SOURCE: “Fabulous Fabulist,” in New York Review of Books, September 22, 1994, pp. 30–33.

In the following positive review of The Harafish, Coetzee explores Mahfouz's use of Arabic and Western literary techniques, calling him “a great middleman” between the two traditions.

1.

When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, the slumbers of the Arab Near East were rudely broken. First Egypt and then the whole of the region was forced to turn away from Turkey and toward Europe. A body of secular European ideas—those that had inspired the French Revolution—broke through the barrier separating Islam from the West setting off a crisis which has not to this day been resolved.

Even before 1798 the Islamic world had a place in the field of Western scholarship and myth, that Edward Said has called Orientation knowledge of Islam, true and false as an armature of power. Islam on the other hand knew land cared...