El Opinador Compulsivo

Naguib Mahfouz(1911 - 2006)
August 31, 2006
Del WSJ

"It became apparent to me that between me and death there was censure, but that I was condemned to hope." So wrote the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz in 1994, the same year he was stabbed in the neck by an Islamic fanatic who took offense at a religious allegory Mahfouz had penned 40 years earlier.

Mahfouz survived that "censure," as he did so many others until his death this week (of natural causes) at the age of 94. He leaves behind some 50 novels, including the "Cairo Trilogy," which earned him a well-deserved Literature Nobel Prize in 1988.

But perhaps Mahfouz's most important legacy is as a model of Arab intellectual life at its best -- critical and playful, sensual and moderate, authentically Egyptian but seriously engaged with the better currents of Western intellectual life.

These qualities, it sometimes seems, are in short supply in Arab life today. But we have spent time in Egypt -- and in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq -- and met others who, like Mahfouz, are also "condemned to hope." Would that the writer's memory inspire such changes that hope in the Middle East be something other than a sentence.