Egyptian Nobel Laureate Dies at 94

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• JEFFREY BROWN:

  The novels of Naguib Mahfouz were set in his own ancient neighborhoods of Cairo, but told stories that resonated well beyond. Mahfouz was long regarded as the Arab world's foremost novelist. His best known works in English are the novels in the so-called "Cairo Trilogy." And in 1988, he became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  His was a strong voice for religious tolerance and women's rights in the Muslim world.

• NAGUIB MAHFOUZ, Nobel Laureate (through translator):

  I support human rights in general, and it is impossible to support human rights and avoid giving half of humanity, which is women, their rights, too. So I support women in their right to learn, work, and all other things that any free person can take in this culture.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  But his writings and ideas made him the target of religious fundamentalists. In 1994, he was stabbed by an Islamic militant. Mahfouz continued to work into his last years. The author of more than 30 novels died today in Cairo at age 94.

  And joining us is Roger Allen, a leading translator of the works of Mahfouz into English. He's a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Professor Allen, why don't we just start with the big picture? What was Mahfouz's significance to Arabic and world literature?

  ROGER ALLEN, University of Pennsylvania: Well, let's start with world literature, because obviously he's the first and, in fact, the only Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize. So when you're dealing with a non-Western writer like him, a primary function of this event is to introduce a world readership and, in our case, an Anglophone readership, to a literary culture which may be quite unfamiliar.

  And that, as I well know, has been the case in that Naguib Mahfouz's works have been introduced into school curricula, into anthologies of world literature, and so on. That's on the global, if you would like, the world scale.

  But even before he won the Nobel Prize, Naguib Mahfouz was acknowledged throughout the Arab world, and perhaps for the first time in that very diverse series of nations and cultures, as the person who laid the foundations for the Arabic novel, by which I mean the novel being a complex form, that he studied it, he discussed ways in which style, content and structure should be integrated along with the Arabic language.

  And during the 1940s, during the Second World War, he set himself to produce a whole series of works in which all these factors came together in a very mature way to essentially provide the foundation of the Arabic novel with the trilogy, which you've just mentioned, as perhaps the foundational work.