Science & Tech Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

There is a deceptively sharp populism baked into Mahfouz's line: science isn't framed as an elite pursuit, but as the only language that reliably serves everyone. "Reject science" sounds like a philosophical stance until he swivels it toward politics and class. The sting lands in the second half, where "the common man" becomes the measure of moral seriousness. If you dismiss evidence, method, and shared verification, you're not just choosing a different worldview; you're choosing a social order where the vulnerable pay for other people's fantasies.

Mahfouz wrote from a 20th-century Egypt where modernity arrived as both promise and pressure: colonial legacies, nationalist projects, state-driven development, religious revival, and widening urban inequality. In that setting, "science" is less lab coats than infrastructure: public health, education, clean water, competent governance. It's the machinery that makes rights legible and enforceable. When it disappears, what fills the gap is not "tradition" in the romantic sense, but arbitrariness: rumor, charisma, patronage, and the kind of authority that can't be argued with because it refuses the rules of argument.

The subtext is also a rebuke to intellectual vanity. Rejecting science can masquerade as sophistication, piety, or ideological purity. Mahfouz drags it back to consequences. The common man is the one who needs institutions that work, medicines that actually heal, and policies that survive contact with reality. Science, here, is solidarity: a commitment to a shared world where claims can be tested, not merely declared.