Arab freedom fighter Malba Tahan wrote one of Brazil's most popular books, even though all was not what it seemed

I have two specialisms: Brazil and mathematics.

My first book Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life was about Brazilian football, and my most recent one, Alex Through The Looking-Glass, is about numbers.

But what about the intersection of these areas – in the Venn diagram of my literary life – where Brazil meets maths?

There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff here:

A Brazilian, Artur Ávila, is one of the favourites to win the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics, later this year.

Academics are conducting fascinating research about the mathematical aptitude of indigenous Amazon tribes who cannot count above five.

The most internationally acclaimed further education institution in the country is the Institute of Pure and Applied Maths in Rio de Janeiro.

Yet my favourite Brazilian maths story is about the author Malba Tahan, one of the world’s most inspirational popularisers of mathematics.

Malba Tahan had his first story published in 1925, on the front page of the Rio newspaper A Noite, which was the biggest-selling paper in the country.

He was introduced to readers as Ali Iezid Izz-Edim Ibn Salim Hank Malba Tahan, a Middle Eastern author, who was born in 1885 near Mecca and had recently died fighting for the liberty of a group of Bedouins in the desert.

His stories in the paper were short tales written in the style of One Thousand and One Nights. Gradually he began to introduce mathematical themes and in 1932 he published his most famous book, O Homem Que Calculava, known in English as The Man Who Counted.

The Man Who Counted tells the story of Beremiz Samir, a Persian mathematician in the 13th century who is confronted with real problems that he solves using mathematics.

For example, the first involves dividing 35 camels between three brothers, in which he manages to persuade them to accept 34, thus keeping one for himself.

It is a charming book, a love letter to Islamic science and a masterclass in storytelling, which has entertained Brazilians for generations and (in my opinion) is a classic of world literature, translated into many languages.

Yet as Malba Tahan was becoming famous in Brazil, he was revealed to be a literary hoax.

Malba Tahan did not exist: he was the nom de plume of a Brazilian maths teacher called Julio Cesar de Mello e Sousa.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julio Cesar de Mello e Sousa. Photograph: Family archive/ www.malbatahan.com.br

Mello e Sousa invented the name because when as a young man he tried to sell stories to the local newspaper, they were not even read by the newspaper’s editors. But when he resubmitted the same stories, saying they were a translation of an American author called R S Slade, a name he made up on the spur of the moment, they were all published.

Fascinated by Arab culture, Mello e Sousa decided to create the character of Malba Tahan. The only other person in on the hoax was the editor of the newspaper A Noite, which means The Night. He realised that it was good branding for the paper to have stories he could promote as being like One Thousand and One Nights.

Mello de Sousa constructed an elaborate backstory for Malba Tahan, saying that he was so well known internationally that Rudyard Kipling had translated him from the original Arabic into English.

Yet it was this fact that led to the unravelling of the hoax after eight years.

A Brazilian scholar of Kipling discovered that the English author had done nothing of the sort – and she called up Mello e Sousa to out him.

But even though Malba Tahan was revealed to be a Brazilian, it did nothing to dent his popularity.

As Malba Tahan, Mello e Sousa wrote more than one hundred books, mostly involving maths, before he died in 1974 and reportedly sold a total of more than two million copies.

Malba Tahan. Photograph: Family archive/ malbatahan.com.br

Malba Tahan’s books are still read in Brazil, where according to his grandson André Pereira Neto, most people assume he is a Middle Eastern author.

“Ninety per cent of people who read Malba Tahan still don’t know that the man who wrote the books was a Brazilian author who never went to the Middle East, who had nothing at all to do with the Middle East, who had no Arab blood in him, who wasn’t a Muslim, who never knew how to read or write Arabic, and had no political interest in any Arab causes.”

André said that his grandfather always dressed soberly in a suit and a tie, and had no Middle Eastern paraphernalia at his home in Rio. The image of Mello e Sousa at the top of this post, he added, must have been done as a joke.

One fan of Malba Tahan who at first didn’t realize that he was a Brazilian author was the young Paulo Coelho, who would later become Brazil’s most successful author.

When Paulo was 10 years old he asked his parents to buy all of Malba Tahan’s books. “Then one day I said, ‘Oh my God this is such a fantastic person, I wish one day I would meet him.’” He was shocked to be told that Malba Tahan was a friend of his parents who lived down the road.

“I went to his house,” he remembers, “and I saw him and I shook hands, and he was of course I guess very flattered to know that a child of 10 years old was reading all his books. I did not dare to ask him to sign my books, because I was totally shy.”

In The Alchemist, Paulo’s most famous book, he lists Malba Tahan along with Hemingway, Blake and Borges as the writers who “managed to achieve the Universal Language".

He says: “Malba Tahan told us about this beautiful Arab culture, and he's so important today because tolerance is always present in his stories.”

As well as writing so many books, Mello e Sousa – who eventually used Malba Tahan as his name in public – was a tireless teacher, constantly touring the country to give talks and also an active campaigner on behalf of Brazilians with leprosy.

André Periera Neto says, however, that the community of professional mathematicians in Brazil are not fans. “Mathematicians don’t like him because he made maths easy, and that’s not what their objective is. My grandfather always used to say that mathematicians are sadists, since they like to see pupils suffer.”

Speaking in 1973, Malba Tahan said his secret in teaching maths was never to tell anyone off nor ever give zero marks. “You pretend not to see the errors, and then gradually get to know the child.”

@alexbellos

My story on Malba Tahan can be heard on the BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less. A longer version appears on the BBC website. My book Futebol has been revised and updated for the 2014 World Cup and includes a new chapter. Alex Through The Looking Glass is out now in the UK and will shortly appear in the US with the title The Grapes of Math.



