Salah Jahin

Life and career

Jaheen was born in Shobra district, Cairo in 1930 to a middle-class family. He studied law in Cairo University. In 1955, he started working for the Egyptian weekly magazine "Rose al-Yousef" as a cartoonist. A year later, he moved to the new magazine "Sabah el-Khair" for which he became the editor-in-chief, then he joined Al-Ahram.

Together with Fuad Haddad, Jaheen had a great role in development of Egyptian colloquial poetry. In fact, the term "shi'r al-ammiya" or "Arabic colloquial poetry" was only coined in 1961 by a group of young poets including Salah Jahin, Abd Al-Rahman Abnudi, Fuad Qaud and Sayyid Higab who called themselves "Jama't Ibn Arus". Before that, poetry in colloquial Egyptian Arabic was regarded as a folkloric and low art produced by and for the uneducated masses, while the term "Shi'r" (Arabic for poetry) was restricted to poetry written in Modern Standard Arabic (commonly known as "Fuṣḥā", meaning most eloquent).

He wrote several plays for the puppet theatre. He was also known for his nationalist and patriotic songs that marked the revolutionary era of Gamal Abdel Nasser role, many of which were performed by the famous Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez. The poet was highly inspired by the 1952 Revolution and was sometimes known as the semiofficial poet of the revolution. However, after Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war and Gamal Abdel Nasser death in 1970 he suffered from a severe depression. In one interview, he said that with the death of Nasser in 1970 and the sudden shift in political orientation he felt increasingly like Hamlet, with Sadat embodying the treacherous Claudius.

In addition to political poetry, Jahin's poems frequently contain metaphysical and philosophical themes, questioning the purpose of human life, the nature of good and evil, human and divine will and the limits of human pursuit of freedom and happiness.

In 1965, Jaheen was awarded the Egyptian Order of Science and Arts of the First Class. He died in 1986 at the age of 55.