Midaq Alley

Midaq Alley (1947) is a historical realist novel by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, the 1988 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. In this work, Mahfouz addresses the changes taking place in Egyptian society of the 1940s. The book tells the story of a group of neighbors living in Midaq Alley, a bustling market street, in the poor quarter of Cairo’s historic city center. The story is set at the end of World War II, during Britain’s colonial occupation of Egypt, and Mahfouz uses the world of Midaq Alley as a microcosm of Egypt at that time. The novel’s main themes are tradition and modernity, love and sexuality, and the negative impact of class divisions.

Midaq Alley was translated into English in 1966 and remains one of the most highly regarded and popular of Mahfouz’s novels. The novel was adapted into the movie El Callejón de los Milagros (Spanish for The Alley of Miracles) in 1995 by director Jorge Fons and starred Bruno Bichir and Salma Hayek. The film is set in Mexico City instead of Cairo, and many of the historical and socio-cultural themes central to Mahfouz’s novel are translated into a more modern North American

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