My intellectual journey | Abdelwahab Elmessiri

He observes the Musiri's individual transformations in thought and methodology and at the same time documents a whole generation, or a segment of it. The transformations of the owner of this biography are in no way disconnected from what was happening around him. From this perspective, the events of the author's life become insignificant in themselves, but their importance lies in the extent to which they shed light on his intellectual development. The author understood many of his private (personal) life events through the same underlying themes and analytical propositions that he used in his studies and research (objective), and not the other way around. However, this intellectual journey is, with this, the author's individual journey; he is the one who interacted with the experiences around him from the time he was born in Damanhour and grew up there, then moved to Alexandria, then to New York, and finally to Cairo where he settled. If this intellectual journey is a non-autobiographical biography, it is also a non-objective biography, a biography of a person who encounters in his private life space the universal. Therefore, he not only mentions abstract intellectual issues but always supports them with events from his life or quotes from his writings that show how the same (public) intellectual issue translated itself into specific events and facts in his personal (private) life, in the author's smooth, deep, and satirical style. This new edition features some additions, the most important of which is a large photo appendix that covers the author's journey and the various stages of his life.