Rifa'a al-Tahtawi

Rifa'a al-Tahtawi

Rifa'a Rafi' at-Tahtawi (Arabic: رفاعة رافع الطهطاوي, romanized: Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ aṭ-Ṭahṭāwī; 1801–1873) was an Egyptian writer, teacher, translator, Egyptologist, and intellectual of the Nahda (the Arab renaissance). One of the first Egyptian travellers to France in the nineteenth century, Tahtawi published in 1834 a detailed account of his 5-year-long stay in France, Takhlīṣ al-ʾibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz ('The Extrication of Gold in Summarizing Paris'), and from then on became one of the first Egyptian scholars to write about Western culture in an attempt to bring about a reconciliation and an understanding between Islamic and Christian civilizations. In 1835 he founded a School of Languages in Cairo, and he was influential in the development of science, law, literature, and Egyptology in 19th-century Egypt. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Rifa'a al-Tahtawi has received more than 154,171 page views. His biography is available in 21 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 17 in 2019). Rifa'a al-Tahtawi is the 2,270th most popular writer (up from 2,354th in 2019), the 324th most popular biography from Egypt (down from 323rd in 2019) and the 24th most popular Egyptian Writer.