When Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1988, his countryman Yusef Idris, a lesser-known Egyptian novelist, groaned as if someone had dropped him on the point of a pyramid.

"He was a safer choice than me," complained Idris. "The explanation is political. They think I'm anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic. And they think that Naguib Mahfouz is pro-Israel. ... There is no Arabic writer in the entire Arabic world who holds the same political position as Mahfouz."

Idris misunderstood the politics of the Swedish Academy; it remained as leftish and anti-Zionist then as it is today. But he was right that Mahfouz, who died this month at 94, stood out in the Arab literary and intellectual world, more so in recent times than in the late 1980s.

The academy didn't give Mahfouz the prize for his tony classical Arabic, despite crediting his work in its official proclamation with aiding the "development of the literary language in Arabic-speaking cultural circles."

The academy declared that Mahfouz won for creating "an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind."

Yes, precisely. Call it the academy's way of acknowledging that Mahfouz, a Cairene so devoted to his tumultuous city that at 78 he'd spent exactly six days outside Egypt, lived and wrote as a cosmopolitan who never let ideology keep him from depicting Egypt's realities and hypocrisies.

Teased about his lack of travel, he jabbed back: "All that we do as writers and philosophers is the study of human nature. And it is one, in any place."

Some dubbed him, at the time of his Nobel, the Dickens or Balzac of Cairo. Add, for tonal reasons, the Naipaul of the Nile, haughty one moment and hopeful the next about Egypt's clash between tradition and modernity, but always soaking up yesterday's news.

His 1,500-page "Cairo Trilogy," a multigenerational depiction of the city's middle-class from post-World War I to the early 1950s, resembles the 19th-century European novel in form. He said that it treats "the struggle between great and burdensome traditions on the one hand, and freedom in its various political and intellectual forms on the other."

But Mahfouz's works also offer orgies on Nile houseboats, corrupt officials, cynical politics, nascent feminism, covert Westernization, and a cinematic style reflective of a man who wrote about 30 film scripts and at one time directed Egypt's State Cinema Organization.

It's no wonder that after his Nobel, Mahfouz, enjoying an international publication boom greater than usual even for a laureate, charmed Jackie Kennedy, then a Doubleday editor, into buying rights to 14 of his books in one shot.

For much of his career, Mahfouz exemplified Egyptian openness to European culture, to the work of thinkers such as Darwin, Marx and Freud, while also espousing a Sufi-influenced belief in democracy.

Idris was right that Mahfouz supported Anwar El-Sadat's peace initiative toward Israel, which led Syria to regret his Nobel prize. But Mahfouz also criticized Israeli policy and its handling of the Palestinian intifadahs many times during his life.

What Mahfouz didn't do, despite long working as a columnist for Al-Ahram, Cairo's government-owned and intermittently anti-Semitic main newspaper, was attack Jews in his books. Occasionally, he even referred to them positively.

With similar courage, Mahfouz attacked Sadat, who banned his writing during a 1973 purge of intellectuals. With remarkable generosity, Mahfouz gave most of his Nobel money to charities such as one for victims of kidney disease.

After an apparent follower of Sheikh Abdul-Rahman, the blind cleric behind the first World Trade Center attack, stabbed Mahfouz in the neck in 1994, he never quite recovered his previous strength, but neither did he succumb to the reflex hatreds that infect so much of the Middle East.

One trusts that when the academy, despite being the world's most overrated literary prize giver, gets its hands on translations of another Arab writer as humane, honest and devoted to truth as Mahfouz, it will honor him or her, too.