R.I.P. Naguib Mahfouz

[Ya Sam]

First Arab Nobel laureate dies, aged 94

Associated Press
Wednesday August 30, 2006
Guardian Unlimited


The Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Photograph: EPA

Naguib Mahfouz, who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for 
Literature, died at his home today. He was 94.
Mahfouz, whose novels depicted Egyptian life in his beloved corner of 
ancient Cairo, was admitted to the hospital just over a month ago after 
falling in his home and injuring his head. He died this morning after a 
sharp decline, according to Dr Hossam Mowafi, the head of a medical team 
that had been supervising his treatment.


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Long established as one of the Middle East's finest and best-loved writers, 
and an ardent advocate of moderation and religious tolerance, Mahfouz's 
acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1988 brought him to international notice. 
But a wider readership came at a price: in 1994, an attacker inspired by a 
militant cleric's ruling that one of Mahfouz's novels was blasphemous 
stabbed the then-82-year-old writer as he left his Cairo home. The attack 
damaged the nerves leading to his right arm, effectively putting an end to 
his former practice of writing for hours in longhand.
Nevertheless, Mahfouz maintained a busy schedule well into his 90s. In his 
final years, he met with friends at Cairo's literary watering holes almost 
every evening while continuing to work during the day, dictating short 
stories, sometimes only a few paragraphs long, to a friend who would also 
read him the newspapers. His final major work, published in 2005, was a 
collection of stories about the afterlife, The Seventh Heaven. Speaking to 
the Associated Press at his 94th birthday celebration last December, Mahfouz 
explained that he wrote book "because I want to believe something good will 
happen to me after death."

Over the course of 50 novels, five plays and a score of short stories and 
essays, Mahfouz depicted life in Egypt, balanced between tradition and the 
modern world, with startling realism. The action of his novels was often 
confined to the 1,000-year-old Islamic quarter of Cairo where Mahfouz was 
born, a crowded neighbourhood of alleys and mosques which was the setting 
for his 1950s masterpiece, the Cairo Trilogy, which deals over the course of 
three books (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street) with the 
fluctuating fortunes of a Muslim merchant family not unlike Mahfouz's own.

It was his 1959 novel, Children of Gebelawi, that mired him in the 
controversy that was to dog him for the rest of his life. An allegory of the 
lives of Islam's prophets, it was first serialized in Egyptian newspapers in 
1959, when it caused an uproar similar to that created by Nikos 
Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, which appeared a year later. 
Egyptian religious authorities banned it from being published as a book, but 
it was later released in Lebanon and subsequently translated into English.

The controversy resurfaced years later when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued 
a fatwa against Salman Rushdie following the publication of The Satanic 
Verses in 1989. In a copycat move in the same year, the Egyptian radical 
sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman said Mahfouz deserved to die for Children of 
Gebelawi, a pronouncement that led directly to his stabbing five years 
later.

In the final decades of his life, Mahfouz became a fixture on the Cairo 
literary scene, and was most frequently to be found in the company of 
friends and colleagues at Nile-side cafes. His last novel, 1988's 
semi-autobiographical Qushtumar, centres on the lives of four elderly 
friends who meet weekly at a cafe that gives the book its title. Raymond 
Stock, Mahfouz's American biographer and translator, named Mahfouz's as "a 
great son of Egypt, a patriot in the fullest sense of the word." But his 
relevance extends far beyond the boundaries of his native country. His work, 
according to Fatma Moussa, a renowned Egyptian critic and writer, "has to do 
with the plight of humanity as a whole. He has presented it from the local 
angle, but it's not really local at all. It's kind of a microcosm of the 
whole world, a little image of the fate of man."

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1861106,00.html

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