Biography
Jurji Zaydan (Jirji Zaydan, Georges Zeidan in French transcription) was born in Beirut on 14 December 1861 into a modest Greek Orthodox family, whose origin is said to go back to the Hauran. His father ran a restaurant and set little store by education: the boy left school after the elementary classes to help him. He continued learning on his own and took evening classes in English. In 1881 he entered the medical school of the Syrian Protestant College, today the American University of Beirut. The case of Professor Edwin Lewis, dismissed in 1882, provoked a student strike; Zaydan then left the college, expelled according to some, resigning according to others, and made his way to Cairo.
In Egypt he briefly attended the medical school, left as an employee with a British military expedition toward the Sudan, then entered journalism. For a time he was an editorial secretary at al-Muqtataf. He published a general history of Freemasonry in 1889 and a universal history in 1890, and taught Arabic. In 1891 he married Maryam Matar. In 1892 he founded the journal al-Hilal and the publishing house Dar al-Hilal, which became, with al-Muqtataf, one of the great platforms of the Nahda, the Arab cultural renaissance.
It was in al-Hilal that he serialized, almost one a year, some twenty historical novels, beginning with his first success, al-Mamluk al-Shari'd, in the early 1890s. In them he brought Arab and Islamic history within reach of a wide readership, in simple language. His taste for historical accuracy led him to work in London, notably at the British Museum. He had already recounted stays in Istanbul, Europe and Palestine in al-Rihla al-thalath (1907). In 1912 he travelled through France, England and Switzerland. His account, Rihla ila Urubba ("Journey to Europe"), was reissued in 2002; the collection's record gives 1923 as the date of the source.
Zaydan was also a historian and a historian of literature: a history of Islamic civilization in five volumes (1901-1906), al-'Arab qabl al-Islam (1907), a history of Arabic literature in four volumes (1910-1913). His secular approach to Islamic history stirred controversy. In 1910 the Egyptian University offered him a chair of Islamic history, but protests from Muslim circles led to the appointment being cancelled before he took it up. He is ranked among the first theorists of Arab nationalism, and is counted among the writers whose influence is acknowledged by Taha Hussein, Naguib Mahfouz and Fadwa Tuqan.
He died in Cairo in 1914, aged 52; the exact date is disputed, 21 July according to English Wikipedia, 12 August according to the American University of Beirut's inventory. His papers, four boxes of correspondence, notebooks, manuscripts and publications (1900-1938), were donated there in 1973 by his sons Emile and Choukri, and are kept there. A foundation created by his grandson had five of his novels translated into English, published in 2011 and 2012.
