Taha Husain remains a pivotal figure in modern Arab and Egyptian cultural life even after hisdeath in 1973. The present work successfully attempts to study his educational journey andtreatment of the cultural encounter between the East and the West. It begins by criticizingTaha'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 alsocriticizes the structuralist methodology used lately to study Taha's critical thought becauseit presupposes that this thought underwent no essential change. Abdelrashid Mahmoudi ratheremploys a historical methodology in which chronological order is combined with change anddevelopment.