SOURCE: “The Works of Najib Mahfuz,” in Najib Mahfuz: The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo, St. Martin's Press, 1998, pp. 56–95.

What one cannot theorize about, one must narrate.

—Umberto Eco

I do not believe that a literary work can be an answer to anything. A literary work is essentially a question.

—Najib Mahfuz

It is perhaps inevitable that the works of a writer whose literary output extends over a period of more than sixty years should invite attempts at classification by style or content.¹ I have chosen to forgo any attempt at a rigid categorization of Mahfuz's works, preferring to present a more or less chronological survey.² This chapter sketches Mahfuz's development as a writer and presents the major themes and ideas which preoccupy him. Particular attention will be paid to the early stories of the thirties and forties, which, although not remarkable for their narrative art, are nevertheless of great interest, as they help us understand the author's psychological make-up, his moral concerns and his urge to write and publish. They also anticipate themes which will reappear throughout his later work.

While Mahfuz's literary output is very impressive in quantity and variation of narrative style, not all of his works maintain the same high literary standard. Years of steady development and improvement of his art culminated in the trilogy (1956–57) and, a few years later, in the very different but equally brilliant short novel al-Liss wa‘l-kilab (The Thief and the Dogs, 1961).³ Since then, however, although he has not produced a work of the same literary stature, Mahfuz has retained the interest of his readers and his position as Egypt's most popular writer. This unique phenomenon may be explained by his unabated creative energy and his continued involvement in Egyptian social and political life: in both his literary works and in his weekly column in al-Ahram Mahfuz continues fearlessly to comment on Egyptian affairs, and thereby serves, in effect, as the literary conscience of his country.

Mahfuz began his literary career as a short story writer, publishing some forty stories before his first novel appeared in 1939. Between 1932 and 1946, he published nearly eighty stories in various Egyptian magazines. The early stories (written before 1936) appeared first in Salama Musa's al-Majalla al-jadida, and later in other magazines, notably al-Zayyat's al-Riwaya and al-Risala.⁴ His first short story, however, did not appear in any of the above-mentioned publications, but in Muhammad Husayn Haykal's al-Siyasa al-usbu‘iyya; this was the only story he ever published in this magazine.⁵ In retrospect, it is symbolic that Mahfuz's first work of fiction appeared in 1932 in this particular issue of Haykal's magazine, on exactly the same page as an advertisement announcing the appearance of the third edition of Haykal's novel Zaynab, widely regarded as the first Egyptian realistic novel.

Critics and literary historians have noted that these stories are not very successful examples of the genre; many of them have rather elaborate plots that stretch over a long period of time, and include a large number of characters—hardly the stuff of the short story. They represent a considerably lower literary standard than was achieved by other Egyptian writers of short stories in the 1920s, notably Mahmud Taymur, Tahir Lashin, and the ‘Ubayd brothers, Shehata and ‘Isa. Furthermore, these stories reflect a level of narrative art markedly lower than that achieved by Mahfuz in his early novels published between 1939 and 1946.

While the short stories of this early period are generally mediocre, his novels of the 1940s progressively improve. This puzzling phenomenon can be better understood in the light of Mahfuz's explanation that these works were not conceived as short stories, but were in fact derived from projected novels.⁶ There are possibly some exceptions; there are short stories which appear to have been written as such, rather than as novel outlines, such as “Yaqzat al-mumya'” (“The Mummy's Awakening,” 1939), “Marad tabib” (“A Doctor's Illness,” 1941) and “Badlat al-asir” (“The POW's Suit,” 1942).

Mahfuz's very first story, “Fatra min al-shabab” (“A Period of Youth,” 1932), is quite obviously based on autobiographical materials.⁷ “Fatra min al-shabab,” covering in about 1200 words a period of some eight years in the life of the hero, may very probably have been condensed or extracted from Mahfuz's unpublished autobiography al-A‘wam (The Years) which he had modeled on Taha Husayn's al-Ayyam (The Days).⁸ It is written in the third person, possibly a reflection of the influence of Taha Husayn's al-Ayyam which is also a third person autobiographical story.

The story begins when a twelve-year-old boy and his family leave their native old-fashioned, traditional part of the city and move to a new neighborhood. The boy is painfully conscious of being poorer than most of the other boys in the new neighborhood, but nevertheless succeeds in being accepted. He falls in love (presumably some time later) with one of the girls there, a coquettish beauty with whom many of the local boys are fascinated. The girl is well aware of her charms, and enjoys the fact that many are attracted to her. The hero cannot understand her behavior, whereas she knows of his love for her, and has full control over him. “Only one thing she could not know: the sincerity of his love for her.”

He tries to distract himself from this hopeless love by devoting himself to reading and the acquisition of knowledge, but eventually comes to view his absorption in books as futile and decides to commit suicide by drowning himself in the Nile. When he rows out to inspect the site of his watery grave on the night preceding the appointed suicide date, he is awakened to the beauty of nature and decides that he does not want to die. Now he decides to live for the sake of life, not for a woman or for learning, but for life itself. He now wonders, “How could he have placed Woman so high in his heart? She is nothing but a plaything for the pleasure of the body, and a picture to please the soul, and she does not deserve to be worshipped. The life which he was about to abandon by suicide became a purpose in itself … and knowledge, which he once thought to be a goal, now became a means for enjoying life by perceiving its affairs and discovering its hidden beauty.” The young author's conclusion—that life is an end in itself—has remained an essential component of Mahfuz's thought ever since.

The hero of the story asserts that, having been awakened to the beauty of the world, he has overcome the painful infatuation that nearly destroyed him. It seems, however, that at the time of writing, Mahfuz, unlike his alter ego in this story, had not quite overcome his own painful adolescent love experience in real life: the story mentions that when the hero accidentally meets the girl who was once the object of his admiration, “his heart flutters and his soul is filled with desire.”

This story was probably composed a few years after Mahfuz's traumatic emotional experience. As has been noted before, Mahfuz said many years later that the “incurable burning madness” of love lasted for ten years. It may therefore be conjectured that when “Fatra min al-shabab” (“A Period of Youth”) was written, his emotional wounds were not quite healed.

It is important to note that it is the idea of beauty which gives new meaning to the life of the hero in this story. Forty years later, in al-Maraya (Mirrors, 1972), Mahfuz again describes a traumatic adolescent love experience (based on the same personal experience) which “created of [him] a new person yearning for everything that is beautiful and real.” Some two years after “A Period of Youth” was published, Mahfuz chose “The Concept of Beauty in Islamic Thought” as the subject of his master's dissertation.

His second story, “Thaman al-du‘f” (“The Price of Weakness,” al-Majalla al-jadida, 3 August 1934), appears to be an outline of a novel. This is the story of a man who displays various character flaws, primarily an acute lack of self-confidence. He is the youngest son of aging parents. His father, in the past known for his strength and authority, is now weak with age and illness. “He did not display any emotion towards his child, and all that the child saw in him was a stern, ill-tempered man who was easily angered.” His mother gave her youngest son all the love and attention, “which she had previously divided among her six [older] children.” In this particular detail (being the youngest of seven children, with some years between himself and the one who preceded him), the hero of the story is obviously similar to Mahfuz.

The author suggests that the psychological problems of the hero are the result of his having been brought up by a very stern, but nearly absent father and by a very indulgent mother. (In various novels, Khan al-khalili, al-Qahira al-jadida, al-Sarab and the trilogy, Mahfuz depicts male characters whose unfortunate psychological make-up results, according to the author, from having an indulgent mother and a very stern father, who otherwise takes little interest in raising his children.) When the hero is old enough to play with other boys, he finds himself weaker than the rest and consequently the victim of their mischievous harassment. Seeking protection, he attaches himself to the strongest boy, who, in return for the weak boy's daily allowance, becomes his friend and protector. (It should be recalled that Mahfuz once revealed that he had been the weakest of his classmates in the Qur'an school and that they used to snatch his food from him.)⁹

The hero in “The Price of Weakness” loves one of his neighbors' daughters, but because of his excessive shyness he dare not ask for her hand in marriage. His mother speaks with the girl's mother on his behalf, and arranges for them to be considered a couple. A very poor student, he lags behind his peers in school, and is still finishing high school when one of his peers—his childhood friend and “protector”—graduates from the police academy as an officer. The self-confident police officer takes a fancy to the hero's sweetheart, and elopes with her. The marriage is not successful and the young woman returns home, divorced, within two months.

In the meantime the hero, who has become a minor government official, is scheduled to be transferred to work in a provincial town. His mother, concerned about who would take care of him, suggests that he should now marry his former sweetheart, the divorcee. The hero, however, does not agree, even though he still loves this woman, because he is afraid he would not fare well in the comparison that the young woman would be bound to make between him and her former husband, the police officer. The price of weakness is a life of loneliness.

Another story which contains autobiographical elements from a later period is “Hikmat al-Hamawi,” which reflects Mahfuz's disillusionment with philosophy and his subsequent decision to become a writer.¹⁰

Two of Mahfuz's other early stories deal with corruption in government circles in Egypt, and the hardships encountered by young educated Egyptians who are not lucky enough to be well-connected. “Mahr al-wazifa” (“The Price of Office,” al-Risala, 9 August 1937) is a story about four friends who graduate from the Cairo University law school. Two, who are from influential families, get high-ranking jobs in the government, the third, with his family's financial assistance, is able to start a career as a lawyer, while the fourth, whose family is neither well-connected nor rich, must resort to a broker who arranges government positions for a fee. Since this young man cannot afford a high price, he can buy his way only into a very low-ranking secretarial job.

In “al-Qay'” (“Vomit,” al-Risala, 7 July 1941), we read about a low-ranking official, Sa‘id Kamil, who advances quickly to become director general of a ministry, thanks to his beautiful wife's becoming the mistress of the minister. The story unfolds in the memory of the main character, Sa‘id, who reflects on his career while bedridden in illness after his retirement. He recalls that many years before, when he was a minor official, he learned that the ministry had decided to transfer him to a provincial town in Upper Egypt. To avert that administrative decision (for Cairenes, a transfer to Upper Egypt has always been tantamount to a punishment), his very beautiful wife, Amina (whose name means “faithful”), goes to plead with the director, one Sulayman Pasha Sulayman.

Sulayman Pasha Sulayman, a rich, pleasure-seeking bachelor, is willing to accede to Amina's request to keep her husband in Cairo on condition that she become his mistress. After some hesitation, both the husband and his wife accept the condition. Sa‘id not only stays in Cairo, but gets rapid promotion. When Sulayman Pasha Sulayman becomes a minister, Sa‘id succeeds him as director and earns the title of pasha, thus becoming Sa‘id Pasha Kamil.

Years pass. One day, Sa‘id Pasha returns home unexpectedly early, and finds his wife in the bedroom with some other stranger. She does not let him in until the man sneaks away. In his fury, he waves his cane and by mistake hits her leg. Staring at him with a cold, hard eye, his wife says, “How dare you hit the leg that elevated you?” Continuing to reflect on his past, Sa‘id remembers a later scene when one day, as he was returning in his car from a high-school graduation ceremony, where he had delivered a speech and presented prizes to the students, some young man, possibly a student, shouted at him, “How dare you hit the leg that elevated you?”

The memory of that moment is now tormenting the sick man. His wife Amina enters his room, asking him tenderly, “How are you?” He looks at her, amazed that she has mysteriously kept her youth and beauty even though she is only eight years younger than him. He thinks, “It is as though every year as I grow older, she grows a year younger. When will she wither and cringe away from her own image in the mirror?”

In both “Mahr al-wazifa” and “al-Qay',” Mahfuz exposes one of the major ills of Egyptian society at the time: the fact that young people could neither find employment nor advance in government service unless they could make use of family connections or somehow bribe those in power. Mahfuz, who spent thirty-seven years as a government employee, had a first-hand knowledge of the experience of young educated Egyptians seeking office in the government service. He also knew and despised the dubious ways by which people sought promotion. Mahfuz's second contemporary novel, al-Qahira al-jadida (The New Cairo, 1946), embraces the central themes of both these stories in its main plot line.

Mahfuz saw the Turko-Egyptian aristocracy as the source of social and political corruption in Egypt. In the story “al-Qay',” he specifically mentions that Amina, the beautiful but shameless wife, is of Turkish origin.¹¹ (With regard to the high-ranking official, Sulayman Pasha Sulayman, he need not even mention this; at the time, most high-ranking officials were of Turkish or Circassian origin.)

In “Yaqzat al-mumya'” (“The Mummy's Awakening,” al-Riwaya, 1 April 1939),¹² Mahfuz uses allegory to challenge the existing political order. His story expresses the hope of seeing the downfall of the alien monarchic dynasty of Muhammad ‘Ali.¹³

Some of Mahfuz's early stories are philosophical or moral parables. “Al-Sharr al-ma‘bud” (“Evil Worshipped,” al-Majalla al-jadida, 27 May 1936) describes the settlement of a nomadic tribe and the emergence of urban life with the necessary functions of judge, police chief, and doctor. The community seems to be progressing well, when a religious teacher appears preaching high moral ideals. He calls on people to return to the pure, pristine form of their religion, which has been corrupted by superstition and innovation. The people respond, and the need for the services of the judge, the police chief, and even the doctor consequently decline. These three therefore decide that they must get rid of the person whose preaching has made their functions redundant. They stir up violent opposition to the preacher, and succeed in banishing him from the city. The established order is again secure.

In a revised and somewhat longer version of this story published three years later, Mahfuz describes the religious teacher as engaging the people in debate on questions of good and evil.¹⁴ The doctrine he preaches is simple: if everyone adheres to ideals of beauty and moderation, both rich and poor will be happy and content. In this version of the story the judge, the police chief and the doctor arrange the teacher's disappearance, only to discover that the community continues to follow his teachings even after he has gone. The three conspirators resort to a further stratagem: they invite a beautiful and seductive dancer into the district, in the certain knowledge that she will cause competition and conflict. The peace of the community is, indeed, soon shattered, and the judge, the police chief and the doctor regain their power and status. The revised version's addition of a beautiful dancer as a means of causing strife is significant: her influence reveals the power of eros, which is hopelessly irrational, and which Mahfuz employs to typify the irrationality of the instinctual element in human behavior.¹⁵

“Evil Worshipped” is patently a parable on the feasibility of establishing a perfect, harmonious society. At the beginning of the story it seems that Utopia might be achieved; but by the end, human nature has reasserted itself, and the ideal society has receded. This story would seem to reflect the conflict in Mahfuz's mind between the Fabians' optimistic view of human nature and the pessimistic view maintained by Gustave Le Bon.¹⁶

The story “‘Afw al-malik Userkaf” (“King Userkaf's Forgiveness,” al-Riwaya, I December 1938) explores the question of loyalty. The Pharaoh Userkaf is advised by the gods to test the loyalty of his subjects. In order to do so, he departs from his kingdom, appointing his son interim ruler. When he returns, he finds that his son has betrayed his confidence and will not vacate the throne for him; he has also married the king's young wife. Others are no better: the chief minister, the commander of the army and the high priest have all switched their loyalties while the king was absent. Banished from his own kingdom, Userkaf allies himself with a malcontent governor with whose help he stages a rebellion against his son, the ruling Pharaoh. Userkaf wins the war and regains power. Rather than face her former husband, the treacherous queen commits suicide. Userkaf, however, forgives all those who betrayed him: the heir apparent, the chief minister, the commander, etc. He explains his decision to the bewildered and amazed governor who helped him win the war: “Who would give me another heir apparent, a more pious priest, a more capable chief minister? … Furthermore, I wish the queen had not committed suicide; I would have asked her to sit on the throne again by my side. And as for sincerity, my dear Governor, I am suspicious of everyone. I do not trust you any more than I trust those others.”

The story ends with a statement that King Userkaf lived the rest of his life in a state of emotional isolation and with no friend other than his dog. The story's moral message is therefore ambiguous. Does it preach constant suspicion, or is it, in fact, a warning against excessive suspicion and against testing people's loyalty? The argument in favor of the second interpretation would appear to be corroborated by a quotation from another story by Mahfuz, written some fifty years later. “Beware of being suspicious of all people, lest you become lonely and abandoned by all,” one of the characters warns the narrator in “al-Fajr al-kadhib” (“False Dawn,” 1989).¹⁷

“Hayat li‘l-ghayr” (“Life for the Sake of Others,” al-Riwaya, 1 July 1939) which tells the story of an unmarried man of thirty-six who is in love with his neighbors' sixteen-year-old daughter, appears to be a sketch of a novel. To some extent, the story line of the main character and his selfless devotion to his younger brother foreshadow the main character of Mahfuz's first realistic novel, Khan al-khalili.¹⁸

The problem of madness is the subject of the short story “Hams al-junun” (“The Whisper of Madness,” al-Risala, 19 February 1945).¹⁹ While reflecting Mahfuz's interest in psychology and in the nature of madness, this story is arguably an attempt to deal with a general cultural problem rather than a plausible description of an individual case. The various incidents described by Mahfuz in this story are too disparate to be considered symptoms of any one particular mental illness: they seem to have been concocted to fit an allegorical scheme. Madness here is the name for a rebellion against the social and cultural shackles which limit human freedom.

Although the short stories published in the 1930s and 1940s lack artistic brilliance and would not seem to herald the appearance of a great writer, they nonetheless display some of Mahfuz's unique qualities as a narrator. Almost without exception, the stories are told in a way that keeps the reader interested and absorbed. Another quality displayed even in these poorly-constructed stories is the author's capacity to depict human emotions and interpersonal relations effectively in just a few words. The range of characters covered in these stories is wide: Turko-Egyptian aristocrats, lower-middle class Egyptians, students, prostitutes, poor children. Many of the stories attack the Turko-Egyptian upper class; Mahfuz ridicules their superficial aping of French culture, their vanity and their dissolute moral behavior. Some deal with problems of poverty and social injustice. Most stories are set in contemporary Egypt, but some, of a markedly philosophical nature, are set in ancient times.

The history of the publication of Mahfuz's short stories is worth noting. Twenty-eight of his early stories were collected and republished in a volume called Hams al-junun (The Whisper of Madness).²⁰ For years, this collection's date of publication caused confusion among scholars. The list of Mahfuz's works which appears at the end of most of his books (and which indicates the year of the first edition and the year and number of the current edition for each work) cites 1938 as the original publication year for this collection. This date has puzzled the researchers because some of the stories could not have been written before 1941. This is especially obvious in the story “The POW's Suit,” which assumes the presence of Italian prisoners of war on Egyptian soil.

Some of the stories included in the collection Hams al-junun appeared in various Egyptian magazines in the years 1939 to 1945. Scholars have also noted with some surprise that there seems to be no reference whatsoever to the appearance of the book Hams al-junun in literary magazines prior to 1949.²¹ In an attempt to understand this strange phenomenon, one critic hypothesized that there had been an original 1938 edition, but that this had been superseded by a later edition which included more recent stories.²² However, the truth behind this discrepancy emerged when Mahfuz revealed that Hams al-junun was really published some ten years after the claimed date of 1938. He revealed this some time in the late 1970s, to the literary historian Dr. ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, who was preparing a study on Mahfuz.²³

He furnishes some more information on this subject in a later interview. “The person who made the collection Hams al-junun is the late ‘Abd al-Hamid Jawda al-Sahhar. I didn't want to publish this collection; at that time, I had already published the three historical novels, al-Qahira al-jadida and Zuqaq al-Midaqq [published in 1947].²⁴ He came and said to me, ‘Why don't you publish a collection of short stories?’ I said, ‘What collection? Now? The time for that has long since passed.’ … Al-Sahhar [the publisher] insisted on publishing a collection of short stories, so I gave him a huge number of magazines whose names I don't even remember. When he saw that I was very uncomfortable [with the idea], he said, ‘So then, let's give the real date of writing of these stories; when did [the editor and publisher] al-Zayyat suggest you publish a collection of your stories?’ I said, ‘In 1938.’ Al-Sahhar said, ‘Then you should consider that [proposed] collection your first book and date it 1938.’ Consequently, the reader doesn't know that Hams al-junun was published for the first time after the appearance of Zuqaq al-Midaqq [in 1947] and not in 1938, as appears in the list of my works which you find in every book.”²⁵

Mahfuz's first three books were historical novels with subjects derived from Egypt's age of the Pharaohs. Even before he began to publish his own fiction, he published a translation of a small English book by one Reverend James Baikie that gave a popular description of everyday life in Pharaonic Egypt.²⁶ Years later, Mahfuz explained that he had done the translation to practice his English; clearly, however, the choice of this particular work reflected his special interest in Egypt's Pharaonic past, as did his choice of subjects for these first three novels.²⁷ This interest stemmed from his concept of Egyptian national identity, in which he followed the lead of Egyptian intellectuals such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Husayn, Tawfiq al-Hakim, and Salama Musa.

These men maintained that the Egyptian national identity is essentially neither Arab nor Islamic, but is inherently and distinctly Egyptian, having its roots in the land and in the great civilization that emerged from it. According to this view, modern Egyptians should see themselves as heirs to a glorious Pharaonic past. The corollary to this view was an animosity towards the Arabs and towards what these intellectuals termed the “Arab mentality”—characterized, in their view, by “barbarism, violence, lack of imagination, addiction to momentary pleasures and an incapacity to create a stable civilization.”²⁸

Consistent with their view of Egypt's national identity and with their liberal world view was their strong advocacy of full equality for the Copts, Egypt's indigenous Christians.²⁹ These intellectuals recognized, of course, that since the conquest of Egypt by the Arab Muslim armies in 639 CE and the subsequent Islamization of its people, Arabic has become the language of all Egyptians. But they insisted that the Arabic language (which the Egyptians share with all Arabs) and the religion of Islam (which they share with all Muslims, Arab and non-Arab alike) are not the determining components of the national identity. Islam should not be allowed to play a role in politics; religion, they maintained, should be a private matter only.³⁰ Najib Mahfuz, it appears, has accepted these views and continues to maintain them to this day.

Just as the Pharaonic setting of Mahfuz's first three novels was motivated by the modern quest for a distinctive Egyptian identity, so did their content reflect Mahfuz's other essentially modern concerns and attitudes. Mahfuz fictionalized Pharaonic history and made it a vehicle for his views on contemporary issues.

The first novel, Abath al-aqdar (Fate's Play, 1939), is set in the court of Khufu (Cheops), the Pharaoh who ordered the building of the great pyramid of Giza. The story, sustained by a plot of political intrigue and gallant love, enables Mahfuz to express his views on government, education, and moral behavior. The plot for the story was inspired by an Egyptian legend recounted by Baikie in Ancient Egypt which Mahfuz had translated several years earlier. In Mahfuz's story, the Pharaoh attempts to thwart a magician's prophecy that the succession to the throne will pass from his family to that of the high priest of the god Re. It is only at the end of the book—and of his life—that he realizes his ruthless attempt to change the course of Fate has proved futile.

The story of the Pharaoh's unsuccessful attempt to defy Fate serves as a frame for the main story, which is an account of the upbringing and exploits of the hero, the high priest's son, Dadaf. By virtue of his education, talent, perseverance, loyalty and other fine qualities, Dadaf distinguishes himself as a commander in the Pharaoh's army. When the crown prince rebels against his father and attempts to kill him, Dadaf saves the Pharaoh's life. The Pharaoh rewards him by giving him his daughter in marriage and appointing him successor to the throne. The story strongly suggests that a ruler should be morally restrained in exercising power and that he should avoid shedding innocent blood. At the end of his life, the Pharaoh records in his Book of Wisdom the lessons experience has taught him; this is his legacy to his people.

The title of Mahfuz's book, Fate's Play, suits the frame story, but the greater part of the book recounts the achievements of Dadaf, who advances by virtue of talent and effort. This reflects an outlook very different from the underlying assumption of the frame story. Hence, the book appears to convey two conflicting messages: the frame story demonstrates the invincibility of Fate, while the main story celebrates man's capacity to shape his destiny by his own efforts. However, the contradiction between the message of the main story and that of its surrounding frame has not, so far, attracted attention. Most critics have seen the book simply as an expression of Mahfuz's belief in the overpowering dominance of Fate.³¹

The title of the novel would appear to be the source of this mis-construction. But Fate's Play (Abath al-aqdar) was not the book's original title; Mahfuz named it The Wisdom of Cheops (Hikmat Khufu). However, Salama Musa, the publisher, changed the title to Fate's Play, thereby influencing the way the book was understood and distracting attention from the other aspect of its message.³²

Throughout his work, Mahfuz has repeatedly emphasized the importance of individual action and responsibility. He is clearly no fatalist. In an interview in 1988 he succinctly states his position: “I believe in work [‘amal] and in the result of work, but there is also an element of luck [wa-lakin al-huzuz mawjuda]. However, predestination [al-qadar] in the sense of abolishing man's freedom [of action]—no, because man is subject to punishment and reward, and so he has to be free.”³³

The book shows how hard work and perseverance can shape destiny; it concludes with the downfall of those who have shed innocent blood, and celebrates the final triumph of loyalty and love.

Mahfuz's identification with the Pharaonicist school of Egyptian nationalism is revealed here not only in his choice of subject and setting but also by various details throughout the book. The hero falls in love with Pharaoh's daughter—whom he will eventually marry—when she is disguised as a fallaha (an Egyptian peasant girl) and he has no idea of her true identity. In the form of nationalist ideology described above, the fellah was viewed as the embodiment of the Egyptian spirit: “Ancient Egypt or the Egypt of the Pharaohs is still alive among our fellahin,” wrote Salama Musa in 1926.³⁴ The love between the hero—who is not of royal lineage—and Pharaoh's daughter qua fallaha symbolizes the triumph of the eternal Egyptian spirit. This image of Egypt as a peasant girl prefigures Mahfuz's use, twenty-eight years later, of a young fallaha, Zahra, in the novel Miramar, to represent Egypt.

Abath al-aqdar depicts the Bedouin of Sinai, whose raids threaten Egypt's peace and security, as barbaric and uncouth. This negative view of the (Arab) Bedouin, too, conforms to the above-mentioned form of Egyptian nationalist ideology.

An idea which Mahfuz expresses directly and emphatically is that the pyramids attest to the greatness of the Egyptian people more than to that of the Pharaoh. He describes the workers who constructed the pyramids as being moved by faith and determination, “imposing human will upon eternal Time.”³⁵ This echoes Tawfiq al-Hakim's view that the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with an ambition to master time and place, and subordinate them to the national will.³⁶

The second novel, Radubis (1943), recounts the story of a young Pharaoh's infatuation with a beautiful courtesan (Radubis) and his fateful struggle with the powerful clergy. Both themes reflect the author's modern concerns. He employs the love story to express his views on the potential destructiveness of love, and the story of the struggle between the Pharaoh and the clergy is an object lesson on the danger inherent in a religious establishment that wields economic and political power.³⁷

Some Egyptian critics interpreted this novel as a warning to the young King Farouk not to let his inclination to debauchery interfere with the exercise of his royal duties, lest he be overthrown by popular rebellion. This, however, is an anachronistic reading of the novel, as King Farouk was at this time still in the early years of his reign and had not yet earned a reputation for dissolute behavior.³⁸

In the third of his historical novels, Kifah Tiba (The Struggle of Thebes, 1944), Mahfuz tells the story of the war of liberation waged by the Egyptians, under the leadership of Prince Ahmas, against the Hyksos, invaders from the north who occupied Egypt for over a century (1700–1580 BCE). The final victory of the indigenous Egyptians over the foreign occupiers and their expulsion from Egypt was intended by Mahfuz and understood by his readers to herald the end of the British occupation of Egypt. It is significant that the young Pharaoh Ahmas, the hero of the war of liberation, is torn between his sense of duty to his people and his loyalty to his Egyptian sister-wife, on the one hand, and his love for the fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the King of the Hyksos, on the other.

This was probably intended to represent through allegory the conflict between Mahfuz's aversion to the British as foreign occupiers and his attraction to Western culture, and to English literature in particular. Some years later, Mahfuz described this conflict in the trilogy, expressing it through the thoughts of Kamal, his alter ego.

Kifah Tiba was highly praised, especially by a young literary critic by the name of Sayyid Qutb, who saw it as the most important of the historical novels written in Egypt. The critic ended his review with the statement that if he had the power, he would distribute the book free to every young Egyptian man and woman and would call a gathering to honor the author whom, he affirmed, he did not personally know.³⁹ In the spirit of Egyptian nationalism of the time, Qutb expressed in his article the same degree of resentment toward all those nations which had invaded and occupied Egypt throughout the ages: Hyksos, Romans, Turks, Arabs and Europeans.⁴⁰ It is interesting to note that Qutb, who within a few years would become one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, did not distinguish between Muslim (Arab and Turkish) and non-Muslim foreign rulers. It is especially striking that he included in his list of “foreign oppressors” the Arabs, whose occupation of Egypt introduced Islam into that country.

In 1966 Sayyid Qutb was put to death by Nasser for having led a Muslim Brothers' plot against him. Mahfuz, who has always been opposed to religious extremism and has often decried the fanaticism of the Muslim Brotherhood, has nevertheless always faithfully remembered the name of Sayyid Qutb, the first critic to note his special talent as a novelist. In fact, one of the chapters of his al-Maraya portrays a fictitious character modeled closely on the enigmatic personality of Sayyid Qutb.⁴¹

After writing these three historical novels, Mahfuz abandoned his plan to write a series of novels tracing the history of Egypt from Pharaonic to modern times and turned to the contemporary scene.⁴²

Khan al-khalili (1945) is set in the early years of World War II (from September 1941 to August 1942).⁴³ It is interesting to note that the family in this novel moves from their home in the more modern Sakakini quarter to the old Khan al-Khalili, for fear of air raids; this incident is based on Mahfuz's own experiences in 1941: because of his fear of the air raids, Mahfuz persuaded his mother (with whom he was living at the time as a bachelor in the ‘Abbasiyya quarter) to move to the old Azhar quarter, which borders on Khan al-Khalili.⁴⁴

As a result of this correspondence between Mahfuz's life and the story of the family's move for fear of air raids, some people, apparently, believed that Ahmad ‘Akif, the main character in Khan al-khalili, was modeled on Mahfuz himself. Mahfuz denies this identification:

Some people ask me, “Doesn't the personality of Ahmad have something of you in it?” This is completely untrue. Ahmad is a real person. He was a minor official in the university administration [where Mahfuz himself worked from 1936 to 1938]. He actually read the novel after it came out but did not recognize himself in it. He didn't realize at all that he was the inspiration for the main character. This, incidentally, proves a very curious thing: a person's view of himself and other people's view of him—they are indeed very different from each other! The “Ahmad ‘Akif” I knew was merely a minor official in the university administration, but he thought that he knew everything in Egypt. He had only a high school diploma, but he believed that he had mastered all the knowledge in the world. He was superficial and fickle. The risk I took was that had he known I was inspired by him in Khan al-khalili, my life might have been in danger; he might have attacked me, because he was truly a deranged character.⁴⁵

Mahfuz succeeds in giving a vivid picture of life in Khan al-Khalili, one of the streets of Cairo's medieval Jamaliyya quarter (where he himself was born). In this book, too, Mahfuz devotes much attention to the big ideological and cultural debates of the time. Ahmad ‘Akif, a hapless low-ranking official, is a protagonist of cultural conservatism, his rival a communist. Mahfuz has them both sound too extreme and one-sided in arguing their respective positions, but it is the conservative in particular whose arguments are pathetically ridiculous, for they reveal his ignorance as well as his intellectual pretentiousness.

Once again it was the critic Sayyid Qutb who highly praised this novel, ranking it higher than Tawfiq al-Hakim's ‘Awdat al-ruh: “The genuine Egyptian features in Khan al-khalili are clearer and stronger, whereas in ‘Awdat al-ruh there are various French shadings. … Khan al-khalili is free of the lengthy repetitions that weigh on ‘Awdat al-ruh. …”⁴⁶ This was a great compliment (and a daring one for the critic) because Mahfuz was a relatively unknown young novelist, whereas Tawfiq al-Hakim was already a literary celebrity.

The next novel, al-Qahira al-jadida (The New Cairo, 1946), is set in 1934, and has for its main characters a group of Egyptian students. Through these characters, the author presents the major ideological orientations dividing the Egyptian intelligentsia at the time: one of the students is an Islamic fundamentalist; another a secularist and a socialist; a third supports the Wafd, the popular national party (which Mahfuz himself had loyally supported ever since high school), and the fourth (the main character) is a cynical careerist who does not care for any ideal.⁴⁷ In his review of al-Qahira al-jadida, Qutb wrote that he regarded Mahfuz's works as “the real beginning of the creation of genuine Arabic novels. For the first time, indigenous Egyptian flavor and aroma appear in a literary work with a [universal] human quality. …”⁴⁸

A comparison of Khan al-khalili and al-Qahira al-jadida shows that the former displays a more mature style, narrative structure and use of language than the latter. It may well be that although, as research has shown, al-Qahira al-jadida appeared a year later than Khan al-khalili, it was actually written earlier; this may be the reason why Mahfuz listed it as the earlier work.

In Zuqaq al-Midaqq (Midaq Alley, 1947), Najib Mahfuz describes the changing social reality of a traditional Cairene neighborhood under the impact of World War II. There is no one main character in the story, which portrays a gallery of characters, most of them of the lower and lower-middle classes.

The following year Mahfuz published al-Sarab (The Mirage), the story of a young man beset by a host of neuroses caused by his having been brought up by an over-indulgent mother. For years he is unable to have normal relations with women, but eventually finds satisfaction in a relationship he establishes with a buxom widow in her forties. In al-Sarab Mahfuz attempts to demonstrate the devastating psychological and social effects of the hypocritical and repressive attitudes to sex current at the time. Though not one of Mahfuz's best novels, it continues to be one of his most widely read.⁴⁹

In 1949 he published Bidaya wa-nihaya (The Beginning and the End), the story of a Cairene family of the lower-middle class whose father dies, leaving four children, three sons and a daughter.⁵⁰ The youngest of the three sons, an ambitious and vain character, enters the military academy after finishing high school. The year is 1936, when the military academy opened its doors for the first time to young Egyptians who were not sons of the aristocracy. (This was the class that included Nasser, ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amir, Sadat, and some other members of the inner circle of the Free Officers who led the 1952 revolution.)

The novel ends with the suicide of the vain and selfish officer. The negative judgment passed by the author on this character anticipates, in a way, Mahfuz's negative view of the military men who led the revolution of 1952. The analogy between the fictitious figure of the officer Hasanayn and the leaders of the Free Officers revolution was not, apparently, lost on perceptive Egyptian readers. In the film made from the novel Bidaya wa-nihaya in 1960, Hasanayn is portrayed as a selfish opportunist. The journalist ‘A'ida Sharif recounts a discussion which took place in the Casino al-Opera café shortly after the film's release. Some of those present criticized the director, Salah Abu Sayf, for his unsympathetic portrayal of Hasanayn, but Mahfuz supported him. ‘A'ida Sharif, who was among those present, challenged Mahfuz: “Some time ago, the critic Ahmad ‘Abbas Salih wrote that Hasanayn was not an opportunist but a person of high ambition, whose striving represents the revolution; and you agreed with him at the time.” Mahfuz smiled and said, “Every interpretation has two edges.”⁵¹

This answer is characteristic of Mahfuz's tendency to avoid confrontation and of his adroit use of the slyly enigmatic response. In this case, the critic's interpretation of Hasanayn as a symbol of the revolution was clearly intended as a positive judgment. But Mahfuz's cryptic response offers an opposite interpretation: what could be a more damning verdict on the revolution than its personification in the character of the vain, self-destructive Hasanayn?

In an interview in 1986, when asked about the apparently prophetic nature of some of his works, Mahfuz recalled a meeting with Anwar al-Sadat in the early 1960s, at which Sadat told him that he had read Bidaya wa-nihaya. Sadat asked: “How could you have made the officer Hasanayn commit suicide? He's us, that officer [da ihna, al-dabit da!].”⁵² The suicide of the young officer at the end of the story is indeed prophetic: it will be recalled that ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amir, Nasser's deputy and Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian army, committed suicide on 14 September 1967, in the wake of Egypt's military defeat in June of that year.

Mahfuz seems to prefer the humble and patient Husayn, the second of the three sons in Bidaya wa-nihaya. Significantly, like Kamal in the trilogy, he would like to become a teacher; but, since he must work to help his family and so cannot go to teachers college, he takes a job as a secretary in a school. This son is considerate of others and proves loyal to family and friends; it is he who will continue the family line. The strongest character of the novel is, however, the mother who, in her patience and wisdom, is able to survive all the troubles and hardships that life brings her.

Mahfuz's next novel was the Cairene trilogy, on which he worked for a number of years, and which he completed in the spring of 1952, a few months before the Free Officers revolution.⁵³ The novel's main character is Kamal, the author's alter ego, who grows up in the shadow of his autocratic father, Sayyid Ahmad. A ten-year-old child at the beginning of the story in 1917, Kamal is a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor when the story ends in 1944.

The story traces three generations of a Cairene family between 1917 and 1944. With the story of Sayyid Ahmad's family as the main plot line, the novel gives a detailed picture of middle-class life in Cairo and a dynamic account of Egypt's major political and social developments throughout that period. Against a background of many alternating milieus (family home, bazaar, café, office, brothel, university lecture hall, etc.), Mahfuz treats a multitude of subjects: Egyptian nationalism, family relations, love, the place of the writer in society, secular positivism versus religious faith, socialism versus Islamic fundamentalism and many other social and cultural issues.

The death of Sayyid Ahmad's second son, Kamal's older brother, in anti-British demonstrations in 1919, casts a long shadow over Sayyid Ahmad's family. Although Mahfuz views the 1919 rebellion with admiration, as a heroic action and a genuine expression of the feelings of the whole nation, he frankly describes the not-so-heroic stance that other members of Sayyid Ahmad's family took at the time. (This is very characteristic of Mahfuz: he does not give up his critical vision or his irony even when describing things dear to him; intellectual honesty has precedence over personal bias.)

Both the father and the mother strongly oppose their son's participation in the nationalist movement. The father, like the rest of his friends, is an enthusiastic supporter of the nationalist call for independence. He regards his signature of the petition in support of Sa‘d Zaghlul—signed by many thousands of Egyptians in November, 1918—as a bold nationalist action. But he will not have his son risk himself by participating in the student demonstrations, and goes so far as to try to make him swear on the Qur'an that he will desist from any anti-British activity. Later, after his son's death, he takes great pride in being “the father of a martyr.” The mother is not interested in politics at all; she cares only for the well-being of her family. She, too, refuses to let her son risk his life, but, unlike the father, she does not quite understand her son's nationalist attitude nor his hatred for the British: “Why do you hate them? Aren't they people like us, with children and mothers?” When the son declares, “A nation cannot live if it is ruled by foreigners,” the mother responds, “We are alive even though they have been ruling us for a very long time. I gave birth to all of you children under their rule. They don't kill people; they don't desecrate the mosques, and Muhammad's nation is fine and well.”⁵⁴ Finally, she sums up her position: “These matters are none of our business. If our ministers believe that the English should get out of Egypt, let them push them out by themselves.”⁵⁵

Sayyid Ahmad's eldest son does not take part in the national upheaval; years later, however, he will boast of having been one of the leaders of the 1919 demonstrations, along with his martyred brother.

Kamal, a mere child in 1919, naturally shares the nationalist enthusiasm and anti-British sentiment of the grown-up members of his family. When Kamal sees British soldiers for the first time, when they encamp near his home, he says in amazement, “How beautiful they are!” His brother asks him sarcastically, “Do you really like them?” The child answers naïvely, “Very much indeed. I imagined that they would look like demons.”⁵⁶ Within a few days, Kamal comes to be-friend these soldiers and visits them in their encampment daily upon his return from school. As Kamal grows, he is torn by an inner strife that has been typical of generations of modern educated Arabs: the conflict between the pull of the indigenous traditional culture on the one hand, and the attraction to the imported modern culture on the other. Kamal, who becomes a teacher, significantly chooses English as his subject. In an interview in 1988, Mahfuz mentioned that he, like so many of his generation, suffered from the crisis of “cultural duality.”⁵⁷

With the publication of the Cairene trilogy, Mahfuz was recognized as the master of the modern Arabic novel, and it was expected that in his next novel he would somehow celebrate the new reality created after 1952 by the Free Officers revolution. This, as we know, did not happen, and Mahfuz did not emerge from his literary silence until 1959, when he published Awlad haretna (Children of Our Neighborhood) in serial form in al-Ahram, Egypt's leading newspaper.⁵⁸

In Awlad haretna Mahfuz deals allegorically with the problems of civilization, as it has evolved under the aegis of the three monotheistic religions until the modern age. He explores the nature of religion, secular authority and knowledge, and the relationship between these three. In the section of the allegory relating to the modern era, Mahfuz focuses on the problem of science and the scientific approach, as opposed to religion and the traditional worldview. Religious circles in Egypt were outraged by the book, which pious Muslims regarded as a blasphemy. The book's division into five parts and 114 chapters may be considered as a mischievous allusion respectively to the five books of Moses and the 114 suras of the Qur'an.

The book deals with another very sensitive subject: the nature of power. It criticizes the oppressive rule of the officers—represented allegorically in the story as club-wielding thugs who brutally oppress the people. For both of these reasons Awlad haretna has never been published in book form in Egypt; it was, however, published in Lebanon in 1967.⁵⁹

The neighborhood (hāra) of the book's title represents the whole of humanity, although it should be noted that the human history encompassed here by Mahfuz is essentially that of the three great monotheistic religions. The term hara signifies a quarter in Old Cairo, whose division into ten to fifteen haras dates back to Fatimid times. “Physically, a hara is a subsection of a city. Having only limited access, usually through a street terminating in an open square, it is equipped with walls and gates which can be closed at night and, in addition, barricaded completely during times of crisis. Socially, the hara is a group of persons usually unified by ethnic and/or occupational characteristics. … Politically, it is often a unit of administration and control.”⁶⁰ The people of Mahfuz's hara inhabit a physical setting which belongs to no particular historical period and which supplies no specific place names relating it to any actual locale. We are, however, given enough hints to indicate that the description of the neighborhood is based on a quarter in Old Cairo in pre-modern times. This neighborhood borders on the desert (khala', literally “empty space”) and life there is described in a way which suggests a pre-modern era: there are no references to cars, telephones or any other form of modern technology. It should be noted that this hara, although presumably located in Cairo, and although many of its features are drawn from Mahfuz's memories of his early childhood in Jamaliyya, is a fictional locale where realistic elements are used to create a mythological environment which represents the whole world. Having created this environment, Mahfuz was to return to it again and again in a number of his later novels and short stories.

In 1961 Mahfuz published an eagerly awaited new novel, al-Liss wa‘l-kilab (The Thief and the Dogs), whose appearance was a milestone in the development both of Mahfuz's art and of modern Arabic fiction.⁶¹ It introduced Arab readers to themes of existentialist literature—alienation, despair, loss of meaning—and to modern narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness. The political content of the book was also of great significance: it was a powerful expression of disenchantment with the 1952 revolution, by Egypt's foremost novelist.

The story begins when the hero, Sa‘id Mahran (the thief of the book's title), is released from jail on the anniversary of the revolution, in honor of which his prison term has been shortened. He finds that the world has not changed for the better since pre-revolutionary days. He wants to avenge himself on those who have wronged him—primarily his one-time henchman, ‘ileish Sidra, who deceived him with his wife Nabawiyya and took Sa‘id's place as Nabawiyya's husband and head of the gang. His other adversary is Ra‘uf ‘Alwan, a journalist closely associated with the regime. In the years before the 1952 revolution, when the hero was just a boy, this journalist (at that time, still a student) had been the hero's spiritual mentor, and had encouraged him to believe that there was nothing wrong in stealing from the rich, since they had no right to their money and property. Now, however, this journalist shows no sympathy for the thief; he gives him some money and tells him not to approach him again. Now the editor of a government-owned magazine, the journalist lives in luxury in a villa resembling those of the wealthy and powerful whom he had once condemned.

When Sa‘id realizes that his former mentor Ra‘uf ‘Alwan is not ready to help him, he feels betrayed by him, too. Convinced that it is his mission to destroy “the traitors,” he tries to kill both his former henchman and Ra‘uf, but fails. In a café frequented by underworld characters, Sa‘id meets Nur, a prostitute he has known for many years. Nur, who has always loved Sa‘id, now gives him refuge in her apartment, in an isolated building bordering on a cemetery. Nur would like Sa‘id to abandon his vengeful schemes and escape with her to Upper Egypt, her place of origin, where they could live quietly together. Sa‘id, however, does not give up his raging desire for revenge. After a few nights, Nur does not return home; she disappears, and Sa‘id can no longer hide in her apartment. A fugitive from the police, he tries to hide in the cemetery. In the final scene, surrounded by policemen and tracker dogs, Sa‘id is shot dead.

The literary-aesthetic qualities of the book drew such enthusiastic acclaim that the book's potentially embarrassing political implications were somehow dimmed. The critics observed, of course, that the novel contained elements of social criticism, but interpreted these as directed against opportunists who distorted the true nature of the revolution. They chose not to see the book as a negative comment on the regime itself. The more profound implication of this novel, that the revolution had failed to bring about any real change for the better, could not be mentioned in Egypt. The Egyptian expatriate Anwar Abdel-Malek, however, wrote in Paris: “The work of fiction [al-Liss wa‘l-kilab] slashed through the euphoria of the newspapers and the daily proclamations of victory. It portrayed the condition of a man who is still downtrodden. The most successful novel by Egypt's best contemporary novelist concludes in crisis and drama, not with a happy ending.”⁶²

Al-Liss wa‘l-kilab was followed by a series of other short novels similar to it in style, more sparing in descriptive detail and with a larger proportion of dialogue and interior monologue than Mahfuz's earlier realistic novels. Social reality is described only when necessary as a background to the problems of the individual which, in the main, are not social (poverty, oppression, etc.), but rather existential: anxiety, loneliness, loss of purpose.⁶³ This change in form and style corresponds to the shift in Mahfuz's thematic focus; with attention directed essentially to the inner world of the individual, the use of interior monologue becomes more prominent. The amount of dialogue increases, while the language becomes more terse and loaded with hints and symbols. In all these short novels, the main characters are alienated, lonesome and forlorn.⁶⁴

It should be emphasized that, despite the obvious differences between Mahfuz's novels of the 1960s and those he wrote in the 1940s and 1950s, there was no sudden revolution in his writing. The third volume of the trilogy (al-Sukkariyya) points both thematically (the problem of alienation) and stylistically (an increase in the proportion of dialogue) in the direction which Mahfuz was to take in the 1960s.

In 1962 Mahfuz published al-Summan wa‘l-kharif (The Quail and Autumn),⁶⁵ whose hero, ‘Isa al-Dabbagh, is a high-ranking government official dismissed in the wake of Nasser's revolution. Embittered and forlorn, he leaves his home in Cairo and moves to self-imposed exile in Alexandria. Despite his friends' entreaties, he cannot bring himself to adjust to the new order. One of his friends, also formerly a high-ranking official in the old regime, tells him that he has found spiritual comfort in Sufism, but for ‘Isa this is not a solution.

Typically, this alienated hero is reluctant to make any permanent commitment; he refuses to look for another job, and has no desire to establish a family. When he does eventually marry for economic reasons, he cannot bring himself to love his wife. Painfully aware of the emptiness of his existence, he tries to reestablish his connection with Riri, a former prostitute with whom he used to live and who has borne him a child. But it is too late. He has no chance of regaining his daughter, Ni‘mat; he has lost the right to fatherhood by his callous behavior towards her mother.

The hero's name, ‘Isa al-Dabbagh, is significant. ‘Isa, Arabic for Jesus, represents the high ideals to which the hero pretends; it also ironically represents the hero's belief that he has served as a scape-goat for the wrongdoings of others. He tells his friends, “I sometimes find consolation in seeing myself as Christ, bearing the sins of a nation of sinners.”⁶⁶ The dabbagh (“tanner”) practices what is considered the most repugnant of professions, because of the foul stench associated with the work. This is an allusion to the corruption which soiled the reputation of both ‘Isa and the Wafd party. The daughter he has lost is called Ni‘mat, which means “God's favors.”

Al-Tariq (The Way, 1964, appeared in English as The Search) is the story of a young man named Sabir (meaning “the patient one,” an obviously ironic name), who, following the death of his mother, sets out on a desperate search for his father, from whom his mother had separated before he was born. Sabir becomes involved with a married woman, murders her rich, elderly husband, is caught and, at the end of the story, is awaiting execution.

The book is, in fact, a parable on man's search for a heavenly Father and his uncontrollable desire for transcendental meaning and guidance.⁶⁷ The name of the father, Sayyid Sayyid al-Rahimi (which in approximate translation can be rendered as “Lord Lord Merciful”), would seem to make this interpretation inevitable.⁶⁸

Tharthara fawq al-nil (Chatter on the Nile, 1966)⁶⁹ depicts a group of Cairo intellectuals—government officials and people from the media and the entertainment world—who meet nightly on a houseboat on the Nile where they engage in drinking, drugs, sex and idle talk. They are morally dissolute and intellectually confused. The story portrays a dismal picture of the mood and manners of Cairo's intelligentsia under the Free Officers' regime. It contains some very caustic remarks made by the characters about the regime, which they regard as a reign of fear.

Although it was not published until 1966, and is usually regarded as one of Mahfuz's short novels of the 1960s, Tharthara fawq al-nil would appear, in fact, to have been written in 1957.⁷⁰ Mahfuz, probably for fear of official reaction, delayed publication. His fears were indeed justified: when the book appeared, ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amir, Nasser's deputy, was angered by the uncomplimentary allusions to the regime; he complained about the matter to Nasser, and demanded that Mahfuz be punished. He was saved by the intervention of the minister of culture, Tharwat ‘Ukasha.⁷¹

In describing the houseboat setting, Mahfuz may well have drawn on a personal experience he describes in a letter to Dr. Rajab (probably from 1947): “I have met a young writer this summer, a talented and pleasant young man, who owns a houseboat. Here we stay until midnight, dividing our time between hashish and women; and your brother has quite changed his nature—though only for the duration of the summer vacation, of course. Furthermore, he has taught me to play poker, may God forgive him, and I have become a gambler, and I am only a step away from [needing] a specialist in venereal diseases. Look what a bad end this writer has come to!”⁷²

In the 1960s Mahfuz began to publish short stories once more: the collection Dunya ‘llah (God's World) appeared in 1963. Says Mahfuz, “The stories in the collection Dunya ‘llah are the first I have ever written out of a genuine desire to write a short story.”⁷³ It should be recalled that Mahfuz has explained on various occasions that in the 1930s he really wanted to write novels, but since he was unable to find anyone willing to publish them, he wrote instead short stories “derived” from his projected novels.⁷⁴

The themes of Mahfuz's short stories of the 1960s are similar to those found in his novels of this period: the existential problems of the individual and the larger problems at the very foundations of civilization. Many of these stories are symbolical or allegorical. Their ideational content is usually more pronounced than in the novels of this period, because of the nature of the genre. In the short stories, as in the novels, universal problems are perceived in a particularly Egyptian setting.

Short stories have now become a regular part of Mahfuz's literary repertoire. Since Dunya ‘llah he has published fourteen collections of short stories, many of which appeared in the literary section of al-Ahram. A number of these stories have a more or less veiled political theme; some of them are surrealistic. The appearance of the more enigmatic of these often allegorical stories invariably provoked argument among intellectuals as to their meaning and Mahfuz's intent.⁷⁵ Mahfuz himself refused to provide any explanation. He told an interviewer that, some days after the appearance of the story “Luna bark” (“Amusement Park,” one of his more enigmatic surrealistic short stories, published in the collection Bayt sayyi' al-sum‘a, 1965), one of his friends told him, “I know the hidden meaning of the story.” Mahfuz recounted that he answered his friend, “If so, please help me by telling me what it is, so that I, in turn, can tell those who ask me.”⁷⁶

A surrealistic atmosphere, verging on the absurd, is especially characteristic of the collections Taht al-mizalla (In the Bus Shelter, 1969), Shahr al-‘asal (Honeymoon, 1971) and al-Jarima (The Crime, 1973). Mahfuz explained on several occasions that the situation and general mood in Egypt following the military debacle of 1967 could not be expressed other than surrealistically.

The novel Miramar (1967) revolves around seven characters—five men, representing different generations, political persuasions and social backgrounds, who lodge in pension “Miramar” in Alexandria, and two women: the aging Greek proprietress of the pension and the young maid Zahra, a beautiful fallaha who has come to the big city from her native village seeking independence and education.⁷⁷

Miramar resembles Mahfuz's previous novels of the 1960s in that most of its characters are lonesome and alienated. It differs, however, from these earlier novels in two respects. First, this is Mahfuz's only contemporary novel which, as a whole, takes place outside Cairo. Second, it has a different narrative form: it is a quartet; the story is told by four of the protagonists, each from his own viewpoint.

The Alexandria locale is of great symbolic significance: from Mahfuz's Cairo-centric point of view Alexandria represents exile and alienation. In fact, all the characters, except for the Greek proprietress, are away from home. The symbolic meaning of Alexandria is already anticipated in the earlier short novel al-Summan wa‘l-kharif (1962), where the hero, a high-ranking government official dismissed from office by the new revolutionary regime, attempts “to get away from it all” by going to Alexandria.

Mahfuz was not the first Egyptian novelist to write a novel narrated from four different points of view. He was preceded, six years earlier, by a younger novelist, Fathi Ghanim, who wrote a similarly constructed novel called The Man Who Lost His Shadow.⁷⁸ But it was through Miramar that the quartet form became “naturalized.” Some critics have drawn the inevitable analogy between Mahfuz's “Alexandria quartet” and Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. However, Mahfuz's approach in Miramar seems to owe more to Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon (1950) than to Durrell's novel. In fact, since the beginning of the 1960s, Mahfuz's narrative art has been greatly influenced by cinematic narrative techniques. He has always been fascinated by the elusiveness of truth and reality, and cinema (which he has always liked and which he came to know at close hand through script writing and through his work as director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema) seems to have suggested to him new ways of portraying the many facets of reality. Mahfuz used the quartet form again in the short novel al-Karnak (1974)⁷⁹ and in Afrah al-qubba (The Festivities of the Dome, 1981).⁸⁰

Al-Karnak, which paints a depressing picture of life under Nasser, aroused controversy and, in some cases, animosity towards Mahfuz.⁸¹

In 1972, with the publication of al-Maraya, a collection of fifty-five self-contained fictional profiles which he himself called “a novel,” Mahfuz began to move away from the classical model of the novel. This tendency to episodic composition reappears in many of his later works, such as Malhamat al-harafish (1977), Layali alf layla (1982), Rihlat Ibn Fattuma (1983) and Hadith al-sabah wa‘l-masa' (1987). This new departure may have been prompted by two factors: on the one hand a feeling on Mahfuz's part that he could neither surpass nor repeat his supreme achievements—the trilogy and al-Liss wa‘l-kilab; and on the other, a desire to experiment with a narrative style akin in some measure to the Arab indigenous tradition of storytelling, which was episodic in both its popular and its classical manifestations.⁸² It is interesting to note that Mahfuz's adoption of the episodic style was preceded, in the early sixties, by his return to the short story form, which he had abandoned some twenty years before.

Malhamat al-harāfish (The Harafish 1977)⁸³ tells the story of sixteen generations of the al-Naji family. In this story Mahfuz returns to the semi-mythological setting he used for the first time in Awlad haretna—a hara (neighborhood) in Old Cairo in an undefined pre-modern era. The eponymous father of the family is ‘Ashur, who begins life as a foundling abandoned outside the walls of the local Sufi monastery and grows up to be an honest, hard-working and good-natured man. When the neighborhood is stricken by plague he, his wife and their three sons flee to the desert. On their return home six months later, they discover that they are the only survivors; hence the family name: al-naji means “survivor.” ‘Ashur becomes the leader of the resettled hara, embodying an ideal of upright leadership as he confronts and overcomes a wicked rival. After ‘Ashur's mysterious disappearance, one of his sons succeeds him as the neighborhood futuwwa (“ringleader,” “strong-man”) and continues his tradition of just rule until he dies, and violence and corruption take over.

The harafish, the poor people of the neighborhood, whom ‘Ashur and his son protected, now once more fall victim to the oppressive rule of the local hoods (futuwwas) and to exploitation by the rich. After generations of strife and jealousy, one of ‘Ashur's descendants—another poor but honest and kind man who, like the ancestor whose name he bears, possesses unusual physical strength—leads the harafish in rebellion against their oppressors and establishes himself as the local futuwwa, securing for the neighborhood a new, just regime.

Malhamat al-harafish is an attempt on the part of Mahfuz to understand and explain the interaction between human nature and the social and political order. This book in some ways resembles Awlad haretna which was published eighteen years earlier. Both novels are situated in the hara, and in both Mahfuz exposes the corrupting effects of wealth and power. However, unlike Awlad haretna, which deals allegorically with particular stages of history, Malhamat al-harafish does not attempt to illustrate any particular era, and focuses primarily on personal desires and fears: sex, greed, the various forms of love, the inevitability of death and the yearning for the infinite.

The title of the book aroused comment because it resurrected the word harāfish, a medieval term which had long fallen into disuse. Harafish—the plural form of the little used harfūsh—means “riff-raff” or “ruffians,” but Mahfuz redeems this derogatory term and applies it to the poor and underprivileged classes in general.⁸⁴ In choosing this term for the title of his book, Mahfuz was indulging in a private joke: several years previously, he and his literary friends had begun to refer to themselves as the harafish.

Afrah al-qubba (1981) is a short novel about a young playwright and his first successfully performed play. From birth, the life of the hero has been closely connected with the theater: his father is a prompter and his mother a box-office cashier. The theater manager and the actors are frequent guests in the family home, where guests and hosts alike nightly indulge in drinking, sex and drugs.

The plot of the successful play, which serves as a pivot for the novel, is taken from the life of the young playwright's own family, and the novel's four narrators—the playwright himself, his parents and an actor—appear as characters in the play. The parents and the actor are horrified by the play—which represents the playwright as having informed the police of his parents' activities as drug dealers and as having killed his wife and young son—because they mistakenly believe it to be an unaltered representation of reality. They do not realize that although the play is founded on actual people and events (the playwright's parents were indeed imprisoned, his wife and son did indeed die), these are represented not as they really were, but as the author's imagination has reshaped them.

Mahfuz uses this story to explore the tense and often tragic relationship between the writer and society and also, possibly, to reflect his own experiences following the publication of al-Karnak, when he was accused of disloyalty and ingratitude towards his country. In addition to making use of the quartet form to show how personal perceptions of reality inevitably differ, Afrah al-qubba also stresses the gap between truth and its fictionalized representations.

Al-Baqi min al-zaman sa‘a (You Have One Hour Left, 1982) is the story of an Egyptian family from the mid-1930s until after the signing of the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978. The various ideological and political affiliations dividing Egyptian society are all represented in the novel by members of the family.

Layali alf layla (The Night of a Thousand Nights, 1982) evokes the Arabian Nights (known in Arabic as the Thousand and One Nights) not only in its title and by borrowing several of its main characters, but also in its frame-story structure. Thirteen loosely related tales are enclosed within a story about King Shahriyar, the murderous king of the Arabian Nights. Mahfuz's Night of a Thousand Nights begins at the point where the Arabian Nights ends: Shahriyar has already decided to spare Sheherazade's life and marry her. A series of stories ensues, recounting events in the kingdom and enabling Mahfuz once more to explore the power of love, the temptations of lust and greed and the uses of political power for good and evil. King Shahriyar, who has become a searcher after truth, invites Sinbad to tell him about his marvelous voyages and hears from him the moral lessons he has derived from his experiences. The first of these is: man often mistakes illusion for the truth. When asked how it is possible to distinguish between the two, Sinbad replies: we must use the senses and reason God has given us (pp. 247–48). He further says that the preservation of outworn traditions is foolish and destructive, that freedom is essential to the life of the spirit and that without it even Paradise is worthless (pp. 250–51). By the end of the book, Shahriyar has given up his kingdom and become an ascetic. He has learned that joy and pleasure are short-lived, and that absolute truth is unattainable.

This is not the first time that Mahfuz has clothed his philosophical and social views in variations on the Arabian Nights. Several years earlier, in his one-act play al-Shaytan ya‘iz (Satan Preaches), he retold the Arabian Nights story, “The City of Brass.”⁸⁵

Rihlat Ibn Fattuma (The Travels of Ibn Fattuma, 1983)⁸⁶ purports to be the travel journal of one Qindil Ibn Fattuma who, dissatisfied with life in his homeland, the Land of Islam (Dar al-Islam), undertakes a journey in search of a social Utopia.

The description of the countries he visits allows Mahfuz to present his views on different societies and stages of human development. The first two countries Ibn Fattuma encounters are the Land of Sunrise (Dar al-mashriq) and the Land of Confusion (Dar al-hayra). The former is a pagan society with a primitive social order, the latter a quasi-feudal regime. For different reasons, Ibn Fattuma finds life in both unbearable, and he makes his way to the Land of the Arena (Dar al-halba). This is a liberal capitalist society in which “God is reason and freedom is its prophet” (p. 107). Ibn Fattuma, however, is shocked at this society's indifference towards the weak and the poor and he leaves for the Land of Safety (Dar al-aman), a society theoretically guided by total justice which is in fact a brutal Soviet-style dictatorship. His journey toward Utopia leads him next to the Land of Sunset (Dar al-ghurub), a serene and beautiful land where people have assembled from all over the world to prepare for the journey to the Land of the Mountain (Dar al-jabal), which is believed to be the land of the heart's desire. The Land of Sunset, is, however, overrun by the conquering army of the Land of Safety, and its inhabitants are given the choice of living in a socialist dictatorship or leaving for the Land of the Mountain with their preparations incomplete. They choose to leave, and although they succeed in crossing the border into the Land of the Mountain, Ibn Fattuma's record comes to an end before the mountain itself is reached. Mahfuz's book leaves the reader uncertain as to whether or not Ibn Fattuma's diary can ever have a sequel. The name of the hero, Ibn Fattuma, was clearly chosen to evoke the name of the famous fourteenth century traveller Ibn Battuta, the Marco Polo of the Muslim world, whose Rihlat Ibn Battuta is a classic of Arabic literature.⁸⁷

Mahfuz returns to the multi-vocal narrative technique (though not in a quartet form) in the short novel Yawm qutila ‘l-za‘im (The Day the Leader Was Killed, 1985),⁸⁸ and in al-‘A'ish fi ‘l-haqiqa (He Who Lives in the Truth, 1985). In the former, the story is told by three of the characters, each one alternating with the others in several turns. The latter is told by fourteen persons.

He Who Lives in the Truth is the story of Akhnaton (c. 1360–1344 BCE), the Pharaoh who established a new religious system. In the story a young Egyptian, a decade or so after the death of Akhnaton, becomes interested in the intriguing figure of this Pharaoh and sets out to discover the truth about him. The search consists of a series of encounters with various people, fourteen in number, who personally knew Akhnaton, and who tell his story from fourteen different perspectives. The name of the novel, He Who Lives in the Truth, is deliberately ambiguous, in more than one way. The Arabic word signifying “truth” also means “reality” and the preposition signifying “in” means also “for the sake of.” Thus, the title can also read “He Who Lives for the Sake of the Truth.” The identity of the subject, “He Who …,” is also ambiguous; it refers to Akhnaton, the King who believed he had found the true religion, as much as to the young narrator who launches a search for the truth about the dead king. What drives the young narrator of this story is indeed the most important impulse of Mahfuz's entire literary enterprise: the desire to grasp the elusive truth. Since Mahfuz is convinced that no one individual can perceive a full, objective picture of reality, he produces fourteen witnesses, each of whom presents his own version of the story.

It is worthwhile noting that in this novel, as well as in an earlier book published in 1983 entitled Amam al-‘arsh (Before the Throne) Mahfuz returned to the Pharaonic setting, which he had not used for decades, as though to remind Egyptian readers of the uniqueness of Egyptian identity—a national identity which precedes Arabism and Islam.⁸⁹

Al-Fajr al-kadhib (False Dawn, 1989) is a collection of thirty short stories set in modern Cairo. The themes and characters are familiar. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this collection is that in many of the stories the main character, like the author himself, has reached a point at which he takes moral stock of his life. The pervading spirit is one of equanimity.

Qushtumur (1988), Mahfuz's latest novel, tells the story of a group of five friends in Cairo over a period of seventy years. All five were born in 1910 (one year before Mahfuz's birth), and grew up in al-‘Abbasiyya (the neighborhood in which Mahfuz lived from the age of twelve until his marriage in 1954). The narrator, who is one of the group, recounts the individual fortunes of each of his four friends against the backdrop of the political vicissitudes of Egypt throughout their lifetime. The story is recounted in the form of the reminiscences of an old man, who views the world and the life he has lived with serenity:

The ‘Abbasiyya we knew—is anything left? Where are the fields and the orchards? … Where are the houses and their gardens? Where are the villas and the mansions, where are the respectable matrons? All we see now is a jungle of cement and iron, and hordes of mad cars. All we hear is clamor and uproar. Heaps of waste surround us.

Since the present denies us any cause for happiness, we are driven to the [gardens of] the past to gather some of its vanished harvest. We do this even though we know we are deceiving ourselves. Although we remember the evils and suffering with which the past was filled, we cannot help but enjoy this source of magic and fantasy.⁹⁰

The book ends as the narrator is aroused from his reflections by the voice of one of his friends reciting the ninety-third chapter of the Qur'an (Surat al-Duha):

By the light of day, and by the fall of night, your Lord has not
forsaken you, nor does He abhor you.
The life to come holds a richer prize for you than this present
life. You shall be gratified with what your Lord will give you
Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter?
Did He not find you in error and guide you?
Did He not find you poor and enrich you?
Therefore do not wrong the orphan, nor chide away the beggar.
But proclaim the goodness of your Lord.(91)

Is it possible that Mahfuz, ever fond of creating enigmas and riddles, sees in the last sentence quoted here—which is also the last line of his final novel—an allusion to his own literary enterprise?

Notes

1. E.g., Nabil Raghib, Qadiyyat al-shakl al-fanni ‘ind Najib Mahfuz (Cairo, 1975), categorizes Mahfuz's entire literary output as follows: “The romantic historical stage,” “The realistic social stage,” “The disconnected psychological stage” and “The stage of dramatic shaping.” ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Najib Mahfuz: al-ru‘ya wa‘l-adah (Cairo, 1984), sees Mahfuz's work up to the completion of the trilogy as a progression toward “critical realism,” and the chapters of his study are accordingly named as follows: “The roots of the vision and the artistic beginnings,” “The fantastic vision,” “[First] contact with reality,” “Towards realism” and “Critical realism.”

2. The literary scholar Jabir ‘Asfur has already called attention to the arbitrary nature of such classifications. See Jabir ‘Asfur, “Nuqqad Najib Mahfuz,” in Ghali Shukri (ed.), Najib Mahfuz: Ibda‘nisf qarn (Cairo, 1989), pp. 245–50.

3. Translated by Trevor le Gassick and Mustafa Badawi and revised by John Rodenbeck as The Thief and the Dogs (New York, 1989).

4. Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat served as editor for both these journals.

5. This story, “Fatra min al-shabab,” appeared on 22 July 1932; it is discussed below.

6. Jamal al-Ghitani, Najib Mahfuz yatadhakkar (Beirut, 1980), pp. 38–39, and see below, pp. 62–63, 65–66.

7. The title of the story would appear to paraphrase the subtitle of Muwaylihi's Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham—Fatra min al-zaman (“A Period of Time”). See above, p. 6.

8. See above, p. 10.

9. ‘Abd al-Tawwab ‘Abd al-Hayy, ‘Asir hayati (Cairo, 1966), p. 128, and see above, p. 25.

10. See above, pp. 33–34.

11. Ihsan, the heroine of al-Qahira al-jadida, whose intimate relations with a high-ranking official secure the promotion of her husband, is also of Turkish origin. On the significance of Ihsan's Turkish origin, see below, p. 190.

12. Also included in Hams al-junun, pp. 81–98.

13. This allegorical story is discussed in detail in Part Four, see below, pp. 168–70.

14. This version appeared in al-Riwaya (15 October 1939), and was later included in the collection Hams al-junun.

15. Cf. Qalb al-layl, pp. 114–15, and see below, p. 101.

16. Here, as in his first published article, “The Dying of Old Beliefs and the Birth of New Beliefs,” Mahfuz expresses his yearning for Utopia, but concludes reluctantly that it cannot be attained. See above, p. 30.

17. “Al-Fajr al-kadhib,” p. 23. It would seem, therefore, that ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr misconstrues the story “‘Afw al-malik Userkaf” when he concludes, “the moral of this story is that a wise man should have a pessimistic view of the world and be suspicious of everyone, even of those closest to him.” See ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, al-Ru‘ya wa‘l-ada: Najib Mahfuz (Cairo, 1984), p. 80.

18. See below, pp. 174–75.

19. For further analysis of “Hams al-junun,” which is also the title-story of Mahfuz's first collection of short stories, see below, pp. 108–9.

20. Twenty-four of the stories included in Hams al-junun appeared in various Egyptian magazines; four others have not been found in magazines and may have been published for the first time in this volume. See the bibliographic list in Badr, Najib Mahfuz, pp. 405–9.

21. Sasson Somekh, The Changing Rhythm: A Study of Najib Mahfuz's Novels (Leiden, 1973), p. 46.

22. See Ahmad Haykal, al-Adab al-qasasi wa‘l-masrahi fi misr, 3rd ed. (Cairo, 1979 [1951]), p. 92, n. 2.

23. Badr, Najib Mahfuz, pp. 72–73. (Badr's book originally appeared in 1978.)

24. Mahfuz neglects to mention here his Khan al-khalili, which was published before al-Qahira al-jadida and Zuqaq al-Midaq.

25. Ghitani, p. 38.

26. James Baikie, Ancient Egypt (London: Adam Charles Black, 1912). This small, eighty-eight-page book, with color illustrations, was obviously intended for young readers.

27. Ghitani, p. 39.

28. See Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs (New York, 1986), pp. 96–111.

29. On “Pharaonicism” and its chief proponents see ibid., pp. 164–90; see also Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 95, 144–47.

30. In 1925, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (brother of Mustafa ‘Abd al-Raziq, Mahfuz's professor) expounded the arguments for the separation of Islam and government in his book al-Islam wa-usul al-hukm (“Islam and the Bases of Political Authority”). The book met with violent opposition in conservative circles, and its author was ousted from the corps of the “ulama” (“religious scholars”). However, his views were apparently widely accepted among Egyptian liberal intellectuals. See: Gershoni and Jankowski, pp. 60–74; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London, 1962), pp. 183–92; Safran, pp. 139–43.

31. Badr maintains that “the purpose of the author in this kind of novel [i.e., “Fate's Play”] was to show us the vanity and uselessness of human action.” Badr, Najib Mahfuz, p. 142. See also Somekh, p. 61.

32. See interview with Ghali Shukri, al-Watan al-‘arabi, 48 (12 February 1988), p. 45. In a conversation in February 1989, Mahfuz told me that he believed that Salama Musa was unhappy with the title Hikmat Khufu because Khufu was the name of his son.

33. Al-Musawwar (October 1988), p. 73.

34. Salama Musa, Mukhtarat Salama Musa (Cairo, 1926), p. 195; see also Gershoni and Jankowski, pp. 205–7. The monument erected in 1928 to celebrate the rebirth of modern Egypt took the form of a statue of a peasant woman resting her hand upon the head of a sphinx. See Gershoni and Jankowski, p. 186.

35. Abath al-aqdar, p. 9.

36. See Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taht shams al-fikr (Cairo, 1938), pp. 106–7. Cf also Gershoni and Jankowski, pp. 145–46.

37. In some significant points Radubis appears to have been influenced by Anatole France's Thaïs. Mahfuz has mentioned that he read and admired Anatole France; see Fu‘ad Dawwara, Najib Mahfuz min al-qawmiyya ila al-‘alamiyya (Cairo, 1989), p. 217.

38. ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr points this out in his study of Mahfuz. See Badr, Najib Mahfuz, p. 155.

39. Al-Risala 586 (Cairo, 18 September 1944); quoted in Fadil al-Aswad (ed.), al-Rajul wa‘l-qimma (Cairo, 1989), pp. 49–55.

40. Ibid., p. 54.

41. “‘Abd al-Wahhab Isma‘il,” al-Maraya, pp. 261–67.

42. Ghitani, pp. 43–44.

43. Mahfuz, in the list supplied at the end of each of his books, gives the publication dates of Khan al-khalili and al-Qahira al-jadida as 1946 and 1945 respectively. Sasson Somekh has shown, however, that reviews of Khan al-khalili appeared in 1945, whereas reviews of al-Qahira al-jadida did not appear until 1946. See Somekh, pp. 198–99. This suggests that the true order of publication is: Khan al-khalili, 1945, and al-Qahira al-jadida, 1946. On this matter see also Rasheed El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London and New York, 1993), pp. 220–21. An additional proof that al-Qahira al-jadida was not published until 1946 is Mahfuz's letter to his friend Dr. Adham Rajab, dated 6 July 1946, in which he promises to send him a copy of al-Qahira al-jadida by next post. See Adham Rajab, “Khitabat bi-khatt Najib Mahfuz,” October (11 December 1988), p. 40.

44. Muhammad ‘Afifi, al-Hilal (February 1970), pp. 95–96.

45. Jamal al-Ghitani, Najib Mahfuz yatadhakkar (Beirut, 1980), pp. 64–65.

46. Sayyid Qutb's review of Khan al-khalili (al-Risala, 17 December 1945) is included in Ghali Shukri (ed.), Najib Mahfuz: Ibda' nisf qarn (Cairo, 1989), pp. 35–39. Citation here is from the latter, p. 39.

47. See below, pp. 182–85.

48. Sayyid Qutb, review of al-Qahira al-jadida, reprinted in al-Rajul wa‘l-qimma, p. 58.

49. Al-Sarab was in its thirteenth printing by 1987, outstripping even such novels as Khan al-khalili, Zuqaq al-Midaqq and al-Liss wa‘l-kilab.

50. Translated by Ramses Awad as The Beginning and the End (New York, 1989).

51. ‘A'ida Sharif, “Dhikrayat wa-hadith ma‘a Najib Mahfuz,” al-Ādāb (March 1967), p. 26.

52. ‘Abd al-Rahman Abu ‘Awf, al-Ru‘a al-mutaghayyira fi riwayat Najib Mahfuz (Cairo, 1991), p. 165.

53. See above, p. 40. For a full analysis of the trilogy, see below, pp. 198–225.

54. Bayn al-qasrayn, p. 399.

55. Ibid., p. 400. The attitude of the mother here is similar to that of the mother in Bidaya wa-nihaya, who tells her sons, when they rejoice at the conclusion of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936: “There is no compensation whatsoever for the loss of young life. … Occupation, independence, I don't see the difference between them. We would do better to pray to God to alleviate our [own] distress and to replace our hardships with ease” (Bidaya wa-nihaya, pp. 175–76).

56. Bayn al-qasrayn, p. 427.

57. Al-Musawwar (21 October 1988), p. 15

58. Al-Ahram (21 September–25 December 1959). The book was translated into English by Philip Stewart, and published in 1981 as Children of Gebelawi (London, 1981); the title of this translation will be used here throughout.

59. Beirut, Dar al-Ādāb, 1967. On the religious opposition to the book and attempts to prevent its publication, see Samia Mehrez, “Respected Sir,” in M. Beard and A. Haydar (eds.), Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition (Syracuse, 1993), pp. 65–69. For an analysis of some philosophical aspects of Awlad haretna see below, pp. 101–3; for its political significance, see pp. 133–35.

60. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, 1971), p. 24.

61. For further discussion of the book see below, pp. 115–16, 136, 226–35.

62. Anwar Abdel-Malek, Egypt: Military Society (New York, 1968), p. 319. Abdel-Malek's book was originally published in French (Paris, 1962).

63. See Menahem Milson, “Nağib Mahfūz and the Quest for Meaning,” Arabica, 17 (1970), pp. 178–86.

64. The novels I am referring to are the following: al-Liss wa‘l-kilab (1961), al-Summan wa‘l-kharif (1962), al-Tariq (1964), al-Shahhadh (1965), Tharthara fawq al-nil (1966).

65. Translated into English by Roger Allen as Autumn Quail (Cairo, 1985).

66. Al-Summan wa‘l-kharif, p. 70.

67. See my article, “Nağīb Mahfūz and the Quest for Meaning.”

68. While the book has been more or less generally recognized as a parable on a religious quest, the critic Fu‘ad Dawwara has offered a different interpretation, regarding al-Tariq as an allegory of Egypt's modern political history. See Dawwara, “al-Tariq: awwaluhu ‘ahr wa-akhiruhu jarima,” in al-Majalla, 91 (July 1964). Reference from Dawwara, Najib Mahfuz, pp. 105–30.

69. Translated by Frances Liardet as Adrift on the Nile (Cairo, 1993).

70. See above, p. 43. The novel first appeared serialized in al-Ahram in 1965, and was published in book form the following year.

71. Mahfuz to Ghali Shukri, al-Watan al-‘arabi (29 January 1988), p. 45.

72. Letter to Dr. Adham Rajab, “Khitabat bi-khatt Najib Mahfuz,” October (11 December 1988), p. 42.

73. Ghitani, p. 101

74. See above, pp. 38, 63, 65–66. The collection God's World, trans. Akef Abadir and Roger Allen (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1973) is not a translation of Dunya ‘llah but an assembly of twenty stories from a number of Mahfuz's collections, from Hams al-junun (1948?) to Shahr al-‘asal (1971).

75. E.g., see below, p. 141 n. 23. Mahfuz's reluctance to provide explanations for his works has already been noted in connection with the character of Hasanayn in the film version of Bidaya wa-nihaya; see above, p. 77.

76. Interview with ‘A'ida Sharif in al-Ādāb (March 1967), p. 29.

77. The novel was translated into English as Miramar by Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud (London, 1978).

78. Fathi Ghanim (b. 1924), al-Rajul alladhi faqada zillahu (Cairo, 1962). English translation by Desmond Stewart (London, 1966).

79. A translation appears in Three Contemporary Egyptian Novels by Saad Al-Gabalawy (New Brunswick, 1984).

80. Translated by Olive Kenny and revised by Mursi Saad El Din and John Rodenbeck as Wedding Song (New York, 1989).

81. See below, pp. 130–31.

82. I have borrowed the term “episodic” from Rasheed El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London and New York, 1993).

83. Translated by Catherine Cobham as The Harafish (New York, 1994).

84. On the historical meaning of harafish see EI 2, s.v. “harfūsh.”

85. This play appeared at the end of a collection of short stories of the same name, published in 1979. The story of the City of Brass occupies the 602nd to the 623rd of the Arabian Nights.

86. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies as The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (London, 1992).

87. See EI 2, s.v. “Ibn Battūta.”

88. Translated by Malak Hashim as The Day the Leader Was Killed (Cairo, 1989). For a discussion of this story and its political intent, see below, p. 143.

89. On the content of Amam al-‘arsh, see below, pp. 144–55.

90. Qushtumur, p. 146.

91. Ibid., p. 147. The translation of the Qura‘nic verses is that of N. J. Dawood, The Koran, Penguin Books.