Naguib Mahfouz

Egypt's Nobel Laureate
By Rasheed El-Enany

The Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was the father of the Arabic novel. Born in the old quarter of Jamaliyya in Cairo, the traditional neighbourhood played an important role in his earlier realistic novels such as Midaq Alley and The Cairo Trilogy, and as a metaphor for Egyptian society in later works such as Children of the Alley and The Harafish. He established an international reputation and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, but accusations of a blasphemous portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad in Children of the Alley led to a fatwa against him by Islamic extremists, and he was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in 1994.

This book, written by an expert in Arabic literature, is the first biography of Mahfouz to be published since his death in 2006, and is a fascinating study of the author who brought Middle-Eastern fiction onto the world stage in the 20th century.

'El-Enany handles the Mahfouz archive with skill and style, adding much rare and valuable historical, biographical and visual material. One particularly useful aspect of Naguib Mahfouz: Egypt's Nobel Laureate is its use of sidebars that either explain the importance of certain literary and historical details to the reader or contain some of Mahfouz's late, short narratives. . . . Other handy tools include a chronology relating Mahfouz's long life to global political and cultural events, as well as a detailed listing of Mahfouz's works and their English translations, an annotated bibliography and index. In under 200 very readable pages, El-Enany gives the reader a solid introduction to a man whose works span several thousand.’

 Times Higher Education Supplement

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'He [was] not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romain.' 

The London Review of Books

  A little treasure
  By Margaret Obank,  Banipal

Exactly the right size. Beautiful to look at as well as to hold. Easy to read. Illustrated, annotated, indexed. And then, a well-laid out and informative chronology, a list of all Mahfouz's works . . . and a handy compilation of further reading. All this in less than 200 pages.
Haus Publishing and Rasheed El-Enany must be congratulated on this handsome volume, the first biography of the Arab world's Nobel Laureate for Literature since his death at the age of 94 on 30 August 2006.

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Rasheed El-Enany is Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction (2006). He is also the author of Naguib Mahfouz: the Pursuit of Meaning (1993) and translator of Mahfouz’s Respected Sir (1986).