Abdeltawab Youssef
His writings

Such Was the Teacher

هكذا كان المعلم · 2014

A short preface Abdeltawab Youssef wrote for the bilingual Arabic–English edition of My Father Was a Teacher, published in 2014, nearly forty years after the book first appeared. He recalls how readers received the biography, asks how the son of a turbaned village teacher came to raise a family of professors, diplomats and writers, and offers the book to teachers “who carry the stick of chalk as a sixth finger on their hands.”

This short biography of a teacher in the compulsory and elementary schools is set in the first half of the twentieth century. When it first came out, the eminent critic Ragaa El-Naqqash said of it:

“Thank you, for you have honoured our fathers. My father was one of them, and so was the former prime minister so-and-so… and so-and-so… and so-and-so.”

[…]

An American university professor asked me: How did it come about that your father received a religious education and wore the turban and the jubba, yet gave you a modern education, so that you studied political science; and that his grandchildren, your own children, became Dr Loubna, a professor at Cairo University and the American University in Cairo, her brother Hesham, an ambassador in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Essam, the writer whose first novel stayed at the top of the bestseller list in Egypt and the Arab world for nearly a year, as he put it?

Do you have an explanation for these leaps?

I said: You will find it quite ordinary. It is as if it were a trait of our country: we inherit the genes of a love of knowledge, of teaching ourselves, and of determination to advance as a civilisation.

The work was published in «Al-Ra’id», a magazine for teachers, and met with great interest. To my surprise, readers kept the issues in which it appeared as a serial. A Saudi scholar and writer wrote an extensive study of it, comparing it with the first part of Taha Hussein’s «The Days» and even preferring it to the famous novel «Goodbye, Mr. Chips», which I translated into Arabic, which has been translated into dozens of languages and made into two films, and which is counted among the most important works about the teacher. And here is «My Father Was a Teacher» appearing again, in Arabic and English together. I believe it will find still more interest among new readers who carry the stick of chalk as a sixth finger on their hands.

With my respect and esteem for them,

Abdeltawab Youssef