Three and a half decades have passed since the publication in Arabic of Naguib Mahfouz's masterpiece, “The Cairo Trilogy.” We owe to the 1988 Nobel Prize its appearance in English: the first volume, Palace Walk, last year; now the second, Palace of Desire; the final volume, Sugar Street, early next year. The trilogy recounts, with Tolstoyan assurance, the lives, marriages and disruptive extramarital passions of a Muslim family of the middling merchant class. Its patriarch is the extraordinary al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who leads two lives almost successfully walled off from each other. At home he's an austere tyrant, but abroad on nightly rambles through Cairo's pleasure districts a hard-drinking, witty and amorous companion. The focus is always upon one or another member of his family; ceremonial gatherings, conflicts and ritualized negotiations are minutely rendered. Politics and history accompany the family chronicle, usually as a dissonant music off in the middle distance, now louder, now almost forgotten, yet inescapable. Palace Walk is set against the British occupation of Egypt during the First World War, and ends in 1919 with the death of the family's second son, Fahmy, in an anti-British demonstration. Palace of Desire begins five years later, and ends in 1926 with news of the death of the family's political hero, the nationalist leader, Sa‘d Zaghlul. Mahfouz, with the most subtle and non-programmatic touch, makes private worlds resonate against the public. Sa‘d Zaghlul's death and our knowledge of the inevitable departure of the British suggest parallels to the decline in vigor and authority of the patriarch and the increasing independence of the sons, especially that of the idealistic, intellectual Kamal.

For the American reader, Mahfouz's writing produces a simultaneous double-reading. One gets caught up in this Muslim family's concerns. Scandals produced by the sexual obsessions of father and sons—leading to unfortunate, unruly marriages, divorces, mistresses and, for the teenage Kamal, the collapse of romantic enchantment—threaten the private stability of the patriarchal household, the public respectability all-important to its perilous social standing, indeed the stability of traditional Muslim structures themselves. Mahfouz is so absorbed in each scene, so effortlessly able to assume with the great story-tellers that the tale he is telling is the only tale worth hearing at the moment, that the reader, as it were, must become a member of the family. A family member, however, uncannily sharing all lives, those of the enclosed, oppressed women, as well as of the men on their nightly debauches in the pleasure districts and private houseboats on the Nile, where they drink forbidden liquors in the company of female “entertainers.” The reader is placed, one might say, in a super-patriarchal position, forced to worry about fine balances of power and manners which the males of the family seem recklessly intent on testing to the limits.

Yet immersed as we are in the world of one family and in the domestic, public and demimonde spaces of a Cairo struggling towards independence from British “protection,” we are necessarily outsiders as well. It is Mahfouz's minute observation of Cairo life that fascinates, the customs, practices and speech-patterns (like the constant quoting from the Qur'an) of a world only a few devoted Arabists would ever have experienced first hand. We observe thousands of formalities and gestures, so natural to those who make them, so distant from our ways. Here, for example, the twenty-eight-year-old Yasin has come to his father's store to beg permission for something he fully intends to do, contract a second marriage with Maryam, a woman who was beloved by his dead brother; who has been, moreover, tinged with scandal (she is thought to have flirted with a British soldier); and is now a divorcée. But forms must be observed:

With great courtesy he said, “Please grant me a little of your precious time. Were it not absolutely necessary, I would not have dared to trouble you. But I am unable to undertake a step without your guidance and consent.”

Not long after Yasin's questionable marriage, however, lust satisfied and the slightly-scandalous Maryam shut up in his house on Palace of Desire Street, he is back in the pleasure districts. Here he has picked up his father's mistress, the lute-player Zanuba, gotten drunk with her, and has brought her home, where Maryam is presumably soundly asleep upstairs. But Maryam intrudes upon the scene of seduction, hair-pulling and scratching escalate, and she strikes her husband with a slipper. In the midst of what could be a comic mêlée,

He shouted at her, “I never want to see you again.” Then he pronounced the irreversible triple divorce formula: “You're divorced, divorced, divorced!”

But the exoticism we experience is one offered by a guide unconcerned with our presence as tourists or travellers. Mahfouz, writing in the 1950s, was intent on holding up his modernizing realist mirror to Arabic readers. His energy and narrative confidence derive from the same sources as did those of the great realists in our tradition—George Eliot, Balzac, Joyce, the Mann of Buddenbrooks, even Lawrence. His power is not, as in lesser realists, a virtuosity aware that life can be represented with illusions of fullness and accuracy; nor a virtuosity that doesn't know what else to do with itself; but rather a moral trust that life should be represented, that a society ought to see and think about aspects of itself which through habit or choice it avoids or suppresses. What “The Cairo Trilogy” meant in the fifties, or what it means today to Egyptian readers, I cannot say. For the contemporary American, it rings with strong feminist sympathies in its critique of patriarchal tyrannies and in its representation of the restricted worlds of wives and daughters, as well as of the freer, but still pathetically limited lives of the spirited “entertainers” who age before our eyes as they grind out their commodities of sex and charm for al-Sayyid Ahmad and his cronies. Yet it is in no way a tract merely confirming our worst suspicions about Muslim treatment of women, for it offers complex and varied views of women's lives and powers within official structures.

At the end of Palace of Desire we observe the inevitable presence of modernization. The patriarch's authority is crumbling: he's been forced to “relax the rules” and allow his wife to leave the house to visit her married daughters or the neighborhood mosque. The sophisticated Europeanized younger set picnic by the pyramids, drinking beer and eating ham. The Enlightenment arrives as the nineteen-year-old Kamal, losing his Muslim faith, creates great scandal by publishing an article (in 1926!) on Darwin. I look forward to Sugar Street.