“Egyptian and Arab culture has lost one of its solid pillars,” Culture Minister Enas Abdel Dayem said in a statement.
She added that the late “made prominent fingerprints in the field of enlightenment and achieved many immortal achievements in it,” referring to his leading role in academic research and the management of cultural sites that he undertook.
Jaber Ahmed Al-Sayed Mustafa Asfour was born on March 25, 1944, in the city of Mahalla Al-Kubra in the Gharbia Governorate. He graduated from the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, Department of Arabic Language, in 1965.
He obtained his master’s and doctorate degrees to start his academic life by teaching at the university and rose in positions until he became head of the Arabic language department at Cairo University in 1990.
He served as Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Culture from January 1993 to March 2007. His efforts also contributed to the establishment of the National Center for Translation, of which he became director from 2007 to 2011.
He assumed the Ministry of Culture for the first time on January 31, 2011 within the last government under former President Hosni Mubarak, but he submitted his resignation from the position after only about 10 days, then returned and took over the ministry in June 2014 until February 2015.
Among his most prominent books are (The Ordeal of Enlightenment), (Anwar al-Aql), (The Time of the Novel), (The Seduction of Heritage), (Literary Criticism and Cultural Identity), (Critique of the Culture of Underdevelopment), (Challenges of the Contemporary Critic), (A Beautiful Time Past) and (In Loving Poetry) and (Margins on the Notebook of Enlightenment).
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