© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/157006008X364703 Die Welt des Islams 49 (2009) 98-121 Revisiting Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Fī al-Shi ʿr al-Jāhilī and its sequel 1 Yaron Ayalon Princeton, NJ Abstract In 1926, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn published Fī al-shiʿr al-jāhilī, a book in which he analyzed the language and style of pre-Islamic poetry, and argued that some poems were written in the Islamic period. A few passages in the work questioning the historicity of the Qurʾān infuriated the religious establishment in Egypt. Accused of blasphemy and threatened to lose his professorship at the Egyptian University, Ḥusayn was summoned before a court that charged and convicted him of apostasy and banned his book from circulation. A year later, he published a presumably softened version of the book under a different title, Fī al-adab al-jāhilī, and the clamor subsided. To date, intellectual historians of Egypt understand the second book as an attempt to appease the ʿulamāʾ, and as part of a shift from western-inspired to Islamic- oriented scholarship that occurred among Egyptian intellectuals during the late 1920’s. his article revisits Ḥusayn’s two books, and shows that Fī al-adab al-jāhilī was not a milder and slightly-amended version of the first book. Rather, it served as a platform for Ḥusayn to reassert his message and get back at his rivals. Placed in the context of his scholarship at large, this article argues that Ḥusayn remained a passionate advocate of western liberal ideas throughout his career. Keywords intellectuals, religion, Qurʾān, liberal, western, ʿulamāʾ, poetry, literature, al-Az- har, ḥadīth, Quraysh, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, Imruʾ al-Qays Two public scandals in Egypt of the 1920s have been at the center of a scholarly controversy on twentieth-century Egyptian intellectual 1) I am grateful to professor Israel Gershoni of Tel Aviv University for reading previous versions of this paper and providing me with extensive and useful comments, without which this paper could not have been written.