Taha Hussein excelled here in depicting several scenes from the painful Egyptian reality of the 1940s, a reality rife with poverty, ignorance, and classism; a society that cared little for those without wealth, nor looked down on those destined to live a life of suffering. The author brought these diverse images together in their suffering, despite the differences in names, places, and events. He succeeded in describing the characters in a complete manner, as if he lived them and saw the most minute details of their lives, even going so far as to describe their gait, stance, and bowing. The dean of Arabic literature wanted to send short messages to those who did not feel the suffering of those classes, to provoke them to change their painful reality. The motivation for this immortal social literary work was the hope that the 1952 revolution in Egypt would create a new society, one where equality prevails and justice reigns.