In his best-known work, the epic Cairo Trilogy, published in 1956, Mahfouz chronicled three generations of a troubled family in the decades leading up to the 1952 revolution. It prompted comparisons to the Western greats Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, and earned Mahfouz the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. That may have drawn wider attention to Mahfouz, but he was already known in the Middle East as the father of the Arabic novel.
He was a master of social realism who also experimented with surrealism and traditional Arabic storytelling as he explored existential questions from the meaning of life to the relationship between science and faith. Mahfouz's stories are permeated with human misery, and cry for universal humanitarian values that the author espoused in practice. When Sadat signed Egypt's peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Mahfouz unhesitatingly supported it a courageous gesture that made him an outcast among Arab nationalists for years afterwards.
A devout Muslim, he criticized Salman Rushdie for insulting Islam in the 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, but staunchly defended the British author's right to free expression. A few years later, a Muslim extremist stabbed Mahfouz in the neck, but he survived the assassination attempt. In describing himself as "the son of two civilizations," Mahfouz drew hope from Islam's search for knowledge as well as ancient Egypt's quest for truth. "One day the Great Pyramid will disappear," Mahfouz said in his Nobel address, "but truth and justice will remain for as long as mankind has a ruminative mind and a living conscience."