Daily Inspiration Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

Mahfouz is doing something rarer than defending a book: he is defending the readerly skills a book demands. The line has the clipped impatience of a novelist who’s watched symbols get handcuffed to “what really happened,” as if fiction’s only job were to file a police report. By insisting that allegory isn’t literal, he’s protecting the space where a story can speak around power rather than directly at it - a crucial tactic for a writer who worked under shifting Egyptian regimes, censorship pressures, and the hair-trigger sensitivities of religion and politics.

The subtext is almost accusatory: some readers don’t merely misunderstand, they refuse the contract. Allegory asks you to hold two truths at once - the surface narrative and the shadow narrative - and to tolerate ambiguity without demanding a single authorized takeaway. Mahfouz’s complaint hints at a broader cultural anxiety: when public discourse is policed or polarized, audiences can become literal-minded, treating metaphor as either a confession or a provocation. In that climate, allegory stops being a tool for reflection and gets misread as a coded insult.

He’s also pushing back against a particularly modern form of bad reading: the urge to reduce novels to positions, to treat characters as spokespeople, to translate imagination into “message” and then litigate it. Mahfouz built work that uses fable, history, and street-level realism to map moral and political pressures. If you read it like stenography, you miss the point - and you end up punishing the art for not behaving like propaganda.