Farah Antun

(Farah ibn Antun ibn Ilyas Antun). Born 1874 in Tripoli, Libya; died July 3, 1922, in Cairo. Arabic writer and enlightenment figure of Egypt.

Farah Antun graduated from the Kefti Orthodox School in Lebanon in 1890 and moved to Egypt in 1897. From 1899 to 1906 he published the journal al-Jamiah (The Community) in Alexandria. The journal contributed to the formation of a secular ideology in Egyptian culture. Farah Antun won world renown for his work Avicenna and His Philosophy (1903), which criticized official religion from the standpoint of deism.

Farah Antun, one of the first figures in modern Arabic culture to denounce blind adherence to the traditional norms of classical literature, propagated the principles of French romanticism. His Utopian novels Religion, Knowledge, and Capital, or The Three Cities (1901), Beast! Beast! Beast! (1903), and The New Jerusalem, or the Capture of Jerusalem by the Arabs (1905) combine the philosophical and religious teachings of J. E. Renan with the concepts of such diverse thinkers as the writers of the French Enlightenment, the Utopians, and K. Marx.

Farah Antun was the author of Egypt’s first original realistic social drama, New and Old Egypt (1913). He translated works by F. R. Chateaubriand and L. N. Tolstoy into Arabic, as well as the early writings of M. Gorky.