Although twenty-four years have passed since the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature announced that it had awarded the prize to Naguib Mahfouz for all his work (and not a single work as a claim to the unknown or the informed) and for what presented humanity with fine and immortal literature, which indicated some of its human values in its declared and published reasons, the The echoes and repercussions of this great event still continue until now!
In October of each year, and before announcing the name of the winner, the discussion is renewed and the controversy ignites over the Nobel and why none of the Arab writers and writers have been nominated for it since the time of Naguib Mahfouz until now!
Then, on the sidelines, a sterile Byzantine controversy resumes, and I do not hesitate to define it as trivial on the merit and legitimacy of the award for reasons other than aesthetic or artistic ones, and then throwing out shrill cries here or there to repeat statements that are less than how they are described as obscene, banal and meaningless, and whose purpose is none other than to challenge in the value of what Mahfouz presented to Arab literature, and to Arab and human culture as a whole, of high human literature, bringing great values and a high and refined artistic aesthetic, which has absorbed all the developments in the art of the modern novel since its inception, up to the time when Mahfouz produced his greatest and most wonderful works (a novel, a story and a play in the same way). .
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Usually I do not stop in front of these controversies, and this absurdity about the merit of the award or its attribution to it, this is what has become known historically, artistically and aesthetically, and is inserted in the section of famous classics in the “Heritage of ‘Humanity”. of human creativity with merit and merit, and that what Naguib Mahfouz presented from his early works to his dense texts distilled in his last dreams are among the immortals of human creations, like the works of adults through the ages, in every culture , every language, and every great human literature.
For me, Naguib Mahfouz, creatively, artistically and aesthetically, is never less than the position of “Shakespeare” or “Milton” in English literature, or “Dante” in Italian literature, or “Cervantes” in Spanish literature, or “Goethe ”Or” Thomas Mann “in German literature, or” Dostoevsky “,” Tolstoy “and Turognev in Russian literature … etc., or their counterparts in other literatures and languages.
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Perhaps I will mention in this regard those words written by the late critic Louis Awad (although he was very hard on Naguib Mahfouz in several places in his writings on him!) In which he says:
“I have never known a writer who is satisfied with the right, the middle and the left, and who is satisfied with the ancient and the modern, and those in between, like Naguib Mahfouz; Naguib Mahfouz has become in our country a stable literary or artistic institution similar to those many institutions we read about, and perhaps we do not know what is happening inside it, yet it is standing and noble. The strangest thing is that this institution, which is located in Naguib Mahfouz, is not only a government institution that draws its strength from official recognition, but it is also a popular institution that people talk about freely, at coffee, at home and in clubs for the kind and simple.
He is the one who wrote about Mahfouz also saying: “Naguib Mahfouz is one of those few writers of the history of literature in the East and in the West for me. Every time I read it, I lived a time between the glories of man and I said to myself : there is no art after this art, and I do not rise above these high peaks “.
Whenever I reread the trilogy, the tales of our neighborhood, the epic of Harafish or the nights of a thousand nights, or others, I also said to myself: “By God, there is no art after this art, nor does it rise to the above these high peaks! “
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Almost none of our great critics and historians of the novel in Egypt and the Arab world have lost what was brought about by Naguib Mahfouz’s victory of nostalgia, grudges and grudges, and the gates of hell were thrown open in his face after this victory. without commenting, commenting, writing an article or a chapter of a book that clarifies the question, about the rhetoric and the crazy opinions that were sometimes emitted by the far right, which went too far in its extremism, fanaticism and hatred to the point of when it did not end with an attempt on him six years after receiving the Nobel Prize (October 1994).
There are more than counted examples and examples of this lava erupted by representatives of this current in Egypt and abroad, and they are those who claimed, disseminated and transmitted that Naguib Mahfouz had won a Nobel Prize for his novel “The children of our neighborhood ”(by name) because it attacks religions and attacks the position of divinity, intended or claimed !!
And sometimes those issued, sadly, by some writers who were hit by a “pollution” or something similar right after Mahfouz’s announcement of the award’s victory, hence the irresponsible, immoral and even inhumane accusations and statements who accuse Mahfouz of employment, treason and normalization … etc., and that without these things it would not have been. He won the Nobel and did not “smell” it, as some of them once wrote! Rather, the fanatics obsessed with conspiracy theory went so far as to claim that the first to inform Mahfouz of the Nobel Prize victory was Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (so !!), and some unknown critics and literature professors rushed to claim any cause that would move them from the dump adventurers category, maybe they hit something of the fame that brings them a loot here or a profit from there!
This is what some madmen claim, and God has commanded before and after.
(for the rest of the speech)
