The Revolution of Form: Naguib Mahfouz from the Suez Crisis to the Arab Spring

This chapter considers how Naguib Mahfouz has been co-opted in global and in national literary cultures alike. I argue that while the Swedish Academy’s decision to award Mahfouz the Nobel Prize in 1988 was based on universalist principles that obscure what I regard as his more local aesthetic and formal sensibilities, his subsequent recognition by the Egyptian state as a national writer similarly obscures his lifelong critique of that same state for its authoritarianism, corruption, and political violence. Against these co-optations, I aim to restore Mahfouz’s significance for world literature. I do so by considering the novels of his late, indigenous / traditional phase. In Arabian Nights and Days, Mahfouz draws on the frame narrative, folklorish elements, and magical devices of the 1,001 Nights in order to reinvent the novel as a world literary form. In Morning and Evening Talk, he adopts and adapts the classical Arabic genre of the ṭabaqāt in order to reinterpret the 200-year trajectory of modernity in the country from the perspective of its political, social, cultural, and economic margins. Mahfouz’s “revolution of form”, I conclude, enacts a deeply rooted, organic, and historically conscious form of revolution against the abuses of (Egyptian) modernity.