Jurji Zaydan
| Jurji Zaydan | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Jurji Zaydan December 14, 1861 Beirut Vilayet, Ottoman Syria (present day Lebanon) |
| Died |
July 21, 1914 (aged 52) Cairo, Egypt |
| Occupation | Writer, novelist, journalist, editor and teacher |
Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914, Arabic: جُرْجي زَيْدان, also transliterated Jorge Zaydân, Georgie Zeidan, or Jirjî Zaydan) was a prolific Lebanese novelist, journalist, editor and teacher, most noted for his creation of the magazine al-Hilal, which he used to serialize his 23 historical novels.
His primary goal, as a writer and intellectual during the Nahda, was to make the common Arabic population know their own history through the entertaining medium of the novel. He has enjoyed a widespread popularity. He is also considered to have been one of the first thinkers to help formulate the theory of Arab nationalism.
Zaydan was born on December 14, 1861 in Beirut to an Orthodox Christian family of limited means. His father owned a restaurant and, being illiterate and uneducated himself, placed little importance on education. Zaydan dropped out of school after he completed an elementary education to help his father run the business.
However, he maintained a desire to educate himself by attending night classes in English until, in 1881, at the age of 20, he was admitted to the Syrian Protestant College as a medical student. He developed an interest in concepts of individualism such as laissez-faire economics, the Freemason belief in a universal enlightenment, and social Darwinism. He was particularly influenced by Samuel Smiles's book, Self-Help (published in 1859) to which he felt he could relate because of its emphasis on a rags-to-riches success story built upon hard work and perseverance. Furthermore, the book's focus on individualism and the self, a relatively new concept in Arab intellectual thought, would be a common theme in Zaydan's later historical novels.
He attended the university around the same time as Ya'qub Sarrouf (1852–1927), who first translated Self-Help into Arabic and would later found the magazine Al-Muqtataf (The Elite, 1876) with whom he shared ideals of modernizing the Arab world and emphasis on individual success through hard work.
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