The Days

Taha Hussein’s classic autobiographical novel The Days helped usher in the era of modern Arabic writing and remains one of the most influential and best-known works of Arabic literature

“It is difficult to overstate Taha Hussein’s contribution to the intellectual renaissance in Egypt during the 20th century.“—The Guardian

The monumental three-part autobiography of one of modern Egypt’s greatest writers and thinkers is again available in a single paperback in this classic reissue. 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.

Author Biography

Taha Hussein (1889–1973) was one of the most influential Egyptian intellectuals of the twentieth century and a towering figure of educational reform in Egypt, best known through his voluminous, varied, and controversial writings. Blind from early childhood, he rose from humble beginnings to pursue a distinguished career in Egyptian public life, serving as academic advisor to the Minister of Education and then as Minister of Education (1950–1952). A leading figure of the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) and the modernist movement in the Arab world, he was unofficially known as “The Dean of Arabic Letters.”