MEGASTARS
MEGASTARS
"Naguib Mahfouz is not only a Hugo and a Dickens,
but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romains"- Prof. Edward Said
The Ambassador of Arabic Literature
Nobel Prize Laureate Naguib Mahfouz
(1911-2006)
By Essam Farag
The Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, has for several decades been the beacon for literature in the Arab world and the father of the modern Arabic novel. During his illustrious 95-year career, he wrote more than 30 novels, and in 1988 became the first Arab to be awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature. He died in hospital on 30 August, 2006 after injuring himself in a fall in July. His funeral resulted in the coordination of two funeral services, one held at Al-Husain Mosque in Al-Azhar district of Cairo based on his wishes as mentioned in his will, and the other service was a military funeral held in Nasr City with his coffin draped in an Egyptian flag attended by President Hosni Mubarak. Naguib Mahfouz was arguably the greatest Arab novelist of the 20th Century. Internationally, Mahfouz was best known for winning the Nobel Prize, after which many of his novels were translated into English and other languages. Furthermore, the international media noted that Mahfouz was a man of peace and the with some reports referring to him as the "Pharaoh of Arabic Literature."
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak paid tribute to the writer upon his death, noting that "Mahfouz was a cultural light... who brought Arab literature to the world," adding also that the author expressed "values of enlightenment and tolerance." Furthermore, US President George Bush also expressed his condolences, calling Mahfouz "an extraordinary artist who conveyed the richness of Egyptian history and society to the world". Many scholars also spoke of the great literary writer, including Egyptian writer Ahdaf Souief, saying "He [Mahfouz] was a massively important influence on Arabic literature. He was our greatest living novelist for a very long time and was an innovator in the use of the Arabic language." French President Jacques Chirac alongside Amr Moussa Secretary-General of the Arab League and all the Arab leaders offered their condolences for the passing of Naguib Mahfouz, while Sir Derek Blamely, British Ambassador to Egypt, noted that the British people loved Egypt partly because of the novels of Naguib Mahfouz.
Who is Who?
 Prof. Naguib Pasha Mahfouz with President Mohammed Naguib in 1953 |
Naguib Mahfouz, born in the Gamaliya quarter of Cairo on 11 December 1911, named after Professor Naguib Pasha Mahfouz (1882-1974), who was the obstetrician who delivered him. He grew up in a middle-class family that was ruled by a strong willed father. He completed a degree in philosophy from Fouad University and then joined the civil service in a series of postings until finally working as a consultant to the Ministry of Culture. He retired in 1972 to work for Egyptian Al-Ahram daily newspaper.
In his lifetime, Mahfouz produced over 50 books, with some having been translated into 33 languages. Many of his novels were also turned into television productions such as including movies and soap operas. The best known titles include: The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street) published in the 1950s, Children of the Alley published in 1959, The Thief and the Dogs published in 1961, Miramar published in 1967, and The Day the Leader was Killed published in 1985. His final published major work came in 2005 which was a collection of stories about the afterlife titled, The Seventh Heaven. He mentioned, "Spirituality for me is of high importance and continuously provides inspiration for me."
Like many Egyptian men, cafe life was an essential element of his existence. El-Fishawy Cafe, Cafe Riche, and a restaurant near the Nile River (Aly Baba Cafe) near his home when he became older with heart problems, diabetes, poor eyesight and hearing loss. The Cairo Trilogy introduced a character who became an icon in Egyptian culture: Si-sayid, the domineering father casts an enduring shadow over the three generations of his family, in a tale that stretches over the first part of the 20th century. Si-sayid lords his authority over his wives and daughters but holds the family together. He was a strong voice for moderation and religious tolerance. However, it was his 1959 novel, Children of the Alley or Children of Gabalawy, which brought him the most controversy and resulted in his stabbing. It caused an uproar much like Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, and Egyptian authorities banned it from being published in book form, but it was published in Lebanon and later translated into English. In 1989, the Egyptian radical sheik, Omar Abdulrahman, said that Naguib Mahfouz deserved to die for writing Children of the Alley in 1959. In October 1994, he was attacked by a group of radical Muslims inspired by militant clerics who ruled that the novel was blasphemous. Naguib was driving to a Cairo cafe shop for a weekly meeting with other Egyptian writers, when a car pulled alongside and a man stepped out, reaching through the car window and stabbing him in the neck, damaging nerves leading to serious impairment of his right arm limiting his writing ability. Two weeks prior to the stabbing, Mahfouz told the Paris Review, that he found parts of The Satanic Verses unacceptable and that Salman Rushdie had insulted Prophet Muhammad in his novel. After a serious fall down a flight of stairs in mid-July 2006, Mahfouz remained seriously ill until his death on 30 August 2006.
In late 2005, an Egyptian monthly magazine tried to publish the novel but Mahfouz said he would not agree to republish it without the consent of Al-Azhar, the highest Muslim religious authority in Egypt, but Ibrahim El-Moallem, of Dar El-Shorouk (publisher), had agreed with Mr. Mahfouz to celebrate his 95th birthday by publishing all his works including The Children of the Alley.
His Life
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Among his interests as a young man, he would play football (soccer), go to the cinema weekly, play music, and visiting many museums. As a young adult, he also enjoyed spending time with his friends and sitting down to listen to the sounds of Um Kalthoum. He used to make frequent visits to Cairo's various cafes, including Cafe Riche, which became one of his primary hotspots, in which he used to sit regularly at a very particular spot, analyzing the cultural interactions around him in a constant collection of information for his novels, as he gets served his coffee by the shops famous and trademark waiter, Filfil. Naguib Mahfouz read and was affected by the writings of Al-Akkad, Taha Hussein, Al-Manfaloti, Heikal Pasha, Al-Mazni and Salama Moussa. Also, while working at Al-Ahram newspaper, he enjoyed sitting with intellects on the 6th floor of the building, including Tawfik El-Hakim, Youssef Adris, Louis Awad, Hussein Fawzy, Sarwat Abaza, Lotfy El-Khouli, and Aisha Abdulrahman. Mahfouz, the peace activist and the voice of multiculturalism, was met with many stressful situations throughout his life, but was never broken.
There has been a tendency to divide Mahfouz's writings into a number of periods: historical, realistic and metaphysical-mystical phases. In the final decades of his life, Mahfouz became a fixture on the Cairo literary scene, and was most frequently to be found in the company of friends and colleagues at Nile-side cafes. His last novel, 1988's semi-autobiographical Qushtumar, centres on the lives of four elderly friends who meet weekly at a cafe that gives the book its title. Raymond Stock, Mahfouz's American biographer and translator, named Mahfouz's as "a great son of Egypt, a patriot in the fullest sense of the word." But his relevance extends far beyond the boundaries of his native country. His work, according to Fatma Moussa, a renowned Egyptian critic and writer, "has to do with the plight of humanity as a whole. He has presented it from the local angle, but it's not really local at all. It's kind of a microcosm of the whole world, a little image of the fate of man." The late Palestinian-American philosopher, Edward Said had described Mahfouz saying, "He is not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola and a Jules Romains," emphasizing the large spectrum within which his great writings spanned and the amazing quality level at which they were written in order to be compared to all these great writers. As a result, his productions have meant a powerful upswing for the novel as a genre and for the development of the literary language in Arabic-speaking cultural circles.
His Vision
Although Mahfouz's novelistic technique passed through
recognizable stages, one cannot say the same about his world view, the main
features of which can be traced back to his earliest works. Mahfouz appears
indeed to have sorted out the main questions about life in his youth and to have held on the answers he arrived at ever since, age and
experience serving only to deepen and broaden but hardly to modify them. A socio-political
view of man's existence is at the very root of almost everything that Mahfouz
has written. The social message is aptly woven into the texture of
his works: man is not meant to spend his life on Earth in a futile search and his
only true hope of salvation is the exertion of a positive and responsible effort
to better his lot and that of others. Naguib Mahfouz has always been a socially
committed writer with a deep concern for the problem of social injustice is an
incontestable fact. To him individual morality is inseparable from social
morality. In other words, according to his moral code, those who only seek
their own individual salvation are damned; to him nirvana is, as it were, a
distinctly collective state. On the other hand, characters who are saved in
Mahfouz's books are only those with altruistic motives, those who show concern
for others and demonstrate a kind of awareness of their particular predicament
being part of a more general one.
The picture of the world as it emerges from the bulk of Mahfouz's work is very gloomy indeed, though not completely despondent. It shows that the author's social utopia is far from being realized. Mahfouz seems to conceive of time as a metaphysical force of oppression. His novels have consistently shown time as the bringer of change, and change as a very painful process, and very often time is not content until it has dealt his heroes the final blow of death. To sum up, in Mahfouz's dark tapestry of the world there are only two bright spots. These consists of man's continuing struggle for equality on the one hand and the promise of scientific progress on the other; meanwhile, life is a tragedy. Mahfouz creates an intricate pattern of verbal irony which he weaves into the very texture of the novel and maintains throughout. This pattern of verbal irony engenders in the reader an awareness of the incongruity between the object and mode of expression, i.e. the realistic situation and the hyperbolic terms in which it is rendered. This awareness creates and sustains, all the way through, a sense of dramatic irony where the reader is, as it were, cognizant of a basic fact of which the protagonist is ignorant, namely that his obsession has misguided him. It is in the creation and sustainment of this pattern of verbal irony, and in the complete subjugation of the novelistic experience to a language order originally alien to it, that Mahfouz has achieved a feat unprecedented not only in his own work but probably in Arabic fiction altogether.
Awards and Honours
Long
established as one of the Middle East's finest and best-loved
writers, and an ardent advocate of moderation and religious tolerance, Mahfouz's
acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1988 brought him to international notice. The Swedish Academy's decision
for the Nobel Prize in
Literature made it the first time it be awarded to an Egyptian and the first literary Nobel Prizewinner
with Arabic as his native tongue. The Egyptian Philatelic Bureau issued a series
of stamps commemorating his world-acclaimed honour. He was granted the award recognizing his great and decisive achievement as the
writer of novels and short stories.
Nationally, in 1968 he received the
Egyptian Government's State
Recognition Award in Literature and in 1972, he was awarded the Egypt's Decoration of Republic of the 1st Order.
In 1988, Mahfouz received the Collar of the Nile from President Hosni Mubarak, which is the highest order in Egypt.
In 1992, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and
Letters as an honorary member, and he has received countless other awards
internationally. Furthermore, in
1996, the American University in Cairo (AUC), established the Naguib Mahfouz
Medal for Literature to honour Arabic writers on an annual basis. Recognition of
Mahfouz also led to the
building of a statue in his honour, as well as having the street on which he
lived in Egypt named after him shortly following his death. Furthermore, his
books continue to be re-published in Egypt, by Dar El-Shirook in Arabic and the
American University in Cairo Press in English.
Following his death, Al-Araby Kuwaiti monthly magazine (Chief Editor, Dr. Suleiman Al-Askari), produced an exemplary special issue in December 2006, profiling the man, the life, the writings, and interesting female characters in his books.
In honour of Naguib Mahfouz, he is featured in a caricature (by George
Bahgouri) with Taha Hussein, Youssef Adris, Mustafa and Ali Amin, Kamel El-Shinawy,
Salah Abdel Sabour, Tawfik El-Hakeem, Um Kalthoum and others which is displayed
at Cafe Riche. Today, Cafe Riche, is a hot spot for people from around the world
to visit the place where the Arab Shakespeare wrote most of his novels, a
lasting opportunity to pay homage to a guru.
Naguib Mahfouz Books Database
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Essam Farag, BA Honors (Dalhousie), MA (Guelph) is currently
the special projects coordinator for the National Council on Canada-Arab
Relations (NCCAR). He is the Production Editor of the Ambassadors Magazine.
Email: essamfarag@ambassadors.net
