The Work of Naguib Mahfouz Naguib

Analysis of the Work of Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz is probably one of the best-known writers and novelists in the Arabic language. As Michelle Hartman (1997) pointed out in her analysis of one of Mahfouz's novels, al-Liss wa'l kilub (The Thief and the Dog), this Egyptian writer's fame and reputation has grown on the international level since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. In fact, Hartman (1997) considers Mahfouz to be the pioneer of the novel in the Arabic language; his career has spanned the entire range of novelistic development in the Arab world. This essay will examine several of Mahfouz's novels, drawing upon the novels and critical commentary to describe his themes, his use of literary devices, and his place in the world of contemporary literature.

Mahfouz began his literary career by writing essays on philosophy and literature and only then moved to fiction as a genre of choice (Moosa, 1995). His work invariably draws upon his understanding of Egyptian life in the past, present, and future. His ideal society, according to critic Matti Moosa (1995), is a form of moderate socialism in which the main basis of life is science. He calls for freeing religion - certainly one of if not the most important social influence in Islamic countries - from superstition in order to improve human society through science. Sadly, this particular philosophy has angered many Islamic theologians. Mahfouz was actually stabbed by an impassioned critic of his

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these two stereotypical images of women, the characters of Nabawiyya and Nur are not so simplistically drawn that they are fully representative of thee contrasting portraits of women. In fact, it is Nabawiyya, the wife, who has abandoned her husband after he has been imprisoned for four years for theft; she has taken a new lover, and it is Nur, the prostitute, who emerges in the story as a sympathetic and caring women. Nur, and not the adulterous wife, is the "good woman" of the Islamic ideal, despite her work as a prostitute. In this manner, as Hartman (1997) noted, Mahfouz employs ideal conventions drawn from Islam and from Arabic life and society but twists them to more nearly replicate reality. In Echoes of an Autobiography, Mahfouz (1997) undertook something entirely different. This book is a collection of allusions and aphorisms that bears what seems to be a striking similarity to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. There is a sense of mystical musing in this book, which describes the ways in which human beings search for and often fail to find contentment. Much of this work is at least quasi-autobiographical. It presents Mahfouz's collected wisdom; he was some 85 years old when the book was published (Echoes of an au

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