SOURCE: “The Shroud of Mahfouz,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, February 2, 1989, pp. 19–21.

In the following essay, Shammas discusses Mahfouz as an Arabic novelist and considers his influence on Arabic literature.

In the acceptance speech he sent to the Nobel Prize committee to substitute for his presence, Naguib Mahfouz asked the permission of his far-off audience to present himself as the son of two civilizations “that at a certain time in history have formed a happy marriage”—the civilization of the Pharaohs and that of Islam. Then he told an abrupt little story about each. After a victorious battle against Byzantium, he said, the Muslims gave back prisoners of war in return for a number of books of the ancient Greek heritage in philosophy, medicine, and mathematics. “This was a testimony of value for the human spirit in its demand for knowledge,” Mahfouz said, “even...