SOURCE: Mikhail, Mona. “Love and Sex: A Study of the Short Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris.” In Images of Arab Women: Fact and Fiction, pp. 91-111. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, Inc., 1979.

In the following essay, Mikhail finds parallels in the portrayal of sex and love in the short stories of Idris and Naguib Mahfouz.

The short stories of Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris, and indeed a great many stories of other Egyptian writers, do not present any systematic love ethic by which they can be characterized or measured. They tend to embody perhaps more of a romantic yearning for absolutes than a traditional notion of love. The romantic treatment of love has been, as it were, exhausted by such writers as Ihsan‘Abd Al-Quddus and others whose versions have been interpreted by all the means of mass media, radio, television, and cinema.

A large...