The novel genre, which can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, has no prototypes in classical Arabic literature, which abounded in all kinds of narrative, though none of them could be described as a precursor of the novel as we understand the term today. The Arabic novel is thus a direct descendant of European influence and Arab scholars usually attribute the first serious attempt at writing a novel in Arabic to the Egyptian author Muhammad Husayn Haykal. The novel, called Zaynab after the name of its heroine, and published in 1913, told in highly romanticized terms the story of a peasant girl, victim of social convention, who withers away and finally dies of unfulfilled love. Like many first attempts, the novel suffered from many artistic flaws. Thus Haykal, a well-known author and politician of his day, shyly (he first serialized the novel in a newspaper under a pseudonym) opened the door to serious writers of his generation to try their hand at this new and suspicious art form! Soon after, writers like Taha Husayn, ‘Abbas al-‘Aqqad, Ibrahim al-Mazini, and Tawfiq al-Hakim were to venture into the unknown realm of fiction.

The Arabic novel, however, was to wait for yet another generation for the advent of the man who was to make it the sole mission of his life and at whose hands it was to reach maturity. Naguib Mahfouz, who was born to a middle-class family in one of the oldest quarters in Cairo, was to give expression in powerful literary metaphors, over a period of nearly half a century, to the hopes and frustrations of his nation, whose modern life has been a long act of unceasing turbulence. So much did his readers identify with his work (a great deal of which was adapted for the cinema, the theater, and television) that many of his characters became household names in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. On the other hand, his work, though deeply steeped in local reality, appeals to that which is universal and permanent in human nature, as shown by the relatively good reception that his fiction has met with in English and other languages since the appearance in 1966 of his first translated novel, Midaq Alley.