The advice for us armchair travellers wanting to know Egypt has been unerringly consistent. Read Naguib Mahfouz, Cairenes said. Read him, and then think about venturing into Cairo’s historic centre to understand the country. It makes one wonder, upon hearing of the passing away of Mahfouz, the first and only Arab to get the Nobel Prize for Literature, whether the paces of that inquiry will now reverse. How many of his readers, enriched by the stories told in more than 40 books, will now roam the alleys of Cairo, trying to know the great writer?

Long before foreign policy wonks began to invoke the Arab Street in obfuscatory pretensions to grass-roots knowledge, Mahfouz had taught Egyptian novelists how to find the interface between fiction and experience: the Cairene alley. Even as he went from the literary realism of his Cairo trilogy to the allegory, the locale was urban, the narrative played out on specific streets and quarters.

J.M. Coetzee says that with these stories — set in “medieval Cairo, an area of about one square kilometre” — it was (Mahfouz’s) “example above all that spurred the advance of the novel in Arabic, from Morocco to Bahrain”. The tribute rings loud once again, as Egypt’s latest literary star, Alaa Al Aswany, gathers accolades for his new novel, The Yacoubian Building. The project of mapping Cairo, and thereby the Egyptian mind, continues.

But how imperceptibly that world came to the reader in the Cairo trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street), in which two generations of a family open to modernity and its challenges, between the two World Wars. Amina, the patriarch’s wife, wakes up at midnight. “She always woke up then without having to rely on an alarm clock ... there was no clue by which to judge the time. The street noise outside her room would continue until dawn. She could hear the babble of voices from the coffeehouses and bars, whether it was early evening, midnight, or just before daybreak.”

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