Taha Hussein was one of the most influential 20th-century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, and a figurehead for the Arab Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Arab world. His sobriquet was "The Dean of Arabic Literature" . He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twenty-one times.

Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).