The only Nobel prize winner in literature that the Arab world has thus far produced, Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, passed away at 94 on Wednesday.

His life had almost been cut short at 82 when he was attacked by a fundamentalist muslim wielding a knife, inspired by a fatwa for blasphemy against one of his earlier novels, 1959's "Children of Gebelawi". The cleric issuing the fatwa, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was apparently inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" in 1989. The attack left him partially disabled, and made writing in longhand, as he was used to, difficult.

The novelist had been admitted to hospital with a head injury about a month ago, but he went into a sharp decline due to a bleeding ulcer and died this morning with his wife by his side. He and the family had declined offers of treatment in The United States.

He was politically engaged and critical towards US foreign policy in the region, but was a staunch moderate. And unlike the majority of novelists, writers and artists, Mahfouz has been a supporter of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel since it was signed in 1979.

Mahfouz is perhaps best known for his Cairo Trilogy in which he narrated developments in Egypt through the eyes of a middle class family over three generations. Many of his works, through 50 novels, five plays and scores of short stories and essays, never strayed, in the physical sense at least, beyond the confines of the quarter of Cairo where he lived.

He was not only the Grand Old Man of Egyptian literature, but also a fixture in the vibrant literary cafe-life in Cairo, where he would hold court with friends and younger colleagues, a scene he immortalised in his 1988 semi-autobiographical novel "Qushtumar".