Najib Mahfuz’s Cairo

Synonyms

Cairo as capital of Arabic literature and cinema; The Cairene café; Arabic novel; Islamic Cairo; Egyptian cinema; Cairo’s multifaceted existence; Historical Cairo; Politics of liminality; The Nile; Cairo’s representation; Cairene society; Cairo’s intelligentsia; Modern Cairo

Definition

Being one of Cairo’s intelligentsia in the thirties and forties, Maḥfūẓ adapted the novel, as a European invention, to Egyptian society. Modernism may have meant embracing Western thought to many Egyptians back then, but to Mahfuz, it was nothing but writing Cairo. This is how and why his work, in spite of its international status, always remained scrupulously Cairene.

Introduction

Any discussion of Cairo can avoid neither its centrality in the Arab world as a capital of literary and cinematic production nor its fictional character as a city which is quite literally made out of literature and film in the minds of its own people. To take one salient feature, the cafés of Cairo form an integral...