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.
The Days
His Autobiography in Three Parts
Taha Hussein
Translated byE.H. Paxton
Hilary Wayment
Kenneth Cragg
1 April 2001
412 pp.
ISBN 9781617974700
For sale worldwide
$9.99
This book is only available for purchase from Egypt
Also available by this author
A Man of Letters
Taha HusseinTranslated byMona El-Zayyat
Taha Hussein (1889-1973), blind from early childhood, rose from humble beginnings to pursue a distinguished career in Egyptian public life (he was at one time Minister of Education). But he was most influential through his voluminous, varied, and controversial writings. He became known by the unofficial title ‘Dean of Arabic Letters,’ and the distinguished Egyptian critic Louis Awad described him as “the greatest single intellectual and cultural influence on the literature of his period.” Based on the true story of a friend of the author, this novel—unfolding between Cairo and Paris and through vivid personal correspondence—draws a picture of a powerful friendship and of a young man’s dilemma: the man of letters of the title finds himself split between—and in love with—two cultures essentially incompatible, East and West. In his desperate struggle to reconcile them his soul is estranged and he is thrown—or escapes—deeper into the backstreet abyss of First World War Paris. In the end it is perhaps the very impracticality of his own morality that destroys him.
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1 January 1994
e-book
144 pp.$9.99
This book is only available for purchase from Egypt
The Sufferers
Stories and Polemics
Taha HusseinTranslated byMona El-Zayyat
Taha Hussein (1889-1973), blind from early childhood, rose from humble beginnings to pursue a distinguished career in Egyptian public life, but he was most influential through his voluminous, varied, and controversial writings. The stories in The Sufferers were first published in the periodical al-Katib al-Masri in 1946, but were banned by the government when collected in book form in 1947. The collection was finally published in Lebanon, and was only published in Egypt after the 1952 Revolution.
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1 January 1993
e-book
144 pp.$9.99
This book is only available for purchase from Egypt
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