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Najib Mahfuz was born in Cairo in 1911 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He published his first novel, 'Abath al-aqdar (Fates Play),in 1937 and has gone on producing a stream of novels and volumes of short stories. His writing thus spans more than 60 years, with the exception of a five-year break he took between 1952 and 1957. Until recently it was widely thought that the reason for this break was his belief that his literary mission was brought to a halt with the Free Officers' revolution, led by Gamal Abdul Nasser in July 1952, whose regime would lead the reforms he touted. Mahfuz, a resolute democrat and liberal and a Fabian socialist in his ideological worldview, hated the corrupt, monarchist regime in his country. This was compounded by the fact that King Farouk repeatedly obstructed the Wafd Party from implementing social reforms and prevented the leader of the popular party, Mustafa at-Nahhas, from becoming prime minister despite his victory in the elections. Instead, the king exploited his authority by appointing the leaders of minority parties as prime minister.
In other words, it was thought, Mahfuz embraced the new Nasser regime and stopped writing. But Professor Menahem Milson, in his important book, Najib Mahfuz - The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo, refutes this claim, stating that Mahfuz stopped writing his major trilogy (1,500 pages) in April 1952, three months before the revolution. Mahfuz called this tome Bayn ol-Qasrayn (Palace Walk), which was also the name of the street where the hero of the story lived. When he submitted the work to his publisher, Said Jawda al-Sahhar, the latter was overwhelmed by its length and refused to publish it on the grounds that it was impossible to market such a large book. Dejected, it was this that caused Mahfuz to stop writing. Milson says: 'The fact that the halt in Mahfuz's writing more or less coincided with the Free Officers' revolution led some people to assume that his literary silence was somehow caused by the revolution' (p.42).
In 1957, Milson tells us, al-Sahhar decided to publish the book following the positive response to the chapters which had been serialized in a literary journal edited by his friend Yusuf al-Siba'i, one of the...