End of an Era

Naguib Mahfouz: An Appreciation

Laila Lalami laments the death of one of the Arab world's great writers in this appreciation in the Nation:

With the death of Mahfouz, Egypt has been deprived of its greatest living writer and of its last icon of the twentieth century, and the world has lost one of its most humane literary figures.

Particularly interesting is Lalami's discussion of Mahfouz's interest in both Pharaonic and Islamic Egypt in his works, and his complicated politics in his life.