Allen, Roger

Najīb Maḥfūẓ (10 December 1911–30 August 2006) was Egypt's most prominent writer of fictional narratives in the twentieth century. In 1988 he was the first Arab author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 1. Life Maḥfūẓ was born in the Jamāliyya quarter in the old city o…

Yūsuf Idrīs (1927–91) was an Egyptian writer and one of the most significant contributors to the development of the short-story genre in Arabic. He also wrote a number of plays and novels, and was a major and often controversial participant in the cultural life of his homeland. …

In quest of a term to designate the creation of “ fiction ,” modern Arabic has adopted the word takhyīl —literally, “making something imaginary”—while, for fiction’s most basic parameter, irony—the interplay of knowledge and ignorance—the term mufāraqa is used. While the coinage…

Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī (d. 1930) was an Egyptian author and journalist whose early career was inextricably bound up with that of his father Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī (d. 1906). The date of his birth is the subject of debate. If Muḥammad was born in 1858, as some suggest, then his fath…

Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī (1846–1906) was an Egyptian political journalist and writer born into a wealthy Egyptian family of silk merchants. When his father died in 1865 Ibrāhīm and his younger brother, ʿAbd al-Salām, took over the administration of the family business. In the same y…