Naguib Mahfouz (born December 11, 1911) is an Egyptian novelist.
Naguib Mahfouz was born in the Gamaliya quarter of Cairo. A longtime civil servant, Mahfouz served in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, as Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and, finally, as a consultant to the Ministry of Culture. During his career he has published more than 30 novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988.
Many of his novels are written in serialized form – e.g., Midaq Alley.
Many of Mahfouz's works have been banned in the Middle East for alleged blasphemy. One of his earlier works, Children of Gebelawi (1959) earned him a fatwa for apostasy from Omar Abdul-Rahman . As a result, in 1994 – some 35 years after the fatwa was issued – Mahfouz was attacked and stabbed in the neck by two extremists outside his Cairo home, at the age of 83. He now lives under constant bodyguard protection. When a fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989, Abdul-Rahman said that it would not have been necessary had the death sentence he had issued against Mahfouz been carried out.
US trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas titled a song on his 2001 album Witness "Mahfouz". The 25-minute piece features singer Tom Waits reading an excerpt from Mahfouz's works.
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