Naguib Mahfouz

GREAT writers often seem to haunt their cities. Joyce and Kafka remain ghostly figures on the streets of Dublin and Prague, and the elfin presence of Borges is still glimpsed, through cigarette smoke and tango sweat, in the cafés of Buenos Aires. In the ancient city of Cairo, it is Naguib Mahfouz who does the haunting.

This is not simply because he was a towering literary figure, and the joyous chronicler of a turbulent Egyptian century. Nor is it just because he populated his works—35 novels, more than 20 film scripts and a dozen collections of stories, essays, anecdotes and dreams—with a cast of memorably strong urban characters. Mr Mahfouz himself embodied the essence of what makes the bruising, raucous, chaotic human anthill of Cairo possible.

He was a perfect gentleman: self-effacing, tolerant to a fault, and a consummate listener. Into his 70s he prowled far across the city on solitary early-morning walks, typically ending up in one of the many cafés where he was greeted as a returning son of the quartier. Into his 90s he rarely missed his weekly gathering of intimates at some public watering hole. There he soaked up the endless tales of woe, the political gossip and wicked jokes that provide the spice of Egyptian life.

He could be outspoken, too. He bucked his country's intellectual fashions at times, condemning oppression under the populist revolutionary government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, praising his successor, Anwar Sadat, for seeking peace with Israel, and frequently challenging received pieties, including those of Islam. His wry wit could be scathing, and his social satire bit to the bone: Si El-Sayed, the authoritarian father figure of his most ambitious work, “The Cairo Trilogy”, has become an Arabic byword for monstrous male chauvinism.

The world in alleyways

Mr Mahfouz knew his subject like a true ibn balad, a son of the Cairo soil. The youngest of seven children, he was born, in 1911, in Gamaliya, a 1,000-year-old quarter whose densely packed and labyrinthine lanes were overhung by balconies that blotted out the daylight. By the time he was six his father, a local merchant, had done well enough for himself to join the flight of Cairo's burgeoning middle class to the airier, more modern parts of town. But Mr Mahfouz never lost his love of the Old City. Many of his most pungent novels were set there and drew their titles from it: “Zuqaq al Midaq” (Midaq Alley), “Al Sukkariya” (Sugar Street). In several works, too, the humble Old City alleyway or hara, the turf of Cairo street gangs and the locus of urban loyalties, became a metaphor for Egypt or for the world itself.

His father hoped he would study medicine, but Mr Mahfouz chose philosophy instead. Drawn to European literature, and caught up by the fashion for Egyptology sparked by the discovery in 1922 of Tutenkhamen's intact tomb, he began dabbling in writing. By the mid-1940s he had published three historical novels set in ancient Egypt, and planned a long further series.

But politics and happenstance intervened. The second world war and its aftermath provoked seething debate in Egypt's class-ridden society. At the same time, Mr Mahfouz struck up a close working friendship with Salah Abu Seif, who was to be one of Egypt's most prolific film directors. Both these things focused Mr Mahfouz's attentions and talent on the real-life drama of Cairo's streets.

Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s he produced the dozen realist novels that are widely considered the main body of his work. He rarely touched directly on the big events of the times but, like the European novelists he so enjoyed, he explored historical trends as experienced by ordinary people. Through them, he described the clash between tradition and modernity, the alienation of the individual, the struggle for personal dignity amid pervasive poverty and state repression.

The result was a body of work that bore comparison with Balzac and Dickens. But Mr Mahfouz also introduced his audience to a new way of seeing. He enriched an Arabic literature which, while perhaps incomparable for its poetry, was then still largely innocent of the fully formed imaginary world of the novel.

Writing was a joy to him. He loved the sheer act of it, writing every morning and always in longhand. This made the worst drama of his own life particularly cruel. In his 83rd year, a knife-wielding religious fanatic stabbed him in the neck. The would-be killer—inspired, it seems, by clerical objections to allegorical characters in one of Mr Mahfouz's books—failed in his mission, but nerve damage stopped Mr Mahfouz writing for five years.

He himself might possibly have dreamed up such an act of sudden violence for one of his plots, but religion would never have been the motive. As he accepted the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, he declared himself a happy and grateful receiver of Egyptian, Islamic and Western cultural traditions. What exemplified Islam for him, he said, was the decision by one early Muslim ruler to ransom Christian prisoners in exchange for works of Greek philosophy, medicine and mathematics. It was that curiosity, and generosity of spirit, that Mr Mahfouz wished to prevail in his city.