SOURCE: Wise, Renate. “Subverting Holy Scriptures: The Short Stories of Yûsuf Idrîs.” In The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact on Contemporary Literature, edited by John C. Hawley, pp. 140-54. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

[In the following essay, Wise investigates the Islamic influence on Idris's short fiction.]

I. INTRODUCTION

Since the seventh century Arabic literature has been greatly influenced if not dominated by Islam. While literary critics have elaborated amply on the impact of Islam on medieval Arabic literature,¹ they have for the most part ignored the Islamic influence on modern Arabic literature. Instead, when analyzing this literature, critics are quick to point to the influence of Western literature: “Modern Arabic literature took shape as a result of increasing contacts with Europe and, as a result, has been highly influenced by Western literary models and concepts” (Somekh 4). This proves true also for the short stories of the prominent Egyptian author Yûsuf Idrîs (1927-1991). The influence of Western writers, especially the Russians Chekhov, Gorky, and Dostoyevsky, and of Western concepts on Idrîs's short stories has been illustrated by several critics.² An assessment of the influence of religious scriptures on, and their exploitation by, these stories warrants an exploration of terra incognita.³ And it is a territory gladdened by plenty.

The uniqueness of Idrîs's fiction, however, does not derive from its overt demonstration of religious and literary inseparability in an Egyptian context. We find this inseparability just as pronounced in, for example, the fiction of the Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz. What is unique to Idrîs's short stories is a hidden agenda that is based on subversions of Qur'anic injunctions, iconoclasm, blasphemy and reinterpretations of hadiths, and that serves to justify sexual illicitness.

II. DISOBEYING QUR'ANIC INJUNCTIONS

As true master of the literary craft, Yûsuf Idrîs employs subversions of Qur'anic injunctions as well as prevailing stereotypes about sexuality in order to give sexual illicitness an aura of innocence. The short story “Akbar al-Kabâ'ir” is a telling example. The commands which are violated in this story are those concerning adultery; for example, “and come not near adultery. Lo! it is an abomination and an evil way” (Pickthall, Sura 17:32) and also “the adulterer and the adulteress, scourge ye each one of them (with) a hundred stripes” (Sura 24:2). The story implies that its heroine Umm Jâdd al-Mawlâ, wife of Shaykh Siddîq, has been sexually frustrated for years, ever since her husband had decided that divine and not sexual fusion will make him eternal. Sexually deprived, Umm Jâdd al-Mawlâ looks at the legs of the manure carrier Muhammad with “her gaze fixed on his black legs made muscular by hard work and covered with hair” (Idrîs, Akbar 62). She was looking at something in his calves which “had suddenly hardened … as if it were a piece of iron” (Idrîs, Akbar 62). She agrees to meet him at night on the rooftop of her house when her husband goes to yet another mawlid.⁴ Scared, she thinks about calling the rendezvous off:

A thousand voices kept urging her to get up and leave, but iron chains kept her riveted to the rooftop. Overwhelming forces like Time and Fate made her ears deaf and her eyes blind to everything. A voice made her go and put the ladder up. She tightened the white veil around her and massaged her face with a few drops of borrowed rose water. All this she did as though she were hypnotized, driven to an inevitable fate.

(“Bayt” [“Bayt min Lahm”] 66-67)

Overwhelming forces like Time and Fate make her go to the rooftop, deafening and blinding her to the sin of adultery which she is about to commit. By emphasizing the urgency of her sexual desires, the narrator exploits traditional notions of female sexuality. Lacking moral responsibility or a superego, to use Freud's psychoanalytical terminology, the heroine submits to her animal instincts, to the Freudian id, supporting once again the claim of the Sufi Jalâluddin Rûmî (1207-1273) that “the animal qualities prevail in women” (Rûmî 2465). Unrestrained by moral and religious considerations, the heroine obeys the voice which “made her go and put the ladder up.” She has the potential to cause fitna,⁵ since the gratification of her Dionysian desires becomes her telos.

As for the manure carrier Muhammad, he also submits to his sexual desires once he has sensed the woman in Umm Jâdd:

His arm touched her arm, his undershirt her dress, and in particular, the calf of his leg the side of her leg. Suddenly, Muhammad's heart started pounding, as if someone had caught him unawares and suddenly thrown him into the canal. At that moment, he had realized that the Shaykha Umm Jâdd al-Mawlâ was a woman.

(“Bayt” 65)

Even though caught off guard by his libido, Muhammad, unlike Umm Jâdd al-Mawlâ, has the luxury of choice either to submit to his desires or to listen to God's laws forbidding adultery. He is aware of the risks he is taking, since he is scared not only of Shaykh Siddîq's coming home unexpectedly but also of God's wrath. The narrator's prioritizing of things to be feared by Muhammmad is indicative of the manure carrier's concern for religious commands. He fears first and foremost for his physical existence threatened by the anger of the husband and then for his spiritual well-being. Yet neither physical nor metaphysical threat deter him from feeling an “all-encompassing joy” (“Bayt” 67). “His whole being was vibrating powerfully and intensely.”

They meet and make love to the rhythm of the resounding voice of Shaykh Siddîq. Their movements are synchronized with the swaying of the bodies of the dervishes who participate in Shaykh Siddîq's mawlid. The narrator in this short story is not the first who has compared sexual intercourse with the dance of the Sufis. Annemarie Schimmel explains that sterner Sufis have warned against the practices of samâ‘. They thought that “in music and dance powers are at work which belong to that dangerous, uncontrollable zone of eros which the pious had to avoid or, at best, to strictly regulate” (Schimmel 139). Unable to control this erotic zone, the lovers decide to meet every time Shaykh Siddîq goes to a mawlid. Whenever Muhammad hears Shaykh Siddîq calling people to prayer, “he would feel this thing throbbing in his body, making his blood boil and almost blinding him” (“Bayt” 70). Indeed religious rituals of the Sufis, vocalized by Shaykh Siddîq, become a powerful aphrodisiac for the hero. The protagonists not only commit fornication but also desecrate religious rituals. The subversion of Qur'anic injunctions forbidding adultery and the hero's abuse of the sacredness of Sufi rituals originate in, and are euphemized by, the overwhelming desire to fuse in the protagonists. Replacing religious rituals and defying taboos and divine laws, sex becomes the driving force in their lives.

The sin of adultery has been committed but the participants are not to be faulted since they are not to be blamed for a sexuality which is beyond their control. Who is to be blamed? Who has committed “the greatest sin,” as the Arabic title of the short story translates? The story points to Shaykh Siddîq who failed in his marital duties. As the Muslim scholar al-Ghazâlî (d. 1111) explains in his work Ihyâ’ ‘Ûlûm ad-Dîn, the stilling of a woman's sexual hunger is an important duty of the husband:⁶

It is just for a husband to have sexual intercourse with his wife at least every fourth night if he has four wives. To be sure, he should increase or decrease the frequency of intercourse according to the woman's needs so as to secure her virtue. Indeed her virtue is his duty. If he does not oblige her sexually, he will cause her distress and jeopardize her fidelity.

(al-Ghazâlî 64)

Thus, according to al-Ghazâlî, Shaykh Siddîq jeopardized Umm Jâdd's fidelity and is to be blamed for her adultery. Totally devoted to his prayers, he neglected his marital obligations. The narrator of this story comes to the same conclusion when he assures us that “Shaykh Siddîq will surely enter hell, and through its widest gate” (Idrîs, Akbar 70). This finale shifts the focus from the sin of adultery to the even greater sin of not stilling a wife's sexual hunger. Faulted is the one who prefers divine pursuits to earthly pleasures.

The short story “Bayt min Lahm” is also based on the assumption that leaving a woman sexually hungry is more sinful than the violation of Qur'anic injunctions. It depicts a widow and her three unattractive, unwed daughters whose only male visitor is a blind Qur'an reciter. Urged by her daughters, the widow marries the blind man. By taking turns in putting on their mother's wedding ring, the three daughters are able to dupe the sightless man into having sexual intercourse with them.

The religious ramifications are obvious. In addition to violating Qur'anic laws forbidding adultery, the blind reciter disobeys the law forbidding the father to have sexual intercourse with his stepdaughters. While the Qur'an allows a Muslim up to four wives, “And if ye fear that ye will not deal fairly by the orphans, marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four” (Sura 4:3) it also commands:

Forbidden unto you are your mothers, and your daughters, and your sisters, and your father's sisters, and your mother's sisters, and your brother's daughters and your sister's daughters, and your foster-mothers, and your foster-sisters, and your mothers-in-law, and your step-daughters who are under your protection (born) of your women unto whom ye have gone in—but if ye have not gone in unto them, then it is no sin.

(Sura 4:23)

Since the blind Qur'an reciter shares the marital bed with the daughters' mother, the daughters are forbidden to him. The story's plot violates Qur'anic injunctions, commands of God. Can these violations be justified and on what bases?

The Qur'an reciter knows about the daughters' ruse but hides behind his blindness. He convinces himself

that his partner in bed was always his legitimate wife, the bearer of his ring, young sometimes or old at other times, soft or coarse, thin or fat. It was nobody's business but hers. Nay, it was the business of the people who could see, their responsibility alone.

(Idrîs, “Bayt” 13)

The denouement of the short story which, as the critic Sasson Somekh has pointed out (Somekh 18), represents a Qur'anic reference, casts doubt on his innocence: “He was blind, after all, and there is no fault in the blind. Or is there?” (Idrîs, “Bayt” 13). The critic Fedwa Malti-Douglas points out that the last sentence represents in itself a subversion of the Qur'an since it questions the text of the Qur'an. She argues that the “fault in the blind” does not refer to a lack of moral responsibility, but, in keeping close to the Qur'anic text, to the notion “that the visually or other physically handicapped are in some sense accursed or punished” (74). Then, what the subversive last sentence questions is some curse supposed to afflict the blind. Again Malti-Douglas points in the right direction when she explains that from a traditional Islamic perspective blind men are the most virile of men. Thus it is the virility of the Qur'an reciter and not his moral irresponsibility which leads to his violation of Qur'anic commands. Assuming that sexual vigor in the blind is excessive, the obedience of Qur'anic commands which restrict sexual choice would demand excessive, “superhuman” moral strength. Although the sightless hero had the opportunity to obey God's commands, since he was clearly able to distinguish between his sexual partners, his disobedience of these commands meets with mitigating circumstances.

With the protagonist victimized by the virile nature of the blind, and thus nearly absolved from sin, can the daughters be faulted? Not really, since their sexual misbehavior is justified by the fictional equation of sexual hunger with physical hunger. This description of the female libido as physical hunger gives female sexuality the same urgency as the concept of a virility excessive in the blind gives to male sexuality. Interestingly enough, while blindness nearly exculpates the Qur'an reciter from moral responsibility, femaleness acquits the daughters.

The only other participant in this ménage à cinq who cannot be excused on the basis of excessive sexual urges is the mother who is aware of her daughters' artifice. However, by equating physical with sexual hunger and emphasizing the nurturing duties of a mother, she washes her hands of sin. She muses:

The girls are hungry; the food is forbidden, that is true, but hunger is still more sinful. There exists nothing more sinful than hunger. Indeed she knows hunger and it had known her. It had drained her spirit and sapped her marrow. She knows it. She had her fill of it. She will never forget its taste. They are hungry! She who used to take food out of her mouth to feed them, whose only concern was to feed them even if she had to go hungry herself, she, the mother, did she forget?

(Idrîs, “Bayt” 11)

Not differentiating between sexual and physical hunger, the mother provides her daughters with food out of her mouth to still their physical hunger and with the virility of her blind husband to satisfy their sexual hunger. Sexual deprivation, as the mother reasons, is more sinful than the disobedience of a Qur'anic command. The subversions of the Qur'nic injunctions dictating sexual choices are accomplished on three premises: Muslims are allowed up to four wives; blind men are cursed with more virility than other men; and sexual and physical hunger are equivalent.

III. THE DESTRUCTION OF ICONS: THE LUSTY VIRGIN MARY AND HER CONCUPISCENT CHRIST

While the theme of uncontrollable sexuality dominates the stories “Bayt min Lahm” as well as “Akbar al-Kabâ'ir,” the destruction of the sacred images of the Virgin Mary and Christ becomes the leitmotif in the short story “Jiyûkûndâ Misriyya.” In Mariology the Virgin Mary's relationship with her son Christ presents the apogee of pure nurture and self-sacrificing love. She is an object of love without being subjected to the endurance of bodily pleasures. The Virgin fulfills nurturing and protective needs without the threatening aspects of concupiscence and defilement afflicting the terrestrial female. Mother of a deity, immaculately conceived, pregnant without sexual intercourse, she ascended bodily into heaven. Purged of the defiling horror of female procreative functions, the purity of her body is even safeguarded from the putrefaction of death.⁷

It is this Christian Virgin Mary—idealized in her asexuality and purity—to whom the hero in the short story “Jiyûkûndâ Misriyya” compares the Christian heroine Hanûna. She is fifteen or sixteen years of age while the hero is fourteen years old. She is taller but weaker than he (“Jiyûkûndâ” [“Jiyûkûndâ Misriyya”] 29). The hero walks by her window and waits for her to notice him: “But she was silent and still. She looked exactly like the Virgin Mary, as if the picture [of the Virgin Mary] which hung in her room were hanging now in the window” (“Jiyûkûndâ” 33). This picture symbolizes for the hero the happiness mother and son find in the embrace of maternal love. Mary's pictorial smile of maternal bliss reminds one of the smile of Mona Lisa whose French name ‘La Joconde’ becomes part of the title of this short story, translated as the “Egyptian Mona Lisa.” Interestingly, many admirers of Mona Lisa contend that her famous smile radiates the solipsism of a pregnant woman.

The adolescent hero models the heroine Hanûna after the picture of the smiling Virgin Mary who represents the nurturing mother but lacks the concupiscence and threatening impure aspects of the terrestrial woman. He craves to be her son Christ, protected in her embrace: “I am Christ and you are the Virgin. Think of me as your Christ and of yourself as my Virgin” (“Jiyûkûndâ” 34). He wants to be extremely close to her (“Jiyûkûndâ” 35) and to fuse with her (“Jiyûkûndâ” 30). However, the hero's desire to fuse with the holy mother can be accomplished only on a sexual level:

But that day when I asked her to be my Virgin and to accept me as her Christ, I was not doing this while transforming myself in my mind into a small child whom the mother embraces. A strong, ancient, tempestuous wish to embrace Hanûna lay dormant behind my question and desire.

(“Jiyûkûndâ” 35)

The psychoanalyst Michael Balint argues that the return to the experience of primary love—the possibility of regressing to the infantile stage of a sense of oneness, and a tranquil sense of well-being in which all needs are satisfied—is a main goal of adult sexual relationships.⁸ The hero's sentiments support Balint's statement: “I wanted to encompass her completely and make her smaller so that I could introduce her to my core in some way. This was the only way I knew to silence this continuous desire to be close to her and to be permanently joined with her” (“Jiyûkûndâ” 35). Since this fusion can only take place during coitus, men according to Balint, come closest to a refusion with the mother during intercourse: “The male comes nearest to achieving this regression during coitus: with his semen in reality, with his penis symbolically, with his whole self in phantasy” (Chodorow 194).

As long as the hero wants to be the Christ who finds nurturance in the arms of the Virgin Mary, he will not be able to fuse with Hanûna in order to fulfill his “strong, ancient, tempestuous wish.” His sexual desires cannot be satisfied if he continues to regard himself as Christ and Hanûna as the pure holy mother. Since the women in the world of the short stories are endowed with an “out-of-bounds” libido, the metamorphosis of the Virgin Mary into Eve the temptress is predictable:

Suddenly Hanûna embraced me with a trembling, urgent, sudden strength. She placed a quick kiss on my forehead. My face must have turned crimson. I raised my head and my face came to face hers. We were both breathing heavily when a second wonderful surprise came. I found her bending down to me—for I was a little shorter than she—and kissing me on my lips. It was another quick kiss, enormously confusing.

(“Jiyûkûndâ” 36)

The transformation is complete when the hero realizes that Hanûna “had in her the thing which makes the breasts protrude, the skin soft like silk, and gives the voice this fine timbre” (“Jiyûkûndâ” 37). Hanûna embodies no longer the pure Virgin Mary glorified in her asexuality but a concupiscent woman trying to seduce him.

The hero is caught between his need to play the child Christ in order to be nurtured and affirmed by Hanûna, the holy mother, and his sexual needs which Hanûna in the role of the Virgin Mary cannot fulfill:

Whenever I remembered that I had tried to imagine her as girl and female, I would have felt like I was on the verge of inciting a rebellion which would shake the earth and the heaven. I would have felt as if I were on the verge of committing the greatest sin—the greatest sin a human being can commit.

(“Jiyûkûndâ” 38)

Having sex with Hanûna, the imagined holy mother, becomes “the greatest sin.” The story “Jiyûkûndâ Misriyya” deconstructs the archetype of the pure, holy mother as well as the image of the asexual Christ. When the adolescent hero constructs his ideal woman, a replica of the Virgin Mary in order to satisfy his narcissism, he changes into her child Christ. He chooses the Virgin Mary because she radiates holiness and purity, attributes which the terrestrial mother lacks. When his sexual urges triumph over his infantile narcissism, the hero erases his image of the extraterrestrial mother and admits to his human nature. He realizes that he was attempting the impossible “for all the sanctities of the world cannot keep apart the two strongest of life's forces when they come together—that of the man and the women—since the third force is that Satanic law which cannot be disobeyed” (“Jiyûkûndâ” 37). With this claim the narrator reinterprets the hadith “when a man and a woman are isolated in the presence of each other, Satan is bound to be their third companion” (al-Tirmidhî 120-21). While this hadith warns of a strong possibility of succumbing to Satan, it does not discount the possibility of human steadfastness when faced with divine punishment. The narrator's modification of this hadith contends that sexual illicitness and disobedience of holy scriptures are human certainties, since the desire to fuse in man and woman is an all-binding, Satanic law. Forced by their human nature, the protagonists obey the Satanic law and destroy virginal icons. The virgin Hanûna tumbles from the pedestal of holiness to the quagmire of the concupiscent terrestrial woman. Expelled from Platonic paradise, the heroine gets married off to her cousin when her father catches her in flagrante delicto with the hero. As for the lusty hero, when realizing that he has lost his nurturing “mother,” he is consumed with remorse wondering “Did I have to go to that highest level? Was not closeness, mere closeness, a thousand times easier to bear than the complete severance of any ties with her?” (“Jiyûkûndâ” 41).

In this story the Virgin Mary as well as her son Christ are endowed with concupiscence. Yet this iconoclasm is justified by an all-too-human weakness of the hero striving for nurturance and love. Assuming that this kind of nurturing love can be found in sexual fusion alone, the hero's destruction of sacred images is only human.

IV. THE BLASPHEMY OF GOD'S SERVANT

The Satanic law of “Jiyûkûndâ Misriyya” dictates the plot of the short story “A-Kâna Lâ Budda Yâ Lîlî An Tudî' an-Nûr.” Its hero Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Al loves God and thinks that “he is the only thing which deserves to be alive” (“A-Kâna” [“A-Kâna Lâ Budda Yâ Lîlî An Tudî' an-Nûr”] 21) in the universe. He assumes the challenging position of Imâm of the Shabûkshî Mosque in the Bâtiniyya Quarter which was a “den of opium, seconal and hashish” (“A-Kâna” 15). Already the introduction smacks of blasphemy since some of the worshippers “were half stoned as they performed the prayer,” thus disobeying the command “O ye who believe! Draw not near unto prayer when ye are drunken, till ye know that which ye utter, nor when ye are polluted save when journeying upon the road, till ye have bathed” (Sura 4:43).⁹ The impious plot thickens when the heroine Lîlî is introduced as the offspring of a week-long marriage between her Egyptian mother and an English soldier named Johnny (“A-Kâna” 24). Furthermore, Lîlî makes her living as a prostitute. To sum up, the characters display major desiderata for a sacrilegious climax: Set in an atmosphere of sin, the pious Imâm steadfast in his devotion faces the beautiful harlot impudent in her sexual quests.

Becoming an exercise in blasphemy, the story continues to describe Lîlî's attempts to seduce the hero Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Al by trying to entice him to give her private lessons in praying. The hero refuses. Nevertheless he succumbs to “the Satanic law” when he looks into Lîlî's bedroom window. He explains: “I rubbed my eyes and took one look which pulled me out of the depth of my slumber to a climax of wakefulness like a raging hurricane” (“A-Kâna” 27). What he sees is a white-skinned woman asleep on the bed with the top half of her body uncovered. For the first time in his life the hero looks at “that amazing mass of flesh which is a woman's body.” Lîlî becomes the embodiment of Satan:

But listen, Satan! … While you knew where I was, I did not know who and where you were. How they used to engrave on our minds such a false image of you. We always pictured you as a man, an ugly man. Not once did they think to compare you to beauty, even though nothing delights you more than to lie in wait surrounded by beauty, especially in a woman's form.

(“A-Kâna” 27-28)

The heroine incarnates Satan: “There she was, all of her, Satan personified and perfect in every detail. All the temptation was there too” (“A-Kâna” 29). The hero perceives the Dionysian force in him (his libido) as satanic force outside of him. Once the heroine fuses with Satan, the short story represents the dialectic between the hero and Satan. It portrays the struggle of the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces in the hero.

Idrîs conveys masterfully the hero's agony by polarizing his inner struggle through contextualization. Frequent introjections of “My Lord!,” “Satan!,” and “Lîlî, why did you have to turn on the light?” build the story's frame. After the Lîlî who exposes herself and Satan have become synonymous in the hero's mind, the introjections become metaphysically antipodal entities. The context which links them is one of sin. Since Idrîs's protagonists are denied control over their libido, the victory of Satan becomes a foregone conclusion. The hero leaves his congregation bent over in prostration waiting for the “God is greatest” to conclude the prayer:

I faced the qibla and stated my intention to pray … I opened my eyes … Right there in the middle of the qibla I saw Lîlî, asleep, naked, stretched out, open, with her hair spilling in waves across her body and then pulled back … Forgive me, God! … I hid the truth from You … Satan won!

(“A-Kâna” 34)

The hero runs to Lîlî and tells her that he will teach her how to pray. Whereupon she informs him that she has bought an English record which teaches her how to pray. Then she turns off the light and the hero's fate can be best described by the exclamation of Rûmî: “First and Last my fall is through woman!” (Schimmel 124).

Again, Satanic law is stronger than divine law. Confronted by a beautiful naked woman, the hero deserts his congregation while bent over in prostration. Considering the worshippers' position—vulnerably risqué in Idrîs's world of sin—the Shaykh's action seems even more blasphemous. Yet, since in Idrîs's fiction the law between man and woman becomes, according to the short story “Mashûq al-Hams,” “the most binding sacred law” (“Mashûq” [“Mashûq al-Hams”] 84), the hero cannot be reproached for obeying. This theory of the human libido is similar to the iron-magnet attraction theory of the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Hazm (994-1064) who explains that “the energy of the iron, left to itself and not prevented by obstacles, seeks what resembles it and hastens towards it blindly, naturally and necessarily, not out of free choice and intention” (Hazm 23). Just as the hero in “Jiyûkûndâ Misriyya,” Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Al does not have a choice but to hasten blindly to the magnet. Although Ibn Hazm mentions possible obstacles which could stop the iron in its magnetic attraction, neither violations of Qur'anic injunctions nor iconoclasm and blasphemy can stop Idrîs's heroes in their libidinous pursuits.

V. REWRITING A HADITH

While the narrators of the short stories “Jiyûkûndâ Misriyya” and “A-Kâna Lâ Budda Yâ Lîlî An Tudî' an-Nûr” subvert the hadith “when a man and a woman are isolated in the presence of each other, Satan is bound to be their third companion,” the narrator of the short story “Al-‘Amaliyya al-Kubrâ” rewrites this hadith to read “when a man and a woman are isolated in the presence of each other, ‘death is their third companion’” (“Al-‘Amaliyya al-Kubrâ” 179). This substitution presupposes that on a certain symbolic level Satan and death are interchangeable. When considering that Satan is man's worst enemy in the spiritual kingdom as death is man's worst enemy in the surgical kingdom, we can establish a first rationale for this substitution. The Shaykh in “A-Kâna Lâ Budda Yâ Lîlî An Tudî' an-Nûr” faces his worst enemy when he meets Lîlî, the embodiment of Satan. The surgeon Doctor ‘Adham in “Al-‘Amaliyya al-Kubrâ” faces the challenge of his life when trying to save the life of a female patient. Both lose, the Shaykh to Satan, the surgeon to death.

Furthermore, profiled by events and characteristics associated with not only Satan but death, two of the dramatis personae efface the distinction between Satan and death. Doctor ‘Adham severs the aorta of a female patient on whom he was performing exploratory surgery. Cutting a piece of vein out of the woman's thigh, he tries to repair her aorta. However, his attempt fails because he does not have the right needle and a thread strong enough to withstand the pressure of the blood pumping from the patient's heart. The patient dies. Since he is depicted as “a terrifying Satan” in his dealings with his nurses and assistants (“Al-‘Amaliyya” [“Al-‘Amaliyya al-Kubrâ”] 178) and since he causes the death of his female patient, he personifies Satan and death. The polysemous nature of another protagonist's name includes meanings associated with Satan as well as death. The nurse and sexual interest of the surgeon's assistant is named “Inshirâh.” “Inshirâh” in this morphological form means “joy, delight, relaxation.” Since Idrîs exploits mental structures which equate sexual desire (the force from within) with Satan (the force from without), Inshirâh by promising sexual fulfillment is synonymous with Satan. The root of “inshirâh,” however, means in other morphological forms “cutting open, dissection, autopsy”—meanings associated with death.

Idrîs's masterful exploitation of intertextuality makes death and sex, the submitting to the Satanic law, almost indistinguishable. The description of the process of surgery is frequently interrupted by the depiction of the courtship between the surgeon's assistant and the nurse Inshirâh. Ultimately, the patient's death is sexualized since it is synchronized with the sexual climax of the surgeon's assistant. The dying of the female patient serves as powerful aphrodisiac for the surgeon's assistant. In a blood-splattered hospital-room, the female patient lies in the throes of death while the surgeon's assistant and his nurse who have been instructed to take care of the dying patient strip off their clothes, and their bodies catch on fire in a naked embrace on the bed next to the bloodstained bed of the dying unconscious woman. Before the assistant loses his consciousness in la petit mort, the female patient regains consciousness for a split-second in order to glance at the copulating couple right next to her. The surgeon's assistant explains that

before he lost his awareness of her existence he felt that the woman had surely regained consciousness for a moment. It seemed from the way she looked at them that she saw them for the first time and that she realized what was happening. Indeed she almost did not regain consciousness until it was too late. One glance, however, was enough to put something of a smile on her face—a little surprised smile, like the smile of a child who opens his eyes for the first time to the world and finds what he sees surprising.

(“Al-‘Amaliyya” 206)

The female patient regains consciousness just in time to watch his orgasmic throes. While the intertextuality of conversation fragments between the assistant and the nurse Inshirâh sexualizes the atrocity of the surgery, their copulation sexualizes the death throes of the female patient. The childish smile of the female patient suggests that watching the copulating couple rejuvenated her, that she was reborn. While Freud regards human history as a struggle between the life instinct, embodied in the pleasure principle, and the death instinct Thanatos, such struggle does not exist in the world of the short stories. The pleasure principle is the only driving force; it becomes the telos of the protagonists.

VI. CONCLUSION

In the short stories sexual desire becomes the driving force of the protagonists, the raison d'être. While the heroines are not plagued by moral and religious considerations and obey their animal instincts without a moment's hesitation, the heroes demonstrate a moral consciousness. Sooner or later, however, they submit to their desires. The hero's attraction to the heroine is stronger than the fear of divine punishment. Disobeying Qur'anic injunctions forbidding adultery and incestuous relationships, desecrating sacred images and committing blasphemy—Idrîs's hero continues in his libidinous quest. Not even death stops the protagonist in this quest. While sex replaces religious rituals in “Akbar al-Kabâ'ir,” the pleasures of voyeurism replace the agony of death in “Al-‘Amaliyya al-Kubrâ.” Watching the copulating couple next to her, the female patient smiles like a child awakening innocently to the world's realities, to life. Her childish smile reveals Idrîs's hidden agenda. Once sexual desire has become identical with life itself¹⁰ by defeating death, is then sexual illicitness and the disobedience of divine laws not justified?

Notes

1. See, for example, among more recent works John Renard, and Mustansir Mir.

2. P. M. Kurpershoek discusses the influence of Western writers on Idrîs's fiction. For surrealist and Marxist interpretations of Idrîs's short stories, see Dalya Cohen-Mor. Mona Mikhail gives an existentialist interpretation of Idrîs's short story “An-Naddâha.”

3. A notable exception is Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Blindness and Sexuality: Traditional Mentalities in Yûsuf Idrîs's ‘House of Flesh.’”

4. In Egypt the term mawlid is used to denote a feast held in honor of a saint. For a historical background of the mawlid and its diffusion through the Islamic world, see the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960-): 895-897.

5. fitna is polysemous. Among its many meanings are: A burning with fire; affliction, distress, or hardship; punishment; discord, dissension among the people; madness, insanity. For more meanings see Lane, 2336-37. Here I use fitna to mean “chaos provoked by women's sexuality.” Fatima Mernissi elaborates on this meaning of fitna; see 31, 39, 41-42, 53-54, for example.

6. Ghassan Ascha discusses the issue of woman's sexual rights according to Islamic jurisprudents, 52-58.

7. For a critical discussion on the virtues of the Christian Virgin Mary, see Warner.

8. Michael Balint as quoted by Chodorow, 194.

9. Although the Qur'an addresses the use of wine only, the majority of Muslim jurists include the use of drugs since drugs like wine have an intoxicating effect. For an interesting discussion of the legality of the use of hashish, see Rosenthal, chapter 4.

10. Yûsuf Idrîs himself considered sex equal to life. See al-Sâ'igh: 54.

Works Cited

Allen, Roger, ed. In the Eye of the Beholder: Tales of Egyptian Life from the Writings of Yûsuf Idrîs. Minneapolis and Chicago: Bibliotheka Islamica, 1978.

Ascha, Ghassan. Du statut inférieur de la femme en Islam. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1989.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1978.

Cohen-Mor, Dalya. Yûsuf Idrîs: Changing Visions. Potomac, M.D.: Sheba, 1992.

Al-Ghazâlî, Ihyâ'. ‘Ulum ad-Dîn. Cairo: Mu'assasat al-Halabî wa Shurakâ'uhu li an-Nashr wa at-Tawzî‘, 1967.

Hazm, Ibn. Tawq al-Hamâma. Cairo: Dâr al-Ma‘ârif bi-Misr, 1975.

Idrîs, Yûsuf. Bayt min Lahm. Cairo: ‘Alâm al-Kutub, 1971).

———. “Akbar al-Kabâ'ir,” in Bayt: 59-70; trans. as “The Greatest Sin of All” by Mona Mikhail in Allen: 121-32.

———. “Bayt min Lahm” in Idris, Bayt, 5-13, trans. by Roger Allen as “House of Flesh,” in Allen, 191-98.

———. “A-Kâna Lâ Budda Yâ Lîlî an Tudî' an-Nûr,” in Idrîs, Bayt, 15-35, trans. by Roger Allen as “Lili, did you have to turn the light on?” in Allen, 149-67.

———. “Mashûq al-Hams,” in An-Naddâha. Cairo: Dâr Gharîb lit-Tibâ‘a, n.d.: 59-98.

———. “Al-‘Amaliyya al-Kubrâ” in An-Naddâha: 169-206.

———. “Jiyûkûndâ Misriyya” in Anâ Sultân Qânûn al-Wujûd. Cairo: Gharîb lit-Tibâ‘a, n.d., 27-42, trans. by Dalya Cohen-Mor as “Egyptian Mona Lisa” in Dalya Cohen-Mor, The Piper Dies and Other Stories. Potomac, MD: Sheba, 1992: 1-23.

Kurpershoek, P. M. The Short Stories of Yûsuf Idrîs: A Modern Egyptian Author. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981.

Lane, Edward William. Arabic-English Lexicon. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1956.

Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, guest ed. Critical Pilgrimages: Studies in the Arabic Literary Tradition Austin: U of Texas P, 1989.

Al-Marsot, Afaf Lutfi, ed. Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam. Malibu, California: Undena, 1979.

Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987.

Mikhail, Mona. Images of Arab Women. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1979.

Mir, Mustansir, ed. Literary Heritage of Classical Islam: Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of James A. Bellamy. Princeton: Darwin P, 1993.

Pickthall, Muhammad. The Glorious Qur'an: Text and Explanatory Translation. Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur'an, 1992.

Renard, John. Islam and the Heroic Image. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1993.

Rosenthal, Franz. The Herb: Hashish Versus Medieval Muslim Society. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971.

Rûmî, Jalaluddin. Mathnawî-yi ma'nawî, ed., trans., and commented upon by Reynold A. Nicholson, 8 vols. London and Leiden, 1925-1940. V:2465.

al-Sâ'igh, Samîr. “Yûsuf Idrîs: al-Kitâba, al-Thawra, al-Jins,” Mawâqif, 9, May-June (1970): 54.

Schimmel, Annemarie. “Eros in Sufi Literature and Life,” in Al-Marsot, 139.

Somekh, Sasson. Genre and Language in Modern Arabic Literature. vol. 1. Studies in Arabic Literature, Sasson Somekh and Alexander Borg, eds. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991.

———. Lughat al-Qissa fî Adab Yûsuf Idrîs. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981.

al-Tirmidhî, Sahîh al-Tirmidhî, vol. 5. Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-Misriyya bil-Azhar: 120-21; and vol. 9. Cairo: Matba‘a al-Sâwi, 1934:8-10.

Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage, 1976.