Naguib Mahfouz: Remembering one of Egypt's first great novelists.

Slate ^ | Aug. 30, 2006 | Lee Smith

[Lorianne]

Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, died today at the age of 94. I met him in December. He was at the back of a bar in a Cairo hotel on the Nile, and in the orange glow of the dark room he pressed his eyelids together like a cat dozing in the sun. He'd fallen at home earlier in the day, and he seemed fragile.

His friends were concerned for his health, especially Raymond Stock. Raymond is an American academic and Mahfouz's biographer and translator. It is worth noting that for all the boilerplate criticism of Orientalism and how Western writing on the Middle East implicitly subjugates the Arab world, two of Mahfouz's most careful scholars, and greatest admirers, are Westerners. Professor Menahem Milson is an Israeli academic here in Jerusalem and the author of another biography of Mahfouz, and Raymond is a Michigan native who has made Cairo his home these last dozen years. On this day, Raymond had invited me to meet Mahfouz and I asked along my friend Muhammad, a 26-year-old Egyptian journalist and intellectual. Mahfouz is part of his heritage, just as the pyramids are, and he had never seen his hero up close.

Mahfouz seemed to enjoy these nights out with friends, admirers, and strangers, to smoke, talk, and mostly, at his age, listen. He was so hard of hearing that his interlocutors took turns sitting next to him to shout in his ear and ask their questions, "NAGUIB BEY, NAGUIB BEY, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT … ?"