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Naguib Mahfouz |
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Naguib Mahfouz - Introduction –
Naguib Mahfouz was a famous novelist of Egypt. He was the Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1998. He was a leading power in creating contemporary Arabic literature. Naguib Mahfouz is considered to be one of the earliest writers of Arabic literature. Tawfiq el-Hakim also worked like him to discover existentialism themes.
Early life of Naguib Mahfouz -
Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo’s Gamaliya quarter on the 11th of December in 1911. His name was derived from that of a famous Coptic physician, Professor Naquib Pasha Mahfouz, the man who brought him into the world. His family shifted to al-Abbasiya from el-Gamaliyyah in 1924 and after that shifted to a neighborhood in Cairo. Mahfouz used to read a lot in his childhood days and often visited the museums in Cairo with his mother. Thus it was evident that history would be one of his main themes while writing.
Facts on Naguib Mahfouz -
Naguib Mahfouz wrote 34 novels, more than 350 short stories, five plays and several scripts for films. A large number of his works have been incorporated in Arabian films. The Islam fundamentalists had included Naguib Mahfouz on their “death list” just like other intellectuals and writers of Egypt. Mahfouz also protected Salman Rushdie after Rushdie was sentenced to death by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But he also disapproved of the Satanic Verses of Rushdie as “insulting” to their religion.
Naguib Mahfouz even addressed Khomeini an activist when his fatwa for the killing of Rushdie and the publishers was ordered in 1989. In 1994 some Islamic extremists nearly killed him. But he died on the 30th of August in 2006 in Cairo.
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Themes and writing style of Naguib Mahfouz -
Majority of the early works by Naguib Mahfouz have al-Jamaliyyah as their setting. The historical novels authored by Mahfouz comprise ‘KIFAH TIBAH’, ‘ABATH AL-AQDAR’ and ‘RADUBIS’. These were parts of an incomplete project, which was supposed to consist of 30 novels. Naguib Mahfouz took inspiration from Sir Walter Scott to write in a sequence of books about the entire history of Egypt.
‘Chitchat on the Nile’, published in 1966 is a very famous novel of Naguib Mahfouz, which was used for a film. The ‘Children of Gebelawi’, printed in 1959, is one of the most notable books by Mahfouz. Other works by Naguib Mahfouz comprise ‘Midaq Alley’, ‘The Thief and the Dogs’ and ‘The Journey of Ibn Fatouma’.
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