On December 11, 1911, in one of the conversations in the Jamalia district in ancient Egypt, the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born and presented to the world a picture of the Egyptian society with his novels that take place mostly in Cairo, the city in which he lived for nearly 95 years before To be gone at the end of August 2006.

The deceased was born in a simple house overlooking Beit al-Qadi Square and the Crimson trail. The residents of the neighborhood did not know that the son of their neighborhood - who studied philosophy and was the first to write in it - would narrate their biography to the world.

Mahfouz says, “The house was full of trees. I was reaching out for my hand and grabbing the leaves. It was a tree that we call the Chin Al Basha tree.” As for the house itself, nothing came but silence and waiting for it to fall.

Naguib won - with his realistic literature - the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 when he was 76 years old, and while he was walking as usual to buy morning newspapers on his way to his office, he was surprised by the news of his receipt of the award, and the committee said that Mahfouz has rendered great service to humanity through his literary works.

Formal neglect

After Mahfouz’s death, the idea of ​​establishing a museum for Nobel’s writer appeared, and it was circulated in the media under the auspices of the former Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, who issued a decision to establish the museum, which bears No. 804 of 2006.

However, the actual steps did not begin until 2012, when the Muhammad Abu al-Dhahab hospice was dedicated to converting it to the museum, with a total financing of 15 million pounds (the dollar is about 16 pounds).

According to local press reports, the opening date of the museum has been postponed 6 times, and the reason remains varied. For example, the head of the Cultural Development Fund, Fathi Abdel Wahab, justified the delay by the fact that dealing with the ancient building differs from dealing with any other building in terms of its need for special attention, in addition to a shortage in the budget. .

However, Muhammad Hassan Abdel Fattah, director of archaeological documentation and supervisor of the documentation of archaeological sites at the Ministry of Antiquities, attributed the reason for the delay in the opening to the discovery of a new archaeological find inside the Tekkeh Abu al-Dhahab, which is a place used to store water under the building.

Finally, only last year, the museum, which is located inside the ancient building, Tkiyet Abu al-Dhahab, was opened. The takiyat in Mahfouz’s literature is the refuge of the soul for many of its heroes, the most famous of them being Ashour al-Naji in the epic “Harafish”, who found in the hymns of the hospice rare moments of life.

Umm Kulthum, the daughter of the late Adeeb, revealed in a televised interview on one of the private Egyptian satellite channels, years ago, a secret that has been buried for nearly 3 decades, which is that the Nile necklace - which the ousted president Muhammad Hosni Mubarak honored her Nobel laureate father - was from Silver is not gold as is usual and stipulated in the relevant government documents.

The Nile necklace is the highest decoration in the country. It is made of pure gold weighing 488 grams, and is decorated with sapphire and blue turquoise stones. It was awarded to Mahfouz after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in the same year.

Umm Kulthum said - in the same televised interview - that her mother said to her father as soon as she saw the necklace, "This is not gold." Then she checked later with the jewelry seller who said it was of coated silver, so I asked her Egyptian media host Mona El Shazly, "What does this mean?" She replied, "I mean, it is a fraudulent prize."

Why did the family keep this secret for 29 years? Umm Kulthum says that her father, who is concerned, did not care about these matters, and did not tell anyone about this throughout his life.

Biography of the Arab writer

Mahfouz wrote dozens of novels and stories, and he was considered the most Arab writer whose novels were converted into cinematic and television films.

He joined writers, learned to read and write, then studied general education, and joined the Faculty of Arts, Fouad I University (Cairo after that) in 1930 and obtained a BA in Philosophy, and proceeded to prepare a master's thesis on "Beauty in Islamic Philosophy", but he stopped due to work.

He worked as a government employee, working as a parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Endowments (1938-1945), then director of the Good Loan Foundation until 1954, after which he moved as director of the Minister of Guidance Office, then Director of the Supervision of Artistic Works. He was appointed director general of the Film Support Foundation and then its president, until he was transferred to the pension in 1971.

Mahfouz decided to focus on literature, and he was inspired by the region in which he grew up (Al-Jamalia district and its surroundings) most of his novels and stories, which formed his own world, and from there he set out to global, and he started writing since the mid-1930s.

He published his short stories in the well-known magazine "Al-Risala", and his first story was titled "Whisper of Madness" in 1938, then the novel "Absurdity of Destinies" in 1939, "Radobis", and "Good Struggle", all of which are about the history of the Pharaohs.

He started his realistic writing career with the novels "New Cairo, Khan Al Khalili, Alley Al Midaq, Al Sarab, Beginning and the End" and then "Between Kasserine, Qasr Al Shawq, and Al Sukkariyah." Mahfouz received little attention from critics for nearly 20 years, and he remained grateful to the Islamic writer and thinker Sayyid Qutb, who was the first to write about it, and to present it to the literary scene in "Al Risala" magazine in 1944.

His novel "Children of Our Alley" in 1959, which he published on episodes in "Al-Ahram" newspaper, provoked angry reactions from Al-Azhar scholars, because of direct talk about religious symbols, which led to the cessation of its publication and printing in Egypt, but it is a reason for receiving the "Nobel Prize" In literature.

Mahfouz continued to be creative, writing novel, story and essay, even shortly before his death. He wrote more than 30 novels, most of which were well-known, and were produced cinematically or on television, and his first novels, "Absurdity of Destinies", then "Radobis" 1943, and among his most famous novels are: the trilogy "Between Kasserine, Qasr Al-Shouq, Al-Sukkariyah", and "Gossip over the Nile, Karnak, Beginning And the end, the thief and the dogs, the children of our neighborhood, the Harafish. "

The last novel he wrote was “Qushtumur” in 1988, and he wrote more than 20 short stories, the most recent of which was “Dreams of the Convalescence” in 2004. Critics considered his books as a mirror of social and political life in Egypt and a contemporary codification of human existence.

The stars whispered

After 14 years of his departure, the Egyptian writer returned to tell his stories about the neighborhood, the cafe and the marginalized personalities, through 18 stories that were not included in any book before, but the Egyptian journalist Muhammad Shair - one of his fans - collected them and published them in a new edition.

The group, called "Naguib Mahfouz .. Whispering Stars" and issued by Dar Al-Saqi in Beirut, consists of stories that Mahfouz published in the 1990s in a magazine, but it was not collected in any book, adding to it a new story from a "literary treasure" found by Barley. I have the heirs of the late writer.

"When his daughter Umm Kulthum gave me a small box containing several papers belonging to Mahfouz, I felt a pleasure as if I was about to discover a Pharaonic tomb," said this journalist who has been reviewing and analyzing Mahfouz's narratives.

He added, "Among the papers was a complete file containing about 40 short stories, but the stories were not published at the time they were written. Mahfouz returned to them after years to publish them in Nusf al-Dunya magazine, and 18 short stories remained outside the complete works of various editions."

Absolutely no doubt about the authenticity of the stories, Barley attached a picture of the origins of these stories in a handwritten preservation, while preserving the titles of the works as chosen by the late novelist.

Among these stories, "Chase, Tawhidah, Ibn Al-Hara, Prophecy of an Ant, Abouna Ajwa, Arrow, Whispering Stars, Al-Omar Game, Doaa Sheikh Qaf" and other names that Mahfouz was keen to describe the popular environment.