The Story of the Banned Book: Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley

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. (Mar.)