Henry Habib Ayrout, S.J. (1907 – April 10, 1969) was an author, educator, and

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

priest in

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

. His father

Habib Ayrout Habib Ayrout (1876 – 1956) was an Egyptian architect of Syrian descent. he participated in the planning and construction of Heliopolis (Cairo suburb). Education He was educated in Paris as an engineer-architect. His sons were Henry Habib Ayrout ...

was an Egyptian architect of

Syrian Syrians () are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, most of whom have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend ...

Aleppine descent practicing in

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

, Egypt. After being educated in Paris as an engineer-architect, he participated in the planning and construction of

Heliopolis (Cairo suburb) Heliopolis (, ', , "New Egypt") was an early 20th century suburb outside Cairo, Egypt, which has since merged with Cairo and is administratively divided into the districts of Masr El Gedida and El Nozha in the Eastern Area. Named after ...

. His two brothers Charles Ayrout and Max Ayrout were also architects practicing in Cairo. Ayrout was an educator and sociologist who established the Catholic Association for Schools of Egypt in 1940. His study of the Egypt's

fellahin A fellah ( ; feminine ; plural ''fellaheen'' or ''fellahin'', , ) is a local peasant, usually a farmer or agricultural laborer in the Middle East and North Africa. The word derives from the Arabic word for "ploughman" or "tiller". Due to a con ...

, '' The Egyptian Peasant'', was first published in French in 1938 and is regarded as a major work on the subject. He was a noted advocate for

land reform Land reform (also known as agrarian reform) involves the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership, land use, and land transfers. The reforms may be initiated by governments, by interested groups, or by revolution. Lan ...

in Egypt.Excerpts available
at

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

. Ayrout was rector of the Jesuit College in

Faggala Faggala () is a district of Cairo, Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is ...

from 1962 until his death. He was the founder of the Association of Upper Egypt for Education and Development. Critique According to professor

Timothy Mitchell Timothy P. Mitchell is a British-born political theorist and student of the Arab world. He is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. He was previously Professor of Politics at New York University.New Columbia Hire Backed A ...

, Ayrout authored his disseration (later turned into book) on the Egyptian peasant ''without firsthand experience in rural Egypt''. Born and raised in Cairo, he departed Egypt discreetly in 1926 at the age of eighteen, defying his father's wishes for him to pursue a career in architecture, the family profession. Ayrout embarked on twelve years of education at a Jesuit college in Lyon. His exhaustive study on the Egyptian peasant emerged as a dissertation a decade later, drawing insights from works like

Winifred Blackman Winifred Susan Blackman (1872–1950) was a pioneering British Egyptologist, archaeologist and anthropologist. She was one of the first women to take up anthropology as a profession. Family and education Blackman was born in Norwich to Rev. Jam ...

's "The Fellahin of Upper Egypt" and correspondences with former school acquaintances in Cairo whose fathers owned substantial agricultural estates. Remarkably, Ayrout never physically ventured into rural Egypt during the book's composition. Mitchell further argued that Ayrout's book relies on an "ahistorical method" and includes "racial vocabulary" borrowed from

Gustave Le Bon Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work '' The Crowd: ...

scientific racism Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that the Human, human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "race (human categorization), races", and that empirical evi ...

References

Egyptian Roman Catholic priests 1907 births 1969 deaths Egyptian people of Syrian descent Levantine-Egyptians 20th-century Jesuits {{sociologist-stub