Naguib MahfouzEgypt 
Naguib Mahfouz is one of the best known Arab authors in the Western World. Born in Cairo in 1911, he published his first novel in 1939. Since then, he has had more than 40 books published and they have been adapted for television, cinema and the theater. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. The Swedish Academy of Letters said Mahfouz "through works rich in nuance - now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous - has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind." In 1994, he was attacked by Muslim radicals who called for his death because of Mahfouz's support of peace with Israel. Two of his books are banned in Egypt. Mahfouz now rarely goes out. The assault changed his life completely. Before, Mahfouz, wearing his trademark dark glasses and helped by a stick, would walk every day in the streets of Cairo. He would photograph daily scenes that he would later describe in his novels. In 1959, Muslim fundamentalists condemned Mahfouz as a kafir (infidel), prompting the Egyptian government to offer him protection. His "offense," they asserted, was to depict personages from the Bible and the Quran as heroes of a story that takes place in a Cairo alley. Since then, he and his novel "Awlad Al Haritna" (Children of Gebelawi) have been a target. However, he continued to walk the streets of Cairo without protection. But in October 1994, while en route to his weekly literary circle at the Nile-side Qasr Al Nil café, Mahfouz was attacked by a young man with a knife and severely injured. The deep wounds on his neck still prevent him from writing. The attacker confessed just before he was hanged that he had never read the writer's novels but said that he had listened to a sheikh's condemnations of "Awlad Al Haritna." The sheikh described him as secular writer, the boy had said.
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