The Jordan church attack: Looking beyond the trigger

On Oct. 14, 1994, a 21-year-old Egyptian electrician named Mohammed Nagi Mustafa approached Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and plunged a knife into his neck. Mahfouz was 82 years old.

He had spent his life writing about Egyptian society, its people and their struggles, earning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. The young man who tried to murder him had never read a single word he had written.…