In the mid-seventies we find Mahfouz again searching for a new style. It would appear that, having been diverted by national traumatic events from the course he had embarked on in the early sixties, he was no longer able to return to it. Or it may be that in his old age, with a life’s experience behind him, he felt at last that he could Arabicize the art of the novel. For it is since then that we observe the sporadic emergence of a number of novels which justify the proposition of a fourth stage in his literary development (which has yet to be studied). What is remarkable about the novels of this stage, of which we can count five, is their departure from the norms of novel writing as they evolved in Europe over the last two centuries; these are the norms which conceive of the novel as a work of indivisible unity which proceeds logically from a beginning to a middle to an end. But Mahfouz no longer wants any of that. He now harks back to the indigenous narrative arts of Arabic literature, particularly as found in the maqama form and in The Arabian Nights and other folk narratives in which Arabic literature abounds. While any talk of an organic unity in these works is precluded, the presence of what may be called, for the lack of a better term, a cumulative unity producing a total effect of sorts is undeniable. It is this form that Mahfouz has been experimenting with for the last ten years or so in novels like The Epic of the Riff-Raff The Nights of “The Thousand and One Nights” and others. In his evocation of both the form and the content of these classical Arabic narrative types, and his utilization of them to pass judgment on the human condition past and present, Mahfouz appears to open endless vistas for the young Arab novelist to find a distinct voice of his own.

Although Mahfouz’s novelistic technique has passed, as we have seen, through four recognizable stages, one cannot say the same about his worldview, the main features of which can be traced back to his earliest works. Mahfouz appears indeed to have sorted out the main questions about life at an early juncture of his youth and to have held on to the answers he arrived at ever since, age and experience serving only to deepen and broaden but hardly to modify them.