Palace Walk (Mahfouz)

Author Bio 
• Birth—December 11, 1911
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Where—August 30, 2006
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Education—University of Cairo
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1988

Born in the Gamaleyya quarter of Cairo, Mahfouz was named after Professor Naguib Pasha Mahfouz (1882-1974), the renowned Coptic physician who delivered him. The family lived in two popular districts of the town, in el-Gamaleyya, from where they moved in 1924 to el-Abbaseyya, then a new Cairo suburb; both have provided the backdrop for many of the author's writings. His father, whom Mahfouz described as having been "old-fashioned", was a civil servant, and Mahfouz eventually followed in his footsteps. In his childhood Mahfouz read extensively. His mother often took him to museums and Egyptian history later became a major theme in many of his books.

The Egyptian Revolution of 1919 had a strong effect on Mahfouz, although he was at the time only seven years old. From the window he often saw English soldiers firing at the demonstrators, men and women. "You could say," he later noted, "that the one thing which most shook the security of my childhood was the 1919 revolution." After competing his secondary education, Mahfouz entered the University of Cairo, where he studied philosophy, graduating in 1934. By 1936, having spent a year working on an M.A., he decided to become a professional writer. Mahfouz then worked as a journalist at er-Risala, and contributed to el-Hilal and el-Ahram. The major Egyptian influence on Mahfouz's thoughts of science and socialism in the 1930s was Salama Moussa, the Fabian intellectual.

A longtime civil servant, Mahfouz served in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and finally as a consultant to the Ministry of Culture. He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Arabic-language films.

Mahfouz left his post as the Director of Censorship and was appointed Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema. He was a contributing editor for the leading newspaper Al-Ahram and in 1969 he became a consultant to the Ministry of Culture, retiring in 1972. He has been a board member of Dar al Ma'aref publishing house. Many of his novels were serialized in Al-Ahram, and his writings also appeared in his weekly column, "Point of View." Before the Nobel Prize only a few of his novels had appeared in the West.

Controversy
Mahfouz did not shrink from controversy outside of his work. Due to his outspoken support for Sadat's Camp David peace treaty with Israel, his books were banned in many Arab countries until after he won the Nobel prize.

Like many Egyptian writers and intellectuals, Mahfouz was on a "death list" by Islamic fundamentalists. He defended Salman Rushdie after the Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned him to death, but later he criticized Rushdie's Satanic Verses as "insulting" to Islam. This comment lead many to believe that he spoke against the barbarian-like attitude towards Rushdie, though he personally believed the book didn't give the right image about Islam.

In 1989, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie and his publishers to be killed, Mahfouz called Khomeini a terrorist. Shortly after Mahfouz joined 80 other intellectuals in declaring that "no blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer." The Rushdie incident also provoked fundamentalist Muslims to regret not having made an example of Mahfouz, one telling a journalist...

If only we had behaved in the proper Islamic manner with Naguib Mahfouz, we would not have been assailed by the appearance of Salman Rushdie. Had we killed Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie would not have appeared.

Death threats against Mafouz followed, including one from the "blind sheikh," Egyptian theologian Omar Abdul-Rahman. Like Rushdie, Mahfouz was given police protection, but in 1994 Islamic extremists almost succeeded in assassinating the 82-year-old novelist by stabbing him in the neck outside his Cairo home. He survived, permanently affected by damage to nerves in his right hand. Subsequently, he lived under constant bodyguard protection. Finally, in the beginning of 2006, the "Cairo Trilogy" was published in Egypt with a preface written by Ahmad Kamal Aboul-Magd.

Last years
Prior to his death, Mahfouz was the oldest living Nobel Literature laureate and the third oldest of all time, trailing only Bertrand Russell and Halldor Laxness. At the time of his death, he was the only Arabic-language writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In July 2006, Mahfouz sustained an injury to his head as a result of a fall. He remained ill until his death on August 30, 2006 in a Cairo hospital.

In his old age Mahfouz became nearly blind, and though he continued to write, had difficulties in holding a pen or a pencil. He also had to abandon his daily habit of meeting his friends at coffeehouses. Prior to his death, he suffered from a bleeding ulcer, kidney problems, and cardiac failure.

Mahfouz was accorded a state funeral with full military honors on August 31, 2006 in Cairo. His funeral took place in the el-Rashdan Mosque in Nasr City on the outskirts of Cairo.

Mahfouz once dreamed that all the social classes of Egypt, including the very poor, would join his funeral procession. However, attendance was tightly restricted by the Egyptian government amid protest by mourners. (From Wikipedia.)