JOHN DANISZEWSKI - LOS ANGELES TIMES | Posted: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 11:00 pm
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, Egypt -- died Wednesday. He was 94.
Mahfouz had been hospitalized in Cairo since falling in July. He died after suffering a bleeding ulcer, his doctors told news services.
A literary pioneer and icon of Arab letters, Mahfouz's life traced an outline of the daily pleasures and political struggles of his beloved homeland, and the broader Arab world beyond. In his writing, he celebrated ordinary Egyptian lives, toyed with 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 Al-Ahram newspaper at the beginning of 2003. "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 fatwa handed down by Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, Mahfouz refused to alter his routine of 30 years. He spent every Friday evening 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 admitted 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 hand 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 Los Angeles 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, he admired the accomplishments of Western culture and resented its presence in the form of the British army. Although only 7 at the time of a 1919 popular uprising that won Egypt partial independence from Britain, he remained a lifelong adherent to the values of liberal democracy, tolerance and social justice embodied by the Wafd Party that 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 adviser 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 a day. By the end of his life, he had produced more than 50 novels and short stories, plus eight volumes of essays, a number of screenplays and countless newspaper columns.
Mahfouz was only 10 or 11 when he decided to be 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 1956-57 "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 single work failed and it was eventually published in a monthly journal.
The three books, "Palace Walk," "The 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.
After Mahfouz won 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 new Egyptian literary lion. Western reviewers struggled to define him: He was frequently likened to Charles Dickens, to Emile Zola and to Isaac Bashevis Singer on account of his keen cultural observations.
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 highly religious time. Married Egyptian women remained veiled and locked away behind "mashrabiya" screens; 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.
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.
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Mahfouz's birth apparently was a difficult one, because 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.
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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.
His first major works of fiction were historical allegories set in ancient Egypt that contained allusions to contemporary Egyptian 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 contemporary works of social realism and had set his sights on creating an epic novel about his fellow Cairenes in the tradition of Dostoevsky. That project eventually became the trilogy.
After finishing the 1,200-page manuscript in 1952, and failing 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 1958 novel, "The Children of Gebalawi," landed Mahfouz in trouble with Islamic conservatives. Serialized in the semiofficial Al Ahram newspaper, it was an allegory about religion with characters representing Muhammad, Jesus and Moses. The novel caused such a stir that it was never published in book form in Egypt.
But in the aftermath of Mahfouz's Nobel Prize, and the 1989 fatwa issued by the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini 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 finally came in 1994, it was a shock, said Mahfouz.
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 Dog," 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.
Pleading ill health, he sent his daughters to Stockholm, Sweden, to accept his Nobel Prize on his behalf in 1988. 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 force majeure."
He is survived by his wife, Attiyatullah, and two daughters, Fatima and Umm Kulthoum.
Times staff writer Megan K. Stack in Beirut, Lebanon, contributed to this report.
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page C4.