Nobel Prize Winner Naguib Mahfouz Dies: Voice of moderation, tolerance

[DeepModem Mom]

WP/AP: Nobel Prize Winner Naguib Mahfouz Dies
By LEE KEATH
The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 30, 2006


Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate in 1988, is seen in this Dec. 8, 2004 file photo, in Cairo, Egypt. Mahfouz, who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novels depicting Egyptian life in his beloved corner of ancient Cairo, has died, his doctor said Wednesday. He was 94. (Amr Nabil - AP)

CAIRO, Egypt -- Naguib Mahfouz, who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels depicting modern Egyptian life in his beloved, millennium-old corner of Islamic Cairo, died Wednesday, his doctor said. He was 94....

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The Nobel Prize, awarded to Mahfouz in 1988, brought international acclaim to the author, even though he had already established himself as one of the Middle East's finest and most beloved writers and a strong voice for moderation and religious tolerance. But fame had its perils.

In 1994, an attacker inspired by a militant cleric's ruling that a Mahfouz novel written decades before was blasphemous stabbed the then-82-year-old author as he left his Cairo home.

Mahfouz survived, but the attack damaged nerves leading to his right arm, seriously impairing his ability to write. A man who had once worked for hours at a time -- writing in longhand -- found it a struggle to "form legible words running in more or less straight lines," he wrote in the aftermath.

"Mahfouz was a cultural light ... who brought Arab literature to the world," Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in a statement. "He expressed with his creativity the values shared by all, the values of enlightenment and tolerance that reject extremism."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/30/AR2006083000475.html

[spindrifter]

1. What a fantastic writer he was!

The Palace Trilogy is a masterpiece, well worth a place on any list of great books. And what a great man Mahfouz was. We are lucky he had such a long, influential place in modern times.