SOURCE: ‘Atiyya, Ahmad Muhammad. “Naguib Mahfouz and the Short Story.” In Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz, edited by Trevor Le Gassick, pp. 9-25. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1991.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1971, ‘Atiyya traces Mahfouz's development as a short story writer.

Naguib Mahfouz is a novelist, yet his literary activity began with short story writing and this is a form to which he has since occasionally returned. I once asked him why he wrote short stories at the initial stage of his literary life, and enquired about that intellectual restiveness evident in his first collection entitled The Whisper of Madness (Hams al-Junun, 1938). He replied that he had been at that time in a state of confusion, undergoing a crisis of ideas and expression, having not yet settled into that stability of thought that, he told me, had been with him throughout the...