His father Habib Ayrout was an Egyptian architect of Syrian Aleppine descent practicing in Cairo, Egypt.
Critique According to professor Timothy Mitchell, Ayrout authored his disseration (later turned into book) on the Egyptian peasant without firsthand experience in rural Egypt.
Born and raised in Cairo, he departed Egypt discreetly in 1926 at the age of eighteen, defying his father's wishes for him to pursue a career in architecture, the family profession.
His exhaustive study on the Egyptian peasant emerged as a dissertation a decade later, drawing insights from works like Winifred Blackman's "The Fellahin of Upper Egypt" and correspondences with former school acquaintances in Cairo whose fathers owned substantial agricultural estates.
[7] Mitchell further argued that Ayrout's book relies on an "ahistorical method" and includes "racial vocabulary" borrowed from Gustave Le Bon's scientific racism.