Essays on culture, art and philosophy written as a young man by the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, regarded as one of the greatest Arab writers and intellectuals.

Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most important writers in contemporary Arabic literature. His novels helped bring Arabic literature onto the international stage, and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. But few people know his non-fiction works especially his essays, which he wrote, on a variety of subjects, throughout his adult life.

This collection of his early writing, from his time as a philosophy student, reveals the intellectual ferment of the young author grappling with two millennia of philosophers and writers and establishing his own voice among them. Available in English for the first time, these essays tackle a vast array of subjects from pre-Socratic Philosophy to love and the sexual impulse; from the development of Islam to the struggles between tradition, modernity and the influences of the West.

The intellectual development demonstrated here forms the foundation of Mahfouz s literary work, granting insight into the mind behind such celebrated works as The Cairo Trilogy and Children of the Alley.