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Trials of Faith
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17672 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1990 |
5,138 Words |
| Author
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Trevor Le Gassick
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This long-awaited translation of the first volume from the famous trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, the 1988 Nobel laureate for literature, provides fascinating insight into the constant tension between the theory and practice of faith and personal conduct in the Islamic community of modern Egypt. Centering on the life a middle-class family, it also presents an intimate and authentic picture of the stresses and strains on Egyptian society as it underwent rapid change, impelled both by the encroachment of Western civilization and the nationalist reactions this provoked. Though the action centers in one small area of old Cairo and takes place in a era now many decades past, the impressions we receive help us understand the values and motivations, still active today throughout Arab and Muslim society.
Apparently completed before the Egyptian army revolution of July 1952, this fifteen hundred-page trilogy drew immediate acclaim throughout the Arab world following its publication, in part in serial form, between 1954 and 1957. Though Mahfouz had already written many articles, scores of short stories, and seven novels, none had earned him particular fame within his own nation. The trilogy, however, was recognized as proof of a new level of sophistication in Arabic fiction and as a work of true genius. It earned him acceptance as the master author of Arabic letters, a reputation he has continued to develop over the following decades.
An author of constant inspiration, indefatigable energy, and absolute faith in the importance of his role in his country's intellectual life, Mahfouz has written more than two score book-length publications. His reputation as the greatest author of Arabic fiction in the twentieth century would have been secure in the Arab world even without receipt of the Nobel Prize. The award has brought him international recognition and also inspired an outpouring of Egyptian and inter-Arab national pride.
While still an undergraduate at Cairo University in early thirties, Mhafouz gave ambitious expression to his search for meaning in life by publishing a series of introductory studies on the history of philosophy. Egyptian intellectual life at that time was filled with the exuberance of a newly felt sense of nationhood and expressed a boundless optimism for the future. Egypt's independence movement had made great progress over the previous two decades, and the nation was prospering rapidly. Literate Egyptians like Mahfouz viewed themselves as part of an international intelligentsia. They often had facility in European language; moreover, the burgeoning stock of Arabic-language journals brought them the best writings of the contemporary world and allowed increased opportunities for self-expression through the written word.
Mahfouz's earliest articles were published in journals founded by an Egyptian Christian polymath named Salama Musa. Financially independent and widely traveled in Europe, Musa had interests encompassing the avant-garde thinking of the time and combined, along with the religious skepticism of the European rationalists, the Fabian socialism of George Bernard Shaw and the psychological and sexual inquiry of Havelock Ellis. Mhafouz has often acknowledged his intellectual debt to Musa, whom he has described as his teacher. He is recognized to be the model for 'Adly Karim, the journalist who, in the second volume of the trilogy, greatly influences Kamal, acknowledged by Mhafouz to represent himself as a boy and young
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