A Few Thoughts on the Work of Naguib Mahfouz

It was while going over the Bokklubben World Library list of the hundred best books in order to find interesting books to read, that I discovered the Nobel Prize winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz.

As I mentioned in a recent blog post, the last two books I read in June were the first two books in Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy (thulathia al-qahra) - Palace Walk (Bayn al-Qasrayn) and Palace of Desire (Qasr al-Shawq); the first book read in July would be the third book in the trilogy, Sugar Street (Al-Sukkariyya). The trilogy was written in the late 1950s - the events taking place between WWI and 1944.

The trilogy follows the life of the patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad 'Abd al-Jawad and his family across three generations. I was most interested in Mahfouz' description of family life during that period. Equally interesting was his writing on the practice (or lack of practice, in some cases) of Islam in Cairo, although I found myself at the computer quite often in order to understand many of the historical and political references.

The wikipedia article on Naguib Mahfouz lists his most well known work, aside from the trilogy, as Children of Gebelawi - other translations of the book give the title as Children of Our Alley. I had downloaded the ebook as Children of Gebelawi . Unfortunately, this ebook proved to be defective. I was able to learn quite a lot about the early publication of the book (and it's initial banning) from the preface of the ebook, although the text of the actual novel was simply unreadable. I removed the defective ebook from my Kindle and uploaded a copy of the Children of Our Alley ebook.

Children of Our Alley has been described as an allegory of the interlinked history of the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). The first four sections of the novel retell the stories of Adam (Adham), Moses (Gabal), Jesus (Rifa'a) and Muhammad (Qasim). Some have claimed that the character Gabalawi represents God (Allah) - an interpretation which Mahfouz rejected. I'm only part way thru the book, and I can understand Mahfouz' rejection of that idea.

I have two additional books by Mahfouz to go into the queue following Children of Our Alley - Midaq Alley and Miramar. These six books make up his best works according to thegreatestbooks.org.