Yawmīyyāt nāʾib fī al-aryāf

First published in Arabic in 1937 and also known in English as Maze of Justice, Tawfiq al-Hakim's Diary of a Country Prosecutor is a short, sharp classic of modern Egyptian literature. Drawing on the author's own experience, it takes the form of the diary of a young public prosecutor, trained in the ideals of European law, who is posted from Cairo to a poor village in the Nile Delta.

Over eleven October days, the prosecutor records his attempts to solve the shooting of a peasant named Kamar al-Dawla Alwan — a case tangled up with the beautiful, elusive village girl Rim and the seemingly mad Sheikh Asfur. But the deeper subject is the absurd collision between an imported Napoleonic legal code and the lived reality of the fellahin: a countryside of poverty, illness, and neglect where the machinery of "justice" grinds on without ever touching the truth.

By turns a comedy of bureaucratic errors and a work of biting social criticism, the novel turns a prosecutor's daily notes into a timeless meditation on power, indifference, and the gap between law and justice. Compassionate, funny, and quietly devastating, it remains one of al-Hakim's most enduring works.