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Vale Naguib Mahfouz

Nobel prize winning novelist who brought Arabic fiction to the western world

Denys Johnson-Davies | The Guardian | Thursday August 31, 2006

The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who has died aged 94, was the Arab world’s most prominent literary figure. Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988, and it is difficult to think of any prizewinner whose status as a writer was so dramatically changed as was that of Mahfouz by the award.From being a writer known only in the Arab world and to a handful of Orientalists, he sprang to world attention. Overnight he was taken up by a leading American publishing house and became a bestseller. Novels of his were then translated into many of the world’s languages.

Born in Gamaliya in the old city of Cairo, the son of a minor official, the writer spent his first years in the distinctive medieval atmosphere with its narrow lanes and clustered overhanging buildings. Its features became part of his consciousness and are brought to life in some of his early realistic novels – and, more particularly, in his Cairo Trilogy on which, both in the Arab world and in the west, his fame in great part rests.Mahfouz’s life was ordered and singularly devoid of dramatic happenings – if one excludes the 1994 assassination attempt by an extremist from which the writer miraculously escaped with his life.

He was educated at a kuttab (Koranic school), then at primary and secondary schools, where he read many of the works of classical Arabic literature and mastered the Arabic language. Graduating in philosophy from Cairo University in 1934, he then began an MA in philosophy which he abandoned when he decided to make a career of writing.

Realising that writing must inevitably be part time, he joined the civil service and remained in it until his retirement in 1971. Among the posts he held were director of the film censorship office and, finally, adviser to the culture minister. Into the 1980s, Mahfouz supplemented his income by writing film scenarios, yet while more than 30 films were made from his novels, he refused to adapt his own work for the screen.

On his retirement he joined the group of distinguished writers, among whom was the playwright Tewfik al-Hakim, at Egypt’s leading newspaper al-Ahram. From then on his novels were first serialised in the newspaper before being brought out in book form.

Having to earn his living as a civil servant, Mahfouz acquired the discipline to organise his time so that he would be able to read widely and to produce a considerable body of fiction. Even feeling that marriage might prove a hindrance, he put it off until the age of 43.

He wrote more than 30 novels. His first were three stories with pharaonic backgrounds, beginning with The Curse of Ra (1939). Next came a period of social realism, as seen in novels such as Midaq Alley (1947), an entertainingly vivid depiction of the alleyways of his youth and the characters that inhabit them: the hashish-smoking cafe-owner Kirsha, and Zaita, the “fashioner of deformities”, who performs maiming operations on those taking up a life of begging.

Then, in 1956, came Palace Walk, the first volume of the trilogy, to be followed a year later by the other two volumes, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. A novel on the grand scale of some 1,500 pages, the trilogy deals with three generations of the Abd al-Jawad family and extends from 1917 to just before the end of the second world war, while Egypt was engaged in a struggle for independence from British rule.

The three volumes describe in minute detail the daily events in a middle-class Egyptian family, recording for history as no other book does a way of life that has disappeared under the impact of western influence and the pressures of modern life. The political happenings of the times are interwoven into the lives of the many characters. Members of the protagonist family represent the main trends in the political life of the country: the Wafd party, with its heroes Saad Zaghloul and Mustafa Nahhas (the party with which Mahfouz associated himself), the burgeoning socialist movement as exemplified by the writings of Salama Mousa, and the beginnings of a fundamentalist Islamic movement.

The myriad characters and events are handled with great skill and the writer is seen throughout to be in complete control of his material. It was a remarkable achievement, in particular when one bears in mind that the Arabic novel had only recently come into being.

The trilogy quickly became a best-seller in the Arab world, and those who could not read it came to know its characters through the films that were made of it; that it could also be appreciated outside its own cultural confines is shown by the fact that in the United States, the trilogy achieved sales of more than 250,000 copies.

Though not published until 1956-57, the trilogy was completed before the 1952 revolution of Gamal Abdul Nasser. Mahfouz was disillusioned by the revolution and the repressive era that it introduced. Unable to criticise it, he preferred to remain silent.

Then in 1957 he started work on Children of Our Alley, which was translated into English as Children of Gebelawi. It was the novel that brought its author into conflict with Egypt’s religious authorities. After its serialisation in al-Ahram, Cairo’s religious university, al-Azhar, refused to allow the work to appear in book form. In a society with religious susceptibilities, exception was taken to a novel dealing with issues that were considered unacceptable subjects for fiction. Later the novel came out in Beirut, and is available in Egypt only under the counter. Many years later it became the reason for the attack on his life on October 14, 1994, in which he was hospitalised with a wound to the neck, leaving him partially paralysed in his right arm.

The novel shows a departure in his approach, being written in an episodic form, a structure that he was to adopt later in other works. While the themes that preoccupy him often repeat themselves, Mahfouz continued throughout his career to seek new techniques. Children of Our Alley is an allegory in which God appears in the character of Gebelawi, Adam as “Adham”, while other characters represent the prophets Jesus and Muhammad. Though a new translation was published by the US firm of Doubleday in 1996, a decision was taken not to make it available in Egypt.

Another novel of particular interest is The Harafish (1977). It too is written in episodic form and takes place in an alleyway of Cairo’s old city. It deals with several generations of the same family, universalising the alley into an image of the human condition. The myth here is of his own invention, unlike his use of the fall of Adam in Children of Our Alley.

Mahfouz was widely read in western fiction and particularly admired Flaubert, Stendhal and Proust, and Melville’s Moby Dick. His borrowings from the west in matters of technique can be seen in his novel Miramar (1967), in which – following Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet – he relates the story of several characters staying in a pension in the seaside city of Alexandria, recounting the same incidents from the points of view of four of them. The book was published in English in 1978 with a perceptive introduction by John Fowles who, at this relatively early date, saw in Mahfouz “a significant novelist”.

Published in English in 1995, Arabian Nights and Days is yet another novel written in the episodic form that Mahfouz came to favour. In it he chooses tales from the classic Thousand and One Nights and reforges them into narratives dealing with those themes he was always occupied with: good and evil, man’s social responsibility, and, increasingly with time, death. The novel is set in an Arabian Nights atmosphere, but many of the issues relate to Egypt’s present problems: the corruption of those in power, social justice and the rise of the fundamentalist movement.

Hardly had Miramar appeared than the Israeli victory in the 1967 six days war, a defeat that was as humiliating as it was unexpected, rocked the Arab world. Mahfouz’s reaction was to give up writing novels for five years.

During this period Mahfouz added to the total of 14 volumes of short stories that he published, often with tales of singular blackness that matched his mood. His contribution to the Arabic short story is often forgotten in the face of his overwhelming achievement in the novel. Among his collected works in English is a single volume of stories under the title The Time and the Place (1992). One of the stories represented in this volume, Zaabalawi, has found itself included in the Norton Masterpieces of the World as the only piece of Arabic writing, apart from some extracts from the Koran.

His very first attempts at writing fiction were short stories, which he was delighted to find being accepted and appearing in print. He recounts how one day an editor asked him to pass by the office. He did so and was handed £1 for his latest story. “One gets paid as well!” exclaimed the budding writer in disbelief. His final novel was Qushtumar (1988); his last published work was another collection of short stories, The Seventh Heaven (2005), which dealt with the afterlife. He wanted, he observed, to believe that something good would happen to him after his death.

Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times.

Neither the fame nor the considerable monetary reward afforded by the Nobel prize altered his life. He continued to live in his modest ground-floor flat in the middle-class district of Agouza with his wife and two daughters and changed nothing in his daily routine.

He remained, until the day of his death – by then a frail old man with failing sight and hearing – a modest man with a ready smile and that sense of humour for which Egyptians are famous.

John Ezard writes: In 1990, when he was a physically wasted, half-blind yet zestful 79-year-old, I interviewed Naguib Mahfouz in the Ali Baba cafe overlooking Cairo’s central Tahrir Square, where he breakfasted for 40 years and which he had seen change from a Nile-side preserve of the rich to a demotic chaos.

“The square has had many scenes,” he said. “It used to be more quiet. Now it is disturbing but more progressive, better for ordinary people – and therefore better for me also, as one who likes his fellow humans.” Any country is fortunate if it produces citizens like him.

· Naguib Mahfouz, writer, born December 11 1911; died August 30 2006.

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This entry was posted on 31 August, 2006 by in Arts, Egypt, Opinion.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
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yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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