We are not exaggerating when we emphasize the exceptional role that the great novelist Naguib Mahfouz played and influenced in contemporary Arab culture; a role that transcended the boundaries of literary narration to the spaces of the arts that touched them. If cinema is the most important and most famous of these arts, then I am writing on another art, which is painting that I believe it was not less influenced by the literature of this unique narrator. We do not limit ourselves to art within the limits of classical painting , but rather we proceed to those other arts related to it, and the circle in its astronomy, such as engraving, drawing, cartoons, comics, and sculpture, to book-making, designing their covers, posters of artistic works and cultural events. And even the frescoes (graffiti). 

The seed of my book (Naguib Mahfouz, The Narrator and the Artist) was an article I published in December 2006, in which I noted that I search for an area that was not addressed by criticism in studying the works of a great writer, so the art yard seemed to me the most spacious and worthy of attention and profound, since that time a great change in my vision of a world Naguib Mahfouz, the novelist, as the subsequent research not only completed what I started, but added new angles, which are still reproducing, which made me realize the magnitude of the influence that this great writer deposited in all the arts. 

If that article, titled “Painters of Naguib Mahfouz’s World,” instilled the first idea, then the writer’s relationship with one of the elements of plastic art was discovered in his early novel “Radobis” when Mahfouz introduced us to the boy, the ancient Egyptian artist, Benamoun, who paints the walls of the summer room from Cemetery of Princess Radobis. This novel confirms the writer's care to present a specialized art for graves, with its steps, and the appreciation of its painters, human beings with talents and abilities, so that this young artist becomes the charming princess’s lover. 

Mahfouz’s remarkable interest in art was also a latent feature of our writer, which his novels are broadcasted in cinema, radio and tv series from time to time. Rather, his association with the artists around him, photographers, and filmmakers, even in his close circle among his friends, The Harafish, and his work related to cinema, its heroes, heroines, writers, and directors, made art a cornerstone part of his vision of the world, so the artist must be present in his fictional works, whatever the art is practiced. 

In one of his studies, critic Mustafa Bayoumi monitors such a presence in cinematic art. Cinema for the narrator / child in “Mirrors (Al-Maraya)” as an example, is an integral part of childhood memories, just as the members of the “Qushtumur” group are related to cinema and their attachment to it does not change or dissolve as they move from childhood to adolescence and the thresholds of youth. 

It also involved cinema; in his novel “A Beginning and an End”’ rituals. Among the lovers and the engaged, even cinematic people who witnessed them, Naguib Mahfouz, transferred them from his faction to his fiction, such as the character of the cinematographer in "Dunya Allah", the other cinematographer in "Love Under the Rain", the art critic in "The Beggar", the artistic journalist in "Gossip on the Nile", and the director In the story "Zina". The novel "Love Under the Rain" presents actresses and actors, in "Bidaya wa Nihaya", "Miramar" and "Mirrors", and other works, provide angles of Naguib Mahfouz's vision of the world of cinema, which in most of them did not have a positive opinion. Perhaps this opinion has a close relationship with his own work in cinema, a screenwriter and a censorship director. 

When we leave the cinema to discover that the writer's own relationship with plastic art, in particular, was questioned in a short article by the late plastic artist and critic Mahmoud Bakshish, which was published in Al-Hilal magazine days after Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1988) entitled (Naguib Mahfouz and Plastic Art), in which Bakshish was called for an interview included him with the Noble Laureate more than a quarter of a century ago (i.e. the early sixties of the last century), when he was a final year student at the Faculty of Fine Arts.

They were invited to a radio program entitled “A Writer and Three Readers”, as a reader with Zuhair al-Shayeb (translator of the Book of Description of Egypt) And the storyteller, Muhammad Gad, about Mahfouz’s novel “Zuqaq al-Madaq”, and he had, like the other two, to address the great writer with two inquiries ... due to lack of time! 

When Bakshish’s turn came to speak, the young critic and artist pointed out Mahfouz’s inclination to the anthropomorphic architectural composition, not only in the forms of houses, cafes and alleys, but also in the shapes of people, and their relations with the places in which they live.

For him, despite its clear features, the place does not play the role of a stage; that is, not only hosting a team that presents a temporary celebration, but on the contrary, the place occupied the space of a hero of the drama. In his written drawings of alley buildings and dialogues disappearing - or almost - the loud colors, and the colors of his buildings, and the clothes of his heroes are more towards gray reverence! 

Now, I claim that he discovered in the color of his city Cairo which is totally different from the great impressionistic artists, like Yusef Kamel and Kamel Mustafa. They portrayed Cairo immersed in loud colors, while in reality it is immersed in the ashes of the Mokattam dust! ... And what is really surprising for Naguib Mahfouz is his weighting of mass over color, because his tendency to composition and holographic construction naturally reduces rhetorical figures of speech and refines the written expression. 

The artist critic asserts that Mahfouz’s approach refines the spoken expression, and that even when he turns with his brush / pen to the areas of illusion and dreaming, he does not neglect the anthropomorphism, but rather confirms it to the degree that it delusions the realism of the scene, like the great Surrealists, such as Salvador Dali, Max Ernst. 

And if that refinement is considered an ethical feature in the ancient Egyptian, Coptic and Islamic arts, then the tendency to anthropomorphism provides a feature of the Egyptian artistic memory, as it is similar to the example of the great Egyptian sculpture artist Mahmoud Mukhtar, because the production of the latter is also characterized by a form of structural character and internal movement In terms of content and moral chastity, we compare the chastity of a sculpture chosen by the myth of the fields "polite and lively" despite its nudity, in contrast to the woman in Rodin's sculpture named by the same title, which provokes the potential of desire, as the difference is not between individual artists, but between two different cultures:

 "If Naguib Mahfouz was closely associated with an Egyptian memory that celebrates construction and anthropomorphism, as well as celebrates moral pillars that distinguish it from the Western model, then his mastery of an artistic form created by that Western model, which is the novel, and his orientation to everything that is common to human beings, made him deserving of that unique award in our Arab cultural history.

" Perhaps the great translator, Dennis Johnson Davis, who was the first to translate a story written by Mahfouz from Arabic into English, in his book “Memories in Translation” illuminates that close dimension of Mahfouz’s “conservative” culture, when he mentions that one of the English critics believed that the translation of “The Thief and the Dogs” would deserves more acceptance in England if it had more space for sex and violence suitable for making this plot! The accuracy of the narrative depiction of the plastic space shows Naguib Mahfouz's full care in it. 

I will choose - a sign - his novel "Alley of al-Madaq" when the teacher moves among black vocabulary that indicates the blackness of his life (Naguib Mahfouz, Alley of Al-Madaq, Dar Al-Shorouk, second edition, Cairo, 2007, p. 50): “And when the sun came to set, he left the coffee shop without telling Sonkor of his destination. 

We will tap his fold, wearing his black cloak, leaning on his lame cane, leisurely taking his heavy steps! ... His dark eyes, almost hidden behind his thick eyelids, hardly indicate that he is better at seeing his way, and his heart was It beats! ... and the heart beats even if its owner is close to fifty, and it is astonishing that the boss Kersha, has lived his life in the embrace of an abnormal life, even if the length of his soaking in the soil is that it is normal.

" Let's follow a dark color vocabulary, describing the character's black world; Sundown / Black Cloak / Heavy Steps / Dark Faded Eyes / No Seeing the Way / Falling in the Dirt / Underage of Darkness. The artistic narrator has combined all these chromatically suggestive vocabulary in one paragraph. There is no doubt that the reader will not find a glimmer of light illuminating the character of the boss "Kersha" beyond! 

On the other hand, and in the same novel (pp. 201-202), the vocabulary shimmers to describe a state of the flying affection of its heroine, "Hamida": "The taxi moved and forgot everything for a while, even that man was almost sticking to her.

Her eyes became anxious among the lights that snatched her, and her new world went through the window glass with a dazzling laugh. And the movement of the taxi came to her body and soul, so a singer emitted in himself a trance, preparing for her that she flew in flight, and flew in the sky of the world, and her conscience of joy was crying out in response to the flow of movement and the renewal of scenes and roles, until her eyes shone with a bright flash, and her gap widened from radiance and amazement. 

The taxi ran in lightness, wading through a storm of vehicles, cars, trams and people, and her imagination ran with him, so her enthusiasm rose up, her feelings drunk, and her heart and blood danced and her thoughts. Then she woke up suddenly to his voice, whispering in her ear, saying: "Look at the beautiful people, how they are wandering in their luminous garments." Yes ... they are swaying scattered like the bright planets .. How beautiful they are, what excelled them.” 

I will not enumerate the vocabulary of the light that flooded the color scene, just as the summer sun ignites a field of golden ears of wheat dancing, but parallel the scenes of the Mevlevi dance, which became clear that the great artistic narrator takes his character in a circle in which he ascends to higher heights, from the rented car that takes her with her neighbor, to the luminous sky, and beyond. 

Naguib Mahfouz also creates colors for the place, so once the “squirrel street asphalt” appears a unique color, especially in an environment without squirrels (Naguib Mahfouz, Miramar, Dar Al-Shorouk, First Edition, Cairo, 2006, p. 88), as if he creates a color from nature's palette He found him best suited to the scene of Hosni Allam's car, one of the characters in the novel, in the middle of the fields. Perhaps he listened to the song of Muhammad Rushdie, written by the poet Abd al-Rahman al-Abnoudi: “"Your name is Adawiya, girl .. and your eyelashes are on the beach, and I am always stranger above the waves .. rising and falling .. you have cheeks the color of burgundy .. and eyes the color of a squirrel, O my boat and your movement is my home .. O talisman I will keep it in my absence .." Talking about art in the work of the artistic narrator, Naguib Mahfouz, can be extended, so that it has a beginning without an end, but that will be an emotional adherence to monitoring, statistics, demonstration and representation, rather than a call for re-reading and the pleasure of discovery, which I wish for everyone who finishes reading the lines of this book and see the paintings of this album. 

In fact, I looked for the most effective ways to address this complex topic. I realized that the best way to grip words on ideas is to organize them according to independent projects, beginning with the project of the great engraver Hussein Fawzi in the New Resalah Magazine in 1954 to draw the novel "Between the Two Palaces", and then his most famous project in Al-Ahram newspaper, to publish drawings of Mahfouz's novel "Children of Our Alley" is serialized daily, beginning on September 22, 1959, following up on the artists' subsequent projects, for more than sixty years that followed that date. 

The collection of artists whose works were shown and discussed in my book also included Gamal Qutb’s covers and illustrations, which were typically represent the image of Egypt and Egyptians. 

Saif Wanly’s portraits, in “Mirrors”, brought the modern school in portraying the biographies of Mahfouz’ friends and enemies, alike.

Helmy Al Tony was keen to portray women in the novelist’s works, without forgetting to bring the folklore motifs, as well.

Mohammed Heggy worked on the dreams of Naguib Mahfouz and Salah Enany conveyed the loud voice alleys of the writer.  Theses Egyptian artists were also accompanied by other artists in works translated into tens of languages. I also referred to other types of arts, comics, cartoons, and so on. The portraits of Mahfouz himself had a section in the book that ended with a colorful supplement of samples made by all those artists. 

Published in Arabic by the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO)