Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha was an Egyptian novelist, screenwriter and playwright, born in Cairo on 11 December 1911 and died on 30 August 2006. He worked as a civil servant for some four decades alongside his writing and produced more than thirty novels and hundreds of short stories, all set in Egypt, which make the Cairo lane a microcosm of the world. He received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature — the only Egyptian and the only Arab to win it in literature — with the Swedish Academy crediting him as a writer "who, through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind". ^{1 2}

He was born in the Gamaleya quarter of Old Cairo into a lower-middle-class Muslim family, and was named after the obstetrician Naguib Pasha Mahfouz, who oversaw his difficult birth. He was the seventh and youngest child, and described his father, the civil servant Abdel-Aziz Ibrahim, as "old-fashioned". His mother Fatimah was the daughter of Mustafa Qasheesha, an Al-Azhar sheikh, and although illiterate herself took the boy to museums and cultural sites such as the Egyptian Museum and the Pyramids. In 1924 the family moved from Gamaleya to Abbaseya, and both districts became the backdrop of many of his works. ²

The family were devout Muslims and he had a strict Islamic upbringing; in an interview he said of that climate: "You would never have thought that an artist would emerge from that family." He witnessed the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 at the age of seven, watching British soldiers fire on demonstrators from a window, and later called it the thing that most shook the security of his childhood. He read widely as a boy and was influenced by Hafiz Najib, Taha Hussein and Salama Moussa. In 1930 he entered the Egyptian University (now Cairo University) to study philosophy, graduating in 1934; after a year on a master's degree he gave up his studies to become a professional writer. ²

He joined the Egyptian civil service in 1934 and remained in it until retiring in 1971: first as a clerk at Cairo University, then in 1938 in the Ministry of Islamic Endowments as parliamentary secretary to the minister. In 1945 he asked to transfer to the al-Ghuri Mausoleum library, where he interviewed residents of his childhood neighbourhood for the "Good Loans Project". In the 1950s he worked as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Arts, as Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and finally as a consultant to the Ministry of Culture. ²

He began with three historical novels — Mockery of the Fates (1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (1943) and The Struggle of Thebes (1944) — part of a larger project, inspired by Sir Walter Scott, to cover the whole history of Egypt in thirty novels. After the third volume he abandoned the plan and turned to present-day settings and the psychological impact of social change on ordinary people. ^{2 3}

Then came his realist Cairo phase: Cairo Modern (1945), Khan al-Khalili (1945), Midaq Alley (1947), The Mirage (1948) and The Beginning and the End (1949). He completed the Cairo Trilogy — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, published in 1956–57 — before the July 1952 revolution; it follows the patriarch el-Sayyed Ahmed Abdel Gawad and his family over three generations from the First World War to 1944. He then stopped writing for some years. ^{2 3}

Disappointed with the Nasser regime, he returned to print prolifically from 1959: Children of Gebelawi (1959); The Thief and the Dogs (1961); Adrift on the Nile (1966), later banned by Sadat because it criticised the decadence of Nasser-era society; Miramar (1967), built on four first-person narrators; Karnak Café (1974); The Harafish (1977); Arabian Nights and Days (1979); The Journey of Ibn Fatouma (1983); Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth (1985); and finally Dreams of the Rehabilitation Period (2004). The English article's lead counts 35 novels, over 350 short stories, 26 screenplays and seven plays across a seventy-year career (1932–2004), while its writing-career section counts 34 novels; this article records both figures as given. Many of his works were adapted into Egyptian and international films, making him one of the most widely adapted Arab authors. ^{2 3}

Children of Gebelawi (1959), as the English article describes it, portrays the patriarch Gebelawi and his children as average Egyptians living lives that echo Cain and Abel, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, in an alley where generations feud over the ancestor's estate. The book was banned throughout the Arab world except Lebanon because of its alleged blasphemy through that allegorical portrayal, and was first published in Egypt only in 2006, with a preface by Ahmad Kamal Aboul-Magd. ²

He won the prize in 1988, the only Arab writer to have won it in literature. Shortly after winning he was quoted as saying: "The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level. The Arab world also won the Nobel with me." Because travelling to Sweden was difficult for him at his age, he did not attend the award ceremony. ^{2 1}

The publication of The Satanic Verses revived the controversy over Children of Gebelawi. Death threats against Mahfouz followed, including one from Omar Abdel-Rahman; like many Egyptian writers he was on an extremist "death list", and he was given police protection. On 14 October 1994 an extremist stabbed the 82-year-old novelist in the neck outside his Cairo home. He survived, permanently affected by nerve damage to his right upper limb. Sixteen people were put on military trial and two were hanged. Afterwards he could write for only a few minutes a day and lived under constant bodyguard protection. ²

This section should be read as a report of different positions carried by the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

His positions, as the sources report them: Mahfouz acknowledged that politics runs through all his writing: "You may find a story which ignores love or any other subject, but not politics; it is the very axis of our thinking." In his youth he was drawn to socialist and democratic ideals and sympathised with the Wafd Party; he knew Sayyid Qutb personally when Qutb was a literary critic, and visited him in hospital in the 1960s, but later drew a negative portrait of him in Mirrors. He supported the principles of the 1952 revolution yet became disenchanted with its practices after the 1967 defeat, and said in a 1998 interview that he fully appreciated Nasser only after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. His support for Sadat's 1978 peace treaty with Israel got his books banned in many Arab countries until after the Nobel Prize. He defended Salman Rushdie against Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 death fatwa — calling Khomeini a terrorist and joining eighty intellectuals who declared that "no blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer" — while also criticising The Satanic Verses itself as "insulting" to Islam. ²

Criticism directed at him: Extremist opponents accused him over Children of Gebelawi and placed him on target lists, as described above. The museum presents these accusations and positions as the sources report them, without adopting any of them. ²

He remained a bachelor until the age of 43 because he believed marriage, with its restrictions, would hamper his literary future: "I saw myself drowning in visits and parties. No freedom." In 1954 he quietly married Atiyyatallah Ibrahim — a Coptic Orthodox woman from Alexandria, according to Rasheed El-Enany's biography — and they had two daughters, Fatima and Umm Kalthum. The couple lived first on a houseboat in Agouza and then in an apartment along the Nile in the same district. He distinctly disliked travel; Belgrade was one of the few cities he gladly visited. He died on 30 August 2006 after complications from two falls suffered at home and in hospital. ²

His legacy is considered a cornerstone of modern Egyptian culture. His books are frequently republished and continue to be adapted for film and television in Egypt and abroad, and in 2019 the Egyptian Ministry of Culture opened the Naguib Mahfouz Museum in Old Cairo, near the Wikala of al-Ghuri and al-Azhar, holding his artefacts and his Nobel medal. Newsweek wrote that the alleys and people of Cairo are evoked in his work "as vividly … as the streets of London were conjured by Dickens", and the Washington Post found in his fiction "a pervasive sense of metaphor" and an "utterly honest and unsentimental" love for Egypt and its people. ²

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• The English article disagrees with itself on the novel count — 35 in the lead, 34 in the writing-career section — so this article records both.
• The Nobel Prize facts page places his death in Cairo, while the English article specifies Agouza, Giza; this article uses the more precise location and records the difference here. The Nobel record's official wording is "an Arabian narrative art", where the English article's current lead says "an Egyptian narrative art"; this article follows the Nobel wording.
• Later translations and edits of this article need periodic review with clear update dates.