Mahjub, Muhammad Ahmad

Born May 17, 1908, in Al-Duayn. Arabic writer, literary critic, and Sudanese statesman.

Mahjub received his higher legal schooling in England. He was prime minister of the Sudan in 1965-66 and in 1967-69. In his work “Which Way Should the Intellectual Movement in the Sudan be Directed?” (1941), he expounded the main principles of development for a new national literature and exposed the antiscientific theory of the “uniqueness of the Sudanese character.” In 1946, Mahjub and the writer Abd al-Halim Muhammad coauthored the biographical chronicle Death of the World, in which they paid homage to the traditional maqamq genre and to realistic tendencies in Sudanese literature. Mahjub also wrote several collections of lyrical verse.