by Mahmud Taymur

Mahmud Taymur (1894-1973) grew up in Cairo, in an aristocratic literary family of Kurdish origin. His father, Ahmad Taymur Pasha, was a philologist and a bibliophile whose personal library numbered among the largest and most important in Egypt. Mahmud’s paternal aunt, A’isha al-Taymuriyah (1840-1920), was a respected poetess and essayist. His older brother Muhammad (1892-1921) was a dramatist and short-story writer and a leading light in modern Arabic literature in his own right. As a youth, Mahmud was deeply influenced by his older brother’s literary activities as well as by the famous salons regularly held at the Taymur residence and attended by the intellectual luminaries of the day. Muhammad introduced his younger brother to the work of the French author Guy de Maupassant, who was to...