A tribute to Naguib Mahfouz

by an Iranian living in London.

In 1989, after Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa for apostasy against Salman Rushdie, a blind Egyptian theologian, Omar Abdul-Rahman, told a journalist that if Mahfouz had been punished for writing this novel, Rushdie would not have dared publish his. In 1994 Islamic extremists attempted to assassinate the 82-year-old novelist, stabbing him in the neck outside his Cairo home.

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