Naguib Mahfouz is gone....
Bob Cooper
Mubarak's security detail can always use a few new men.
They gave him a big funeral on TV.
======================================================
http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060831-080013-8748r
Egypt bids farewell to Arab literary giant Mahfouz
Riad Abu Awad
AFP
August 31, 2006
FAREWELL: Naguib Mahfouz, celebrated as one of the greatest writers
in modern Arab literature, died at the age of 94, August 30. Cairo's
district of Nasr City was blocked off to traffic as Mahfouz was given a
fully fledged national funeral August 31.
CAIRO -- Egypt bade farewell Thursday to its Nobel prize-winning novelist
Naguib Mahfouz, celebrated as one of the greatest writers in modern Arab
literature, who died at the age of 94.
Cairo's district of Nasr City was blocked off to traffic as Mahfouz, who
died Wednesday after weeks of illness, was given a fully fledged national
funeral, attended by President Hosni Mubarak and top officials.
The author's coffin was wrapped in an Egyptian flag and briefly carried
on a horse-drawn hearse down a soldier-lined street in the capital, as the
official procession walked slowly behind.
Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of Al Azhar mosque led the funeral
"prayer for the absent" at nearby Rashdan mosque as Egypt mourned
the world's foremost Arab writer and one of its most renowned
ambassadors.
The procession, broadcast live on national television, was preceded
by a more intimate religious ceremony when around 200 people
gathered at the Al Hussein mosque in old Islamic Cairo for the public
funeral that Mahfouz had requested before his death.
(...)
US President George W. Bush said "the writings of this extraordinary
author of novels, short stories, and film scripts transcend all stereotypes
and show the deepest insight into the lives of Egyptians and of all
mankind."
(...)
====================================================
"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether
a man is wise by his questions."
-- Naguib Mahfouz
Count 1
"Bob Cooper" <rcoo...@cox.net> wrote in message
news:m9FJg.6493$SZ3.1408@dukeread04...
Thanks Mr. Cooper. That's an excellent quote.
I Hate muzzies
Too bad his writing was all crap. Is he the best muzzies could offer?
arash...@yahoo.com
210.211.117.172), on a daily basis insults Muslims (He is Jewish). He
also uses the name "I Hate muzzies", "All muzzies are dirty, filthy,
stinking pigs".
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/ea50ecf18928cc9f
Complaints-To: groups...@google.com
Veridas Communications
Brisbane, Australia
abuse[AT]veridas.net
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From: "I Hate muzzies" <ruma...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: alt.religion.islam,soc.culture.iranian
Subject: Re: Naguib Mahfouz is gone....
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Alfred Kleine Beverborch
wrote in alt.religion.islam:
>http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060831-080013-8748r
>Egypt bids farewell to Arab literary giant Mahfouz
>Riad Abu Awad AFP August 31, 2006
Egyptian Nobel laureate's iconoclasm annoyed extremists
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20317480-5001986,00.html
September 01, 2006
Naguib Mahfouz
Novelist. Born Cairo, Egypt, December 11, 1911.
Died Cairo, August 30, aged 94.
THE father of the contemporary Egyptian novel, Naguib Mahfouz
remains the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel Prize in
Literature, which was awarded to him in 1988.
His influence was immense not only on the literature of Egypt, but
on Arab creative writing in general. His great strength was that he
confined himself to themes that he knew best and seldom strayed
from the streets of Cairo and their denizens.
Mahfouz built on the pioneering experiments of Muhammad Haykal, who
had produced the first plausible modern fiction in Arabic, ridding
it of its tendency to become trapped in moralising. Like Haykal, he
well appreciated the problems posed for the creative writer by
Arabic, a tongue understood from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to
the Gulf of Oman and beyond, but as a written language in his era
so formal and remote from the spoken word as to be an unsuitable
vehicle for modern, realistic fiction.
Haykal had written of the villages of the Nile delta. Mahfouz's
achievement was to fuse the colloquial speech of the Cairo streets
with literary Arabic to give his novels a distinctively urban and
Egyptian flavour.
Mahfouz was born in the medieval Gamaliya quarter of Cairo. He
graduated from Cairo University in philosophy and, like many a
middle-class Egyptian, went into government service, in which he
was to be employed for the next 35 years.
Haykal's Zaynab, a study of a village girl of the Nile delta,
published in 1913, was at that time the only native model that an
aspiring Egyptian novelist could look to. But besides immersing
himself in the works of ancient Egyptian writers, Mahfouz had read
voraciously European novelists: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert,
Balzac and Camus.
He had particularly come under the influence of Walter Scott, and
it is Scott who is evident in his first attempt at fiction, A Game
of Fates (1939). This was a historical novel set in the time of the
pharaohs and described the throwing off of the oppressive rule of a
foreign monarchy. The parallels with an Egypt dominated by a
British presence might have caused its author some problems at any
other time. But war was impending and Fates and two further
historical novels published during World War II, though
respectfully reviewed, were not widely read.
Egyptian literature is perhaps fortunate in the timing of these
events. Amid the war, the remainder of a projected five-volume
novel covering the whole of the Egypt of the Pharaohs, an
undertaking that promised to be an indigestible tract, was not
completed.
Instead, after the war Mahfouz's fiction took a modern route when
he concentrated his attention on contemporary Cairo. His Cairo
Trilogy - Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk, 1956), Qasr al-Shawq
(Palace of Desire, 1957) and Al-Sukkariya (Sugar Street, 1959) -
which traced the life of a family from the end of World War I to
the middle of World War II, handled contemporary social and
political themes in a vernacular language in a way that was new in
Arabic fiction.
It was followed by Awlad Haratina (Children of Gebelawi, 1959),
which dealt with the theme of human suffering down the ages in a
manner that was highly iconoclastic for a writer in the Islamic
tradition.
Although it was serialised in the newspaper al-Ahram, the book was
immediately banned and did not reappear in Egypt until this year.
Islamic scholars judged the book blasphemous, identifying its main
character - an authoritarian father figure who exiles his children
and retreats to a distant home on a hill - as a representation of
God.
These novels and their successors can hardly be judged by the
standards of their European counterparts. In the earlier, longer
novels, Mahfouz tended to lose his grasp of characterisation in
providing the reader with a complex tapestry of individuals. But
with The Beggar (1965) and Chitchat on the Nile (1966) he was more
successful at focusing his themes, and he described with great
vividness the changing temper of Egypt since the Nasser revolution.
To make literary Arabic work as the language of the novel of social
realism was Mahfouz's great achievement, and his work pointed the
way irreversibly forward to other practitioners in the language.
Mahfouz was often not popular with officialdom because of the
irreverence of his themes. But he did not openly quarrel with
authority. Indeed, more radical political elements considered him a
turncoat when he supported the 1978 Camp David accord that led to a
peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
|: In 1994, then aged 82, he was attacked outside his home by Islamist
|: extremists who believed they were acting on a fatwa issued in 1989
|: by the Egyptian theologian Omar Abdul-Rahman (who denied issuing
|: any such fatwa) on account of the alleged apostasy of Children of
|: Gebelawi.
The two extremists drove a knife into Mahfouz's neck; lucky to
survive, he lost the use of his right arm.
Mahfouz was modest about his achievements. Faced with the barrage
of publicity that accompanied his Nobel Prize, he said of his work
that it was "probably like the rest of Arab literature: fourth or
fifth rate". Critical opinion has taken some pleasure in
disagreeing with this self-effacing assessment.
The Times
Alfred Kleine Beverborch
wrote in alt.religion.islam:
>They gave him a big funeral on TV.
..
Mahfouz's life was not devoid of contradictions. Although he was a
man of letters, he also served as director of censorship for the
State Cinema Organization, which garnered him criticism from his
country's intellectuals. His instincts as a writer prevailed,
however, when in 1989 he offered his support to Salman Rushdie
after the infamous fatwa on The Satanic Verses. Mahfouz opposed the
fatwa as essentially un-Islamic and stated clearly his defense of
freedom of expression. But in 1992 he appeared to shift his
position slightly, saying that, while the fatwa was intolerable,
Rushdie's novel was "insulting" to Islam. Why Mahfouz, who in 1959
produced a novel (Children of Gebelawi) that portrays God, Adam,
Moses, Jesus and Muhammad as mere mortals, should have found The
Satanic Verses to be offensive is a bit of a mystery.
..
Naguib Mahfouz: An Appreciation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060918/mahfouz
Bob Cooper
"Alfred Kleine Beverborch" <En...@Picardierings.net.invalid> wrote in message
news:acngf2tn9tls75hm4...@4ax.com...
One might speculate he was motivated to "shift his position slightly" by
the thought that doing so might appease the Muslim wackjobs who were
out to kill him. If so, he didn't shift it enough, as they almost got him two
years later.
> Naguib Mahfouz: An Appreciation
> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060918/mahfouz
Thanks, Enzo. Excellent article, as was the other one.
muzzies are dirty, filthy, stinking, terrorist pigs!
> On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:55:17 -0400, "Bob Cooper" <rcoo...@cox.net>
> wrote in alt.religion.islam:
>
> >http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060831-080013-8748r
> >Egypt bids farewell to Arab literary giant Mahfouz
> >Riad Abu Awad AFP August 31, 2006
>
>
> Egyptian Nobel laureate's iconoclasm annoyed extremists
> http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20317480-5001986,00.html
> September 01, 2006
> Naguib Mahfouz
> Novelist. Born Cairo, Egypt, December 11, 1911.
> Died Cairo, August 30, aged 94.
>
> survive, he lost the use of his right arm.
That should be the fate of all muzzie terrorists!
> Mahfouz was modest about his achievements. Faced with the barrage
> of publicity that accompanied his Nobel Prize, he said of his work
> that it was "probably like the rest of Arab literature: fourth or
> fifth rate". Critical opinion has taken some pleasure in
> disagreeing with this self-effacing assessment.
Yep, all muzzie literature is fifth rate - starting with the satanic
kookran't!
Alfred Kleine Beverborch
wrote in alt.religion.islam:
>Thanks, Enzo. Excellent article, as was the other one.
Thank you.