Naguib Mahfouz

Lost Naguib Mahfouz stories discovered in Nobel laureate's papers

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Fifty handwritten stories – 18 of which have never been published – by the late Egyptian writer were found in his daughter’s home

Alison Flood

Friday 9 November 

A lost collection of short stories by the celebrated Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz has been discovered in a box of the late Nobel laureate’s papers.

Naguib Mahfouz

 

Portrait of the Author as a Historian: Naguib Mahfouz

The ideas of a French philosopher provided the great Egyptian novelist with a way of assessing the good and the bad in his nation’s past.

Alexander Lee
History Today Volume 67 Issue 

1 January 2017

Throughout his life, Naguib Mahfouz felt caught between the timelessness of Egypt’s ancient past and the turbulence of its recent history. Even as a boy, he had felt it. Growing up in a devout Muslim household in one of Cairo’s oldest quarters, his childhood had been shaped by the unchanging obligations of faith and overshadowed by the legacy of the past. When he was not studying the Koran, he was playing in the streets of al-Gamaliya, not far from Saladin’s Citadel, or visiting the pyramids with his mother. But, though it was easy to believe that he was insulated from time’s flux, he could see that Egypt was changing around him. Over the preceding 40 years it had embarked on a process of rapid social and economic modernisation. Industrial development was spurred on by foreign investment, new roads and railways were constructed, educational reforms were implemented and scientific rationalism was exalted. Political changes were in the air, too. Though Egypt was notionally a British protectorate, liberal nationalism was on the rise and, before Mahfouz had turned eight, calls for independence had spilled over into violent revolution. 

Naguib Mahfouz (1911 - 2006)

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006)

The 1988 Nobel prize-winner put modern Arabic literature on the map, says Robert McCrum

Robert McCrum
Sunday 3 September 2006

IN THIS SEASON of literary prizes, it is good to reflect that without the Nobel Prize, the great Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) might have remained unknown outside the Arab world. Even in his native city of Cairo, he was always cult reading. Named after the physician who delivered him on

Naguib Mahfouz / Speaking for the People

 

Naguib Mahfouz

Speaking for the People

Tony McKibbin

February 14, 2018

What might it mean to “produce the novel of one’s generation”, (Paris Review) as Charlotte El Shabrawy proposes Naguib Mahfouz did with The Cairo Trilogy, a three thousand page book about Cairo life between the wars?  By extension, we might wish to ask what it means to be a writer of one’s nation? It is to this latter question we want especially to attend as we will look at both the work and the social context to understand the significance of Mafhouz, a writer of immense importance not only in the context of Egyptian literature but modern Arab literature too – so much so that to say he produced the book of his generation can almost seem more like understatement rather than hyperbole. A question worth asking within this one is of a writer’s immense importance in relation to the people, with the public they are not only writing for but somehow speaking for also. The best a writer from the UK, the US, France or Italy can expect is that they have written the book of their generation, as Fitzgerald may well have done with The Great Gatsby, as Moravia may have done with The Time of Indifference, as Michel Houellebecq may have managed with Atomised or even Martin Amis with Money. We do not judge the quality of the books; we aim to say no more than that there will be little opportunity for the writer to hold such a significant place as the writer of their nation because of so many competing figures. Along with Fitzgerald, there was Hemingway and Faulkner, as well as Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis. Moravia’s contemporaries would include Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Cesare Pavese; Amis’s Ian McEwan, Alisdair Gray, James Kelman, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter and Kazuo Ishiguro. Enough listing of names, however. Our point is merely to say that an Egyptian writer has the advantage of making a name for him or herself in an uncrowded field as a writer from the US etc. cannot. This would, of course, be based on the assumption that the writer wants to make a name for themselves and, perhaps alas, many do. As Rushdie says, “my friend Martin Amis has a wonderful phrase: ‘What you hope to do is leave behind a shelf of books.’ You want to be able to walk into a bookstore and say, ‘From here to here, it’s me.’” Rushdie also reckons The “world is drowning in books; even if you read a great masterpiece every day, you’d never be able to read all the ones that exist already. So if you want to add a book to that mountain, it had better be necessary.” Rushdie is here offering more than a couple of egoistic remarks (Harvard Business Review), but he is also implicitly indicating as a British writer (albeit with an Indian background) he is writing in this crowded market. He would appear to be speaking for himself and trying to reach others. Mahfouz, however, is perhaps an example of the reverse: someone who is writing for others but trying to find himself. Rushdie writes to produce literature out of what is already abundantly there; Mahfouz in creating literature gives both a voice to the people and generates a literature out of that voice.

Naguib Mahfouz / The Art of Fiction

Naguib Mahfouz

The Art of Fiction 

No. 129

Interviewed by Charlotte El Shabrawy

Summer 1992
The Paris Review No. 123

Naguib Mahfouz credits Hafiz Najib—thief, jailbird, renowned cop baiter and author of twenty-two detective novels—with being his earliest literary influence. The ten-year-old Mahfouz read Najib’s Johnson’s Son on the recommendation of an elementary school classmate, and the experience, Mahfouz avows, changed his life.

Mahfouz’s subsequent influences have been many and various. In high school Mahfouz became preoccupied with Taha Husayn, whose revolutionary critical work Fil-shi’r al-Jahili provoked a hysterical reaction from conservative Asharite circles when it was published in 1926. In college Mahfouz read Salama Musa, who as the editor of the magazine al-Majalla al-Jadida later published Mahfouz’s first novel, and from whom Mahfouz says he learned “to believe in science, socialism, and tolerance.”

In the years following the Second World War, Mahfouz retreated from his socialist ideals to a deep pessimism. He spent much of his time engaged in gloomy discussions of life and the purposelessness of literature with fellow writers ‘Adil Kamil and Ahmad Zaki Makhluf, on the lawn area by Cairo’s Jala’ Bridge, which they dubbed “the ominous circle.” In the fifties he experimented with Sufi mysticism, seeking in it answers to the metaphysical questions not addressed by science. These days Mahfouz appears to have settled on a philosophy that combines scientific socialism with a concern for the spiritual—a combination anticipated by the definition of fiction he advanced in 1945: Fiction is art for the industrial age. It represents a synthesis of man’s passion for fact and his age-old love affair with the imagination.

Born in Cairo in 1911, Mahfouz started writing at the age of seventeen and has since written more than thirty novels. Until he retired from the civil service at sixty, he wrote at night, in his spare time—unable, despite his critical successes, to depend on writing for a living. His first published work, Abath al-Aqdar, appeared in 1939, the first in a series of three historical tales set in the time of the pharaohs. Mahfouz originally intended to expand this series into a thirty- or forty-novel history of Egypt in the style of Sir Walter Scott, but he abandoned the project to work on his contemporary Cairo novels, the first of which, Khan al-Khalili, appeared in 1945.

Although much acclaimed in other parts of the Arab world, Mahfouz did not acquire a significant reputation in Egypt until the publication of The Cairo Trilogyin 1957. This three thousand-page epic portrays life in middle-class Cairo between the world wars, and was immediately hailed as the novel of its generation. Mahfouz became known abroad in the late sixties, when a number of his works were translated into English, French, Russian, and German. In 1988 Mahfouz achieved worldwide recognition when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Now eighty, Mahfouz lives in the Cairo suburb of Agouza with his wife and two daughters. He avoids public exposure, especially inquiries into his private life, which might become, as he puts it, “a silly topic in journals and radio programs.” The series of meetings that made up this interview were held on a succession of Thursdays, each time at precisely eleven o’clock. The interviewer sat on a chair to Mahfouz’s left, next to his good ear.

Mahfouz in person is somewhat reserved, but always candid and direct. He laughs frequently and wears an old-fashioned dark blue suit, which he buttons to the top. He smokes, and he likes his coffee bitter.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing?

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ

In 1929. All my stories were rejected. Salama Musa—the editor of Majalla—used to say to me: You have potential, but you’re not there yet. September 1939 I remember well because it was the beginning of World War II, Hitler’s attack on Poland. My story, “Abath al-Aqdar,” was published, a sort of surprise gift from theMajalla publishers. It was an immensely important event in my life.