Niqula Haddad came from an Orthodox family and graduated from the American Protestant College in Beirut. Haddad moved to Cairo in 1900, where he married Ruza Antun, the sister of none other than Farah Antun, whom he also followed to America. There he collaborated with Antun and his sister on their journal al-Sayyidat wa-l-Banat (Women and Girls), which the Haddad couple revived in Alexandria in the 1920s under the name al-Sayyidat (later: al-Sayyidat wa-l-Rijal, translated as Women and Men). During his lifetime, Niqula Haddad was best known as a novelist, and between 1948 and 1950, he occupied an important position in Egypt’s literary scene as the editor of al-Muqtataf. His work al-Ishtirakiyya from 1920 was the first full-fledged elaboration of socialism in Arabic.
His book ʿIlm al-Ijtimaʿ (Sociology), published in two volumes in 1924/1925 and numbering no less than 694 pages, seems hardly known today, but at the time of publication was widely received by the Egyptian public. An appendix to the book lists endorsements by eighteen journals and newspapers. According to Haddad, who self-confidently presents his work as the first Arabic book on sociology, this science was completely unknown to Arabs before the translation of works by Le Bon, and he stresses that, contrary to what many believe, Ibn Khaldun was no sociological thinker, for he merely described the social and political conditions of his times and did not discern universal principles or laws on which a proper science could be based.