My intellectual journey

The Dar Al-Shorouk issued a new edition of the enjoyable biography of the great thinker Dr. Abdul Wahab Al-Masiri, which traces his personal transformations in thought and methodology and, at the same time, chronicles an entire generation, or part 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 are not important in themselves, but their significance lies in how much they shed light on his intellectual development. The author understood many of his personal and private life events through the same underlying themes and analytical propositions he used in his studies and objective research, and not the other way around. However, this intellectual journey, with all its depth, is the journey of the individual author himself, as he interacted with the experiences around him from the time he was born in Damanhour and grew up there, to his move 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 one—a biography of a person who encounters the universal in the space of his private life. Therefore, he does not only mention abstract intellectual issues but always supports them with events from his life or quotes from his writings, illustrating how the same (public) intellectual issue was translated into specific events and facts in his personal (private) life, all conveyed in the author's smooth, deep, and satirical style. This new edition features some additions, most notably a large photo appendix that covers the author's journey and the different stages of his life.