Muhammad al-Muwaylihi

(1858 - 1930)

Born in Egypt in 1858, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi briefly attended a posh school in Cairo, and later learned much from tutors and his father’s famous friends. After his father moved to Naples to tutor an exiled prince, al-Muwaylihi moved in with his uncle and got a job in government. For distributing a nationalist leaflet written by his father in 1882—the year British forces occupied the country—the twenty-four-year-old al-Muwaylihi was arrested, fired from the Ministry of Justice, and exiled to Italy. In 1898, having returned to Cairo, he started a newspaper with his father, called Light of the East.