SOURCE: “The Novelist and the Sheikh,” in New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 47, January 30, 1995, pp. 52–69.

In the following essay, Weaver considers the impact of religious and political events on Mahfouz's life and career—particularly the attempt on Mahfouz's life in 1994.

Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab world's only Nobel Laureate in Literature, leaves nothing to chance. There is a precision and an economy about him, and he measures his daily life down to the minute. Thus, on the afternoon of October 14, 1994—as he had done every Friday afternoon for seven years—the eighty-two-year-old writer left his apartment building in the Agouza section of Cairo at exactly ten minutes before five, and walked outside. It seemed to him unusually quiet that afternoon as he glanced around the street—a rather ordinary, rather characterless block, where old houses of ochre and beige are interspersed with taller, concrete buildings from the nineteen-fifties, and where...