Naguib Mahfouz, 94, Nobel Laureate in Literature, Dies

Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist, playwright and screenwriter who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature and was widely regarded as the Arab world’s foremost novelist, died yesterday in Cairo. He was 94.

Mr. Mahfouz had been hospitalized and in declining health since suffering a head injury in a fall at his home in July, Reuters and The Associated Press reported, citing Dr. Hossam Mowafi, who supervised Mr. Mahfouz’s treatment and who announced his death.

Twelve years ago, Mr. Mahfouz survived a stabbing attack near his home after Islamic fundamentalists had accused him of blasphemy.

Mr. Mahfouz’s city was teeming Cairo, and his characters were its most ordinary people: civil servants and bureaucrats, grocers, shopkeepers, poor retirees, petty thieves and prostitutes, peasants and women brutalized by tradition, a people caught in the upheavals of a nation struggling through the 20th century.

Around their tangled lives, Mr. Mahfouz chronicled the development of modern Egypt over five decades in 33 novels, 13 anthologies of short stories, several plays and 30 screenplays. The Swedish Academy of Letters hailed his work as “an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.”

Mr. Mahfouz, a slim, shy and modest man — he once described himself as “a fourth- or fifth-class writer” — was admired for his vivid depictions of modern Egypt and the social, political and religious dilemmas of its people. Critics compared his richly detailed Cairo with the London of Dickens, the Paris of Zola and the St. Petersburg of Dostoyevsky.

He has been the only Arab writer to receive the Nobel Prize. At the time of his selection, in 1988, he was widely read in Egypt and other Arab countries but largely unknown in the United States and Europe. While many of his works had been translated into French, Swedish and German, only about a dozen had been rendered into English, and many were out of print. Since then, his best-known novels have been published in the United States and other English-speaking countries by Doubleday and sister companies. They include “The Cairo Trilogy,” widely regarded as his masterwork.

Arabic has a rich tradition in poetry, but the novel was not a strong art form until Mr. Mahfouz made it accessible. For English-language translators and readers, Arabic presents special difficulties: the dialogue sounds overwrought, the descriptions stilted. As Brad Kessler wrote in a 1990 article for The New York Times Magazine: “Mahfouz writes in the florid classical Arabic, which is roughly the equivalent of Shakespearean English.”

Until winning his $390,000 Nobel Prize, much of which he said he gave to charities, Mr. Mahfouz had struggled financially despite the popularity of his books. For many years he supported himself and his wife, Attiyat-Allah, and two daughters by working for government ministries. He almost never left Egypt and did not go to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize but sent his daughters, Om Kolthoum and Fatima, to accept it on his behalf. They and his wife survive him. During the 1960’s and 70’s, he was the head of the State Cinema Organization, which is responsible for raising money, censorship and decisions on which movies should be made. About 30 of his own novels and short stories were adapted, including one that won a national film prize in 1962. For his censorship work, he was often criticized by Cairo intellectuals.

Mr. Mahfouz had many enemies. Islamic fundamentalists considered some of his work blasphemous, and political opponents resented his support for Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel in 1979 and his earlier criticisms of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who seized power after a 1952 coup.

Many of Mr. Mahfouz’s books were banned in Arab countries, and a 1959 novel, “Children of the Alley,” whose theme is man’s search for spiritual values, has always been blacklisted in Egypt at the behest of the Islamic theological authorities because it portrays Muhammad as a simple, all-too-human womanizer. It also has characters based on Adam and Eve, Moses, and Jesus.

Like many Egyptian intellectuals, some of whose works have been denounced as disrespectful to Islam, Mr. Mahfouz in recent years had been put on a “death list” by Islamic fundamentalists who were said to be responsible for hundreds of terrorist killings in Egypt and abroad.

In 1989 Mr. Mahfouz joined scores of literary figures in defending Salman Rushdie after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned one of his books, “The Satanic Verses,” as blasphemous and offered a reward for his being killed. But in 1992, Mr. Mahfouz distanced himself from Mr. Rushdie and criticized his book as “insulting” to Islam, though he also said that the death threats against him were wrong.

Mr. Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck outside his apartment building in 1994. The assailant fled in a car. The authorities said the attack might have been carried out by the Islamic militants who had declared him an infidel. The police had offered him protection, but Mr. Mahfouz, who condemned “cultural terrorism” by Islamic fundamentalists, refused it.

After the stabbing, however, armed guards were posted outside his apartment building, which overlooks the Nile. And though he continued to write in his later years, he did so in failing health; he was diabetic and nearly blind, and the attack impaired his ability to hold a pen.

It also led to a more restricted life, forcing him to curtail his almost daily walks to a coffeehouse to meet friends or to an office at Al Ahram, the newspaper for which he wrote occasional columns. After the attack, friends had him driven to their homes for weekly salons.

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo on Dec. 11, 1911, the youngest of seven children of a civil servant. His early childhood was spent in the old city’s Gamaliya quarter, the setting of many of his books, and he came of age in an era of intense nationalist activity against British rule.

He studied Arabic literature in high school and cultivated a wide range of literary interests while studying philosophy at the University of Cairo, from which he graduated in 1932. He read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Proust, Mann, Kafka and Joyce and the playwrights O’Neill, Shaw, Ibsen and Strindberg.

He began writing short stories, 80 of which were published in magazines, and in 1938 he published his first collection, “ The Whisper of Madness.” A year later, his first novel, “The Games of Fate,” appeared. It was a thinly veiled allegory about the struggle against British occupation but was set in ancient Egypt to get around the censors.

After several such “historical” novels, he turned to a new genre, the realistic novels of the 1940’s and 50’s for which he is best known. “The Cairo Trilogy,” whose three volumes took 12 years to complete, appeared in the late 1950’s and is regarded as a masterpiece of the Arabic language.

It tells the story of Egypt through the eyes of three generations of a middle-class Cairo family from World War I through the 1952 coup that overthrew King Farouk. Each of the volumes — “Palace Walk,” “Palace of Desire” and “Sugar Street” — is named for a Cairo street, and the tragedies and fortunes of the family parallel the nation’s struggle for political independence.

Later works by Mr. Mahfouz — “The Thief and the Dogs” (1961), “Chatting on the Nile” (1966) and “Miramar” (1967) — were experimental, sometimes given to stream-of-consciousness, and critical of either the coup that eventually made Nasser the ruler or of his dictatorial rule. Mr. Mahfouz was never jailed for these or other writings, though other writers were.

Women play important roles in many Mahfouz stories and often illuminate their inferior status in Egypt and the wrenching social changes under way. In one story, a girl exploited as a prostitute fights back; another tells of a home where women are not even allowed to look out a window for fear of being seen, until a modern woman marries into the family and begins to demand equal rights.

Mr. Mahfouz supported President Anwar el-Sadat and the Camp David accords that led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and he was denounced by many of his countrymen. But he also supported the Palestinian cause, giving a portion of his Nobel money to Palestinian charities, and his works remained popular; his Nobel Prize was welcomed throughout the Arab world.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2002, Mr. Mahfouz said he no longer feared death and no longer fretted that it would come before he had the chance to finish his work. But he sounded melancholy when enumerating the pastimes that old age had denied him. “That is the way of life,” he said. “You give up your pleasures one by one until there is nothing left, then you know it is time to go.”