Naguib Mahfouz

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the novelist. For the doctor, see Naguib Pasha Mahfouz.
 This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2012)
Naguib Mahfouz
Necip Mahfuz.jpg
Born (1911-12-11)11 December 1911
Cairo, Egypt
Died 30 August 2006(2006-08-30) (aged 94)
Cairo, Egypt
Occupation Novelist
Nationality Egyptian
Notable work(s) The Cairo Trilogy
Notable award(s) Nobel Prize for Literature (1988)

Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic: نجيب محفوظ‎ Nagīb Maḥfūẓ, IPA: [næˈɡiːb mɑħˈfuːzˤ]; 11 December 1911 – 30 August 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism.[1] He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.

Contents

Early life and education [edit]

Born into a lower middle-class Muslim family in the Gamaleyya quarter of Cairo, Mahfouz was named after Professor Naguib Pasha Mahfouz (1882–1974), the renowned Coptic physician who delivered him. Mahfouz was the seventh and the youngest child in a family that had five boys and two girls. The family lived in two popular districts of the town, in el-Gamaleyya, from where they moved in 1924 to el-Abbaseyya, then a new Cairo suburb; both provided the backdrop for many of Mahfouz's writings. His father, whom Mahfouz described as having been "old-fashioned", was a civil servant, and Mahfouz eventually followed in his footsteps. In his early years, Mahfouz read extensively and was influenced by Hafiz Najib, Taha Hussein and Salama Moussa.[2] His mother often took him to museums and Egyptian history later became a major theme in many of his books.[3]

The Mahfouz family were devout Muslims and Mahfouz had a strict Islamic upbringing. In an interview, he elaborated on the stern religious climate at home during his childhood. He stated that "You would never have thought that an artist would emerge from that family."[3]

The Egyptian Revolution of 1919 had a strong effect on Mahfouz, although he was at the time only seven years old. From the window he often saw British soldiers firing at the demonstrators, men and women. "You could say ... that the one thing which most shook the security of my childhood was the 1919 revolution", he later said. After completing his secondary education, Mahfouz was admitted to King Fouad I University (now the University of Cairo), where he studied philosophy, graduating in 1934. By 1936, having spent a year working on an M.A., he decided to become a professional writer. Mahfouz then worked as a journalist at er-Risala, and contributed to el-Hilal and Al-Ahram. The major Egyptian influence on Mahfouz's thoughts on science and socialism in the 1930s was Salama Moussa, the Fabian intellectual.

Civil service [edit]

Mahfouz left academia and joined the Egyptian civil service, in which he continued till 1972. He served in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, as Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and finally as a consultant to the Ministry of Culture.[4]

Marriage [edit]

Mahfouz remained a bachelor until the age of 43. The reason for his late marriage was that he laboured under the conviction that with its numerous restrictions and limitations, marriage would hamper his literary future.[2] In 1954, he married an Egyptian woman, Atiya, with whom he had two daughters, Fatima and Umm Kalthum.[5]

Novels [edit]

He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts and five plays over a 70-year career. He was a board member of the publisher Dar el-Ma'aref. Many of his novels were serialized in Al-Ahram, and his writings also appeared in his weekly column, "Point of View". Before the Nobel Prize only a few of his novels had appeared in the West.[citation needed]

Clash with fundamentalists [edit]

Mahfouz did not shrink from controversy outside of his work. As a consequence of his outspoken support for Sadat's Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978, his books were banned in many Arab countries until after he won the Nobel Prize. Like many Egyptian writers and intellectuals, Mahfouz was on an Islamic fundamentalist "death list". He defended Salman Rushdie after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned Rushdie to death in 1989, but also criticized his Satanic Verses as "insulting" to Islam. Mahfouz believed in freedom of expression and although he did not personally agree with Rushdie's work, he did not believe that there should be a fatwa condemning him to death for it. In 1989, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie and his publishers to be killed, Mahfouz called Khomeini a terrorist.[6] Shortly after Mahfouz joined 80 other intellectuals in declaring that "no blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer."[7]

Attempted assassination [edit]

The appearance of The Satanic Verses brought back up the controversy surrounding Mahfouz's novel Children of Gebelawi. Death threats against Mahfouz followed, including one from the "blind sheikh," Egyptian theologian Omar Abdul-Rahman. Mahfouz was given police protection, but in 1994 Islamic extremists almost succeeded in assassinating the 82-year-old novelist by stabbing him in the neck outside his Cairo home.[8]

He survived, permanently affected by damage to nerves in his right hand. After the incident Mahfouz was unable to write for more than a few minutes a day and consequently produced fewer and fewer works. Subsequently, he lived under constant bodyguard protection. Finally, in the beginning of 2006, the novel was published in Egypt with a preface written by Ahmad Kamal Aboul-Magd. After the threats, Mahfouz stayed in Cairo with his lawyer Nabil Mounir Habib. Mahfouz and Mounir would spend most of their time in Mounir's office; Mahfouz used Mounir's library as a reference for most of his books. Mahfouz stayed with Mounir until his death.[citation needed]


Views, writing style, and themes [edit]

Most of Mahfouz's early works were set in Cairo. Abath Al-Aqdar (Mockery of the Fates) (1939), Rhadopis (1943), and Kifah Tibah (The Struggle of Thebes) (1944), were historical novels, written as part of a larger unfulfilled project of 30 novels. Inspired by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) Mahfouz planned to cover the whole history of Egypt in a series of books. However, following the third volume, Mahfouz shifted his interest to the present, the psychological impact of the social change on ordinary people.[citation needed]

Mahfouz's central work in the 1950s was the Cairo Trilogy, an immense monumental work of 1,500 pages, which the author completed before the July Revolution. The novels were titled with the street names Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street. Mahfouz set the story in the parts of Cairo where he grew up. They depict the life of the patriarch el-Sayyed Ahmed Abdel Gawad and his family over three generations, from World War I to the 1950s, when King Farouk I was overthrown. Mahfouz ceased to write for some years after finishing the trilogy. Disappointed in the Nasser régime, which had overthrown the monarchy in 1952, he started publishing again in 1959, now prolifically pouring out novels, short stories, journalism, memoirs, essays, and screenplays.[citation needed]

Tharthara Fawq Al-Nīl ("Chatter on the Nile"; 1966) is one of his most popular novels. It was later made into a film featuring a cast of top actors during the time of president Anwar al-Sadat. The film/story criticizes the decadence of Egyptian society during the Nasser era. It was banned by Sadat to avoid provocation of Egyptians who still loved former president Nasser. Copies were hard to find prior to the late 1990s. Mahfouz's prose is characterised by the blunt expression of his ideas. His written works covered a broad range of topics, including socialism, homosexuality, and God. Writing about some of these subjects was prohibited in Egypt.[citation needed]

The Children of Gebelawi (1959, also known as "Children of our Alley") one of Mahfouz's best known works, has been banned in Egypt for alleged blasphemy over its allegorical portrayal of God and the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, until the ban was released in 2006. It portrayed the patriarch Gebelaawi and his children, average Egyptians living the lives of Cain and Abel, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Gebelawi has built a mansion in an oasis in the middle of a barren desert; his estate becomes the scene of a family feud which continues for generations. "Whenever someone is depressed, suffering or humiliated, he points to the mansion at the top of the alley at the end opening out to the desert, and says sadly, 'That is our ancestor's house, we are all his children, and we have a right to his property. Why are we starving? What have we done?'" The book was banned throughout the Arab world, except in Lebanon, and in Egypt where the novel was published in 2006. In the 1960s, Mahfouz further developed its theme that humanity is moving further away from God in his existentialist novels. In The Thief and the Dogs (1961) he depicted the fate of a Marxist thief, who has been released from prison and plans revenge.[citation needed]

In the 1960s and 1970s Mahfouz began to construct his novels more freely and to use interior monologues. In Miramar (1967) he developed a form of multiple first-person narration. Four narrators, among them a Socialist and a Nasserite opportunist, represent different political views. In the center of the story is an attractive servant girl. In Arabian Nights and Days (1981) and in The Journey of Ibn Fatouma (1983) Mahfouz drew on traditional Arabic narratives as subtexts. Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth (1985) is about conflict between old and new religious truths. Many of his novels were first published in serialized form, including Children of Gebelawi and Midaq Alley which was adapted into a Mexican film starring Salma Hayek (El callejón de los milagros).

Mahfouz described the development of his country in the 20th-century. He combined intellectual and cultural influences from East and West - his own exposure to the literature of non-Egyptian culture began in his youth with the enthusiastic consumption of Western detective stories, Russian classics, and such modernist writers as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and James Joyce. Mahfouz's stories are almost always set in the heavily populated urban quarters of Cairo, where his characters, mostly ordinary people, try to cope with the modernization of society and the temptations of Western values.[citation needed]

Political influence [edit]

Most of Mahfouz's writings deal mainly with politics, a fact he acknowledged: "In all my writings, you will find politics. You may find a story which ignores love or any other subject, but not politics; it is the very axis of our thinking".[9]

He espoused Egyptian nationalism in many of his works, and expressed sympathies for the post-World-War era Wafd Party.[2] He was also attracted to socialist and democratic ideals early on in his youth. The influence of socialist ideals is strongly reflected in his first two novels, Al-Khalili and New Cairo, and also in many of his latter works. Parallel to his sympathy for socialism and democracy was his antipathy towards Islamic extremism as expressed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He strongly criticized radical Islam in his works and contrasted between the merits of socialism and the demerits of Islamic extremism in his first two novels. He perceived Islamism as critically delineated and rejected it as unsuitable for all times. In his memoirs, he purportedly stated that of all the forces active in Egyptian politics during his youth, he most despised the Muslim Brotherhood.[citation needed]

Mahfouz had personally known Sayyid Qutb in his youth, when the latter was showing a greater interest in literary criticism than in Islamic fundamentalism; Qutb later became a significant influence on the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, Qutb was one of the first critics to recognize Mahfouz's talent in the mid-1940s. Mahfouz even visited Qutb when the latter was in the hospital, during the 1960s, near the end of his life. In his semi-autobiographical novel, Mirrors, he drew a very negative portrait of Sayyid Qutb. He was disillusioned with the 1952 revolution and by Egypt's defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. He supported the principles of the revolution but became disillusioned, saying that the practices failed to live up to them. Naguib Mahfouz influenced a new generation of Egyptian lawyers, including Nabil Mounir and Reda Aslan.[citation needed]

Works [edit]

  • Old Egypt (1932, translated from English) مصر القديمة

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ Haim Gordon. "Naguib Mahfouz's Egypt: Existential Themes in His Writings". Retrieved 2007-04-26. 
  2. ^ a b c Charlotte El Shabrawy (Summer 1992). "Naguib Mahfouz, The Art of Fiction No. 129". The Paris Review. Retrieved September 25, 2012. 
  3. ^ a b Rashee El-Enany (25 June 1993). Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-07395-0. Retrieved 25 September 2012. 
  4. ^ Tore Frängsmyr; Sture Allén (1993). Nobel Lectures: Literature, 1981-1990. World Scientific. p. 121. ISBN 978-981-02-1177-6. Retrieved 26 September 2012. 
  5. ^ "About Naguib Mahfouz". The American University in Cairo Press. Retrieved September 23, 2012. 
  6. ^ Deseret Morning News editorial (7 September 2006). "The legacy of a laureate". Deseret News. Retrieved 2007-09-20. 
  7. ^ Le Monde, 8 March 1989
  8. ^ "President pays tribute to Mahfouz". BBC News. 30 August 2006. 
  9. ^ Rasheed El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning, Routledge, 1992, p. 23.

External links [edit]

Works of Naguib Mahfouz
Nobel Laureates in Literature (1976–2000)
Authority control
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Naguib_Mahfouz&oldid=555170334"