Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz dies

EGYPT: Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab world's sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died yesterday at 94 from a bleeding ulcer.

Born in the poor Gamaliya quarter of Cairo, where many of his stories and novels are set, he began writing as a child. During half a century he produced 30 novels and 10 volumes of short stories, many of them serialised in Egypt's premier daily al-Ahram. Half of his novels were made into films.

Mahfouz graduated from Cairo University in 1934 with a degree in philosophy. Although he published his first volume of short stories and initial novels in the 1930s, he supported his family by working as a civil servant.

Throughout his career, he was obsessed with the two defining experiences of Egypt, the reign of the pharaohs and the rise of Islam. He used allegory to comment on contemporary morals, manners and politics.

In one of the early novels, The Struggle of Thebes, he compared a foreign invasion of ancient Egypt to Britain's occupation of modern Egypt.

In Midaq Alley he experimented with magical realism (later adopted by Salman Rushdie) as a means of portraying the lives of the poor in the Cairo bazaar. This work was regarded as a masterpiece and was translated into many languages.

He wrote 13 novels before the British-backed monarchy was overthrown by the Free Officers Movement in 1952.

The Cairo Trilogy, a monumental book of 1,500 pages which he considered his greatest achievement, launched the second phase of his career in 1957. The Trilogy was read widely throughout the Arab world and made his reputation as a great storyteller.

The Children of Gebelawi, an allegory which depicts Cain, Abel, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad as ordinary Egyptians living in modern Cairo, was serialised in al-Ahram in 1959, but it was not published in book form in Egypt because it was viewed by conservative clerics as irreligious.

In subsequent books he used allegory and symbolism to criticise President Gamal Abdel Nasser's attempt to reform Egypt, a task Mahfouz believed impossible in a country with a 7,000-year-old bureaucracy.

In spite of controversial political views, he won Egypt's National Prize for Letters in 1970 and was given its highest honour, the Collar of the Republic, in 1972.

Mahfouz regarded the Nobel Prize as a celebration of Arabic literature.

However, at the time it was awarded to him many of his books were banned or boycotted in Arab countries, due to the fact that he had given vocal support to President Anwar Sadat's 1979 peace treaty with Israel, widely condemned in the region as a betrayal of the Arab cause.

In 1994 he was stabbed in the neck by militants protesting his lack of reverence for religion and backing for peace with Israel. Although he survived, nerve damage limited his ability to write and see. His final work, The Seventh Heaven, a collection of short stories about life after death, appeared in 2005.