Dr. Mohamed Bencheneb

Mohamed Bencheneb was born in Takbou near Médéa into an intellectual family of Turkish-Algerian (Kourghli) origin. Mastering Arabic, Turkish, Persian, French, Latin, and German, he dedicated his life to teaching at the Thaalibia Madrasa in Algiers and the Faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers.

In 1920, he made history by becoming the very first Algerian to successfully defend a State Doctorate of Letters at the Sorbonne in Paris with his monumental thesis on Turkish and Persian loanwords in Algerian Arabic. Elected to the Arab Academy of Damascus, his critical editions of classical manuscripts remain masterpieces of international orientalist scholarship.