In October 1994 an extremist stabbed 82-year-old Naguib Mahfouz in the neck outside his Cairo home. This episode asks how a mild-mannered civil servant became a target, tracing his life from birth in the Gamaleya quarter in 1911, a strict Islamic father and an illiterate but adventurous mother who took him to pharaonic ruins, to the day at age seven when he watched British soldiers fire on demonstrators during the 1919 revolution.

The conversation follows his philosophy studies, thirty-seven years in government posts including director of censorship and the Good Loans Project that let him interview ordinary Cairenes, and the pivot from a planned thirty-book pharaonic saga to gritty realism. It covers the Cairo Trilogy’s hypocritical patriarch, the interior monologue borrowed from Joyce, the banning of Children of Gebelawi and Adrift on the Nile, his early ties to Sayyid Qutb, his support for the Camp David accords, the 1988 Nobel Prize he did not travel to collect, his nuanced defense of Salman Rushdie, the attack that left him barely able to hold a pen, and his fiercely private marriage.

• The 1919 revolution seen from a child’s window and a lifelong political awareness
• Civil service as research: censorship, endowments and loan interviews
• The Cairo alley as a microcosm for every existential question
• Gebelawi as God and as a critique of Nasser’s strongman rule
• Defending Rushdie’s right to publish while calling the book personally offensive