Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the first Arabic-language writer to receive the honor. Six years later, an Islamic extremist stabbed him in the neck outside his Cairo home. He survived, but the attack left him barely able to write.

This episode traces his literary career from the Cairo Trilogy to the controversial allegorical novel Children of the Alley, and examines why his work drew both the Nobel committee’s admiration and a fatwa.

• How the Cairo Trilogy became the defining work of Arabic realist fiction
• Why Children of the Alley was banned in Egypt for decades
• The assassination attempt and its connection to the Salman Rushdie affair
• His quiet persistence as a writer in the face of censorship and violence