الأيام

The Days is the landmark autobiography of Taha Hussein, one of the most influential figures of modern Arabic letters — a blind boy born into a poor family in an Egyptian village in the 1890s who would go on to study at Al-Azhar and the Sorbonne and become a towering intellectual known as the "Dean of Arabic Literature."

Written with striking candor and, unusually, in the third person, the memoir recounts his childhood in the countryside, the textures of village life and folk belief, the loss of his sight and the ways it shaped him, and his often disillusioning encounters with the rigid religious education of Al-Azhar in Cairo.

A foundational work of modern Arabic autobiography, The Days is at once an intimate personal story and a portrait of Egypt on the cusp of profound change.