Adel Hussein

The youngest brother of Ahmed Hussein, founder of the Young Egypt Party, Hussein became an anti-British activist early and was imprisoned for communist student activism from 1953 to 1956. Graduating in science from Cairo University in 1957, he was imprisoned again from 1959 to 1964.^[1]

On release from jail, Hussein became a journalist, joining the newspaper Akhbar el-Yom. Forced into an administrative job for his opposition to President El-Sadat in 1973, he embarked upon a period of scholarly research which resulted in three books: The Egyptian Economy, Towards a New Arab Thought (1981), and Normalisation (1984).^[1]

Joining the Socialist Labour Party in 1984, he drove the party towards a hybrid of Marxist anti-imperialism and Islamist emphasis on Shari'a. He edited the party newspaper, Al-Shaab from 1985 to 1993, allowing the leaders of the banned Muslim Brotherhood to write for it.^[1] At the party congress in May 1993, Adel Hussein was elected the Labour Party's General Secretary, and gave up the editorship of Al-Sha'ab to his nephew Magdi Hussein.^[2]

On 24 December 1994, Hussein was arrested in Cairo on his return from a trip to France, and held in solitary confinement in Tora Prison. One week after his arrest, a reason was provided: al Jama'a al-Islamiya leaflets with his handwriting on had apparently been found under his plane seat. After continuing protest at his imprisonment, he was released on 18 January 1995.^[3]

• 'Islam and Marxism: The absurd polarisation of contemporary Egyptian politics', Review of Middle East Studies, Issue 2, 1976
• Al-Iqtisad al-Misri min al-Istiqlal lil-Taba'iyya [The Egyptian Economy: from independence to dependency, 1974-1979], 2 vols., Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-'Arabiya, 1982. (In Arabic)
• Towards a New Arab Thought: Nasserism, development and democracy. Cairo: Al-Mustaqbal al-'Arabī, 1985. (In Arabic)
• Normalisation: the Zionist plan for economic hegemony, Institute of Palestinian Studies, 1984. (In Arabic)
• 'La normalisation économique entre l'Égypte et Israêl', Revue d'études palestiniennes, Spring 1985, No. 15, pp. 69–92
• 'Bias in Western Schools of Social Thought: Our Heritage as the Starting Point for Development', in Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, ed. (2006). Bias: Epistemological Bias in the Physical and Social Sciences. IIIT. pp. 77–104. ISBN 978-1-56564-416-8.