Darwaza began his daily diary in 1932 then turned it into fair copy in the late Seventies in Damascus. It was then published by the celebrated Tunisian publisher Al-Habib al-Lamasi and appeared in Beirut in 1993 in six volumes of 4242 pages, under the title The Memoirs of Muhammad `Izzat Darwaza (1305-1404 AH/1887-1984 AD) and published by Dar al-Gharb al-Islami.
These memoirs are considered among the most important primary sources for history of Palestine and of Arab nationalism in the Greater Syria region in the Twentieth Century. In seeking to introduce the new Arab generations to this author, we removed from these six volumes what we considered to be non-autobiographical material and thus recovered the genuinely autobiographical material to be found in these excerpts. We further prepared an Introduction which explains the principles employed in our selection and which contains a brief sketch of some of Darwaza’s political and literary activity throughout his long life.
