Politics & Power Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

There is a quiet sleight of hand in Mahfouz's praise: he separates the man from the machinery. Mubarak's constitution, he concedes, "is not democratic" - a blunt admission that the system is built to concentrate power. Then comes the pivot: "but he is democratic". It's the kind of distinction Egyptians were often invited to accept in the late 20th century: trust the ruler's temperament instead of demanding rules that restrain him. Mahfouz, a novelist of institutions and alleyway politics, knows exactly how thin that bargain is. The line reads like relief and self-protection at once.

The rhetoric works because it is framed as everyday testimony, not ideology. "We can voice our opinions now. The press is free" has the plainness of someone reporting the weather. Yet the subtext is conditional freedom: "now" signals a permission that can be revoked; "free" sounds aspirational, almost talismanic, in a state where emergency laws and security services shaped the boundaries of speech. Mahfouz is also writing from inside a cultural field that depended on the state's tolerance. A Nobel laureate could speak, but not without calculating consequences - and after surviving an assassination attempt in 1994 tied to controversies over artistic expression, calculation wasn't abstract.

Read in context, the quote becomes less an endorsement than a portrait of a particular authoritarian moment: the regime offering managed openness, intellectuals weighing incremental space against the structural absence of democracy. Mahfouz captures how autocracy sustains itself not only through coercion, but through the seductive promise that a "good" strongman can substitute for a democratic constitution.