When Naguib Mahfouz passed away this morning in a Cairo hospital, the last great figure of 20th century Egyptian life disappeared. The life of the 1988 Nobel prize laureate - he was the only Arabic-language writer ever to get one, which tells you more about the Nobel prize than it tells you about Arabic literature - spanned most of the past century.
During that time Egypt went through British occupation, the fall of a monarchy, the populist-charismatic dictatorships of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, a calamitous socialist experiment, an equally disastrous crony capitalist experiment, two world wars, four wars with Israel and the occupation of Sinai, alliances with the Soviet Union and later the United States, an uneasy peace with Israel, an Islamist insurgency and its brutal repression, a surge in corruption and incompetence now so generalised that it has become an actual public hazard (trains crash, buildings crumble, ferries sink ...), and the distinctly unpopular and uncharismatic dictatorship of the current president, Hosni Mubarak.
In a country full of engaged intellectuals, Mahfouz kept a healthy distance from politics. While his books occasionally lampooned rulers (he was known for having a particular distaste for Nasser, and only reluctantly embraced Sadat), they were generally more focused on the minutiae of Egyptians' lives, their ambitions, their jealousies and their weaknesses. The Professor (Al Ustaz), as he is called, weaved vast sociological tapestries of Egyptian life as he knew it - particularly the urban life of Cairo's traditional neighbourhoods, where he was born and raised. These portraits were eminently recognisable, and it's hard not to wander down a Cairo street and not see Mahfouzian characters at every turn.
But even if Mahfouz shunned controversy, he could do little to avoid it. His support for the Camp David treaty caused his books to be banned in some Arab countries. Islamist fundamentalists judged his works blasphemous and caused some of his books to be banned in Egypt. In 1995 one young extremist stabbed him in a café, which caused him to lose the use of his writing hand. Perplexingly, when his Children of Gabalawi, long banned in Egypt by religious authorities, was finally published in Cairo earlier this year Mahfouz was against it. He said he didn't want to stir up more trouble than he already had.
Mahfouz, who despite his success remained a civil servant at the ministry of culture until retirement, was a man deeply attached to his routine. He would get up early and write all morning, or just sit at his desk and stare at blank paper if nothing came into his head. (Patience is the key to salvation, he once wrote.) Then came lunch, an afternoon nap, and later meetings with friends and writers at cafés. Even in his old age, this rarely changed. One of his closest friends, the Egyptian novelist and critic Gamal Ghitani, tells an anecdote that when the Swedish ambassador in Cairo came to Mahfouz's house in 1988 to tell him he had won the Nobel prize, his wife refused to wake him up and made the ambassador wait until nap time was over.
This routine was combined with extreme humility. Mahfouz kept the same set of friends, which he would see on a daily or weekly basis according to his schedule, and never sought the limelight or fortune. Satisfied - even grateful - with what he had, he was the opposite of the few contemporaries matching his stature. Umm Kulthoum and Gamal Abdel Nasser, whatever their merits, had monstrous egos. Mahfouz reportedly did not even think of himself as that great a writer.
Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian archetype - a pragmatic, down-to-earth, somewhat fatalistic, stubborn man who liked to keep his head down and observe the world around him with humour and irony. "Life is wise to deceive us," he once wrote, "for had it told us from the start what it had in store for us, we would refuse to be born."
