Biography

Ibrahim El-Masry: The Teacher Who Built a Library

Ibrahim El-Masry is not famous across the world, yet in the village of Kom Ashraf, in Fayoum, his name is spoken with enormous respect. A teacher for four decades, he is best known for founding the village's first free public library, which has introduced thousands of children to the joy of reading.

Childhood and Early Life

Ibrahim El-Masry was born on 3 March 1958 in Kom Ashraf, a small farming village near Lake Qarun. He was the eldest of six children, and his father, a farmer, had never learnt to read. Books were rare in the village; the only one in the El-Masry home was a battered dictionary that had belonged to his grandmother. Despite this, the young Ibrahim was fascinated by words. According to his younger sister, he would copy the writing on shop signs and newspaper scraps into the dust with a stick.

Education

In 1970, Ibrahim was sent to a school in Fayoum city, a journey of two hours each way, which he made by bus and on foot. Although he was often exhausted, he excelled in Arabic and English, and he was later offered a place at Cairo University, where he studied languages. He graduated with honours in 1980. Many of his classmates accepted well-paid jobs in the capital. Ibrahim, however, chose to return home. “The village gave me my first words,” he later explained. “It was time to give some back.”

Work Experience

For the next forty years, Ibrahim taught English at the village preparatory school. He was known for his patience and for his unusual methods: lessons were often held outside under the palm trees, and every student was expected to read one story a week. In 1995, he was appointed headteacher, a role he held until he retired in 2018. During that time, the number of girls completing secondary school in Kom Ashraf more than doubled. Former colleagues believe that this was largely due to his visits to families who were unsure about keeping their daughters in education.

Achievements

His greatest achievement, however, began in a single room. In 2003, Ibrahim turned the ground floor of his own house into a free library, which he stocked with two hundred books collected from friends and charities. Within ten years, the collection had grown to over eight thousand books, and the library was moved into a new building funded by local families. In 2015, he was honoured by the governorate as Fayoum's Teacher of the Year. Today, the library runs reading clubs, computer classes and a summer programme that is attended by more than three hundred children every year.

Ibrahim El-Masry, now sixty-eight, can still be found behind the library desk most mornings, recommending stories to children whose parents he once taught. He will be remembered not only as an inspiring teacher, but also as a man who believed that a single book could change the direction of a life. As he often tells young visitors, “A library is the only place where a poor child and a rich child own exactly the same treasure.”