Region | Egypt
Mahfouz's literary work
Across the span of 34 novels, hundreds of short stories and essays, dozens of movie scripts and five plays, Mahfouz depicted with startling realism the Egyptian "Everyman" balancing between tradition and the modern world.
- AP
- Published: 00:00 August 31, 2006
Across the span of 34 novels, hundreds of short stories and essays, dozens of movie scripts and five plays, Mahfouz depicted with startling realism the Egyptian "Everyman" balancing between tradition and the modern world.
Often the scene of the novels did not stretch beyond a few familiar blocks of Cairo, the 1,000-year-old quarter of the capital where Mahfouz was born.
Cairo Trilogy Masterpiece
The crowded neighbourhood of alleys and centuries-old mosques is the setting for his masterpiece Cairo Trilogy. The trilogy Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, all of which appeared in the 1950s details the adventures and misadventures of a Muslim merchant family not unlike Mahfouz's own.
The trilogy introduced a character who became an icon in Egyptian culture: Si-Sayed, the domineering father, who lords his authority over his wives and daughters but holds the family together a character Mahfouz drew from his own father.
Controversy
It was his 1959 novel Children of Our Alley known by its English title Children of Gabalawi that brought him the most controversy.
It was an allegory for the series of prophets including Jesus and Moses Eissa and Moussa in Arabic and culminates in the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH).
First serialised in Egyptian newspapers in 1959, it caused an uproar much like Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, published a year later.
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Egyptian religious authorities banned it from being published in book form, but it was published in Lebanon and later translated into English.
The controversy was resurrected when Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the death of British writer Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses in a 1989 fatwa, or religious verdict.
In a copycat fatwa the same year, Egyptian hardliner Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman later convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks said Mahfouz deserved to die for Children of Gabalawi.
The controversy over the book was renewed late 2005, when a monthly magazine tried to publish the novel. Mahfouz said he wouldn't agree to republishing it without the consent of Al Azhar, the prestigious Sunni clerical institution in Cairo. But Children of Gabalawi will be republished along with all Mahfouz's other works next year, his publisher said.
Funny incident
Mahfouz spent most of his adult life working for the government, his writing a sideline even as he grew more successful. He once described preparing a parliament speech for the minister of religious endowments.
He handed the minister an envelope containing the speech, then sat down outside parliament to review a short story he also had just finished.
To his horror, he realised he had the speech, and the minister had his story. The young writer rushed into parliament "and exchanged the two envelopes when the minister wasn't looking."
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