Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Pasha

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), born in the historic quarter of Gamaleya in Islamic Cairo, worked as a quiet civil servant in the Ministry of Islamic Endowments while sitting daily in the El-Fishawy café in Khan el-Khalili, observing the colorful pageant of Cairo street life. Over a seventy-year career, Mahfouz wrote thirty-four novels, 350 short stories, and dozens of film screenplays.

His crowning masterpiece, The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, 1956–1957), chronicled three generations of the merchant Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad's family from World War I through the overthrow of the monarchy, hailed as the Arabic equivalent of Balzac and Tolstoy. In 1959, his allegorical novel Children of Gebelawi (Awlad Haratina), retelling the lives of the prophets Adam, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad in a Cairo alley, sparked religious controversy, leading to an extremist assassination attempt in 1994 where he survived a knife wound to the neck at age eighty-two. In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.