Of my seven siblings, my brother Hussein was always closest to me, not only in terms of age (I am the youngest, he was the second youngest), but also in our love for reading and writing, and our intellectual pursuits in general. From a very young age, Hussein was driven by a thirst for knowledge and a desire to accumulate as much of it as possible. He was highly intelligent, and possessed a brilliant memory. From the time when he first started writing, his style was beautiful and fluent, becoming more forceful and eloquent as he got older.

At the age of eight, Hussein embarked on writing a book on Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, whom he considered to be his role model at the time. His intention, he said, was to turn it into a three-volume masterpiece, only to find that his material had run out after the first thirty pages! This failed first attempt was followed by two historical novellas written at the age of ten, and a story, of which I still have a copy, titled The Joy of Old Age, written at the age of twelve, that I still find a delight to read. However, he was most proud of a novel he wrote soon after, titled The Punishment. My father, Ahmad Amin, wanted to encourage him to continue in his footsteps, and so he arranged for the Authorship, Translation and Publication Committee Press to print 200 copies of the book at his expense.

Hussein had a highly developed sense for beauty in literature, and would tirelessly roam the bookshops of Cairo and beyond for the next book on his reading list, and follow the news of the latest publications of authors he admired or believed to be significant.

His interests did not go unnoticed by our father, and so he asked the publisher of his books (the owner of the Al-Nahda Al-Misriyya bookshop in downtown Cairo) to allow Hussein to buy any books he wanted from the bookshop at a discount, to be deducted from my father's royalty payments. He only protested when he found that Hussein had purchased several volumes of Andre Gide's journals, a writer who my father believed to be immoral.