CAIRO: Intellectual, scholar and coordinator of the Kefaya Movement for Change Abdel Wahab El-Messiery, passed away Thursday at age 70, following a long struggle with terminal illness.
The funeral prayers were held yesterday noon at Nasr City’s Rabaa Al-Adaweya mosque and gathered a host of Egyptian intellectuals and politicians, including lawyer Mohamed Selim El-Awwa, Sheikh Youssef El-Qaradawy, Amr Khaled and Wasat Party leader Abol Ela Mady.
El-Messiery was born in Damanhour in 1938, where he received his primary and secondary education.
In1955, he joined the English department at Alexandria University’s faculty of arts, after which he traveled to the United States where he received his masters degree from the University of Colombia in 1964, followed by a PhD from Rutgers University in1969.
Upon his return to Egypt, he held posts as a visiting scholar at Ain Shams University and later at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, and the Malaysia Islamic University.
He was also the cultural consultant for the permanent Arab League delegation at the UN and a member of the experts council at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. More recently, he was a member of the board of trustees of Islamic and Social Science at the University in Lisberg, Virginia, as well as, the chief editor of a number of periodicals issued in the United States, England, France, Malaysia and Iran.
El-Messeiry’s published work includes a significant number of books on Judaism, and Zionism, characterized by a unique philosophical approach and a deep analysis of issues from new perspectives.
His eight-volume “Jews, Judaism and Zionism Encyclopedia is considered one of the most important Arabic encyclopedias published in the 20th century, for which he was granted the Best Book award at the Cairo International Book Fair in 2000.
In a pseudo-autobiography, El-Messeiry presented his intellectual pedigree in a book titled “My Intellectual Journey: Seeds, Roots and Fruits, where he explains how he generated his thoughts and the methods he used in his research.
His other major works include “The World from a Western Perspective and “Materialist Philosophy and Human Disintegration.
El-Messeiry received prizes and certificates as diverse as El-Quds Prize from the General Union of Arab Writers, and the Suzan Mubarak prize for best children’s literature in 2000 and 2003.
