Time & Perspective Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

Mahfouz’s line lands with the quiet authority of someone who understands that politics is rarely a single event; it’s an atmosphere. “Passing through” makes crisis feel less like a headline and more like a corridor you’re forced to walk down, uncertain about what waits at the end. It’s a novelist’s verb: time becomes a narrative space, and the reader is reminded that societies don’t “solve” their way out of trouble so much as they endure their way into a new chapter.

The phrase “very sensitive” is doing double duty. On its face, it’s cautionary, even calming. Underneath, it signals risk: speak wrong, move wrong, and the moment breaks. In authoritarian or tightly policed environments, sensitivity also hints at surveillance and self-censorship; it’s a way of naming danger without provoking it. Mahfouz’s restraint is part of the message. He doesn’t dramatize; he diagnoses.

Then comes the deliberately broad “this country” and “very big problems.” No specifics, no factions, no slogans. That generality isn’t vagueness so much as strategy. By refusing to narrow the target, he makes the problems structural rather than partisan, the kind that seep into daily life: legitimacy, inequality, corruption, violence, stagnation. It’s also a writer’s move to keep the sentence survivable in public space while still communicating urgency to anyone living inside the subtext.

In an Egypt marked by revolutions, crackdowns, and the long negotiation between modernity and tradition, Mahfouz’s intent feels clear: to warn without inflaming, to record the tremor in the air, and to insist that “big problems” are not temporary storms but consequences of how power has been arranged.