Word: mahfouz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Naguib Mahfouz, who died last week at 94, was a true hero in this Islamophobic age, the sort of brilliant, embattled writer and public intellectual who has almost ceased to exist. Prolific and serene, Naguib-bey stood his ground, which was Egypt. He did not leave, even to collect his Nobel Prize. He wrote about growing up in Cairo, about movie stars, madmen, beggars, pashas, gods and religion. His bravest book is Children of the Alley, with its parable of Islam--banned in most Arab countries. Condemned to death in a fatwa issued by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, he continued...
When the Swedish Academy gave the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 there were still plenty of people in the U.S. who had no idea that there was such a thing as an Egyptian novelist. Mahfouz, who died Wednesday at 94, was the avatar of an Arab culture a lot of Americans had no concept of: a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, humane, humorous literary culture very different from the Islamic fundamentalism that was more visible on the evening news...
...Mahfouz was born in the now almost unimaginable year of 1911, in Cairo, and for the rest of his long life he rarely left that city. He worked as a civil servant in Egypt's ministry of culture, but as one of his colleagues remarked today, he was put on earth to write. And write he did: in his lifetime he produced on the order of 50 books, working every morning, never deviating from a disciplined routine. "A writer must sit down to write every day, pick up his pen and try to write something - anything - on a piece...
...Mahfouz did not always play the placid cultural observer. He was an early and vocal supporter of normalizing relations with Israel (some Arab countries banned his books in response.) His Children of Gabalawi, although set in modern times (it was published in 1959), features characters that loosely parallel figures in the Bible and the Koran. The novel's boldness attracted the attention of Islamic extremists, and in 1994 a young fanatic attacked him, stabbing him in the neck. Mahfouz survived, but lost much of the use of his right-and writing-hand. (His attacker fared worse: he was hung...
...Mahfouz suffered some backlash after he won the Nobel. The Western press was quick to take him up as the literary voice of the Arab world, and in turn some Arab critics took him to task for being too moderate and Western-friendly. In truth he was his own man, concerned only with a personal and human truth older and greater than politics. "I am a very old man, an introvert," he once told an interviewer, who wasn't sure whether Mahfouz was joking or not. "So winning the Nobel was really terrible for me. I won the prize...