The Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who has died aged 94, was the first and remains the only Arab winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was the Nobel, awarded in 1988, which brought Mahfouz to prominence outside the Arab world. But at least three decades before, he had established himself as one of the greatest Arab novelists of the 20th century with his Cairo trilogy Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957) and Sugar Street (1957). Mahfouz is best known in the West for this magisterial 1Â 500-page saga of three generations of the Abd al-Jawad family, moving from 1917 to near the end of World War II.
Born in Gamaliya in old Cairo, Mahfouz lived his formative years in a medieval milieu whose narrow alleys and cloistered atmosphere he brilliantly evoked in his early realistic novels, such as Midaq Alley (1947). That irretrievably lost world is most vividly recreated in the Cairo trilogy, as is the quotidian existence of a middle-class Egyptian family living under a patriarchal regime.
After the trilogy, Mahfouz went in for episodic and mystical modes. Those were exhibited most eloquently in Children of our Alley (Children of Gebelawi in English), which was banned after being serialised in 1959 by al-Ahram, the leading Egyptian daily newspaper. Cairo’s religious university, al-Azhar, one of the Islamic world’s leading institutions, forbade the book’s publication because it included characters representing God and the prophets. Mahfouz was accused of blasphemy.
Though the book was later published in Beirut, there was to be a terrible sequel. On October 14 1994, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck outside his home by extremists who were allegedly angered by the book. Mahfouz’s right arm was partly paraÂlysed as a result.
If the Nobel changed the non-Arab world’s perceptions, it had no effect on Mahfouz. He stayed on, with his wife and two daughters, in his ground-floor flat in the middle-class Agouza area beside the Nile in Cairo. He also continued breakfasting at the Ali Baba café on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where he had for decades.
Mahfouz was hospitalised after a bad fall in July this year. Complications led to his death at the end of August. His second funeral, following a smaller ceremony, had the pomp and circumstance of a state affair, with the hearse being followed by Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Indeed, despite the lingering rancour surrounding Children of Gebelawi and minority extremist disaffection with his work, Mahfouz was widely regarded as an Egyptian national treasure.
Mahfouz’s last of more than 30 novels was Qushtumar, published by happenstance in the year of the Nobel, 1988. His last published work, the 14th collection of short stories, was The Seventh Heaven, which came out last year. Its theme was the afterlife, for which he was clearly preparing, if not already prepared.
Naguib Mahfouz was born on December 11 1911 and died on August 30 2006