Egypt’s Dickens becomes the champion of a fledgling democracy

Naguib Mahfouz would have been 100 years old last Sunday (he died in 2006 aged 94). Mahfouz was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was renowned for describing, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary,  ‘the scent, colour and texture of life in the streets of his native Cairo’. Those qualities were particularly apparent in his best known work, The Cairo Trilogy — a historical trio spanning the two world wars, published in the mid ‘50s during Colonel Nasser’s rise. The trilogy is a native counterpoint to Lawrence Durrell’s Levantine Alexandria Quartet. The novels resound with cosmopolitanism, cultural observation and an immediate sense of place; Newsweek was so enamoured it compared Mahfouz’s Cairo to Dickens’ London.

You wonder what Mahfouz would have made of Cairo at this present moment of drama and crisis in Egypt. Mahfouz’s work indicates where his thoughts certainly would have lain.