LOS ANGELES: Naguib Mahfuz, who died on Wednesday, was the first Arab author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature — for novels that evoked the scent, colour and texture of life in the streets of his native Cairo. He was 94.
The 94-year-old cafe denizen was a literary pioneer and icon of Arab letters. Mahfuz traced in his own life an outline of the daily pleasures and political struggles of his beloved homeland and the broader Arab world. In his writing, he celebrated ordinary Egyptian lives and criticised aristocracy. He suffered a knife wound at the hands of an enraged man, and fretted in his final years over the chaos he feared would engulf Arab nations because of the US-led war in Iraq.
Tiny and frail-looking, in thick, dark eyeglasses and oversized coats that hung from his frame, Mahfuz was a social critic, a philosopher and a passionate defender of free expression.
As a child, Mahfuz both admired the accomplishments of western culture and resented its presence in the form of the British army.
Only seven years old at the time of a 1919 popular uprising that won Egypt partial independence from Britain, he was a lifelong adherent of the values of liberal democracy, tolerance and social justice embodied by the Wafd Party, which led the revolt.
For the first half of his life, Mahfuz wrote — always in longhand with ballpoint pens — in relative obscurity while struggling to get by on the salary of a government bureaucrat.
During a 37-year public-service career until his retirement at age 60, he was at various times a university secretary, an assistant to the minister of religious endowments, a director in the ministry of culture and an adviser on film.
Mahfuz was only 10 or 11 when he decided to become a writer. He was enthralled by cheap European detective stories and would copy them over, changing the names of characters to suit himself. He published his first short story in 1932, still shy of his 21st birthday, and his first novel in 1939. Mahfuz’s magnum opus was The Cairo Trilogy, which he had completed as a single manuscript in 1952 after six years of work. His efforts to have it published as a unified work failed, and it was eventually published in a monthly journal in 1956-57.
The three books — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street — follow one family living in Gamaliya across four decades of social and political upheaval. The novels, which begin before the First World War and end after the Second World War, reveal corruption and licentiousness mixed with piety and dignity in an Egypt undergoing rapid modernisation.
Mahfuz said he took his characters from his experiences but denied that the work was autobiographical. Nevertheless, there were clear parallels to his own childhood in Palace Walk, especially in the sympathetic portrait of Kamal, the youngest son of a stern and emotionally distant father and a doting, indulgent mother.
When Mahfuz began writing, the modern novel barely existed as a literary form in Arabic. But spurred by an urgent need to explore truth through fiction, Mahfuz popularised the novel with the Arab public and inspired legions of younger writers to follow his example.
After Mahfuz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988, British and US publishers rushed to market an English translation of the trilogy to satisfy the curiosity of readers, most of whom had never heard of the Egyptian literary lion.
Western reviewers struggled to define him: He was frequently likened to Charles Dickens, Emile Zola and Isaac Bashevis Singer because of his keen cultural observations.
At the time, John Fowles, the British author, wrote that Mahfuz had provided the ‘rare privilege of entering a national psychology, in a way that thousands of journalistic articles or television documentaries could not achieve’.
Arab readers were ecstatic but thought the honour was long overdue, especially considering that Mahfuz had published his key trilogy three decades earlier. “Nobel Wins the Naguib Mahfuz Prize,” needled a headline in Al Ahram.
Mahfuz was born on December 11, 1911, the youngest of seven children. A decade younger than his next sibling, he lived a solitary childhood.
His father was a minor civil servant who later went to work for a wealthy copper merchant in the bazaar. Although Mahfuz never criticised his father publicly, his fiction is sprinkled with overly strict, even cruel, father figures.
Mahfuz’s birth was apparently a difficult one; he was named Naguib Mahfuz Abdelaziz after the Coptic Christian obstetrician who delivered him, Dr Naguib Mahfuz.
Mahfuz and his family had moved in 1924 to Abbasiya, a more upscale section of Cairo. After attending elementary schools and a high school, he entered King Fouad I University, where he graduated in 1934 with a degree in philosophy.
Later in life, Mahfuz recalled a ‘horrible struggle’ within himself during this period over whether to complete his master’s dissertation in philosophy or pursue his passion for fiction.
“I had to make a decision or go mad,” he said. He chose fiction.
Like many educated Egyptians of his generation, Mahfuz was convinced that the key to lifelong economic security was a government position. He worked at the university for five years before winning an appointment to the ministry of religious endowments, due to the good fortune that a former professor and mentor had become the minister.
Several of Mahfuz’s stories would concern the struggles of young men to get jobs or to get ahead in the government bureaucracy, sometimes by corrupt means.
His first major works of fiction were historical allegories set in ancient Egypt that contained allusions to contemporary society and obliquely criticised the ruling monarchy and the Egyptian aristocracy.
But by the 1940s, Mahfuz had switched to works of social realism and had set his sights on creating an epic novel. That project eventually became The Cairo Trilogy. —Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service
