SEPTEMBER 2006
Associated Press
Naguib
Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature died
Wednesday, 30th August, in Cairo.. He was 94. Egyptian
writer Naguib Mahfouz won the 1988 Nobel Prize in
literature. In portraying everyday life and its tensions
in a changing Egyptian society, he helped establish the
genre of the novel in modern Arabic literature.Mahfouz,
whose novels depicted Egyptian life in his beloved corner
of ancient Cairo, was admitted to the hospital more than
a month ago for an injury to his head. His physician, Dr.
Hossam Mowafi, said he died Wednesday morning after a
sharp decline.
"His wife last night was whispering in his ears and
he was smiling and nodding," Mowafi said.The Nobel
Prize, awarded in 1988, brought to notice a man who had
already established himself as one of the Middle East's
finest and most beloved writers and a strong voice for
moderation and religious tolerance.
In 1994, an attacker inspired by a militant cleric's
ruling that a Mahfouz novel written decades before was
blasphemous stabbed the then-82-year-old writer as he
left his Cairo home.
Mahfouz survived, but the attack damaged nerves leading
to his right arm, seriously impairing his ability to
write. A man who had once worked for hours at a time -
writing in longhand - found it a struggle to "form
legible words running in more or less straight
lines," he wrote in the aftermath.He continued to work, producing
short stories, sometimes only a few paragraphs long,
dictating each day to a friend who would also read him
the newspapers.
Nevertheless, Mahfouz maintained a busy schedule well
into his 90s. In his final years, he would go out six
nights a week to meet friends at Cairo's literary
watering holes, trading jokes, ideas for stories and news
of the day
Naguib Mahfouz at the Aly Baba Cafe
His final published major work came in 2005 _ a
collection of stories about the afterlife entitled
"The Seventh Heaven."
I wrote 'The
Seventh Heaven' because I want to believe something good
will happen to me after death," the wispy-bearded
writer told The Associated Press at his 94th birthday in
December 2005. "Spirituality for me is of high
importance and continuously provides inspiration for
me."
Across the span of 34 novels, hundreds of short stories
and essays, dozens of movie scripts and five plays,
Mahfouz depicted with startling realism the Egyptian
"Everyman" balancing between tradition and the
modern world. Often the scene of the novels did not
stretch beyond a few familiar blocks of Islamic Cairo,
the 1,000-year-old quarter of the capital where Mahfouz
was born.
The crowded neighborhood of alleys and centuries-old
mosques is the setting for his masterpiece "Cairo
Trilogy." The trilogy _ "Palace Walk,"
"Palace of Desire" and "Sugar
Street," all of which were published in the 1950s _
details the adventures and misadventures of a Muslim
merchant family not unlike Mahfouz's own.
The trilogy introduced a character who became an icon in
Egyptian culture: Si-Sayed, the domineering father who
lords his authority over his wives and daughters but
holds the family together _ a character Mahfouz drew from
his own father.
It was his 1959 novel "Children of Our Alley,"
or "Children of Gebelawi," that brought him the
most controversy. The book was an allegory for the series
of prophets that Islam believes includes Jesus and Moses
_ Eissa and Moussa in Arabic _ and culminates in the
Prophet Mohammed.
First serialized in Egyptian newspapers in 1959, it
caused an uproar much like Greek writer Nikos
Kazantzakis's "The Last Temptation of Christ,"
published a year later.
Excerpt from Midaq
Alley (Zuqaq al-Midaq)
| Biographic Note (Cairo 1911- ) Egyptian writer, educated at King Fuad 1 University (now University of Cairo). He was born into an ordinary family, as the youngest of seven children. While he studied, he wrote for professional journals, and after graduating he started writing fictions and published more than 80 short stories in less than 6 years. While working at the Ministry of Religious Affairs from 1939 to 1954, he published three volumes of Pharaonic novels. After that he started writing novels of social realism, as well as screenplays for films. Mahfouz writes in strict Modern Standard Arabic, even dialogs. His style is clear-cut, mainly with stories from everyday life, without much moralizing lectures, free from ideology and seldom with much use of symbolism. Mahfouz’s aim with writing is to tell a good story, to preserve a moment in history and to present true people for readers in a distant future. But Mahfouz have experimented with more complex styles and symbolism, beginning in the 1960s but this production is not counted among his best and has also only managed to reach only a small audience. His main work is the Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) finished in 1952, but first published in 1956 and 1957. This trilogy has been compared to Dickens and Dostojevskij thanks to the way he depicts the city where the stories takes place, Cairo. He is the most read Arabic novelist outside the Arabic world, but has had a declining audience in Arab countries. He was honoured with the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. After supporting president Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Mahfouz have had his books banned in some Arab countries. Many of his books have been translated into several languages, including Hebrew. Bibliography The whisper of madness, 1930s, short stories
in newer collection |
