英语名人堂：纳吉布·马哈富兹

纳吉布·马哈富兹(1911年12月11日—2006年8月29日)，埃及作家和阿拉伯世界最重要的知识分子之一。纳吉布四岁时就被送到私塾学习《古兰经》，接受宗教启蒙教育。1988年他被授予诺贝尔文学奖，他是第一名获诺贝尔文学奖的阿拉伯语作家。获奖理由：“他通过大量刻画入微的作品—洞察一切的现实主义，唤起人们树立雄心—形成了全人类所欣赏的阿拉伯语言艺术”。

Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 and died in 2006. He was an Egyptian novelist and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is considered as the father of modern Arabic literature and is popular throughout the Arab world. Many of his books were about Egyptian nationalism. He said politics “is the very axis of our thinking”.

Mahfouz came from a lower middle-class Muslim family in Cairo, the youngest of seven children. He had a very strict Islamic upbringing. He later wondered how “an artist would emerge from that family". Mahfouz was an avid reader and spent his early years with his head buried in books. His interests included traditional Arab literature and Western classics and detective stories.

He graduated in philosophy from the University of Cairo and decided to be a professional writer. He got a job in the Ministry of Culture, where he stayed until 1972, as a movie censor. While working as a civil servant, Mahfouz wrote 34 novels, 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts and five plays. Many of his works were made into Arabic-language movies.

Mahfouz was not a stranger to controversy. Many Arab countries banned his books because of his support of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. He also supported Salman Rushdie after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the author to death. Mahfouz received many death threats, and he survived an assassination attempt in 1994. He is the only Arabic-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.