WITH the passing of Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911), who died yesterday following almost two months of ill-health, Egypt has lost a towering figure in the world of literature. Associated primarily with the novel, a genre that barely existed in Arabic literature when Mahfouz made his debut on the literary scene (with the short story collection Hams Al-Junun in 1938, to be followed by the novel ' Abath Al-Aqdar in 1939), he established and legitimised the form across the Arab world over six decades of sustained writing. Had Mahfouz's contribution been confined to securing the place of the novel within the Arabic literary tradition, the achievement would have been enormous but, as many critics have noted, his novels have run a gamut of schools of writing -- from the historical novel, his first published texts having been in the Pharaonist vein, to realism, most famously in The Cairo Trilogy, modernism, as in Tharthara Fawq Al-Nil ( Adrift on the Nile ) and Miramar, and beyond. Nor is his corpus limited to the novel, comprising short stories, plays, autobiographical writing and texts, such as Ahlam Fatrat Al-Naqaha (Dreams of Convalescence, translated as The Dreams ), which defy generic classification. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the citation of the Nobel committee included the following tribute: "Naguib Mahfouz has an unrivalled position as spokesman for Arabic prose. Through him, in the cultural sphere to which he belongs, the art of the novel and the short story has attained international standards of excellence, the result of a synthesis of classical Arabic tradition, European inspiration and personal artistry." Mahfouz is survived by his wife and two daughters, Umm Kulthoum and Fatma, and by a literary legacy that will continue to enrich readers the world over, germinate in younger writers' works and command new critical interpretations.
