Justice & Law Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

Mahfouz drags the romance out of martyrdom and replaces it with something colder: institutional self-preservation. The line refuses the comforting myth that persecution is an aberration committed by uniquely evil eras. Instead, it frames repression as a recurring civic reflex, a society flinching at the prospect of being remade.

The first sentence sets a grim historical ledger: prison cells, stakes, bodies used as punctuation marks in arguments about truth. But the real sting is the second sentence, where “defended itself” sounds almost reasonable. Mahfouz borrows the language of immunity and security to describe censorship, torture, and execution, exposing how power narrates violence as prudence. The subtext is not simply that heretics are punished; it’s that communities often experience new ideas as contagion. When the social order feels threatened, it reaches for the tools it already has: law, clergy, courts, fire.

Coming from a novelist who wrote under shifting Egyptian regimes and later survived an assassination attempt after accusations of blasphemy, this isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s field reporting from someone who understood that the modern “stake” can be a prison sentence, a ban, a fatwa, or a knife in the street. Mahfouz’s intent is diagnostic rather than consoling: don’t expect society to reward truth-tellers. Expect it to protect its consensus, its hierarchies, its sacred stories. The warning lands because it makes persecution sound ordinary, even bureaucratic - and that ordinariness is exactly how it persists.