As my goal in this glimpse is to address Arab youth, who are beginning to place their feet in the land of knowledge and draw their strength from their great civilization, my aim is also to address non-Arab foreign audiences so they can learn something new about our Arab literature through translating the articles into their English and Chinese languages. The first person that would come to mind for any of them if asked about an Arab literary figure would be "Naguib Mahfouz", the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. But if asked for more information, you won't find a satisfactory answer. So let us in this glimpse quickly get to know the global Arab writer Naguib Mahfouz, and in other glimpses we will get to know many more Arab writers.

His full name is: Naguib Mahfouz Abdel Aziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha, and Naguib Mahfouz is his name alone, a compound name.

He was born on December 11, 1911, and died on August 29, 2006. Among his most important literary works are the novels (New Cairo (1945), Khan El Khalili, Alley of the Pestle, The Mirage, Beginning and End, The Trilogy "Between the Palaces - Palace of Desire - Sugar Street", The Thief and the Dogs, Quail and Autumn, The Road, The Beggar, Chit Chat Over the Nile, Miramar, Children of our Neighborhood, The Mirrors, Love Under Rain, Karnak, Our Neighborhood's Tales, Heart of the Night) and many other novel works that have been transformed into artistic works.

Let's dedicate a part of our conversation about the Arab novelist Naguib Mahfouz to one of his most important works and let it be the novel "Al-Harafeesh". Initially, it is a novel that our global writer Naguib Mahfouz innovated in 1977 to join the list of his great novels that have turned into a source for the most important dramatic works "radio, cinema, theater, television", and the creators competed to rephrase it each in his field.

Let's quickly go over the events of that novel which is overall a literary epic where the great writer takes us on a long journey through ten stories of generations of a family that lived in an unspecified Egyptian neighborhood in time and place, and if we were to guess the time and place, we would say that the events took place with the beginning of Muhammad Ali's rule of Egypt, and the place is Al-Hussein area.

Al-Hussein area and Old Egypt are the inspiring place for Naguib Mahfouz, and his immersion in the local was the source of his global reach. In this novel, Naguib Mahfouz describes to us the constant human soul's quest for salvation and its rebellion against itself that has gotten used to the bitter reality, and Mahfouz revealed that defeatist spirit then extracted the latent strength inside them. His call is for the current human to rebel and move from darkness to light, to liberation, but the mundane world has a temptation that breaks the power of the liberated, so he stands in a state of dispersion at a crossroads, does he choose to follow the path of the righteous or to move away from that path and favor the inner desires? What our writer emphasizes the most is that the humiliation and disgrace that affects the soul due to despair of salvation have no place in reality, for salvation will not come from outside because true salvation is the one that comes from within.

As for the salvation imposed on it from the outside, it is fake and will not bear any fruits. In this epic, the succession of generations appears over two centuries of time through ten stories that have always been a source for the creators of Egyptian drama whether cinema, theater, radio, or TV drama.

The conversation about the global Arab writer Naguib Mahfouz needs volumes and many studies but our glimpse aims to just shed light, and we end here on a date and a new glimpse in the expanse of Arabic literature.