Nobel winner Mahfouz lives on in Cairo’s alleyways

Cairo, Nov 27 (AFP/APP): The legacy of Islamic Cairo’s most famous son Naguib Mahfouz lives on in its winding lanes 21 years after he became the only Arab to win the Nobel Literature Prize.

A mosaic of the bespectacled author overlooks a market teeming with children on bikes, waiters balancing trays of hot drinks and shoppers haggling with hawkers over the price of meat.

It could be a scene straight out of a typical Mahfouz novel focusing on the minutiae of life in the Egyptian capital, with its satirically political overtones and timeless characters.

After years in the making, a museum in the writer’s honour opened in July this year.

A new translation of previously unpublished Mahfouz work is also in print, underscoring 13 years after his death the mark he made both on world literature and on Egyptians themselves.

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In November, young writer Ahmed Mourad sparked controversy in Egypt when he suggested that the quality of Mahfouz’s work needed to be adapted to make it more contemporary.

The backlash at this tarnishing of the great man’s reputation forced Mourad to go on the popular television talk show circuit to clarify his comments.

Mahfouz is considered to be the father of the modern Arabic novel: he broadened its literary range by pushing through sacred red lines including religious taboos.

And he was nearly killed for doing so. In 1994, a knifeman stabbed him in the neck in an assassination attempt.

The attacker had been acting on a fatwa or religious edict issued by radical Egyptian-American imam Omar Abdel-Rahman, denouncing what he deemed to be the prodigious author’s blasphemous prose.