SOURCE: “Naguib Mahfouz: Life in the Alley of Arab History,” in Georgia Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 224–30.

Among the major figures in the development of modern Arabic fiction, none has received higher international acclaim than Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1988 became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Before then he was—like Taha Husayn (d. 1973) and Tawfiq al-Hakim (d. 1987)—known in the West only to a very limited audience despite an output that includes over thirty novels and a number of short-story collections and plays. In fact, until the 1940's, Mahfouz was little known even in his native Egypt, where he began his literary career as an essayist. He gained some fame with the publication of three historical novels, but his undisputed literary renown came from a series of realistic contemporary novels in which he portrayed various aspects of life in Cairo. “Al-Thulathiyya” (“The Trilogy”), published in 1956–57, was immediately seen as a major achievement and brought him wide recognition in literary circles outside Egypt.

Mahfouz was born into a middle-class family, the youngest of seven children. Though he seldom discusses his early life, it appears that he grew up in a solid family environment with happily married parents whom he loved and respected and who nurtured his intellectual interests, particularly in ancient history. He also took an interest in politics, soccer, and composing poetry in both traditional and free verse. He began reading Arabic translations of Western detective stories and historical novels, and then the works of prominent Egyptian writers. After completing his formal education, he concentrated on the masterpieces of Western literature.

Mahfouz began his literary career in high school, writing essays on various topics in philosophy and literature, along with an occasional short story. Initially viewing philosophy more important than literature, he eventually chose fiction only after he saw his short stories being readily accepted for publication. Even so, he spent the years from 1930 to 1945 largely in writing essays, and his first short-story collection, Hams al-junun (The Whisper of Madness), did not appear until 1938.

His first philosophical essay, “Ihtidar Mu‘taqadat wa Tawallud Mu‘taqadat” (“The Death and Birth of Doctrines”), appeared in Salama Musa's periodical al-Majalla al-Jadida (The New Periodical) in October 1930. In it Mahfouz points out that life is subject to constant change and evolution, which man must accept as the inevitable result of civilization. Yet man is also by nature a believer who needs religious faith or an acceptable substitute to achieve tranquility and happiness.

Though imported Western doctrines like socialism and communism had been finding some acceptance among the intelligentsia, Mahfouz desired an egalitarian system which would benefit the majority while not offending Muslim believers, something between capitalism and communism. He settled on moderate socialism but recognized that, while it can fulfill some of man's material needs, it cannot bring him spiritual happiness. In the late 1960's, when an interviewer suggested that Mahfouz appeared to sympathize with Marxism, he expressed antipathy toward the materialistic tenets on which it is based and doubt about its workability. In his vision of society, individual freedom and happiness must prevail; everything depends on science, which ultimately leads to understanding of the highest truth and the acquisition of knowledge.

Mahfouz's early articles on philosophy reveal him as an intelligent young Muslim trying to reconcile various Western concepts with his traditional beliefs. Despite his respect for philosophy, he seems convinced that the modern age is dominated by science, technology, and pragmatism. Caught between the idea that the concept of God has always been inherent in the collective society and the mystics' view that God is a transcendental essence which man feels in the depths of his soul, Mahfouz grew more perplexed than ever. Years later, calling himself a Muslim believer, he declared that in his heart he had combined an aspiration for God, faith in science, and a predilection for socialism.

Mahfouz also wrote on psychology, music, and literature, and two of his articles on Arabic writers are especially significant. In one he calls Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad the soul of the Arab literary nahda (“awakening”), Taha Husayn its intellect, and Salama Musa its will. In a 1945 article, however, he sharply disagrees with al-Aqqad, whose little book Fi Bayti (At My House) praises poetry at the expense of fiction, which he calls inferior. Art in any form, Mahfouz says, is an expression of life, and should not be scorned because it brings pleasure to many. He contends that story is more popular than poetry because its technique is simpler and its purpose is to entertain.

With encouragement and help from Salama Musa, Mahfouz published three historical novels before moving to other concerns. He called the first Hikmat Khufu (The Wisdom of Cheops), but Musa renamed it Abath al-aqdar (Ironies of Fate) and printed it as a separate issue of his magazine in September 1939. Two others followed, Radobis (1943) and Kifah Tiba (1944). In writing these novels, Mahfouz was continuing the tradition of Salim al-Bustani and Jurji Zaydan, later carried to greater heights by Ibrahim Ramzi, Muhammad Said al-Uryan, and others. Several educated writers of his generation, eager to portray current social and political movements, sought parallels between Egypt's ancient and contemporary history, giving the historical novel a new nationalistic emphasis.

After writing this series of novels, however, Mahfouz abandoned historical themes to focus on contemporary life in his native Cairo. “To me,” he says, “history had lost its charm. There was a time when I wanted to write more historical novels, but I could not.” Between 1945 and 1951 he published five novels dealing with social themes drawn from city life. These include al-Qahira al-Jadida (The New Cairo, 1945), which contrasts the city's upper- and lower-middle classes in the 1930's, confronting us with the stark, absolute dichotomy between them. The upper class had wealth, power, and prestige, but was morally bankrupt; the poor struggled to improve their lot but could succeed only by compromising their principles. The moral climate was changeable, and when the members of the lower class sought answers to society's problems, they were faced with diverse, often conflicting values.

Khan al-khalili (1946), named for an old quarter of Cairo, focuses on the many Egyptians squeezed in between the upper-middle class, which controlled wealth and land, and the fallahin (peasants). It depicts well the growing semiliterate segment of the population in the 1940's, people who dabbled in a variety of disciplines, mastering none and impressing only those less educated than themselves. Mahfouz also shows here the dramatic effect of World War II on the common people. Cairo has been turned upside down, with a new class of profiteers having risen to join the aristocracy, and thus having blurred the old class distinctions. Mahfouz vividly shows people's credulity and their vulnerability to propaganda from both sides.

In Zuqaq al-Midaqq (Midaq Alley, 1947), the alley becomes the protagonist, defiant and changeless, while its inhabitants hate it, leave it, and return. A timeless relic of the Fatimid and Mamluk periods, it is a monument to antiquity; its people, showing little interest in the outside world, carry on its tradition. Zuqaq al-Midaqq has no formal plot and no dominant character. It is filled with common folk from the lower-middle class, mostly semiliterate or uneducated. The action is set in the last years of World War II; the war directly affects only a few inhabitants, though the conflict between their traditional values and those imposed upon them by the war is clear.

Al-Sarab (The Mirage, 1948), is a continuation of Mahfouz's contemporary social novels with a different technique and emphasis. A careful reading shows that it explores male-female relationships, family ties, and the social gap between the Turkish aristocracy and common Egyptians. Mahfouz experiments here with a first-person narrative, letting the protagonist describe his own actions without comment. Mahfouz's aim is not to write a psychological novel but to reveal Cairo life from the viewpoint of a Turko-Egyptian who happens to suffer from an Oedipus complex.

Bidaya wa Nihaya (The Beginning and the End, 1949) presents the hopes and fears of a lower middle-class family struggling against the hardships caused by the death of its head and sole breadwinner. It is set in the 1930's, when British imperialists controlled Egypt with the aid of subservient, self-seeking politicians.

“Al-Thulathiyya” (“The Trilogy,” 1956–57), is undoubtedly Mahfouz's most important work and one of his personal favorites. In studying the novel as a genre, he became interested in the “generations novel,” which follows a single family over an extended period. Subsequently he composed “al-Thulathiyya,” the saga of three generations of a Cairo family that offers a comprehensive view of major social and political events from 1917 to 1944 from the perspective of the Egyptian middle class, then caught in the clash between traditional Islamic ideals and Western doctrines.

The first volume, Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk), examines the family's basic relationships and interactions, and reveals the hypocrisy of the patriarch Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who pretends to be a good Muslim but is actually a libertine. Kamal, only a young boy (a character many believe modeled after Mahfouz himself), fears his father and takes refuge in his mother and in Islam. In addition, we learn of the patriarch's political apathy toward the Egyptian national leader Sa‘d Zaghlul and his revolutionary movement against the British authorities in 1919. Sadly, Abd al-Jawad's other son—Fahmi, a high school student who had a promising future—is killed while demonstrating against the British in the Revolution of 1919.

The second part of the trilogy, Qasr al-Shawq, (Palace of Desire) covers from 1924 to Sa‘d Zaghlul's death in August 1927. In it Mahfouz depicts the deterioration of the national movement into petty squabbling between the politicians and the palace, and shows the clash of traditional values and concepts with those imported from the West. In essence, Kamal is a perplexed young man attempting to reconcile his faith and idealism with social reality. The novel also explores the social tension between the aristocracy and the middle class, as exemplified in the account of Kamal's love for the noble Aida, who ultimately spurns him. Kamal then becomes a skeptic and turns to science for the salvation of both himself and mankind, espousing Darwinism. As a result he is totally estranged from his own culture and society, which is still controlled by the British.

In the final book of the trilogy, al-Sukkariyya (Sugar Street), covering the period from 1935 to 1944, Mahfouz looks closely at political upheavals, the conflict between Western ideologies and traditional Muslim beliefs, and the cultural and social changes wrought by modern civilization and World War II. Kamal's nephews—Ahmad (a Marxist) and Abd al-Munim (who joins the Muslim Brotherhood)—represent the opposing poles of this spectrum. Western ideas now enter more pervasively through radio. In the midst of all this change, Kamal becomes emotionally paralyzed, incapable of significant action for good or evil, while his nephews, as the embodiment of the new generation, suffer no such ambivalence. Although Mahfouz also pictures here the strong demarcation between the Muslims and the Coptic Christian community, his most significant concern remains the confusion of the middle class about their place and identity in society.

Shortly after Mahfouz finished his trilogy in 1952, a group of army officers overthrew King Farouk and proclaimed the dawning of a new day. For seven years Mahfouz waited for the revolution to yield the social changes he had envisioned. In 1959, disillusioned by the outcome of the revolution, he wrote the allegorical Awlad Haratina (literally “Children of Our Quarter,” but translated as Children of Gebelawi) to comment specifically on the Egyptian situation within the general context of the human condition. Divided into five chapters, each named for its central figure, the book (like Shaw's Back to Methuselah) follows a loose chronological sequence. The first chapter retells the thinly disguised story of Adam and Eve; the next three parallel the lives of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad; and the final chapter introduces Arafa, who symbolizes modern science. The characters dwell in the hara (alley) of history, which is dominated by the nearby house of the powerful, enigmatic Gebelawi; they experience history as an endless cycle of hope and despair, escaping tyranny only briefly. Mahfouz is interested here not in religious questions but in social and political issues and the role science plays in settling them.

Awlad Haratina reflects Mahfouz's doubt that any society can maintain justice for long. Religious figures come and go, but the people remain powerless and miserable. Science represents the last great hope for mankind, but whether it can overcome human tyranny is unclear. Mahfouz seems to think that religion, if freed from fanaticism, parochialism, and superstition, could lead men's rulers to use science for the good of all. At the same time, he appears to accept the contention of Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–98) that there are two kinds of truth, philosophical and theological, and that a single phenomenon can be understood rationally in philosophy and allegorically in theology.

This theory, which has long aroused the wrath of Islamic theologians, led to attacks on Awlad Haratina and prompted the clerics of the Islamic University of as-Azhar to ban the publication of the novel. Although the Egyptian government itself neither condemned nor banned the book, the initial publication came in Lebanon in 1967, and the title remained unpublished in Egypt until relatively recently. Nevertheless, even after Mahfouz received the 1988 Nobel Prize the book was still troubling some people, and the blind Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman, a member of an extremist religious group, issued a fatwa (juristic opinion) condemning Mahfouz as a blasphemer. According to Islamic Sahri‘a (law), Mahfouz should have then either repented or been killed.

Between 1961 and 1967 Mahfouz published six novels and two collections of short stories—an astonishing burst of literary productivity all the more remarkable because of his increasing distress at the direction Egypt was taking under President Nasser. In the last stage of his literary career, beginning with the publication of Miramar in 1967, Mahfouz appears to have synthesized the social realism of the contemporary novels and the trilogy with the allegory of Awlad Haratina. Since 1969 he has published several more novels and collections of short fiction, constantly experimenting with new forms and techniques as he moved further from conventional realism. Even after retiring from the Ministry of Culture in 1972, Mahfouz continued to write fiction in addition to working on film adaptations of several of his novels and producing a weekly column for the newspaper al-Ahram. He has, to be sure, been publicly criticized for some of his political and religious positions, but he has attracted many readers throughout the Arab world and is commonly viewed as the conscience of Egypt.

Events took an ominous turn in October 1994, however, when the Cairo evening newspaper al-Masa began to give many Egyptians their first look—seventeen years after its initial publication outside of Egypt—at the controversial novel Awlad Haratina. Mahfouz had authorized neither that newspaper's daily serialization of the novel nor the almost immediate printing of 45,000 copies of the complete book by another newspaper, al-Ahali. But that was of little consequence to Muslim fundamentalists, who rekindled their attack on Mahfouz. On the evening of 14 October 1994, while Mahfouz was in a car waiting to be driven to a weekly literary meeting, he was stabbed twice in the neck by Muhammad Naji Mustafa, a Muslim militant who subsequently admitted that he had never read the novel but acted on the strength of the blind shaykh's five-year-old fatwa.

Fortunately, Mahfouz, though he nearly bled to death, was moved to a nearby hospital and saved with blood transfusions. He has recovered and seems likely to continue his sharp criticism of both the current government and the Islamic movement that vies with that government for power. Awlad Haratina is not against religion, he insists; it has suffered from misinterpretation.

Though sometimes called the Dickens or the Balzac of Egypt, Mahfouz has by now surely earned a standing of his own. He is the Mahfouz of the Arab world, and it will benefit other cultures to read his work on its own merits. His realistic style, his interest in social issues, and indeed his whole ethos are non-Western, genuinely Egyptian. But his works reflect so many Arab and Islamic traditions—and do so with such unparalleled skill—that he deserves to be claimed by all Arabs.