The papermaker Amali Alaa

Author's name: Youssef Ziedan

Alaa al-Din Ibn al-Nafis lived for eighty years, during which he witnessed a tremendous amount of horrors and grave events: the Crusades and the horrific seventh campaign against Damietta and northern Egypt, the Mongol invasion and the fall of Baghdad at the hands of Hulagu, the power struggles between the last generation of Ayyubids and the first generation of Mamluk rulers, the revolt of Hisn al-Din Tha’lab, the fierce clashes between Aqtai, Aybak, Qutuz, Baibars and Qalawun...
Al-Ala' Ibn al-Nafis was close to all of this, as he was the personal physician of al-Zahir Baybars, and the chief physician of Egypt and the Levant. Despite the turbulent circumstances of his time, he never stopped writing on medicine, thought, and the sciences of his time, leaving us thousands of pages. So how did Ibn al-Nafis live, and what events of his life did he dictate to al-Warraq, who was forty years younger than him and lived forty years after him? This is what this novel tells.