Naguib Mahfouz: A Western and Eastern Cage of Female Entrapment ...

With these conditions in place, Hallengren asserts “the Egyptian novel matured in great works by twentieth-century writers such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1888–1956), Taha Husayn (1889–1973), Ibrahim al-Mazini (1890–1949), Mahmud Tahir Lashin (1894–1954), and Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987)” (2). Therefore, the time was ripe when Mahfouz began to use the novel form, while “his aim was to seek the identity of his own country in the space-time of his existence and the sphere of his Self” (Hallengren, 3).

Naguib Mahfouz continued developing as a writer from the beginning of his writing career to his death, but the height of his genius covers the years between the 1940s and early 1960s. Mahfouz’s first novels (1939–1943) were historical and were written as part of a larger unfulfilled project of thirty novels. His intention was to cover the entire history of Egypt in a series of books, but after the third novel, he concentrated on the psychological impact of the social changes on ordinary people as his interest changed to the present. Mahfouz’s major work in the 1950s, The Cairo Trilogy, was completed before the July Revolution and represented a more realistic technique. Titled with street names—Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street—the Trilogy represents the parts of Cairo where he grew up and features the three-generational family saga that runs from WWI to the 1950s, with the overthrow of King Farouk I. One of the most controversial novels Mahfouz wrote, The Children of Gebelawi (1959), allegorized the patriarch Gebelawi and his children—all average Egyptians—who live the lives of Cain and Abel, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed and culminated in the age of modern science. Banned in the Arab world (except for Lebanon) because Islamic law forbids negative depictions of Mohammed, some suggested that a fatwa (death appeal) be declared on Mahfouz for this heretical act by Islamic standards. The fatwa nearly came to fruition in 1994 when Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck on a Cairo street causing him to live in seclusion thereafter.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Mahfouz started to incorporate a freer style and the use of interior monologue into his novels. His appeal to Arab readers apparent, it is more difficult to assess his appeal in the West because translations from Arabic to English are not always reliable and can lack cultural nuances, contributing to a reader’s confusion or dissatisfaction.