NAGUIB MAHFOUZ: FIFTEEN MINUTES WITH EGYPT'S NOBEL LAUREATE
Steif, William
THEP ROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Naguib Mahfouz Fifteen minutes with Egypt's Nobel laureate BY WILLIAM STEIF Though I'd made seven trips into the Arab World in the past fifteen years, from Casablanca...
...Mahfouz: We are passing through a very sensitive time, and the country as a whole faces very big problems...
...El Habrouk said this particular Thursday was "slow...
...The Swedish television crew was on hand, fidgeting nervously...
...A month before traveling to Cairo, my colleague began our negotiations to see Mahfouz—and we began reading, in English translation, some of his books, all translated and published by the American University in Cairo...
...Thursdays and Fridays I consider holidays [the Moslem sabbath starts at sunset Thursday and continues to sunset Friday], and I meet my friends and my literary colleagues...
...No longer...
...He said the Nobel Prize has radically changed Mahfouz's life...
...Q: How did you begin writing...
...About an hour-and-a-half after our appointed time, we were told to take the elevator to the sixth floor, where Mahfouz's secretary, a bright and jolly woman, ushered us into a smaller waiting room and ordered the ritual Turkish coffee-masbout, or medium-sweet—served throughout the Arab World...
...Something in my feelings pushed me into it...
...Usually, he said, more media types were hanging around, asking "such questions as whether he'd ever had a mistress and what was his first kiss like...
...That spurred Al-Ahram's editor to announce Mahfouz's "timetable" in the newspaper: He would be available only on Thursdays at the newspaper's offices, where he still writes his once-a-week column, "Point of View, "for page seven of the paper...
...Instead, he would remain at home with Attiyatallah, his wife of thirty-four years, and dispatch their two daughters, Om Kalthoun and Fatma, both graduates of the American University in Cairo, to accept his award, accompanied by Mohammed Salmawy, under secretary of Egypt's Culture Ministry and himself a writer...
...With that came tensions in agriculture, industry, education...
...Al-Ahram has given Mahfouz a car and driver because of the media crowds on his early-morning walks...
...Last fall, Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist who turned seventy-seven on December 10, won the Nobel Prize for literature...
...Soon thereafter, El Habrouk appeared and translated Mahfouz's taped answers—for a price: 200 Egyptian pounds, or about $84 U.S...
...What's the importance of the Nobel Prize to Egypt and the Arab world...
...Q: How do you view the major changes in Egyptian society, politics, and economics in your lifetime...
...If I have something to write, I prefer to write in the morning until midday...
...Do you consider that your most important work...
...Then Hussein El Habrouk appeared...
...We were to meet at the offices of Al-Ahram, Cairo's biggest newspaper, and we arrived on time...
...Mahfouz is to Arabic literature what Charles Dickens was to English literature or what Mark Twain was to American literature—an original with a deep feeling for his people...
...Naguib Mahfouz: When you start to write a novel you don't decide if it's going to be 100, 200, or 300 pages...
...Mahfouz: From my viewpoint, I see the relations between the Arab countries and Israel as a movie...
...Since I was going to the Arab world again last fall, I thought it would be interesting to interview Mahfouz...
...What's your daily routine...
...We are like a woman: Some things happen in our life and we can't back off, we have to accept them...
...An appointment was made for a Thursday at 9:30 a.m...
...That is becoming set and is the only direction for our lives...
...Habrouk, "Mahfouz has given 125 interviews...
...The secretary said Mahfouz's health was too fragile to permit him to go to Stockholm to receive his award...
...So much for the ignorance of the American journalist...
...As we entered the novelist's smallish corner office two-and-a-half hours after our appointed time, Mahfouz smiled warmly, greeted us, and gestured to our tape-recorder, suggesting it go on the coffee table...
...He has been a journalist for twenty years with Al-Ahram and now serves as Mahfouz's translator for interviews...
...He was born in Cairo, grew up there, was educated there, and has lived there all his life...
...In his earlier years he was an Egyptian civil servant, but his first occupation always has been writer...
...m Q: How do you spend your time...
...We have had to rebuild the social classes in Egypt...
...Mahfouz bade us goodbye, smilingly, and prepared for another round of questions...
...He wore dark glasses and sat on the corner of a couch next to El Habrouk, who translated questions from English to Arabic in a loud voice because Mahfouz is quite hard of hearing...
...Mahfouz: I started writing as a little boy, maybe because I was reading a lot and liked reading and thought I'd like to write...
...But our final direction with President [Hosni] Mubarak seems to be toward democracy...
...Now the Ali Baba Cafe charges fifty Egyptian pounds to any television crew that enters it—that's about $21 U.S...
...Mahfouz: I wake up early in the morning and walk for one hour, or did until the Nobel Prize announcement...
...So did a fellow journalist who does some work for a slick English-language magazine published by the Arabian American Oil Company, ARAMCO...
...And the only ending there should be is peace...
...As for the Nobel Prize, it's given me for the first time in my life the feeling that my literature could be on the international level...
...In the two months sinc&the prize was announced," said El William Steif, a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, is a free-lance writer based in the U.S...
...He has written and published more than thirty novels and a dozen books of short stories...
...we had to change in Gamal Abdel Nasser's time, so that new classes were born...
...in early December...
...I visit with my family and I do everything that is proper and in good time...
...El Habrouk said Mahfouz, despite all the harassment, had retained his "lovely sense of humor...
...But if the writer's viewpoint is so important on his books, I think El Soulisaya [his Cairo trilogy] and Mohammed and El Harafiche are both more important than Gabaliya...
...THEP ROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Naguib Mahfouz Fifteen minutes with Egypt's Nobel laureate BY WILLIAM STEIF Though I'd made seven trips into the Arab World in the past fifteen years, from Casablanca to Baghdad, from Damascus to San'a, I'd never heard of Naguib Mahfouz...
...Q: In the later 1970s you strongly supported the Camp David accords, and for that you were banned throughout much of the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia...
...He used to go to the AU Baba Cafe at the square, sit and chat with friends, and enjoy his early-morning coffee...
...Now, a decade later, how do you see the future of peace between Israel and Egypt and the Arab world...
...Immediately after the prize was announced, there were ten reporters in his home...
...The film is finished at every location except the ending...
...Virgin Islands...
...And so he had...
...So was an East German crew, four or five reporters, and Abbas Hamdani, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his wife...
...Q: In Children of Gabaliya, you compressed the history of three major religions [Islam, Christianity, Judaism] into several hundred pages...
...What's its significance...
...In the afternoon I read and at night I prefer to sit at the TV...
...Mahfouz used to go walking daily, early in the morning, to Tahrir Square, the big plaza near the Nile into which Cairo's main streets pour...
...It simply came to that...
...Mahfouz's secretary informed each cluster of people that it would have only fifteen minutes with the novelist...
...I believe that from now on the international doors have opened and in the future literate people will look for Arab literature^and Arab literature deserves that recognition...
...To me, this is like a very difficult pregnancy...
...As we sat, waiting, in a large ground-floor reception room, we noticed a Swedish television crew and several persons of indeterminate nationality who were also inquiring for Mahfouz...
...At this point, Mahfouz's secretary entered, trailed closely by the East German television crew...
...Egypt and the Arab world also get the Nobel Prize with me...
Vol. 53 • February 1989 • No. 2
