Respected Sir is a story of vaulting ambition. Othman Bayyumi joins the civil service at the lowest point of the professional scale as an archives clerk. From the first minute in his career he is seized by a mad desire to become one day director-general of the department, and his eagerness to fulfill this ambition becomes an exalted and arduous religious quest, for the sake of which no sacrifice is too great.
Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in the crowded Cairo district of Gamaliya. He wrote nearly 40 novel-length works, plus hundreds of short stories and numerous cinema plots and scenarios. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988. He died in Cairo on August 30, 2006 at the age of 94.