ABOUT THIS BOOK

The nonfiction writing of Naguib Mahfouz, presented in English for the first time.

The first Arabic language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz, helped bring Arabic writing to an international readership. This collection of his early writing, from his time as a philosophy student, reveals the intellectual ferment of the young author, grappling with two millennia of philosophers and writers and establishing his own voice among them.

Available in English for the first time, these essays tackle a vast array of subjects, from Presocratic Philosophy to love and the sexual impulse. The intellectual development demonstrated here forms the foundation of Mahfouz’s literary work, granting insight into the mind behind such famed works as the Cairo Trilogy and Children of The Alley.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) is often named as the greatest Arab writer of the twentieth century. Born in the old Islamic Quarter of Cairo in 1911, he began writing aged seventeen before entering university to study philosophy in 1930. He is the author of over thirty novels. In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Rasheed El-Enany is the dean of the school of social sciences and humanities and professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He is also professor emeritus of modern Arabic literature at the University of Exeter, where he became director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. He has authored several books on Mahfouz, including Naguib Mahfouz: His Life and Times. Aran Byrne studied Arabic and Persian at SOAS, University of London, and completed a master’s degree in Oriental studies at the University of Oxford. In addition to On Literature and Philosophy, he was co-translator of Democracy is the Answer by the best-selling Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany.

REVIEWS

“These essays . . . give fascinating context to a great novelist’s oeuvre, while also shedding light on the interests of literate Egyptians in the early 1930s.”

— Marcia Lynx Qualey, Qantara

“Mahfouz has been associated in the western imagination as his country’s great cosmopolitan secularist, a quiet critic of patriarchy and a reasoned voice against the gathering forces of Islamist revivalism. . . . Western readers have historically only had the novels to go by, in situating Mahfouz in the context of Egypt’s mid-century transformations. It is only with the English publication of On Literature and Philosophy, the first volume of Mahfouz’s non-fiction writing, that there is a body of journalism and essays through which to trace Mahfouz’s intellectual journey.”

— Financial Times

“At this time in the twenty-first century when reactionary and fundamentalist religious currents are forcefully asserting themselves wherever one looks, it is wonderful to read these essays on art and culture, on love, on democracy, on Umm Kulthum, on philosophy, on psychology, written when the Arab world’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature was a young rnan, and showing that the humanity and depth of his literary oeuvre was part and parcel of his tolerant, open-minded, and secularist world view. Congratulations are due to Gingko Library for setting this series in motion.”

— Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arabic Literature

“As a citizen, Naguib Mahfouz sees civility and the continuity of a transnational, abiding, Egyptian personality in his work as perhaps surviving the debilitating processes of conflict and historical degeneration which he, more than anyone else I have read, has so powerfully depicted.”

— Edward Said

“One of the greatest creative talents in the realm of the novel in the world.”

— Nadine Gordimer

“Mahfouz embodied the essence of what makes the bruising, raucous, chaotic human anthill of Cairo possible.”

— Economist

“He is not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romain.”

— London Review of Books

“Perhaps best known as a novelist, Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was a prolific commentator on extraliterary issues, both national and international. On Literature and Philosophy: The Non-Fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz collects, for the first time in English translation, a representative selection of his early essays on topics ranging from philosophy in the pre-Socratic era to artistic imagery in the Koran. . . . The anthology provides important insights into mid-twentieth-century currents of thought that informed the acclaimed author’s subsequent novels. Dating in large part to the 1930s and 1940s, the essays highlight the consequential influence of European philosophy on the evolution of Arabic intellectual history. According to El-Enany, if Maḥfuẓ “had not been a great novelist, he would have been a great teacher.”. . . Recommended.”

— Choice

"The books offer a fascinating insight into how the writer processed and responded to the sometimes-tumultuous events his country faced during these times."

— Aramco Magazine

"The books offer a fascinating insight into how the writer processed and responded to the sometimes-tumultuous events his country faced during these times."

— Aramco Magazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Translator’s Preface
The Demise of Old Beliefs and the Emergence of New Ones
Women and Public Office
The Development of Philosophy in the Pre-Socratic Era
The Philosophy of Socrates
Plato and His Philosophy
Anton Checkhov (The Russian Author)
Three of Our Writers
Love and the Sexual Impulse
Philosophy According to the Philosophers
What is the Meaning of Philosophy?
Psychology: Its Trends and Methods, Ancient and Modern
Animal Life and Psychology
The Senses and Sensory Perception
Consciousness
Theories of the Mind
Language
Art and Culture
I Have Read (Part 1)
I Have Read (Part 2)
Of Art and History
Concerning the Book Artistic Imagery in the Qur’an