He was born in Cairo, and he traveled to many places in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. He was a bilingual, with advanced proficiency in both the Turkish language as well as in Arabic. He wrote about literature and poetry in both languages, and in 1884 he established in Istanbul an arabic magazine called Al'iinsan (meaning "The Human"), which transformed into a newspaper later on; and stopped in 1890. He participated in editing a number of Egyptian newspapers.