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Last of the titans Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who passed away recently, was the best-known writer of the Arab world. He earned the Arabic novel respect and popularity and his literary career mapped the changes in Egyptian history
In 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in 1911 in the popular quarter of Gamaliya in the heart of old Cairo, he devoted his life and work to his native city. His vivid recollections of old Cairo inspired his work, from his early novels up to his last, Qushtumor (1988). He published his first novel, Abath al-aqdar (Absurd Fates, 1939). This and the following two novels, Radubis (Radobis, 1943) and Kifah Tibah (The Struggle of Thebes, 1944) were historical works written as a part of a grand plan to employ the narrative genre in relating the history of Egypt from the time of the Pharaohs to the present. After reading Ivanhoe at secondary school, Mahfouz had become fascinated by the historical novels of Walter Scott and embarked on this grand project under his influence. The historical setting was merely an attempt to root the work in Egypt’s glorious history and use this to help develop a sense of national identity. But after writing three novels without making a dent in the vast history of Egypt (he was still in the early pharaonic period), he turned his attention to the present. This coincided with World War II, an important period in Mahfouz’s career. During these turbulent years he became increasingly aware of the need to deal with social issues. The title of his first socio-realistic novel, Al-Qahira al-jadida ("New Cairo"), written in the first year of the war but not published until 1943, sums up his new preoccupation. He was concerned with the transformation of Cairo both as a city and as a distinct urban culture. This culminated in Al-thulathiya (translated as The Cairo Trilogy), the masterpiece of the Cairene urban chronicles. The Cairo Trilogy its three volumes Bayn al-qasrayn (1956; translated as Palace Walk, 1990), Qasr al-shawq (1957; Palace of Desire, 1991) and Al-sukkariyya (1957; Sugar Street, 1992) - spans half a century of Egypt’s quest for national identity and modernisation over three different generations. It is the greatest family saga of modern Arabic literature and the work that enshrines middle-class morality and culture. Inspired by Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. The trilogy reflects the cultural and political development of a society in turmoil under the pressures of the British occupation, and draws a highly detailed map of Egypt’s political orientations. It sets out the major social stereotypes of relationships, emotions and roles to the extent that its hero, Ahmad Abdul-Jawwad, based on Mahfouz’s own father, has become the Egyptian patriarch par excellence. The Cairo Trilogy ends with the death of the patriarch and the birth of a new child heralding the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. The completion of the trilogy coincided with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolution of 1952 which ended the ancient regime. The radical change brought by this revolution led Mahfouz to five years of contemplation in which he stopped writing. The revolution had removed in one stroke the three major topics of Mahfouz’s attention—the monarchy, the British occupation and the corrupt political system. His writing was inspired by a desire to create an awareness of the need for socio-political changes, and the desired change was taking place at a very rapid pace.In 1959 Mahfouz published his major novel Awlad haritna (Children of Gebelawi, 1981), which was serialised in the newspaper Al-Ahram. As soon as its serialisation was complete, the Azhar, the major religious authority in Egypt, moved a resolution banning it from publication in book form. But in 1966 the book was published in Beirut and was allowed calmly into Cairo until it was banned again on the heels of Salman Rushdie’s case (in 1994 Mahfouz himself was attacked and stabbed outside his house in Cairo). The book enraged the religious establishment. An allegorical novel, it was interpreted as solely a narrative account of the story of creation and man’s spiritual and intellectual development through the three major religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — reaching the peak of his intellectual and spiritual maturity with the age of reason. Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war, realising the prophecy of doom enshrined in Miramar (1967), the last novel of this period, came as a shock none the less and led to another period of silence in Mahfouz’s career. Instead of turning his attention to writing films, he poured his energy into short stories and one-act plays. His narrative world is peopled with characters from all walks of Egyptian life, from beggars to aristocrats, with a special place reserved for the intellectuals with whom Mahfouz identifies. On the literary plane, his career spans the whole process of development of the Arabic novel from the historical to the modern. By arrangement with The Independent
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