أفيون الشعوب

Abbas Mahmoud El-Akkad is an Egyptian writer, thinker, journalist and poet. He was born in Aswan in 1889. He is a former member of the Egyptian Parliament, and a member of the Academy of the Arabic Language. His literary production did not stop despite the harsh conditions he went through. Where he used to write articles and send them to Fosoul magazine, and he was also translating some topics for them. Al-Akkad is considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in Egypt. He contributed greatly to the literary and political life, and added to the Arabic library more than a hundred books in various fields. Al-Akkad succeeded in journalism. This is due to his encyclopedic culture, as he used to write both poetry and prose, and he was known to be an encyclopedist of knowledge, reading in human history, philosophy, literature and sociology.
He was famous for his literary and intellectual battles with the poet Ahmed Shawky, Dr. Taha Hussein, Dr. Zaki Mubarak, the writer Mustafa Sadiq Al-Rafi'i, the Iraqi Dr. Mustafa Jawad, and Dr. Aisha Abdul Rahman (Bint Al-Shati). He also disagreed with his fellow poet Abdul Rahman Shukri, and issued a book of Authored by Al-Mazni with the title Al-Diwan, in which he attacked the Prince of Poets, Ahmed Shawky, and laid the rules for his poetry school. Al-Akkad died in Cairo in 1964.