SOURCE: El-Enany, Rasheed. “Images of God, Death and Society: The Short Stories and the Plays.” In Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning, pp. 195-212. London: Routledge, 1993.

In the following essay, El-Enany asserts that Mahfouz's short stories are “immensely valuable in highlighting particular aspects of his vision and reassuring the critic on the soundness of his interpretation of the novels” and urges an assessment of his short fiction independent of his novels.

If Mahfouz had not written any of his novels, he would still have merited a place of high prominence in the history of modern Arabic letters on account of his short stories alone, of which he has written some 200 spread across fourteen collections¹ and a lifetime. As it happens he has also written, as we have seen, thirty-three novels,² many of which are masterpieces of craft and vision. The inevitable result of this has been that his...