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The Story of the Banned Book
Naguib Mahfouz's Children of the Alley
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- 17,99 €
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- 17,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
An award-winning account of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s most controversial novel and the fierce debates that it provoked
Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Children of the Alley has been in the spotlight since it was first published in Egypt in 1959. It has been at times banned and at others allowed, sold sometimes under the counter and sometimes openly on the street, often pirated and only recently legally reprinted. It has inspired anxiety among the secular authorities, rage within the religious right, and a drawing of battle lines among Arab intellectuals and writers. It dogged Mahfouz like a curse throughout the remainder of his career, led to his attempted assassination, and sparked a public debate that continues to this day, even after the author’s death in 2006. It is Egypt’s iconic novel, in whose mirror millions have seen themselves, their society, and even the universe, some finding truth, others blasphemy.
In this award-winning account, Mohamed Shoair traces the story of Mahfouz’s novel as a cultural and political object, from its first publication to the present via Mahfouz’s award of the Nobel prize for literature in 1988 and the attempt on his life in 1994. He presents the arguments that swirled about the novel and the wide cast of Egyptian figures, from state actors to secular intellectuals and Islamists, who took part in them. He also contextualizes the interactions among the principal characters, interactions that have done much to shape the country’s present.
Extensively researched and written in a lucid, accessible style, The Story of the Banned Book is both a gripping work of investigative journalism and a window onto some of the fiercest debates around culture and religion to have taken place in Egyptian society over the past half-century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Shoair (Sons of Gebelawi) chronicles the controversy that followed the 1959 publication of Naguib Mahfouz's novel Children of the Alley in this exhaustive study. Almost as soon as the first installment of the novel appeared in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, religious, literary, and political figures attacked it: Mahfouz critiqued "the Arab cultural system in its entirety," while others wrote that the book "deviates from and avoids every principle of the novel." Sohair covers Mahfouz's response to critics (his goal was to show that society could only achieve freedom by "putting an end to the exploitation of the poor by the rich"), his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, and a 1994 attempt on Mahfouz's life because of his "defiance of Islam." As Shoair observed, Children of the Alley "became both a book and the symbol of a political, social, and cultural battle that is not yet over but which takes, with each era, a new and fascinating form." Shoair is exceedingly meticulous in his reporting, cultural criticism, and literary history, all of which has an unfortunate tendency to be slowed down by repetitive passages. Still, readers invested in the ongoing debates about book banning will find this to be a worthy resource.