Naguib Mahfouz, 94, was only Arab to win a Nobel for literature

Naguib Mahfouz, whose novels about the struggles of workaday Egyptians drew worldwide acclaim and made him the only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, died of complications from a bleeding ulcer Wednesday in Cairo. He was 94.

A literary pioneer and icon of Arab letters, Mr. Mahfouz's life traced an outline of the daily pleasures and political struggles of his beloved homeland and the broader Arab world beyond.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak issued a statement mourning the loss of "an exceptional writer, an enlightened thinker, an author who brought Arab culture and literature to the world's attention."

Mr. Mahfouz will be buried today after a military funeral at Cairo's al Rashdan Mosque, an honor typically reserved for senior government officials.

He was nothing if not prolific. He wrote more than 40 novels, 30 film scripts and several plays. His work is widely read throughout the Arab world and has been translated into many languages. Even with Egypt's high illiteracy rate, his tales reached millions here through television and film adaptations of his best-loved novels.

For the first half of his life, Mr. Mahfouz wrote — always in longhand with ballpoint pens — in relative obscurity while struggling to get by on the salary of a government bureaucrat. "In the mornings, I was an employee. In the afternoons, I was a writer," he recalled.

He published his first short story in 1932 and his first novel in 1939. Mr. Mahfouz's magnum opus was the "Cairo Trilogy," which he had completed in 1952 after six years of work. The three books — "Palace Walk," "Palace of Desire" and "Sugar Street" — were published from 1955 to 1957. Set in Cairo during British colonial rule, it portrays generations of an Egyptian family led by an iron-fisted patriarch.

Mr. Mahfouz was a passionate defender of free expression who remained undaunted by the threats of religious extremists who considered his work an affront to Islam.

Although condemned to death in a fatwa, he refused to alter his routine of 30 years. He spent every Friday evening with friends at a coffee shop in downtown Cairo.

It was en route to one such sitting that he was attacked in 1994 by a fanatic who buried a knife in Mr. Mahfouz's throat.

The wound missed an artery but caused nerve damage, leaving his right hand — the hand with which he wrote — incapacitated.