The Beginning and the End

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Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in Gamaliyya, an old quarter of Cairo, which was the setting for several of his novels, to a family which earned its living from trade. When he was six years old his family moved to Abbasiyya, then at the outskirts of the capital.

Mahfouz’s writings clearly reflect the deep concern of the Egyptian petite bourgeoisie with material security, its worry about the morrow, its conformity to the system, and its disinclination to challenge the authorities or the powers that be. The sole preoccupation of this class was, and perhaps still is, security.

In 1930 Mahfouz entered the Secular University in Cairo, where he studied philosophy. It was his desire to give up this field to study the Arabic language, with which he was infatuated, but since this proved to be impossible, he accepted his academic lot and obtained a B.A. in philosophy in 1934. Then he registered for the master’s program in philosophy, the proposed title of his thesis being “The Concept of Beauty in Islamic Philosophy.”

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