Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha was born on the eleventh of December 1911 at the Gamaliya quarter of old Islamic Cairo, the seventh and youngest child of Abdel-Aziz Ibrahim — a minor civil servant of the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments — and Fatma Mostafa Mahfouz. He was named after Naguib Pasha Mahfouz, the obstetrician who delivered him.

He was raised in the Gamaliya — the medieval quarter of the Fatimid wall at the heart of Cairo, which would furnish the principal setting of the Cairo Trilogy thirty-five years later — and educated at the Gamaliya elementary school and the Fuad I Secondary School. He enrolled in 1930 at the King Fuad I University — subsequently Cairo University — and completed the licentiate in philosophy in 1934.

He took employment in 1934 at the Egyptian civil service and remained at the Ministry of Religious Endowments and the Ministry of Culture across thirty-seven years until his retirement in 1971 — composing his novels in early-morning hours at the Café Riche and the Café Opera before reporting to the ministry office.

He published his first novel in 1939, Khufu’s Wisdom, the first of a planned cycle of forty Pharaonic novels — of which he completed only three before turning to contemporary Cairo as the principal subject of his fiction.

He completed between 1956 and 1957 the three volumes of the Cairo Trilogy — Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk), Qasr al-Shawq (Palace of Desire), and al-Sukkariya (Sugar Street) — the chronicle of three generations of the al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad family of the Gamaliya quarter between 1917 and 1944.

He was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature on the thirteenth of October 1988 — the first writer in the Arabic language to receive the prize. The award was a recognition, the committee stated, of the Cairo Trilogy and the further thirty novels.

He was stabbed in the neck by an Islamist assailant on the fourteenth of October 1994 outside his Cairo home in response to the publication of Awlad Haratina (Children of the Alley). He survived the attack but lost partial function of his writing hand.

He died at Cairo on the thirtieth of August 2006 of complications of a fall, at ninety-four.

He is honored here as the first Nobel Prize in Literature in Arabic.