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Portrait of Naguib Mahfouz

Literature · Novelists

Naguib Mahfouz

1911–2006 · Egyptian

Modern Arabic realism

Naguib Mahfouz was the first writer in Arabic to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1988. Over more than fifty novels he turned the alleys of old Cairo into the setting for a national epic, above all in the three-part family saga that follows one household from the 1919 revolution to the Second World War. A 1959 allegory of the prophets brought accusations of blasphemy that culminated, thirty-five years later, in an attempt on his life.

How to spot them

  • ▸The first Arabic-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, in 1988
  • ▸The Gamaliya quarter and the alleys of old Cairo; street names as titles
  • ▸A civil servant for most of his career; later a columnist on Al-Ahram
  • ▸The three novels named after Cairo streets that form his great family saga
  • ▸Stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home in 1994

Key works

Midaq Alley (1947)

Zuqaq al-Midaqq — a cul-de-sac off the Gamaliya quarter during the Second World War, and the fate of the beautiful Hamida

Palace Walk (1956)

Bayn al-Qasrayn, the first part of the Cairo Trilogy: the tyrannical al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his cloistered family during the 1919 revolution

Palace of Desire (1957)

The second part of the Cairo Trilogy, following Kamal into university and disillusion

Sugar Street (1957)

The third part of the Cairo Trilogy, ending with the grandchildren split between the Muslim Brotherhood and communism

Children of the Alley (1959)

Awlad Haratina — an allegory of Adam, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad as men of a Cairo alley; serialised in Al-Ahram and then banned in Egypt for decades

The Thief and the Dogs (1961)

A short, stream-of-consciousness novel about a released convict hunting the men who betrayed him

Miramar (1967)

Four residents of an Alexandria pension give four accounts of the same servant girl, Zohra

Arabian Nights and Days (1979)

A sequel of sorts that picks up where Shahrazad's storytelling leaves off

Key ideas

  • The family house as a model of the nation: patriarchy, hypocrisy and slow political change
  • A career moving from historical romance to social realism to allegory and fragmentary modernism
  • Religion treated as human history, the choice that made Children of the Alley notorious

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 11 December 1911 in the Gamaliya quarter of Cairo; he studied philosophy at what is now Cairo University
  • •He worked as a civil servant until 1971, latterly in the ministry of culture and the cinema organisation
  • •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the only Arabic-language laureate to date
  • •Too frail and unwilling to travel, he sent his daughters to Stockholm to receive the prize
  • •Children of the Alley was condemned by clerics at Al-Azhar and went unpublished in book form in Egypt for decades
  • •In 1989 he criticised the fatwa against Salman Rushdie while also criticising The Satanic Verses
  • •In October 1994 he was stabbed in the neck outside his home by Islamist extremists; the injury damaged the nerves in his right hand and made writing difficult
  • •He held a famous weekly literary salon in Cairo cafés, including the Café Riche
  • •He died on 30 August 2006 and was given a state funeral

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources