 He spent most of his life in Cairo but moved to Alexandria for high school.immediately after his graduation he practiced law for less than a month until Mohammad Farid (a prominent lawyer and historian) asked him to become the editor of the Major General Al-San newspaper and this proved to be the first step in his life as a historian and a politician.In 1907 he became a part of Egyptian national party that was led by Mostafa Kamel Pasha who was also a journalist and a political figure.At that point al-Rafai started to become concerned with the relationship of national history in terms of national awareness, and the emergence and development of the modern nation-state.