CAIRO, 1 September 2006 — Egypt’s outlawed Islamist opposition yesterday joined leading Muslim leaders in mourning for Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, some of whose work was condemned by extremists as sacrilegious.
President Hosni Mubarak attended a military funeral for Mahfouz at a mosque in Cairo’s Nasr City neighborhood. Mahfouz, the only Arab to have won a Nobel Prize for literature, died Wednesday at age 94.
Mahfouz’s coffin, wrapped in green shroud with the words “there is no god but God” in gold letters, was first driven to the historic Hussein mosque in Islamic Cairo, the district where he was born. A crowd of the author’s friends and admirers accompanied the body, chanting “to eternal Heaven, Naguib.”
“We see between the lines of Mahfouz books that with clear faith, he managed to reach all hearts in the world, not only Arabs or Muslims,” said Ali Gomaa, Egypt’s Grand Mufti after the prayers before the coffin.
Mahfouz stirred controversy among conservatives with his calls for religious tolerance. In 1994, an Islamic militant stabbed him after accusing him of blasphemy in one of his novels, “Children of Gebelawi”, a religious allegory.
During yesterday’s prayer service, a reporter asked Gomaa whether it was appropriate to pray before the body of Mahfouz, seen by extremists as an atheist. “These are myths,” Gomaa replied. “We want to prove the opposite.”
The prayers were led by Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the grand sheik at Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most important seat of learning. The presence of the two leading clerics was seen as an attempt to rebut allegations that Mahfouz was not a devout Muslim.
Mahfouz’s attacker was inspired by a fatwa issued in 1989 by Egyptian radical Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman — later convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks — in which he said that Mahfouz deserved to die for his novel.
The 1959 “Children of Gebelawi” — or “Children of Our Alley” by its Arabic title — told the story of a family patriarch and his sons. The book was banned in Egypt.
However, in an apparent acknowledgement of the writer’s broad appeal across Egyptian society, two senior figures and five lawmakers from Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s biggest Islamic group, attended the funeral. One of them, Mohammed Abdel Qudous, described Mahfouz as “a great, modest and devout Muslim man,” in an interview with Egyptian state-run television.
The state accorded the acclaimed author full honors. A military band of drummers and trumpet players dressed in red tunics and white caps marched as six horses pulled the coffin wrapped in the black-white-and-red Egyptian flag to the Al-Rashdan mosque where the funeral was held.
