The three-part autobiography of one of modern Egypt’s greatest writers and thinkers, a saga of perseverance in the face of daunting odds, is published here for the first time in a single volume.
The Days
His Autobiography in Three Parts
Taha Hussein
Translated by E.H. Paxton
and Hilary Wayment
and Kenneth Cragg
Apr 2001
412pp. Paperback
26.00 x 20.50 cm
$16.95
LE 75.00
ISBN 978 977 424 635 7
For sale worldwide
For the first time, the three-part autobiography of one of modern Egypt’s greatest writers and thinkers is available in a single paperback volume. The first part, An Egyptian Childhood (1929), is full of the sounds and smells of rural Egypt. It tells of Hussein’s childhood and early education in a small village in Upper Egypt, as he learns not only to come to terms with his blindness but to excel in spite of it and win a place at the prestigious Azhar University in Cairo. The second part, The Stream of Days: A Student at the Azhar (1939), is an enthralling picture of student life in Egypt in the early 1900s, and the record of the growth of an unusually gifted personality. More than forty years later, Hussein published A Passage to France (1973), carrying the story on to his final attainment of a doctorate at the Sorbonne, a saga of perseverance in the face of daunting odds.
TAHA HUSSEIN (1889–1973) was most influential through his voluminous, varied and controversial writings. He was unofficially known as the ‘’Dean of Arabic Letters.’’