The Historian: Yusuf Fadl Hasan

This book embraces a breathtaking approach to writing about Yusuf, the historian, who is himself a history.  So, its author opted for a unique discursive approach.  Whenever anything, related to Yousuf and Yusuf’s history, is mentioned throughout the book narrative: be it a social incubator/ community; a village or town/city; a school or university; a teacher or a colleague; chairmanship of a department or deanship of a faculty; vice chancellery of a university, the author would dwell on interspersing its separate histories in both the main text and the footnotes/ annotations, to the degree of exhaustion. Hence,  this book evolved into a sort of chronicle of Yusuf the historian, and Yusuf the cumulative history,  by creatively engaging the biographies of the said incubators that brought him up and shaped his unfaltering mettle. And discursiveness is like cholesterol, either benign or malignant.  And the book’s discursiveness is, indeed, very benign. You will never get weary of it; it digresses and takes you away from the main narrative into the separate, yet interrelated, histories of Yusuf’s world; that is the above-mentioned incubators. Rather, you will applaud the fascinating smooth flow of such digressions because it makes you more knowledgeable of Yusuf and the worlds which have nurtured him and from which he emerged a full-fledged history and an indubitable blessing to us.

Dr. Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim, Professor Emeritus of African and Islamic History, History Department, University of Missouri

This rich and scholarly biography, which Abu Shouk presented in the best possible way, reveals that we are beholding a naturally disposed historian, who’s endowed with a captivating historical imagination and who succeeded in establishing distinguished scholarly traditions that strived to bridge communication with the rest of the world. It is characterized by rigor and prudence in arriving at conclusions and issuing judgments, as well as scholarly fervency… To my mind, this biography has scrupulously and eloquently expressed that the chronicle of Yusuf cannot be separated from the history of higher education and its trajectory in Sudan, nor can it be read in isolation from the development of historical studies in Sudan.

Dr. Abdalla al-Faki al-Basheer, Sudanese writer, researcher, and academic

About the Author

Abu Shouk is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, and Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, at Qatar University. He received his doctorate in history at the University of Bergen, Norway (1998). Before joining Qatar University in 2012, he worked as a researcher at the Center for Middle East and Islamic World Studies at the University of Bergen (1995-1999), then as a professor in the Department of History and Civilization (1999-2012) at the International Islamic University in Malaysia. He also worked as a researcher and visiting professor at the Center for Modern Middle East Studies in Berlin (2010-2012-2016); the American University of Pittsburgh (2015) and the American University of Wisconsin (2017). He authored more than twenty books and seventy scholarly papers, published in both Arabic and English and in peer-reviewed scientific journals; published in regional and international publishing houses.