Do we like Naguib Mahfouz?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A long record of backing free expression at real personal cost, held back from the top by a thin record on women's and LGBTQ+ issues and one awkward remark about Rushdie.
Mahfouz was born in 1911 and died in Cairo on 30 August 2006, aged 94. He studied English and philosophy at King Fouad University, and his first novel, The Curse of Ra (1939), was set in pharaonic Egypt. He worked in government, moved to the Ministry of Culture and retired at 60, writing the whole time.
His fame rests on the Cairo Trilogy of the 1950s and roughly 50 novels, plus plays and short stories. In 1988 he became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. That's a hell of a body of work to sit on a government day job.
His biggest stoush was Children of Gebelawi, a 1959 allegory that portrays God and the prophets as mortals. Egyptian religious authorities blocked it as a book, so it was published in Lebanon. A 1989 ruling from Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman said he deserved to die over it, and Mahfouz kept writing anyway.
On 14 October 1994 he was stabbed in the neck at 82. Reporting links the attacker to the militant group al-Gamaa al-Islamiyah, acting on Abdel-Rahman's incitement. Mahfouz survived but was left almost unable to write for the rest of his life. That's the price he paid for refusing to bend.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty in his own words. He backed Sadat's peace treaty with Israel, which got his books banned in some Arab countries. He opposed the fatwa on Salman Rushdie as un-Islamic and defended free expression. In 1992 he also called The Satanic Verses “insulting”, which some will wince at. We found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people, and the sources we read say little about his views on women.
The good stuff is mostly the work and the courage. He did not publish Children of the Alley in Egypt, which he said was about not wanting to antagonise Al-Azhar, and still stood by the book. That's the whole list we could verify. The wider tributes this year, including a new fiction prize in his name, show how much he still means to readers.