Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy

The Cairo Trilogy is made up of Palace Walk (Bayn al-Qasrayn, 1956), Palace of Desire (Qasr al-Shawq, 1957) and Sugar Street (al-Sukkariyya, 1957), each named for a district of old Cairo. Written in Arabic by Naguib Mahfouz, it follows the family of the merchant Ahmad Abd al-Jawad over three generations, from the First World War through the 1919 revolt against British rule to the end of the Second World War. His household is ruled by a stern patriarch who keeps a hidden life of pleasure.¹

Mahfouz, born in Cairo in 1911, was a civil servant who wrote at night, and he completed the trilogy by 1952 but it did not appear until after the military coup that overthrew the monarchy. He drew on the European realist novel, adapting it to Egyptian life, and used the family as a lens for changes in religion, politics and women's roles. The books were widely read across the Arab world. In 1988 Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in Arabic to do so, and in 1994 he survived a stabbing in Cairo by a man angered by an earlier novel. The trilogy was translated into English in the 1990s.¹²