RECOVERING EGYPT WRITER ASKS EXTREMISM'S DEFEAT
Author: Associated Press
Date: Sunday, October 16, 1994
Page: 31
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
CAIRO -- Nobel Prize-winning writer Naguib Mahfouz said yesterday that
the knife attack against him, blamed on Muslim radicals, provided an
opportunity for prayers for the defeat of Islamic extremism.
Mahfouz, diabetic and nearly blind, was stabbed in the neck several times
Friday evening on a Cairo street.
The attack unleashed a torrent of anger in Egypt, where it was condemned
by Muslim leaders and fellow writers. The Egyptian Organization for Human
Rights called the stabbing "intellectual terrorism."
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but police blamed Muslim
militants, who have carried out a bloody 2 1/2-year campaign to destabilize
the government and install Islamic rule.
Mahfouz has been criticized by radicals for favoring peace with Israel and
for the unorthodox depictions of religious prophets such as Christ and
Mohammed in his 1959 novel, "Children of Gebelawi." The book remains banned in
Egypt.
Islamic radicals pronounced a death sentence on the writer in 1989,
shortly after British author Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by Iran's
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Mahfouz's novels, "Khan al-Khalili," "Midaq Alley" and the three volumes of
the Cairo Trilogy are renowned for their depiction of Cairo's ordinary people.
Hospital officials said Mahfouz was in good condition. State television
showed him talking with political officials.
"You are leading a battle in defense of true Islam," he told Interior
Minister Hassan Alfy, who is in charge of the police battling Muslim
militants.
"This incident is an opportunity to ask God to make the police defeat
terrorists and to plead for the country to be purified of this evil in defense
of people, liberty and Islam," he said.
Egypt's chief Muslim official, Grand Mufti Sheik Said Tantawi, called the
stabbing a violation of Islamic law, or sharia.
"The sharia forbids a Muslim from pointing a weapon at his fellow Muslim,
not to mention using this weapon in killing," he said.
Gamal Ghitani, editor of the literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab, said, "This
attack defames Islam and Arabs in a way that the worst of our enemies have not
been able to inflict upon us."
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