Abdullah El Tayib
Arabic language scholar from Sudan
Abdullah El Tayib, also referred to as 'Abd Allāh al-Tayyib al-Majdhūb (2 June 1921 – 19 June 2003), was a prominent Sudanese writer and scholar of Sudanese literature and the Arabic language. He was born in Tamirab, a village near Ad-Dāmar in Sudan, during the Anglo-Egyptian condominium and received his primary education in Kassala, Ad-Damar and Berber. After graduating from Gordon Memorial College (now University of Khartoum), he continued his studies until his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1950.
El Tayib occupied leading academic and administrative positions at universities in Khartoum, Juba and Kano, Nigeria. He was also president of the Arab Language League of Sudan and a member of the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo, Egypt. His scholarly work was dedicated to the history and development of Arabic poetry from pre-Islamic to modern times, as well as to editions of folk tales of Sudan.
Life and career
El Tayib was elected first as Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1961–1974) and then as President (1974–1975) of the University of Khartoum. Following this, he was the first director of the University of Juba (1975–1976) and the founder and provost of Abdullahi Bayero College (1964-1966) which later became Bayero University Kano in Nigeria.
El Tayib's primary field of research was the Arabic language, and he has been considered among the most important scholars of Arabic literature and language in the 20th century. One of his most notable works is A Guide to Understanding Arabic Poetry, a massive opus written over thirty five years, for which he was awarded the King Faisal Prize for Arabic Language and Literature in 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abdullah El Tayib” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.