Yacoub Artin

Yacoub Artin (15 April 1842 – 21 January 1919) was an Egyptian educator and scholar of Armenian origin. He served as undersecretary of the Ministry of Public Instruction from 1884 to 1906, shaped Egyptian schooling for a generation, helped lay the ground for the Egyptian university, and was the first to write down and record the folk tales of the Nile valley. He was a Christian, and the French press of his day twice remarked that a "non-Muslim" was directing the education of a predominantly Muslim population. ^{1 2}

He was born in Cairo into the Tcherakian family, an Armenian family originally from Sivas that had settled in Egypt in 1812; the French article describes the family as Armenian Catholic. His father, Artin Bey Tcherakian, had been a student in one of the first missions Muhammad Ali sent to France and became foreign minister in Muhammad Ali's government. Orphaned of his father in 1859, Yacoub was raised by his uncle Khosrov, studied in Turkey and France with interests in law, literature and philology, and returned to Egypt in 1870, when the Khedive Ismail appointed him his European secretary and tutor to the Khedive's children. ^{2 3}

From 1878 he served as secretary-interpreter in the Khedive's private cabinet, then on the land-tax commission and a long series of commissions — the 1880 census, the Alexandria indemnities after the destruction of 1882, customs, the cadastre — and in 1882 he became a founding member of the committee for the conservation of Arab art. In April 1884 he was appointed undersecretary of the Ministry of Public Instruction, and apart from a spell administering the state railways he remained at the ministry until 1906. The Arabic article describes his programme: schools should teach foreign languages, and curricula should prize quality over quantity; he worked to develop Egyptian schools and was among the earliest advocates of founding an Egyptian university. He was a member of the Institut Égyptien from 1881 and its president in 1888 and again from 1913 to 1916. His books include La propriété foncière en Égypte (1883), L'instruction publique en Égypte (1890), his edition of unpublished folk tales of the Nile valley (1895), a contribution to the study of heraldry in the East (1902) and England in the Sudan (1911). ^{2 3}

His presence at the head of Egyptian education was noticed at the time precisely because he was not a Muslim. The English article states plainly that he was an Armenian Apostolic Christian, and cites an 1888 French newspaper noting that he was one of many "non-Muslim" Egyptians in government — a source of irritation to a segment of the population — and an 1895 item noting again that a "non-Muslim" was in charge of education for a predominantly Muslim population. The French article, which gives the fullest family history, describes the Tcherakians as an Armenian Catholic family and records that Yacoub was buried with his family in the Armenian Catholic cemetery in Old Cairo. The two traditions thus agree that he was a Christian and disagree on the branch — Apostolic in the English text, Catholic in the French family's history and his burial. The museum records him as christian, documented, and leaves the branch unrecorded rather than choose between the two. The Arabic article names no religion for him and Wikidata has no religion value; his Armenian origin by itself would not have been a basis for any value. ^{1 3 4}

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