The Egyptian Revolution of 1919 had a strong effect on Mahfouz, although he was at the time only seven years old. He stated that "You would never have thought that an artist would emerge from that family." In an interview, he elaborated on the stern religious climate at home during his childhood. The Mahfouz family were devout Muslims and Mahfouz had a strict Islamic upbringing. Mahfouz’s mother, Fatimah, was the daughter of Mustafa Qasheesha, an Al-Azhar sheikh, and although illiterate herself, took the boy Mahfouz on numerous excursions to cultural locations such as the Egyptian Museum and the Pyramids. His father, Abdel-Aziz Ibrahim, whom Mahfouz described as having been "old-fashioned", was a civil servant, and Mahfouz eventually followed in his footsteps in 1934. (Experientially, he grew up an "only child.") The family lived in two popular districts of Cairo: first, in the Bayt al-Qadi neighborhood in the Gamaleya quarter in the old city, from where they moved in 1924 to Abbaseya, then a new Cairo suburb north of the old city, locations that would provide the backdrop for many of Mahfouz's later writings. He was the seventh and the youngest child, with four brothers and two sisters, all of them much older than him. Mahfouz was born into a lower middle-class Muslim family in the medieval Fatimid quarter of Cairo in 1911.
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