Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz Abdel Aziz Ibrahim Ahmed El-Basha (December 11, 1911 - August 30, 2006), better known by his literary name Naguib Mahfouz, was an Egyptian novelist and writer, considered the first Arab writer to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. Naguib Mahfouz wrote since the thirties, and continued until 2004. All of his novels take place in Egypt, and a recurring feature appears in them, which is the warmth that equals the world. Among his most famous works are: The Trilogy, and The Children of Our Neighborhood, which has been banned from publication in Egypt since its publication until recently. While Mahfouz's literature is classified as realistic literature, existential themes appear in it. Mahfouz is considered the most Arab writer whose works have been transferred to cinema and television

 :His Life

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Al-Gamaliya neighborhood, Cairo, on December 11, 1911. His father, "Abdul Aziz Ibrahim", who was an employee, had not read a book in his life after the Qur'an other than the hadith of Isa bin Hisham because its writer Al-Muwailihi was a friend of his. His mother is "Fatima Mustafa Kashisha", the daughter of Sheikh "Mustafa Kashisha", who is one of the scholars of Al-Azhar. Naguib Mahfouz was the youngest of his siblings, and because the difference between him and his closest sibling was ten years, he was treated like an only child. Mahfouz was 7 years old at the time of the 1919 revolution, which affected him and later remembered him in Ben Kasserine, the first parts of his trilogy.

Mahfouz joined Cairo University in 1930, obtained a BA in Philosophy, and then proceeded to prepare a master's thesis on beauty in Islamic philosophy, then changed his mind and decided to focus on literature.

 :His Personal Life

During his hiatus from writing after the 1952 revolution, Naguib Mahfouz married Mrs. Attiya Allah Ibrahim, and concealed the news of his marriage from around him for ten years, citing his non-marriage as he was preoccupied with taking care of his mother, widowed sister and her children. At that time, his income had increased from his work writing scripts for films, and he had enough money to start a family. It was not known about his marriage until ten years after its occurrence, when one of his two daughters, Umm Kulthum, quarreled with a classmate at school. The poet Salah Jahin learned about the matter from the student's father, and the news spread among the acquaintances.

 :His Positions

• Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Awqaf (1938 - 1945)

Director of Al-Qard Al-Hasan Foundation in the Ministry until 1954

Director of the Office of the Minister of Guidance

Director of Control of Artistic Works at the Ministry of Culture

In 1960, he worked as general manager of the Cinema Support    Foundation

Advisor to the General Organization for Cinema, Radio and Television.

His last government position was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the General Film Organization (1966-1971)

He retired after that to become one of the Al-Ahram Foundation writers

His career

Naguib Mahfouz began writing in the mid-1930s and published his short stories in Al-Risala magazine. In 1939, he published his first novel, The Absurdity of Destinies, which presents his concept of historical realism. Then he published The Struggle of Thebes, and Radopis, ending a historical trilogy in the time of the Pharaohs. Starting in 1945, Naguib Mahfouz began his realistic novelist line, which he preserved for most of his literary career, with the novel New Cairo, then Khan Al Khalili, and Al Mudaq Alley. Naguib Mahfouz experimented with psychological realism in the novel The Mirage, then returned to social realism with: The Beginning and the End, and the Cairo Trilogy. Later, Mahfouz turned to symbolism in his novels: The Beggar, and The Children of Our Neighborhood, which caused strong reactions, and was the reason for inciting the assassination attempt. In an advanced stage of his literary career, Mahfouz turned to new concepts such as writing on the limits of fantasy, as in his novels: Harafish, Nights of a Thousand Nights. And writing Sufi revelations, and dreams as in: Echoes of Autobiography, and Dreams of Convalescence, which were characterized by poetic condensation, and the explosion of language and the world. Mahfouz's works are considered on the one hand as a mirror of social and political life in Egypt, and on the other hand they can be considered as a contemporary account of human existence and the human condition in a world that seems to have been abandoned by God or by God, and it also reflects the vision of intellectuals with different tendencies to power.

The writer Naguib Mahfouz was known for his strong tendency not to travel abroad, to the extent that he did not attend to receive the Nobel Prize, and sent his two daughters to receive it. Nevertheless, he traveled as part of a delegation of Egyptian writers to: Yemen, Yugoslavia in the early sixties, and again to London for heart surgery in 1989.

Naguib Mahfouz died at the beginning of August 29, 2006 at the age of 95 from a bleeding ulcer twenty days after entering the Police Hospital, in the Agouza neighborhood, in Giza governorate, due to health problems in the lung and kidneys. Before that, he was admitted to the hospital in July of the same year due to a deep head wound after falling in the street.