Naguib Mahfouz
From Philosopedia
Naguib Mahfouz (11 December 1911 - 30 August 2006)
Mahfouz (Arabic: نجيب محفوظ, Nağīb Maḥfūẓ) was the novelist who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, the youngest of seven children of a civil servant in Cairo, Egypt.
He spent his early childhood in the old city's Gamaliya quarter, a place which was the setting of many of his books and during a time when nationalism flourished against rule by the British.
In high school he studied Arabic literature, and at the University of Cairo, from which he graduated in 1932, he studied philosophy and read works by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Proust, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, O'Neill, Shaw, Ibsen, and Strindberg.
Over 80 of his short stories were published in magazines, and in 1938 he published a collection, The Whisper of Madness followed in 1939 by his first novel, The Games of Fate, a thinly veiled attack against British occupation but which was set in ancient Egypt to avoid censorship.
A longtime civil servant, Mahfouz served in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and, finally, as a consultant to the Ministry of Culture. He published more than 30 novels. Many of his novels were first published in serialized form, including Children of Gebelawi and Midaq Alley, which was adapted into a Mexican film starring Salma Hayek (El callejón de los milagros).
Children of Gebelawi (1959), one of Mahfouz's best known works, has been banned in Egypt for alleged blasphemy over its allegorical portrayal of God and the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The story told the history of five generations of people, all of whom follow one leader. Mahfouz depicted his characters as followers of a monotheistic religious faith, and not only personified Islamic prophets - considered blasphemous - but at the end, has the character called "Knowledge" kill the character called "The Supervisor," who represents God. The clear implication was to say, as Nietzsche [[]] did, that in the modern world, God is dead.
Mahfouz was known and loved for his detailed portrayals of life in modern Egypt. In his stories, he explored issues like women's roles in society, political prisoners, and relations with the West from a realistic point of view previously unseen in Arabic literature. The Swedish Academy of Letters hailed his humanistic work as "an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind."
In 1989, after the fatwa for apostasy against Salman Rushdie, a blind Egyptian theologian, Omar Abdul-Rahman, who later was convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks, told a journalist that if Mahfouz had been punished for writing this novel, Rushdie would not have dared publish his. Sheikh Omar has always maintained that this was not a fatwa, but in 1994 Islamic extremists, believing that it had been one, attempted to assassinate the 82-year-old novelist, stabbing him in the neck outside his Cairo home, a stabbing that impaired use of his hands although he continued to write. He survived and lived afterward under constant bodyguard protection. Finally, in the beginning of 2006, the novel was published in Egypt with a preface written by Ahmad Kamal Abu Almajd.
US trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas titled a song "Mahfouz" on his 2001 album. Witness. The 25-minute piece features singer Tom Waits reading an excerpt from Mahfouz's works.
Because of his outspoken support for President Anwar Sadat's Camp David peace treaty with Israel, his books were banned in many Arab countries. This changed after he won the Nobel prize.
Of his significance, The Economist (2 September 2006) commented, • Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s he produced the dozen realist novels that are widely considered the main body of his work. He rarely touched directly on the big events of the times but, like the European novelists he so enjoyed, he explored historical trends as experienced by ordinary people. Through them, he descried the clash between tradition and modernity, the alienation of the individual, the struggle for personal dignity amid pervasive poverty and state repression. The result was a body of work that bore comparison with Balzac and Dickens. But Mr. Mahfouz also introduced his audience to a new way of seeing. He enriched an Arabic literature which, while perhaps incomparable for its poetry, was then still largely innocent of the fully formed imaginary world of the novel.
Prior to his death, Mahfouz was the oldest living Nobel Literature laureate and the third oldest of all time, trailing only British philosopher Bertrand Russell and Icelandic Catholic Halldor Laxness.
In July 2006, Mahfouz sustained an injury to his head as a result of a fall. The 94-year-old was badly hurt and, after briefly responding to treatment the week before he died, the diabetic Mahfouz suffered a serious hemorrhage of the colon, required a blood transfusion because of ulcer colon bleeding. and the nearly blind major novelist of the modern Arab world failed to recover because of a kidney dysfunction.
Known for his wit and humor, he once observed that “Life is wise to deceive us, for had it told us from the start what it had in store for us, we would refuse to be born." When he was visited in his hospital room a few days before his death and was asked if he needed anything, the request was mistranslated to see if he needed anything from America. "Yes," Mahfouz replied in English. "I want all the states."
At the moment before his heart stopped, according to a Cairo journalist, Mahfouz was smiling as his wife whispered into his ear.
