Alleys of Naguib Mahfouz

Despite getting lost, it was a pleasant experience to explore the alleys which Mahfouz wrote about in his novels and which had a great impact in forming his characters and ideas, while enriching his imagination. As you read his work, the streets come to life as they were in the 1920s and 1930s.

Mahfouz was born on 11 December 1911 the youngest of six in El-Gamaleya district, where the events of one of his most important novels, the Cairo Trilogy, are set and where he spent his childhood and part of his teenage years in this district.

The two-storey museum is devoted to this Nobel Prize-winner whose works rich in clear-sighted realism have formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind. Each room in the house is devoted to a period in the author’s life or an incident.

The house where he was born overlooks Qadi Square and Kormoz Alley, like the many alleyways that inspired many of his works.

The alleys provide the backcloth for his stories and myths. He wrote of people’s sorrows and happiness. His characters are so well-rounded and credible that they leap off the page. The narrow streets teemed with life and unique people in the shadow of the British occupation or the beginning of the 1919 Revolution in his novel Midaq Alley and the effect this had on the family of Ahmed Abdel Gawad in his “Cairo Trilogy”: “Palace Walk”, “Palace of Desire” and “Sugar Street”.

“I am the son of two civilisations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilisation, the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilisation,” Mahfouz said in his speech to the Nobel laureate prize ceremony in 1988. The quotation hangs in the room dedicated to showcase his peace prize in its leather case with the initials NM.

His accomplishments are celebrated in a special room where there are the national and international awards that he received throughout his life, such as the Order of Merit in 1962, the State Appreciation Award in literature in 1968, and the Order of the Republic in 1972 as well as the Order of the Nile in 1988, one of the most distinguished Egyptian awards.

Covers of movies and series based on his novels and the screen plays are also on display. The politically sensitive “El-Karnak” and the action story “Al-Liss w-al-Kilab” can still be seen on the small and silver screens.

Every day Mahfouz dedicated three hours to writing and reading in his study. His library is on display in a special room. Mahfouz was quite daring with his ideas and was inclined to experiment with new writing styles, such as symbolism in his controversial novel, “Children of our Alley” was serialised in Al-Ahram daily in 1959.

Much later in his literary career, Mahfouz included Sufi elements in his novels “Echoes of an Autobiography and Dreams”, which was his last work, published in 2004. Despite Mahfouz’s early start as a writer, he became popular by the end of the 1950s, when some of his novels were made into films.

The attempt on the life of Mahfouz in 1994 is shown in a special room. Two young men attacked Mahfouz while he was on the street. One of them stabbed him in the neck. Both young men had adopted extremist ideas against Mahfouz’s literary work, especially his novel “Children of Our Alley”. Mahfouz was immediately taken to the hospital, where he underwent an operation that lasted five hours. He spent another two months in hospital. After this incident, his nerves were badly affected. His ability to write with the same hand that took him on his way to the Nobel Prize was weakened. But he didn’t give up. He kept trying to regain his ability to write by training himself and filling several notebooks with his trembling handwriting. He was able to write for a few minutes a day. His notebooks are on display in this room.

Mahfouz, therefore, used these few minutes to take down important notes of his ideas, he would later dictate in more details to any of his friends who helped him in writing. Later, he published a number of short stories “Echoes of an Autobiography”, “The Echo of Forgetfulness” and “Dreams”.

On 30 August 2006, Egypt bid farewell to the 94-year-old writer, whose health deteriorated due to problems with his lungs and kidneys. He survived by two daughters, Fatima and Om Kulthum. The latter donated most of the exhibits to the museum, which was opened in 2019.