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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Egyptian Nobel Prize novelist Mahfouz dies


Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate in 1988, left,  died Wednesday  He was 94. Mahfouz's  novels depicted Egyptian life in his beloved corner of ancient Cairo.
 (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Miret El Naggar McClatchy

CAIRO, Egypt – Naguib Mahfouz, whose novels about the struggles of workaday Egyptians drew worldwide acclaim and made him the only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for literature, died of complications from a bleeding ulcer Wednesday at a Cairo hospital. He was 94.

President Hosni Mubarak issued a statement mourning the loss of “an exceptional writer, an enlightened thinker, an author who brought Arab culture and literature to the world’s attention.”

Mahfouz will be buried today after a military funeral at Cairo’s al Rashdan Mosque, an honor typically reserved for senior government officials.

He was nothing if not prolific. He wrote more than 40 novels, 30 film scripts and several plays. His work is widely read throughout the Arab world and has been translated into many languages. Even with Egypt’s high illiteracy rate, his tales reached millions here through television and film adaptations of his best-loved novels.

Mahfouz was born in 1911 in one of Cairo’s most populous districts. He began writing at an early age, and after graduating with a degree in philosophy from Cairo University, published his first novel in 1939.

He garnered international attention with his Cairo trilogy – “Palace Walk,” “Palace of Desire” and “Sugar Street” – published from 1955 to 1957. Set in Cairo during British colonial rule, it portrays generations of an Egyptian family led by an iron-fisted, complicated patriarch.

The Swedish Academy of Letters, in awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1988, noted that Mahfouz, “through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind.”

Mahfouz’s work also drew condemnation.

Militant Islamists demanded that Mahfouz be killed for his writings, and in 1994, when he was 82, he survived an assassination attempt by a militant who stabbed him in the neck with a knife. The incident left him unable to write, and his trips through Cairo’s streets became limited.

“They are trying to extinguish the light of reason and thought. Beware,” he said after the attack.