Salama Moussa (or Musa; 4 February 1887 – 4 August 1958) (Arabic: سلامه موسى pronounced [sæˈlæːmæ ˈmuːsæ], Coptic: ⲥⲁⲗⲁⲙⲁ ⲙⲱⲩⲥⲏⲥ) was an Egyptian journalist, writer and political theorist.
[1] Salama Moussa campaigned against traditional religions and urged the Egyptian society to embrace European thought, he espoused the theory of evolution by natural selection.
[1] Salama Moussa joined al-Wafd party after Saad Zaghloul became the leader, he believed it to be essentially a call to independence.
[4][5] His father died when Salama Moussa was still a young child, leaving the family an inheritance that allowed them to live comfortably.
The Khedivial secondary school where Moussa attended, from 1903 to 1907, was run like a military camp with harsh punishment for misbehavior dished out by the British instructors.
While in Cairo, Moussa was exposed to writers such as Farah Antun, Jurji Zaydan, and Ahmad Lutfi Al-Sayyid that discussed modern and at the time radical ideas such as Social Darwinism, women's rights, and nationalism.
[6] In 1907, Moussa traveled to France to continue his education and he was exposed to a modern, secularized Europe rampant with socialist ideologies.
Moussa embraced Fabian ideas of getting rid of the landed classes and empowering the peasant, and he wanted to realize them in Egypt.
[8] In 1910, he wrote his first book, Muqaddimat al-superman, comparing European life with the lives of the Egyptians and the social injustices they faced on a daily basis.
In 1913, Salama Moussa returned to Egypt and started his first weekly magazine, Al-Mustaqbal, with Farah Antun and Yaqub Sarruf on topics such as evolution, national unity, and socialism.
Salama Moussa remained an important figure during this period and was appointed supervisor of the science section in Akhbar el-Yom, a position that he held until his death in 1958.
[4][5] Moussa pleaded in his book Ha'ula'i 'allamuni (Those inspired me, Cairo, 1953) for the independence of thought and indigenous creativity of the contemporary Egyptians.