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

Le Gassick adds that Mahfouz received “honorary degrees from France, the Soviet Union, and Denmark and his works have been translated into many languages.” Moreover, he also “received Egypt’s prestigious National Prize for Letters, and in 1972 he was awarded the Collar of the Republic, his nation’s highest honor” (v). Mikhail notes that he “was offered the position of director of Cinema Organization” and published in Al-Ahram and other daily and weekly papers (10).

Mahfouz’s life was influenced not only by the positions he held, but also by his personal beliefs on marriage and family. One’s age at the time of marriage is generally not an issue in the West. Although many couples choose to marry after they have earned their education, some begin their married lives at an early age. In a predominantly Muslim society, most men marry and begin their families at a young age; however, El-Enany relates that “Mahfouz remained a bachelor until the age of 43—for many years he laboured under the conviction that marriage with its restrictions and commitments would hamper his literary future”¹ (31). Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud reports that Mahfouz’s “private creed [was] tried to the utmost, when he was offered a government job at his graduation, together with the hand in marriage of the mistress of the deputy-minister of a ministry to which he applied for work” (100). He acquiesced to the offer, and sadly, could not reveal his marriage to his family. He was alienated from friends as well as a result of this strange domestic situation. Moussa-Mahmoud asserts that Mahfouz had to close his eyes and leave the premises when the deputy-minister visited his home regularly (100). His single life had its advantages; however, his clandestine marriage brought Mahfouz to the “pale of society” (100). He had not taken the advice of his mother on “one of the reasonable matches…urged on him” (Roded, 4). El-Enany believes that “his prolonged bachelorhood gave him the opportunity to know many women, all of whom, he tells us, were later to appear in his fiction” (31). Roded also points out that Mahfouz had many liaisons with these women (4). Mahfouz’s female characters, it should be noted, did not fit into one mold: his characters were, alternately, passive, active, and motherly. Some were prostitutes.