Nagib Mahfuz

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Nagib Mahfuz in the 1990s

Nagib Mahfuz ( Arabic نجيب محفوظ, DMG Naǧīb Maḥfūẓ , also Nagib Machfus, Nadschib Mahfus, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadjib Mahfus ; * December 11, 1911 in Cairo ; † August 30, 2006 ibid) was an Egyptian writer . He was considered one of the most important authors in his country and one of the leading intellectuals in the Arab world. In 1988 he was the first Arabic-speaking author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature .

Life

The son of an official was named after Professor Nagib Pascha Mahfuz (1882–1974), a famous Coptic doctor who supervised his delivery. Nagib Mahfuz grew up in a devout Muslim family in Cairo's old town al-Abbasiya, which he later described in many of his novels. After leaving school, he studied philosophy , and from the 1930s he worked as a civil servant in the Egyptian Ministry of Education.

In addition to his work, he wrote short stories and published the first of three novels about the time of the pharaohs in 1939 . Given Egypt's semi-colonial status at the time of King Faruq , these historical novels attempted to reinforce contemporary Egyptian nationalism by revisiting a great past . During this time Mahfuz met Sayyid Qutb , who at the time was more interested in literary criticism and only later developed into a leading Islamic fundamentalist .

In the mid-1940s, he turned to contemporary subjects in realistic novels. After Midaq Alley , his Cairo trilogy (Between the Palaces , Palace of Longing and Sugar Alley) earned him unreserved recognition as a leading writer. In these three works that made him famous around the world, he tells the story of a Cairo merchant family spanning three generations. She traces the processes of change that society goes through during the first half of the 20th century due to modernization and contacts with the West. The trilogy earned Mahfuz the Egyptian State Prize for Literature.

In 1959, Mahfuz caused a sensation of a completely different kind with his novel The Children of Our Quarter , a parable on human history in which he had characters appear there that are reminiscent of Adam , Moses , Jesus and Mohammed . After the first chapters of the book appeared in the government's Al Ahram newspaper , protests from conservative Islamic circles forced the preprint to be discontinued. The complete novel could not appear in Arabic until 2006, given the persistent outrage of the strictly religious about alleged blasphemy in Egypt. Before that, it was published in English by the American University Press in Cairo and in Arabic in Lebanon.

In addition to novels, short stories and essays, Mahfuz also wrote screenplays. Many of his works have been made into films, including Qasr asch-Schauq (Palace of Longing, 1967) and As-sukkariyya (Zuckergässchen, 1972) with Nour El-Sherif . The 1995 film Midaq Alley based on Mahfuz's novel Midaqgasse , directed by Jorge Fons , was awarded the Gran Coral .

In 1994 Nagib Mahfuz was attacked by an Islamist assassin. He survived his knife stabs in the neck seriously injured.

In 1992 he was elected as an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2002 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In the summer of 2006, the media reported that Mahfuz was seriously ill. He died on August 30, 2006 in a Cairo hospital.

Political position, international impact

After the Nobel Prize was awarded, a monument to Mahfuz was erected in Cairo on the western bank of the Nile on a busy street

Because of his support for the peace process with Israel , Mahfouz has been the target of sharp criticism from fundamentalist and Arab nationalist circles. The 1988 Nobel Prize ceremony was seen by Islamists as a provocation on the part of the West. The radical clergyman Omar Abdel-Rahman , who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the USA for terrorism and who died in custody in 2017, issued a fatwa and sentenced the winner to a death sentence. On October 14, 1994, at the age of 82, Mahfuz was critically injured as a victim of an assassination attempt, so that from then on he had to live with personal protection.

Mahfuz, however, continued to stand against the ideas of a fundamentalist Islam and for a separation of state and religion and for a secular, democratic social order. In 1996 he supported the publication of the book Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne (The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics) by the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy , without dissociating himself from his claim that the Holocaust was merely a Zionist invention. Garaudy, who was invited to the Cairo Book Fair in 1998 because of the ban proceedings against the book in France, was subsequently convicted in France and his book was banned.

Works (selection)

Web links

Commons : Nagib Mahfuz  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Nagib Mahfuz  - Quotes
Obituaries

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Honorary Members: Naguib Mahfouz. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 15, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Nordbruch, online ( Memento of the original dated December 4, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / sicsa.huji.ac.il
personal data
SURNAME Mahfuz, Nagib
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mahfus, Nagib; Machfuz, Naguib; Mahfouz, Nadjib; نجيب محفوظ (Arabic)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Egyptian writer
BIRTH DATE December 11, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Cairo
DATE OF DEATH August 30, 2006
PLACE OF DEATH Cairo