the unpublished memoirs of her father, Moenis-Claude Taha Hussein, Amina Taha Hussein-Okada reminds readers of Avec Toi of the life and career of her grandfather, as well as of her grandmother's remarkable character. Born in rural France at the end of the 19th century, Suzanne Taha Hussein "lived almost her entire life in an Arab and Muslim country, where for more than 60 years she was the admired companion of a blind Egyptian man who became the greatest Arab writer of the 20th century and who was celebrated for the things he did to promote education, science and culture, setting up universities and research institutions in Egypt and abroad." "Throughout this time, she was at his side, loving, attentive and loyal. She consoled and encouraged him when things went badly, and she shared his success and triumphs in her own modest way. She helped him to overcome his disability, to become what he was, to dine at the table of kings and to receive tributes and decorations in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. She was always there when he needed her, and he himself said that without his wife he would have been nothing." Avec Toi mostly focuses on the domestic side of this remarkable partnership, with Suzanne Taha Hussein describing the many famous visitors who came to visit the family at their house, first in Zamalek and later on the Pyramids Road. However, there are also reflections in the memoir of some of the well-known controversies that her husband found himself caught up in: after the foundation of the Egyptian University, later Cairo University, he was appointed a professor, "second class," she writes, and "the intrigues and plotting against him never ceased." Following the publication of Taha Hussein's book On Pre-Islamic Poetry in 1926, Suzanne Taha Hussein writes of the "senseless prejudice, the jealousy, and the duplicity with which a campaign was stoked up against an honest man, hauling him up before a disciplinary tribunal following the banning of the book and organising press campaigns, insults, and death threats against him." The campaign began again in 1932, this time temporarily forcing Taha Hussein out of his job at the University, and Suzanne Taha Hussein writes of her disgust at a campaign that aimed "not only to push him out of the faculty, but also to burn his books and take away the house he lived in and his livelihood." She also comments on Taha Hussein's attempts to find a readership for his work in Egypt. In the 1930s, he was exhausting himself, she writes, in editing the magazine Al-Kawkab, whose circulation went up "from 4,000 to 20,000 copies, without for all that improving our finances." Then came another magazine, Al-Wadi, this time both owned and edited by Taha Hussein. "What he did with it was magnificent," she writes, "but he had to deal with machines that did not work, paper that did not arrive, inadequate type- setting, reporters who did not report and sellers who did not sell." Later still there was Al-Katib Al-Masri, dedicated, she says, to "an idea he never abandoned -- to establish as many forms of contact as possible between western culture, Egypt and the Arab world." In editing this review, Taha Hussein "set to work hiring an army of translators from different languages and finding original work by contemporary writers and translating it into Arabic." However, this initiative also failed, Suzanne Taha Hussein says for political reasons, and a selection of pieces from it published in book form as The Wretched of the Earth was banned in Egypt and had to be published in Lebanon. Suzanne Taha Hussein writes with pride and admiration of her husband's public achievements. There was the campaign he led to admit women to the Egyptian University, which succeeded in 1930, leading to the first women graduates three years later. "Taha presented the first four women graduates in literature amid thunderous applause," she writes, at a celebration organised jointly with the Egyptian Feminist Union. Above all, there is the work he did when minister of education immediately before the 1952 Revolution, making education free and founding Ain Shams University in Cairo and Alexandria University. "We never expected Taha to become a minister," Suzanne Taha Hussein writes. "There had always been too many things to prevent it, such as his disability, his liberal ideas, and his determined and independent character." However, the seemingly impossible happened in 1950, and Taha Hussein "immediately took the decisive step of making education free for allE Everyone abroad was perfectly aware of what this enormous change meant. In Egypt, people were deliriously happy. Taha smiled when someone told him what one street- vendor had said [to his wife]: 'we can have children now that we can educate them.'" Following the Revolution, Taha Hussein was sidelined in Egypt, and from the early 1960s to his death in 1973 there was also ill-health to contend with. However, it seems that as recognition in Egypt faded it only increased abroad, and Suzanne Taha Hussein writes of frequent visits to foreign countries to receive a variety of honours, including a meeting with the pope (Pius XI) before the Second World War and honorary doctorates in France and the United Kingdom. She is mostly silent about what Taha Hussein may have thought about events in Egypt and the Arab world in the 1950s and 60s, as the country changed radically and the international situation became more polarised. "He had such an elevated view of France," she writes, that "he was deeply saddened" when the sultan was expelled from Morocco by the French colonial authorities, not to mention the French colonial war in Algeria and the joint British, French and Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. Taha Hussein "sent back his légion d'honneur." Reading the pages of Suzanne Taha Hussein's memoir that deal with these years, one has the feeling that she is uncomfortable about dealing with events of this sort, relevant though they might be thought to be to her husband's project of dialogue between the western and Arab world, and she prefers to pass over them in silence. "It was a real pleasure to dine with E.M. Forster in Cambridge," she writes instead, and Taha Hussein was delighted by the "speech addressed to him in Latin by the public orator in Oxford" when he received his honorary degree. Suzanne Taha Hussein does not seem to have wanted to write a work of history, and if in her memoir she does not say very much about the contents of her husband's work or his thoughts about it, and still less about his views on the political scene, there are other places to which interested readers might turn. Generally speaking, she is discreet, too, about the challenges to which her marriage introduced her. Though she lived in the country for most of her life, sacrificing much in order to do so, "I have not always been happy in Egypt," she writes at one point in her memoir. Shortly after her arrival in Egypt in 1919, Taha Hussein "became the first doctor of the new University with his thesis on Abu'l Ala al-Ma'arri," and Suzanne Taha Hussein was taken to meet her new parents-in-law at Kom Ombo near Aswan. Though they welcomed her with open arms, later sending her a Singer sewing-machine as a wedding present ("the most beautiful present one could give a young bride"), other acquaintances were less understanding, including Sheikh Bekhit, at the time Grand Mufti at Al-Azhar. "All the same, Doctor Taha, I would like to know why you decided to marry a foreign woman. You are a good Egyptian, a patriot, very intelligent. What could have got into you to do such a thing?" There are occasional references to boredom or isolation. Though "I have never met anyone who looked indifferent when someone introduced me as 'Madame Taha Hussein,'" she writes, being the wife of such a famous man meant sitting through a vast number of dull occasions on which "I was the only woman present." There are references, too, to her husband's occasional ill-humour, when dark thoughts or depression temporarily got the better of him, putting additional pressure on his wife. "When I think about it," Suzanne Taha Hussein writes of her husband's work during their early years in France, "I am still amazed that someone who suffered from such a disability and who was so ill-prepared as far as western culture was concerned was nevertheless able to gain a university degree and a post-graduate qualification and do a doctoral thesis in fewer than four years." In fact, though, as Weygand and Ronfard explain in their afterword to the present volume, she may be being too modest about her own contribution. Thanks to their research in the relevant French archives, the editors have discovered that the young Suzanne Bresseau was a pupil at the lycée Fénelon in Paris in 1913-14, where she was studying for the entrance exam to the Ecole normale superièure in Sèvres, a teacher training college. She only went to Montpellier in 1915, presumably to escape the German bombardment of Paris, where Taha Hussein had registered as a student at the city's university in January 1915. According to the editors, "the teaching of French, the most important part of secondary education for women at the time, placed the emphasis on the explication of texts and 'reading aloud as the natural aim of studying authors.'" Though she may have abandoned her career as a teacher to move to Egypt as the wife of Taha Hussein, Weygand and Ronfard write that "with the seriousness that characterised everything she did, Suzanne nevertheless carried out her vocation as a teacher of French, though only in the company of a single student. But what a student he was!"
