Naguib Mahfouz; LA Times obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
Los Angeles Times
John Daniszewski, Special to The Times
August 31, 2006 Thursday
HEADLINE: NAGUIB MAHFOUZ | 1911-2006;
Nobelist's Fiction Brought to Life His Beloved Cairo
Naguib Mahfouz, the cafe denizen who became the first Arab
author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature -- for
novels that evoked the scent, color and texture of life in
the streets of his native Cairo -- died Wednesday. He was
94.
Mahfouz had been hospitalized in the Egyptian capital since
taking a fall in July. He died after suffering a bleeding
ulcer, his doctors told news services.
A literary pioneer and icon of Arab letters, Mahfouz 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, poked fun at religion and criticized aristocracy. He
suffered a knife wound at the hands of an enraged Muslim
fundamentalist, and fretted in his final years over the
chaos he feared would engulf Arab nations because of the
U.S.-led war in Iraq.
"I have a terrible vision of the reign of chaos," Mahfouz
said in Egypt's semiofficial Al Ahram newspaper at the end
of 2002 during the run-up to the invasion. "And those Arabs
who imagine they will be at a safe distance are under a
foolish and grave illusion, for they will be the first to
pay the price of the war."
Tiny and frail-looking, in thick, dark eyeglasses and
oversized coats that hung from his frame, Mahfouz was a
social critic, a philosopher and a passionate defender of
free expression who remained undaunted by the threats of
religious extremists who considered his work an affront to
Islam.
Although condemned to death in a \o7fatwa \f7handed down by
radical Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, Mahfouz
refused to alter his routine of 30 years. He spent every
Friday evening engaged in repartee and gossip with a circle
of friends and literary colleagues at a favorite coffee shop
in Cairo's clamorous downtown.
It was en route to one such sitting that he was attacked in
1994 by a young fanatic who later acknowledged that he had
never read a single Mahfouz novel. The attacker buried a
knife in Mahfouz's throat.
The wound missed the author's carotid artery but caused
nerve damage, leaving his right hand -- the one with which
he wrote -- incapacitated. After the attack, Mahfouz's
already poor eyesight and hearing deteriorated even more.
But he retained his love of life.
"The channels between myself and the sources of culture have
been severed," he said in a 1997 interview with The Times.
"There is no book in my life now; there is no TV or music. I
have only my friends left.... They tell me about the
novelties in life, and I am pleased with that."
Raised in the Gamaliya district in the heart of what is
today known as Islamic Cairo, he was a keen observer of the
colorful characters and the quotidian conflicts of the
families living in the warren of streets surrounding the
1,000-year-old Al Azhar Mosque.
As a child, Mahfouz both admired the accomplishments of
Western culture and resented its presence in the form of the
British army.
Only 7 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.
The various political philosophies that washed over the
intellectual classes in the Arab world during his
lifetime -- Marxism, Arab nationalism and Islamic
fundamentalism -- held little allure for Mahfouz. He was an
early advocate of detente with Israel and, to the chagrin of
many of his compatriots, defended the 1978 Camp David
accords until the time of his death.
For the first half of his life, Mahfouz wrote -- always in
longhand with ballpoint pens -- in relative obscurity while
struggling to get by on the salary of a government
bureaucrat.
"In the mornings, I was an employee. In the afternoons, I
was a writer," he recalled.
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 advisor on film.
Ironically, for a lifelong advocate of free artistic
expression, he also served for a number of years as Egypt's
chief censor.
By all accounts, he was an able and conscientious employee,
giving government business his full attention during working
hours, and he said that the contacts he had with the public
in his daily duties provided grist for his fiction.
With prodigious discipline, he returned home in the
afternoon for a late lunch and then without fail would sit
down and write for at least two hours each day. By the end
of his life, he had produced more than 50 novels and short
story collections, in addition to several volumes of essays,
a number of screenplays and countless newspaper columns.
Mahfouz 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. Mahfouz'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 World War I and end after World
War II, reveal corruption and licentiousness mixed with
piety and dignity in an Egypt undergoing rapid
modernization.
Mahfouz 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 Mahfouz began writing, the modern novel barely existed
as a literary form in Arabic, the language of the Koran and
of traditional poetry. But spurred by an urgent need to
explore truth through fiction, Mahfouz popularized the novel
with the Arab public and inspired legions of younger writers
to follow his example.
After Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988, British
and U.S. 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
Mahfouz 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 honor was long
overdue, especially considering that Mahfouz had published
his key trilogy three decades earlier. "Nobel Wins the
Naguib Mahfouz Prize," needled a headline in Al Ahram.
Mahfouz was born Dec. 11, 1911, the youngest of seven
children. A decade younger than his next sibling, he lived a
solitary childhood. He came of age at a time when married
women remained veiled and locked away behind wooden
latticework \o7mashrabiya \f7screens, water sellers walked
the streets and families lived on top of one another along
alleys so narrow that people could reach out and touch their
neighbors across the way. It was also a highly religious
period.
His father was a minor civil servant who later went to work
for a wealthy copper merchant in the bazaar. Although
Mahfouz never criticized his father publicly, his fiction is
sprinkled with overly strict, even cruel, father figures.
Mahfouz's birth was apparently a difficult one; he was named
Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz after the Coptic Christian
obstetrician who delivered him, Dr. Naguib Mahfouz.
Mahfouz apparently liked the doctor's name, because he never
used Abdelaziz, his father's clearly Muslim surname.
According to Menahem Milson's 1998 literary biography --
"Najib Mahfuz: The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo" -- Mahfouz
lost a government scholarship to study in France because of
this.
As he later disclosed, the committee handing out the
scholarships based on a competitive examination assumed that
Mahfouz was Christian and, not wanting to give too many
prizes to the Coptic minority, awarded his to a
lower-scoring Muslim.
Mahfouz and his family had moved in 1924 to Abbasiya, a more
upscale section of Cairo. After attending Islamic elementary
schools and a secular high school, he entered King Fouad I
University, where he graduated in 1934 with a degree in
philosophy.
Later in life, as cited by Milson, Mahfouz 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, Mahfouz 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 Mahfouz'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 criticized the ruling
monarchy and the high-living, Europe-worshiping pashas and
beys of the Egyptian aristocracy.
But by the 1940s, Mahfouz had switched to works of social
realism and had set his sights on creating an epic novel
about his fellow latter-day Cairenes in the tradition of
Dostoevski. That project eventually became "The Cairo
Trilogy."
After finishing the 1,200-page manuscript in 1952, and
having failed to immediately find a publisher because it was
so long, Mahfouz stopped writing books for five years and
concentrated on screenplays. It was only after "Palace Walk"
was finally published in 1956, to immediate acclaim, that he
returned to literature.
A 1959 novel, "The Children of Gebelawi," landed Mahfouz in
trouble with Muslim conservatives. Serialized in Al Ahram,
it was an allegory about religion with characters
representing the prophet Muhammad, Jesus and Moses. The
novel caused such a stir that it was never published in book
form in Egypt.
But after Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel and Iran's Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini issued a \o7fatwa\f7 in 1989 against
Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie, extremists in
Egypt dredged up the memory of the book and declared Mahfouz
to be the Egyptian Rushdie, deserving of death for apostasy.
When the attack came in 1994, it was a shock, Mahfouz said.
"They had been threatening me for a long time. But I never
grasped the possibility that they might kill a writer
because of a story he wrote. They used to try to assassinate
ministers, or even the president, but to kill writers --
this was rather new."
In the 1960s, Mahfouz shed the strict social realism of his
earlier works and began to publish detached, existentialist
short novels. Of these, the best known is "The Thief and the
Dogs," which casts a bleak light on the failures of the
military officers and their hangers-on who took over when
Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser threw out the Egyptian monarchy in
1952.
After his retirement from government work, Mahfouz kept an
office at Al Ahram and wrote a popular weekly column filled
with sage and pithy observations on the questions of the
day.
Throughout his life, Mahfouz maintained a strong underlying
belief in God.
"I think of him always," he said in his 1997 interview with
The Times. But he did not believe that his success had been
preordained. "They say that after something happens, it
becomes fate," he laughed.
Because of his strict observation of routine and schedules,
Mahfouz was considered something of an eccentric even by his
friends and companions. He left Egypt only three times,
twice on the instructions of Nasser to represent the nation
at official meetings in Yugoslavia and Yemen and once for
surgery in Britain. Even within Egypt, he never strayed
beyond Cairo except for his annual seaside holiday in
Alexandria.
Pleading ill health, he sent his daughters to Stockholm to
accept the Nobel on his behalf. In his 1997 interview he
explained: "I don't like to travel, so I have arranged my
life this way. I traveled only in cases of \o7force
\f7\o7majeure\f7."
Mahfouz often remarked that he could have done without the
celebrity that came with the Nobel. He was once quoted in a
profile in the New York Times as saying: "I am a very old
man, an introvert. So winning the Nobel was terrible for me.
I won the prize, yes, but I lost everything else."
He was at once extremely private and extremely gregarious.
He never tired of sitting in crowded cafes or of his weekly
literary discussions with his circle of friends. Yet he
could be so reticent on personal topics that some of these
same colleagues did not realize until years after the fact
that he had quietly married at age 43. He is survived by his
wife, Attiyatullah, and two daughters, Fatima and Umm
Kulthoum.
As he described it, he liked variety in his life -- but a
very ordered variety. "I don't like a week to pass without
having gone to the movies, and to the theater, and to have
worked and to have met my friends."
Asked late in life what had given him the most pleasure,
Mahfouz paused before answering: "To tell you the truth,
there is nothing but my work. I dedicated my life to
writing, in spite of the fact that I remained an employee
all my life." Over the years, he said, the great lesson that
he learned was "to love my work more than its fruit -- more
than what it could earn me."
He will be buried today with a military funeral at a Cairo
mosque.
Times staff writer Megan K. Stack in Beirut contributed to
this report.
*
()
Major works
A look at some of the best-known fiction of Egyptian Nobel
laureate Naguib Mahfouz:
* "The Cairo Trilogy" (1956-57): This tripartite epic --
"Palace Walk," "Palace of Desire" and "Sugar Street" --
charts the life of a merchant and his extended family living
in Islamic Cairo, the 1,000-year-old quarter of the capital
where Mahfouz
was born. The domineering father casts an enduring shadow
over three generations of his family in a tale that
stretches over the first part of the 20th century.
* "The Children of Gebelawi" or "The Children of the Alley"
(1959): The patriarch Gebelawi retreats to a mansion he has
built in a desert oasis, banishing his children. The book is
an allegory of the series of prophets that Islam believes
includes Jesus and Moses -- Eissa and Moussa in Arabic --
and culminates in Muhammad. First serialized in Egyptian
newspapers in 1959, the novel was banned in book form in
Egypt.
* "Miramar" (1967): The story of a beautiful peasant girl
who comes to work as a maid at an Alexandria hotel and her
dealings with its residents. Told by four narrators, each
representing different political views, the book was seen as
a criticism of the rule of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel
Nasser.
* "The Day the Leader was Killed" (1985): A young man and
his fiancee struggle with poverty and limited opportunities,
trying to get married. The story leads up to the day when
President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamic militants
in 1981, depicting the effect of Sadat's rule on Egypt.
Source: Associated Press
*
An Excerpt
She woke at midnight. She always woke up then without having
to rely on an alarm clock. A wish that had taken root in her
awoke her with great accuracy. For a few moments she was not
sure she was awake. Images from her dreams and perceptions
mixed together in her mind. She was troubled by anxiety
before opening her eyes, afraid sleep had deceived her.
Shaking her head gently, she gazed at the total darkness of
the room. There was no clue by which to judge the time. The
street noise outside her room would continue until dawn. She
could hear the babble of voices from the coffeehouses and
bars, whether it was early evening, midnight, or just before
daybreak. She had no evidence to rely on except her
intuition, like a conscious clock hand, and the silence
encompassing the house, which revealed that her husband had
not yet rapped at the door and that the tip of his stick had
not yet struck against the steps of the staircase.
Habit awoke her at this hour. It was an old habit she had
developed when young and it had stayed with her as she
matured. She had learned it along with the other rules of
married life. She woke up at midnight to await her husband's
return from his evening's entertainment. Then she would
serve him until he went to sleep. She sat up in bed
resolutely to overcome the temptation posed by sleep. After
invoking the name of God, she slipped out from under the
covers and onto the floor. Groping her way to the door, she
guided herself by the bedpost and a panel of the window. As
she opened the door, faint rays of light filtered in from a
lamp set on a bracketed shelf in the sitting room. She went
to fetch it, and the glass projected onto the ceiling a
trembling circle of pale light hemmed in by darkness. She
placed the lamp on the table by the sofa. The light shone
throughout the room, revealing the large, square floor, high
walls, and ceiling with parallel beams. The quality of the
furnishings was evident: the Shiraz carpet, large brass bed,
massive armoire, and long sofa draped with a small rug in a
patchwork design of different motifs and colors.
\o7 From \f7\o7"Palace Walk" \f7\o7by Naguib Mahfouz
\f7
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: HONOR: A woman in Cairo passes near a statue
of native son Naguib Mahfouz. PHOTOGRAPHER: Khaled El-Fiqi
European Pressphoto Agency PHOTO: LITERARY LION: Naguib
Mahfouz traced in his own life an outline of the daily
pleasures and political struggles of his beloved homeland
and the broader Arab world. His writings celebrated ordinary
Egyptian lives, poked fun at religion and criticized
aristocracy. PHOTOGRAPHER: European Pressphoto Agency PHOTO:
ICON: Naguib Mahfouz in his Cairo home, a few days after
winning the Nobel Prize in 1988. Six years later, he was
wounded by a Muslim extremist incited by condemnation of his
works. PHOTOGRAPHER: Peter Oftedal AFP/Getty Images