Najib Mahfuz

The monograph Mahfouzian Nights: Fate, Desire and Politics in Layālī alf layla examines the influence of the collection of the Thousand and One Nights on Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s (1911 – 2006) novel Layālī alf layla [Nights of the Thousand Nights, 1982; translated into English as Arabian Nights and Days]. The study explores intertextual relationship between the two works and identifies possible parallels between Maḥfūẓ’s novel and the collection of popular stories, taking into account their historical, socio-political and cultural background. It also tries to demonstrate different ways in which the pre-modern work influenced Maḥfūẓ’s writing, with special emphasis on similarities between certain motifs and themes that the two works share. The main focus of this monograph is hence put on further exploration of themes like fate, desire, madness, political criticism and Sufism in Maḥfūẓ’s work, their understanding, mutual interactions and interconnectedness and to show how they fit together in a mosaic of Maḥfūẓ’s perception of reality and his view of the socio-political challenges of the era.

The expression of novel in literature deals with various literary works whose corner-stones are being written in prose, being like a story and its length. The main elements that convey the theme of a novel are its characters. A novel is an indicator of the behaviours and states of the characters whose unique names and characteristics in an outside world have substitutes that indicate the fate of other members of the society for the reader. The writer of the novel creates the characters from an example of real mankind and tries to indicate their reactions to the deeds and behaviors of themselves and other characters. In a word, it creates an example of a real mankind with all its mental and emotional characteristics. Therefore, in order to create a valuable literary work, he should have enough skills in terms of characterization. The present study is an attempt to indicate the effort of Najib Mahfūz,  the famous and contemporary Egyptian novelist, to the element of character and different ways of characterization in his literary works that in this investigation, this phenomenon is just examined in the novel “al-Lis va al-kilāb”. The main motivation in the selection of this character and novel is the place of this literary work in Arabic story writing because some people consider it as a corner-stone in Arabic story writing. This study first investigated the definition and place of character in literature and after enumerating different types of characters and different methods of characterization, the novel will be investigated based on the above mentioned criteria.

Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s novel Al-Qāhira al-jadīda (Cairo Modern) takes on the crisis of modernity by exposing the various conflicts inherent to the processes of democratization in 1930s Egypt. This article argues that Al-Qāhira al-jadīda, written in 1945 but set a decade earlier, makes a literary intervention against the corrupt and corrupting British colonial superimposition of modernity in Egypt. The novel presents the difficulties four Egyptian university students face in defining themselves as modern subjects in a sham democracy controlled by colonial outsiders and entrenched local elites. By narrating his characters’ struggles, Maḥfūẓ re-evaluates the outcomes of the Arab nahḍa in Egypt and highlights the shortcomings of modes of binary thinking that took hold among Arab intellectuals during the early 20th century. Through a combination of historical and literary critical analysis, I show how Maḥfūẓ parodies various contemporary political trends—such as socialism, Islamism, and capitalism—in order to critique them.