Dialogues of Naguib Mahfouz: Taking the high road By Mohamed Salmawy Everyone knows Naguib Mahfouz disliked travelling. But that wasn't always the case. As a young man, Mahfouz really wanted to go abroad and was repeatedly disappointed that he couldn't. He told me how, as a university student, he applied once for an art scholarship in Italy although he couldn't paint. Immediately after graduation, Mahfouz took a job in the Cairo University administration. And when the university announced a scholarship for philosophy graduates from the School of Literature to study in France, he sensed that would work out. He had a working knowledge of French and could read it, and was also fourth in his class. So there was no doubt in his mind that he would soon be studying in France. "I recall preparing the clothes I would take with me. I even went to one of my professors who studied in France and asked him about life there. But when the names of the 10 graduates who won the scholarship were announced, I was not one of them. I didn't know what to do, or who to turn to. A friend of mine had an uncle working in the student exchange programme. We went together to see the uncle, the playwright Ibrahim Ramzy, and what he told me shocked me even more. Ramzy congratulated me on my grades but said that the student exchange programme decided to send only two Copts on that fellowship. Judging by my name, he thought I was a Copt. My friend told him that I was Muslim and my father's name was Abdel-Aziz. "So who named you Naguib Mahfouz?" Ramzy asked. I explained that my mother named me after the Coptic doctor who helped her give birth. "Terrible," he said. "How dare your mother name her Muslim child after a Coptic doctor?" "Although Ramzy was kind to me, it was too late to do anything about the scholarship. He promised to select me for the next scholarship. But when the next scholarship came, a year later, I didn't want to go. I had decided to become a writer and didn't want anything to distract me, not even living abroad. "So it happened that I declined to travel abroad of my own volition. From then on I never travelled unless I absolutely had to. I was sent by the Ministry of Culture once to Yemen with a delegation of writers and another time to Yugoslavia. I also had to go to London for heart surgery in 1989. So when I won the Nobel Prize and knew I could send someone else to receive it on my behalf, I was glad to send my daughter," Mahfouz said.
