ree of lust and carnal desire for a beautiful, poor young woman named Hamida. The protagonistÆs conflict is between his sense of duty and obligation to his wife and his religion, and his equally intense desire for the sexual favors of a young woman. It is this kind of conflict that Mahfouz interjects into much of his work, largely because he recognizes that the tensions between an idealized faith and the reality of the human conditions cannot be eliminated by simply ignoring them.
Family life is one of the themes that tend to predominate in MahfouzÆs novels. He created The Children of
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