THE father of the contemporary Egyptian novel, Naguib Mahfouz remains to date the only Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature, which was awarded to him in 1988. His influence was immense not only on the literature of Egypt, but on Arab creative writing in general. His great strength was that he confined himself to themes that he knew best, and seldom strayed far from the streets of his beloved Cairo and their denizens.

Mahfouz built on the pioneering experiments of Muhammad Haykal (1888-1956) who had produced the first plausible modern fiction in Arabic, ridding it of its tendency to become trapped in moralising. Like Haykal he well appreciated the problems posed for the creative writer by Arabic, a tongue understood from the Atlantic Coast of Morocco to the Gulf of Oman and beyond, but as a written language in his era so formal and remote from the spoken word as to be an unsuitable vehicle for modern, realistic fiction.

Haykal had written of the villages of the Nile Delta. Mahfouz’s achievement was to fuse the colloquial speech of the Cairo streets with literary Arabic to give his novels a distinctively urban and Egyptian flavour. Indeed the volumes of his Cairo Trilogy, published in the second half of the 1950s, take their titles from three well- known suburbs of the city.

Naguib Mahfouz was born in the picturesque medieval Gamaliya quarter of Cairo in 1911. He graduated from Cairo University in philosophy and, like many a middle-class Egyptian, went into government service, in which he was to be employed for the next 35 years.

Haykal’s pioneering Zaynab, a study of a village girl of the Nile Delta, published in 1913, was at that time the only native model that an aspiring Egyptian novelist could look to, and by any standards it presented a somewhat rough-hewn one. But besides immersing himself in the works of al-Jahiz (d. 869) and Ibn Abd Rabbihi (d. 940), Mahfouz had read voraciously in the 19th and 20th-century European novel — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Camus — while at university.

He had particularly come under the influence of Sir Walter Scott, and, it is Scott who is mainly evident in his first attempt at fiction, A Game of Fates (1939), subsequently to be translated into English as Khufu’s Wisdom. This was a historical novel set in the time of the pharaohs, and described the throwing off of the oppressive rule of a foreign monarchy.

The parallels with an Egypt dominated by a British presence might have caused its author some problems at any other time. But war was impending and it, and two further historical novels published during the war, though respectfully reviewed, were not widely read. Egyptian literature is perhaps fortunate in the timing of these events. In the circumstances of war the remainder of a projected five-volume novel covering the whole of the Egypt of the Pharaohs, an undertaking which promised to be an indigestible tract, was not completed.

Instead, after the war Mahfouz’s fiction took a modern route when he concentrated his attention on contemporary Cairo. His Cairo Trilogy, Bayn al-Qasrayn (1956, Palace Walk), Qasr al-Shawq (1957, Palace of Desire), al-Sukhariya (1959, Sugar Street), which traced the life of a family from the end of the First World War to the middle of the Second, handled contemporary social and political themes in a vernacular language in a way that was quite new in Arabic fiction.

It was followed by Awalad Haratina (1959, Children of Gebelawi, 1981), which dealt with the theme of human suffering down the ages in a highly iconoclastic manner for a writer who was, theoretically at least, in the Islamic tradition.

Although it was serialised in Al-Ahram the book was immediately banned and, after French and English translations, did not reappear in Egypt until this year. Islamic scholars judged the book blasphemous, identifying its main character — an authoritarian father figure who exiles his children and retreats to a distant home upon a high hill — as a representation of God.

These novels and their successors can, perhaps, hardly be judged by the standards of their most sophisticated European counterparts. In the earlier, longer novels, certainly, Mahfouz tended to lose his grasp of characterisation in providing the reader with a complex tapestry of individuals. But with The Beggar (1965) and Chit-chat on the Nile (1966) he was more successful at focusing his themes, and he described with great vividness the changing temper of Egypt since the Nasser revolution.

If the award of his Nobel Prize was assumed in some quarters to have something to do with a feeling that it was the Third World’s “turn” (none of the Nobel judges read Arabic), then this generous impulse, if so it was, certainly did not detract from the merit of the laureateship, which was richly deserved. To make literary Arabic work as the language of the novel of social realism was Mahfouz’s great achievement, and his work pointed the way irreversibly forward to other practitioners in the language.

Mahfouz himself was often not popular with officialdom, thanks to the irreverence of his themes. But he did not openly quarrel with authority. Indeed more radical, younger political elements considered him a turncoat when he concurred in the Camp David accord which led to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s.

In 1994, then aged 82, he was attacked outside his home by Islamist extremists who believed that they were acting on a fatwa issued in 1989 by the Egyptian theologian Omar Abdul-Rahman on account of the alleged apostasy of Children of Gebelawi. Abdul-Rahman has denied issuing any such fatwa, but at any rate the two extremists drove a kitchen knife into Mahfouz’s neck. Lucky to survive, he lost the use of his right arm and could only dictate his later publications.

Mahfouz remained prolific to the end, although his later works lack the strength of his main oeuvre. The first instalment of Dreams, a two-volume collection of fragmentary prose poems, was published last year and the second volume is due out later this year.

Mahfouz was utterly modest about his achievements. Faced with the barrage of publicity which accompanied his Nobel laureateship he said of his work that it was “probably like the rest of Arab literature — fourth or fifth rate”. Critical opinion has taken some pleasure in disagreeing with this self-effacing assessment.

Naguib Mahfouz, novelist, was born on December 11, 1911. He died on August 30, 2006, aged 94.