SOURCE: “Naguib Mahfouz: Life in the Alley of Arab History,” in Georgia Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 224–30.

In the following essay, Moosa outlines the development of Mahfouz's literary style and thematic concerns.

Among the major figures in the development of modern Arabic fiction, none has received higher international acclaim than Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1988 became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Before then he was—like Taha Husayn (d. 1973) and Tawfiq al-Hakim (d. 1987)—known in the West only to a very limited audience despite an output that includes over thirty novels and a number of short-story collections and plays. In fact, until the 1940's, Mahfouz was little known even in his native Egypt, where he began his literary career as an essayist. He gained some fame with the publication of three historical novels, but his undisputed literary renown came from a series of...