The study of Mahfouz’s output shows his fiction to have passed through four distinguishable stages. The first (1939–44) comprises three novels based on the history of ancient Egypt. Though by no means works of outstanding literary merit, they provide a useful insight into the germination of the then budding young talent. Admittedly written under the influence of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances, the last of the three, namely The Struggle of Thebes, is particularly interesting for the way in which the novelist brought history to bear on the present political scene at the time. Drawing on the heroic struggle of the Egyptians under their patriotic Pharaohs to expel from their country the Hyksos, the foreign invaders who had ruled it for two hundred years, the novel bore a relevance to Egyptian sociopolitical reality at the time (British occupation and a ruling aristocracy of foreign stock) that was all too obvious to be missed.

Mahfouz had meant to write a whole series of novels encompassing the full history of Pharaonic Egypt; he even did the research required for such a monumental task. In the event, and perhaps luckily for the development of the Arabic novel, he was voluntarily deflected from his intended course and the scene of his next novel, A New Cairo (1945), was placed in the raw reality of its day. This marks the beginning of the second stage in the novelist’s career, which culminated in the publication in 1956–57 of his magnum opus, The Cairo Trilogy. The novels of this phase include six titles, of which three are in English translation, i.e. Midaq Alley, The Beginning and the End, and Volume I of The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk). In this period of his writing, the novelist studied the sociopolitical ills of his society with the full analytical power afforded him by the best techniques of realism and naturalism. What emerges from the sum total of these novels is a very bleak picture of a cross section of Egyptian urban society in the twenty or so years between the two world wars. A work which stands by itself in this phase is The Mirage (1948), in which Mahfouz experimented for the first and last time with writing a novel closely based on Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. For his Trilogy, the peak of his realist/naturalist phase, the Egyptian people will forever stand in their great novelist’s debt. For without this colossal saga novel in which he gives an eyewitness account of the country’s political, social, religious, and intellectual life between the two wars, that period of turmoil in their nation’s life would have passed undocumented.