In 1978, he received a Master of Advanced Studies, known in French as a Diplôme d'études approfondies, in linguistics at the University of Paris V, commonly known as “the Sorbonne” in preparation for a second doctoral thesis on diglossia in the Arab countries.
El Daif has received dozens of invitations to speak about his novels from all over the world including in the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, France, the United States.
El-Daif’s work has attracted numerous critical books and articles including by Samira Aghacy, Stefan G. Meyer, Ken Seigneurie, Assaad Khairallah, Paul Starkey, Mona Takieddine Amyuni, Edgar Weber and others.
In 1979, he witnessed the Mossad assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh which took place in front of the building he was living in and could have lost his life.
As El Daif explains in a 2007 interview with Rita Sakr: “When Marxism failed as a theoretical tool for systematically interpreting the world, I lost my belief in all such systems of thought and sought refuge in writing.
I realized that only literature can tell the world.” [5] His 1995 novel Azizi as-sayyid Kawabata, translated in English by Paul Starkey, is often taught as a seminal text on Lebanon’s civil war.
Two books resulted from the encounter: El Daif’s Awdat al-almani ila rushdih (The German’s Return to His Senses, 2005) and Helfer’s response Die Verschwulung der Welt (The Queering of the World, 2006).
[8] Over the span of three decades, el Daif's prolific oeuvre has encompassed the Lebanese civil war (extensively), marital relations and sexual violence, homosexuality, anti-black racism, historical fiction including on the Arab Nahda and Jurji Zaydan and two autobiographies.