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

He was born into a middle-class family, the youngest of seven children. Sketches of his early life are few, but it appears that Mahfouz grew up in a solid family environment. According to all known sources, including Mahfouz himself, he lived an uneventful childhood, although Rasheed El-Enany claims in Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning that “the events of 1919 [Egypt’s gaining its independence from Britain] could be said to have been what most shook the security of his childhood” (5). Mahfouz is believed to have woven major elements of his childhood into the text of The Cairo Trilogy, especially in the character of Kamal Abd al-Jawwad, as El-Enany asserts (5). Mahfouz states himself: “I grew up in a stable family. The atmosphere around me was one which inspired the love of parents and family...The family was a basic, almost sacred, value of my childhood; I was not one of those who rebelled against their parents or rejected their authority” (qtd. in El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz, 5).

In Studies in the Short Fiction of Mahfouz and Idris, Mona Mikhail says Mahfouz began to read Arabic classics and Western classics that he could find in translation in high school. After majoring in philosophy at Cairo University where he graduated in 1934, he became a civil servant working for the Ministry of Waqf. He also directed al-Qard al-Hassan (the Loan Department), which provided him the “opportunity of dealing directly with a cross-section of society that otherwise would have been inaccessible” (10). Mikhail states that Mahfouz “particularly appreciated the opportunity of dealing with the women from the lower classes who sought the intercession of the Ministry of Waqf for financial assistance” (10). Mahfouz eventually moved to the Ministry of Information while continuing to build his reputation as a writer. As a writer with an appreciation for literature, he was mindful of capturing in his memory these experiences, which would later surface on the pages of his novels. Trevor Le Gassick, in his introduction to Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley, maintains that Mahfouz developed “a dedication to literature that would later give him international prominence as his country’s leading author” (v).