Taha Husain remains a pivotal figure in modern Arab and Egyptian cultural life even after his death in 1973. The present work successfully attempts to study his educational journey and treatment of the cultural encounter between the East and the West. It begins by criticizing Taha's admirers who assume a consistent writer and fail to see that under the surface, “Taha's thought is riddled with all sorts of tension and ambivalence.” It also criticizes the structuralist methodology used lately to study Taha's critical thought because it presupposes that this thought underwent no essential change. Abdelrashid Mahmoudi rather employs a historical methodology in which chronological order is combined with change and development.