Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad (28 June 1889-12 March 1964) was an Egyptian journalist, poet, and literary critic. Born in Aswan, Upper Egypt to an Egyptian father and a Kurdish mother, he was self-educated, learning to speak fluent English and French and spending all his weekly allowance on books,. He became an outspoken political thinker, leading to his imprisonment from 1930 to 1931 and his flight to Sudan in 1942 as Nazi Germany's armies threatened to invade Egypt. al-Aqqad lambasted Nazism as the greatest threat to freedom, modernity, and the very existence of man, and he took his political passions to a new level by entering the Chamber of Deputies as a Wafd Party member. He died in 1964.
Gallery[]
A statue of al-Aqqad in Aswan
al-Aqqad's tomb