SOURCE: Allen, Roger. “Introduction to “Lovers' Quarter,” by Najib Mahfuz.” Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 1, no. 1 (1998): 47-9.

In the following essay, Allen explores the dominant themes of “Lovers' Quarter” and provides historical context for the story.

The steady stream of English translations that has been published in the wake of the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Najīb Maḥfūz (Naguib Mahfouz) in 1988 has served to introduce the Arab world's most illustrious novelist to a new readership. Mixed in with this western acknowledgement of Maḥfūz's novelistic eminence is The Time and the Place, an anthology of short stories¹ which joins the earlier published God's World² in providing examples in English of Maḥfūz's continuing resort to the short story genre as an alternative mode of expression. As any number of historical surveys of his career have pointed out, it was with...