When he published Min Wahid li-‘Ashara (From One to Ten) in 1977, Mustafa Amin (1914–97) had been out of prison for three years. A powerful journalist and a habitué of Nasser's intimate circle, Amin had suddenly seen his universe collapse when armed guards burst into his Alexandria villa on 21 July 1965. Charged with pro-American espionage, Amin was found guilty and condemned to life imprisonment by a military court. It was only in 1974, after interventions by the diva Umm Kulthum and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, that he was finally released by president Anwar al-Sadat. A presidential decree soon returned him to his position as editor-in-chief of Akhbar al-Yaum, a daily he had founded with his brother ‘Ali Amin in 1944, whom the same decree installed as chairman of the board after a ten-year exile in London. Both Mustafa and Ali wrote enthusiastic editorials supporting the slight democratic opening operated by Sadat, the ‘war and peace hero’ who had established his legitimacy with the October 1973 war against Israel.

While writing his editorials, Mustafa Amin simultaneously embarked on a more lasting project and plunged into his childhood and adolescence years. He became obsessed with the legacy of his illustrious grandfather, Saad Zaghlul– Amin's mother, Ratiba, was Saad's niece and was adopted by Saad and Safiyya after her parents’ death. Min Wahid li-‘Ashara is a recollection of Amin's childhood in the house of his grandparents. As its title indicates, the memoir narrates the first ten years of Mustafa Amin's life, from 1914 to 1924; it is the first volume of a coming-of-age narrative portraying the formation of Amin's vocation as a journalist. In this reconstruction of his childhood, Mustafa Amin gives a preponderant role to his education in Bayt al-Umma in the midst of the 1919 turmoil.

His first publication after his release, however, together with his prison memoirs, was a volume compiling documents belonging to Saad Zaghlul that were hitherto unknown to the public. Titled Asrar Thawrat 1919 (Secrets of the 1919 Revolution), the book depicts 1919 as a revolution in which both popular and organised violence played a key role.