Politics & Power Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

A novelist insisting on his political innocence is rarely just being modest; he’s drawing a border before someone else draws it for him. When Naguib Mahfouz says he’s “never worked in politics” and has never joined an “official committee” or “political party,” the repetition isn’t idle. It’s a careful inventory of affiliations he can prove he didn’t have, offered in a world where association can be treated as confession.

The phrase “official committee” is doing heavy lifting. In Mahfouz’s Egypt, especially across the Nasser-Sadat-Mubarak decades, the state didn’t only govern; it absorbed. Culture could be recruited, rewarded, surveilled, disciplined. Committees and parties aren’t merely civic organs here; they’re mechanisms of legitimacy and control. By naming them, he signals an awareness of how power wants to launder itself through respected artists - and how artists, in turn, can be branded as collaborators or enemies.

The subtext is less “I’m apolitical” than “Don’t reduce my work to a dossier.” Mahfouz wrote relentlessly about institutions, class, religion, and the moral compromises of ordinary life. That’s political in the deep sense: it anatomizes how authority is experienced at street level. But he stakes out independence from the formal rituals of ideology, protecting the novel as a space where ambiguity survives - where a character can be wrong, sympathetic, cowardly, brave, all at once, without a party line dictating the reading.

It’s also self-preservation. Mahfouz lived long enough to see how quickly writers become symbols, targets, and property. This sentence is a quiet refusal to be owned.