For Khairy Doma, professor of Arabic literature at Cairo University, Naguib Mahfouz has a season that returns every year around the same time, when Doma prepares a reading syllabus for his students.
For years, he has used the syllabus to introduce students to Mahfouz’s transformations throughout a writing career that began in the late 1920s, passed through his most famous works, including the Trilogy, and continued until his final volumes, including Dreams of Convalescence, largely dictated because of his declining health.
Mahfouz’s fiction is generally divided into four broad phases. His early works of the 1930s and 1940s used ancient Egypt allegorically to reflect on contemporary politics within a distinctly nationalist framework. This was followed by the social realist phase, which began toward the end of World War II and continued through much of the 1950s, depicting Egypt’s social, economic, and political dilemmas.
The 1960s marked a more philosophical phase in which Mahfouz delved into existential despair and political disillusionment, while his later fiction became increasingly concerned with faith, destiny, and the meaning of life.
For Doma, these classifications reflect shifts in Mahfouz’s style and method, but beneath them lies a deeper continuity: the human journey through the world, its limitations, and its end.
This thread, he said, runs from early works such as Thebes at War through the Trilogy, The Thief and the Dogs, Children of the Alley, and The Harafish.
“Mahfouz’s transformations have never meant that the constants were not there; the constant for Mahfouz is always there from his very first published volume to the very last — and it is always the same: the human quest for meaning in life and for an answer to the question of what comes after life,” Doma said.
“The question is always there. It is perhaps best pronounced by Said Mahran in The Thief and the Dogs, but it is there literally in every text.”
Yet Mahfouz’s work, Doma argued, is always layered. Beneath the central philosophical search for meaning in the passage from life to death and beyond lie more immediate concerns: politics, love, the transformation of the city, and changing social norms.
It is this layered quality, he added, that has enabled Mahfouz to appeal to generations of readers with different interests and backgrounds. “Everyone read him for what he could get out of him,” Doma said.
One novel that repeatedly appears on Doma’s syllabus is The Thief and the Dogs.
“This work is particularly exemplary of everything about Mahfouz in terms of the multiple intellectual layers that can be of relevance to diverse readers of different age brackets and cultural formation,” he said.
Some readers may approach it as the story of a disillusioned revolutionary, others as that of a man betrayed by the woman he loved or manipulated by a mentor, while still others may read it simply as a detective story.
Published in 1961, The Thief and the Dogs reflected Mahfouz’s growing disillusionment with the direction of Egypt under the Free Officers. The novel centres on Said Mahran, a released convict seeking revenge against those he believes betrayed him. His struggle is both existential and rooted in the everyday realities of the city around him.
Critics have often compared Said Mahran’s dilemma with those of Hamida in Midaq Alley and Eissa Al-Dabagh in Autumn Quail. For Doma, however, The Thief and the Dogs occupies a central position in Mahfouz’s work, connecting the realism of his earlier fiction with the philosophical concerns that became more prominent later.
“Said Mahran is the core protagonist of the works of Mahfouz, and this is one reason I always include it in the syllabus,” he said.
Doma also sees the novel as exemplary of Mahfouz’s stylistic transformation, particularly the move toward greater dynamism in syntax and meaning after earlier works influenced by Mustafa Lutfi Al-Manfaluti.
A late 19th- and early 20th-century writer known for his eloquent prose and adaptations of French literature, Al-Manfaluti was among Mahfouz’s favourites. Doma recalled novelist and critic Yehia Hakki’s observation that Mahfouz’s movement “from the static to the dynamic” represented an important turning point in his writing.
Doma pointed to two critical studies that illuminate both transformation and continuity in Mahfouz’s work: Abdel-Mohsen Taha Badr’s Al-Roiya wal-Adah, published in 1986, which examines Mahfouz’s vision and the impact of his fiction, and Mohamed Badawi’s Sardiyat Naguib Mahfouz, published in 2024, which traces changes in his narrative style and language.
For Doma, Mahfouz will remain a subject of literary criticism for years to come, as befits a great novelist. His fiction, he added, also continues to offer rich material for cinema and television.
“Some might be more appealing to a particular audience than others, but there is always enough material there to create cinema and drama that is interesting and captivating — even if it is not exactly representative of the literary text, as Mahfouz himself admitted of films based on his novels during his lifetime,” Doma said.
He also pointed to the continuing commercial and cultural life of Mahfouz’s work. Almost two decades after his death, Diwan began reissuing his works with new covers that proved popular among younger readers, and in cooperation with Al-Mahroussa published some in comics form.
For Doma, this renewed interest demonstrates that Mahfouz can remain “en vogue” for new generations just as he was for earlier ones.
Born on 11 December 1911, Mahfouz died on 30 August 2006. In 1988, he became the first Arab writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Over a career spanning some seven decades, he wrote 35 novels and hundreds of short stories. Many were adapted for cinema and television, while his work was translated into numerous languages, securing his place as one of Egypt’s most enduring literary voices and one of the most internationally recognized figures in modern Arabic literature.
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