Naguib Mahfouz was a man who suffered for his art:

Naguib Mahfouz, who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and who was later stabbed by an Islamic militant who accused him of blasphemy, died Wednesday, said his doctor, Hossam Mowafi. He was 94.

Mahfouz, whose novels depicted Egyptian life in his beloved corner of ancient Cairo, was admitted to the hospital more than a month ago for injury to his head. Mowafi said he died Wednesday morning after a sharp decline. "His wife last night was whispering in his ears and he was smiling and nodding," Mowafi said.

His passing is particularly sad in these times:

The prize, awarded in 1988, brought to notice a man who had already established himself as one of the Middle East's finest and most beloved writers and a strong voice for moderation and religious tolerance.

That voice earned him enemies:

In 1989, after the 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. Sheikh Omar has always maintained that this was not a fatwa, but in 1994 Islamic extremists, believing that it had been one, attempted to assassinate the 82-year-old novelist, stabbing him in the neck outside his Cairo home.

Abdul-Rahman is serving a life sentence in the US for seditious conspiracy, from charges laid in 1993 for planning terror attacks against New York landmarks.

Now the story for which he was attacked was hardly a screed denouncing Islam. Children of Gebelawi is an allegorical tale of life in an alley, where four men try to carve out a life amidst the chaos:

Children of Gebelaawi (Awlad haratina) is Naguib Mahfouz's most controversial work. Set on the edge of real Cairo, it relates in a simple, parable-like language the history of an isolated alley (harah) through several generations. The hero of each generation struggles to restore the rights of the alley's poor and oppressed inhabitants to the estate (waqf) set up by their ancestor, the powerful and enigmatic Gebelaawi. In order to accomplish this mission, he must battle the tyrants who control the estate and their thugs or "strongmen'' (futuwah), sadistic protection-racketeers with colorful gangster-like names such as Guzzler, Bruiser, etc.

On closer examination, we see that Children of Gebelaawi is an allegorical tale. The heroes of the first four episodes relive the lives of the prophets Adam, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, and the protagonist of the fifth represents modern man who relies on science and technology to destroy the alley's oppressors.

The book was published in serial form with the support of the Egyptian government, including President Abdul Nasser, but even before all the sections were in print, the attacks began:

Children of Gebelaawi was first published in serialized form in the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram (September 21 to December 25, 1959). Before the complete serialized version of the novel had appeared, conservative Muslims, led by members of the Mosque-University al-Azhar, condemned the work as blasphemous and demanded that it be banned. This group of Muslims felt that Mahfouz's depiction of the prophets--in particular that of Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets--as ordinary, flawed men who frequently drank alcohol and smoked hashish, was highly irreverent and that the death of the patriarch Gebelaawi symbolized the "death of God.''

Even the number of chapters was offensive:

They later went so far as to maintain that Mahfouz had written an "anti-Qur'an,'' as indicated by the fact that the number of chapters found in Children of Gebelaawi (114) equaled the number of the suras of the Holy Qur'an.

Despite Nasser's support which allowed the full publication of the serial, publication in book form was prohibited in Egypt. It would not be printed again until 1967 in Beirut.

A curious coincidence -- Omar Abdul-Rahman is an alumnus of al-Azhar university. Nothing much has changed at al-Azhar since it came out against Children of Gebelaawi in 1959. The institution is more seminary than university, and its main purpose remains to propagate Islam and Arab culture. The library contains 99,062 books -- not a single non-Islamic text in the lot. I wonder if the works of Mahfouz, the Arab world's only winner of the Nobel Prize, are available for borrowing.

The question of allegory bring to mind the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie that was released last year. Of course, most people in the English-speaking world have read the stories as children, and they hold a special place in children's literature not just great yarns, but also as unapologetic Christian allegory by one of the foremost Catholic Christian thinkers of our time, C.S. Lewis.

Not only did C.S. Lewis not get knifed in the throat depicting Jesus as a large cat (Mahfouz suffered permanent nerve damage in his arm as a result of his neck wound that affected his writing thereafter), in the run-up to the movie's release, many feared that the Christian allegory would be removed by Hollywood producers nervous about movies with a Christian moral message. The cluelessness of people associated with the film made many uneasy:

RADAR ONLINE: What are your thoughts on the Christian theme in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe? Did it translate to the film-and did you want it to translate?

TILDA SWINTON: I reckon that the themes of the book-Christian or otherwise-are entirely in the eye of the beholder. Since I was never one for picking up on possible Christian themes in the first place, I'm not the best person to judge whether they might have survived the adaptation. All of us concentrated, exclusively, on telling a great story about a childhood adventure.

Tilda Swinton, of course, played the White Witch.

As it was, everyone agreed that the allegorical elements survived intact. To date, no one associated with the film has suffered a grizzly death.

Christians of all sorts thought that allegory was a wonderful thing. In the unappreciative Islamic world, though, they have lost one of the few masters of that art.

Apologies: When C.S. Lewis returned to the Christian faith, he joined the Church of England, despite the best efforts of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien to make a Papist out of him. However, it is true that Lewis' thinking was very Catholic in flavour. Thanks to the readers who pointed out my mistake.