mahfouz links

I've been occupied with moving (more on that later) but want to put up some links to various responses to the death of Naguib Mahfouz. Issandr el Amrani of The Arabist writes in the Guardian's "Comment is Free" blog on Mahfouz's Nobel: "he was the only Arabic-language writer ever to get one, which tells you more about the Nobel prize than it tells you about Arabic literature."

In another post at The Arabist, Hossam el-Hamalawy has photos from and a Reuters report about the funeral procession, which was monopolized by state elites and denied the broader public access:

Mohsen Khas, from one of Cairo’s poorer suburbs, had arrived too late for the morning ceremony and had taken a big sign praising Mahfouz to the state funeral instead. Once again the coffin passed without him catching a glimpse. “Farewell, Arab Shakespeare,” his sign read.

Laila Lalami of MoorishGirl has an essay on Mahfouz's legacy in The Nation:

His modesty was legendary, his devotion to his literary work exemplary and his influence extraordinary, particularly for a man who never traveled outside Egypt--he did not even attend the Nobel ceremony.

Many people have linked to Edward Said's 2001 essay "Naguib Mahfouz and the Cruelty of Memory," and rightfully so:

What is both remarkable and poignant about him is how, given the largeness of his vision and his work, he still seems to guard his nineteenth- century liberal belief in a decent, humane society for Egypt even though the evidence he keeps dredging up and writing about in contemporary life and in history continues to refute that belief. The irony is that, more than anyone else, he has dramatised in his work the almost cosmic antagonism that he sees Egypt as embodying between majestic absolutes on the one hand and, on the other, the gnawing at and wearing down of these absolutes by people, history, society. These opposites he never really reconciles. Yet as a citizen Mahfouz sees civility and the continuity of a transnational, abiding, Egyptian personality in his work as perhaps surviving the debilitating processes of conflict and historical degeneration which he, more than anyone else I have read, has so powerfully depicted.

There have also been many good blog responses--I like Teju's observation that Mahfouz "wrote his country into literary modernity." (I think Hikmet did something similiar--via poetry, not prose--for Turkey. And now, I suppose, Pamuk is busily writing it into postmodernity....) I've enjoyed what I've read of Mahfouz's work but rarely loved it, the way I do books that entrap me, whose characters haunt me long past the last pages. But I'm determined to go finally finish the Cairo Trilogy now. And I recommend the Mahfouz book I like the best (s0 far), the little-known and rarely mentioned Fountain and Tomb, a warm, minutely-observed collection of vignettes about an alley in Cairo where a takiyya (Sufi shrine) is located, and the children who live and play there.