Naguib Mahfouz – Biography

aguib Mahfouz – Biography

Born in Cairo in 1911, Naguib Mahfouz began
writing when he was seventeen. His first novel was published in 1939 and ten
more were written before the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952, when he stopped
writing for several years. One novel was republished in 1953, however, and the
appearance of the Cairo Triology, Bayn al Qasrayn, Qasr al Shawq, Sukkariya
(Between-the-Palaces, Palace
of Longing, Sugarhouse)
in 1957 made him famous throughout the Arab world as a depictor of traditional
urban life. With The Children of Gebelawi (1959), he began writing
again, in a new vein that frequently concealed political judgements under
allegory and symbolism. Works of this second period include the novels, The
Thief and the Dogs (1961), Autumn Quail (1962), Small Talk on the
Nile (1966), and Miramar
(1967), as well as several collections of short stories.

Until 1972, Mahfouz was employed as a civil servant, first in the Ministry of
Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, as
Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and, finally, as
consultant on Cultural Affairs to the Ministry of Culture. The years since his
retirement from the Egyptian bureaucracy have seen an outburst of further
creativity, much of it experimental. He is now the author of no fewer than
thirty novels, more than a hundred short stories, and more than two hundred
articles. Half of his novels have been made into films which have circulated
throughout the Arabic-speaking world. In Egypt,
each new publication is regarded as a major cultural event and his name is
inevitably among the first mentioned in any literary discussion from Gibraltar to the Gulf.

From Les Prix Nobel.
The Nobel Prizes 1988, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation],
Stockholm, 1989

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an
addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the
source as shown above.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1988

Presentation Speech by Professor Sture
Allén, of the Swedish
Academy

Translation from the Swedish text

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

On the Nobel Day, 10th December, 1911, Maurice Maeterlinck received that year's Nobel Prize in Literature from
the hands of King Gustavus V here in Stockholm.
On the following day Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo. The capital of Egypt has
remained his home and he has left it only on very rare occasions.

Cairo also
provides, time and again, the setting for his novels, short stories and plays.
There we find the throng in Midaq Alley, described in a manner that is
both affectionate and translucent. There, in the great novel trilogy, Kamal
faces the crucial questions of existence. There lies the houseboat which, in Chit-chat
on the Nile, becomes a platform for
conversations and animated discussions about social roles. There we meet the young
lovers, preparing their bed amidst the blocks of the pyramid.

It is vital for a living society to take
its authors seriously. They have learnt to see in the profoundest sense
of the word, exploiting its full potential. This, in fact, represents a fundamental
component shared by art and science alike.

One approach, among several others, to the
works of this year's Nobel Laureate is to read them as a committed, perceptive,
almost prophetic commentary on the world around him. During a long writer's
life, he has witnessed sweeping social changes. Also, his production is
uncommonly extensive.

In Arabic literature, the novel is
actually a 20th-Century phenomenon, more or less contemporary with Mahfouz. And
it was he who, in due course, was to bring it to maturity. Some of the
milestones are Midaq Alley, The Trilogy, Children of Gebalawi, The
Thief and the Dogs, Chit-Chat on the Nile,
Respected Sir, and Mirrors. Greatly varied and partly experimental,
these novels range from psychological realism to an allegorical and
mystic-metaphysical design.

The nature of time is one of his basic
preoccupations. As for last year's Nobel Laureate, Joseph Brodsky, it takes on the character of mercilessness.
"Time cuts like a sword", it says in the novel Respected Sir.
"If you don't kill it, it kills you."

For the numerous readers that Mahfouz had
acquired through The Trilogy, with its broad canvas depicting
contemporary life, Children of Gebelawi meant quite a surprise. The
novel comes out as a spiritual history of mankind,' presented in as many
chapters as there are suras in the Koran, i.e. 114. The great figures of
Judaism, Christianity and Islam - although recognizable - appear in disguise,
facing new situations charged with tension. The man of modern science mixes,
with equal skill, an elixir of love and an explosive. He bears the
responsibility for the death of Gebelawi or God - but also perishes himself.
Still, there is a glimmer of hope at the end of the novel. Mahfouz is not a
pessimist, even though he is occasionally referred to as one. "If I were a
pessimist", he says, "I wouldn't write."

In the short stories, too, we meet the
great existential themes: reason versus faith in God, love as a source of
strength in an inexplicable world, the alternatives and limitations to an
intellectual attitude, the existential struggle of exposed man.

Taking authors seriously does not always
imply taking them literally. Mahfouz once said that he writes because he has
two daughters in need of high-heeled shoes. Unconventional remarks like that
may be - and have been - misunderstood. They tell us less about Mahfouz's
literary achievements than about his personality - moderate as well as serious
and, at the same time, slyly humorous.

Naguib Mahfouz has an unrivalled position
as spokesman for Arabic prose. Through him, in the cultural sphere to which he
belongs, the art of the novel and the short story has attained international
standards of excellence, the result of a synthesis of classical Arabic
tradition, European inspiration and personal artistry.

For private reasons Mr. Mahfouz is unable
to join us tonight. However, with your permission I should like to address him
directly at this moment, using the medium of vision.

Dear Mr. Mahfouz,

Your rich and complex work invites us to reconsider the fundamental things in
life. Themes like the nature of time and love, society and norms, knowledge and
faith recur in a variety of situations and are presented in thought-provoking,
evocative, and clearly daring ways. And the poetic quality of your prose can be
felt across the language barrier. In the prize citation you are credited with
the forming of an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind. On behalf
of the Swedish Academy I congratulate you on your eminent literary
accomplishments. And now, may I ask you, Miss Om Kalsoum Naguib Mahfouz, and
you, Miss Fatma Naguib Mahfouz, to step forward to receive from the hands of
His Majesty the King, on behalf of your father Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize
in Literature 1988.

Naguib Mahfouz

Through the
Swedish Academy's decision this year the Nobel Prize in Literature has for the
first time been awarded to an Egyptian. Naguib Mahfouz was born and lives in
Cairo. He is also the first literary Nobel Prizewinner with Arabic as his
native tongue.

To date Mahfouz has been writing for about fifty years. At the age of 77 he is
still indefatigable.

Mahfouz's great and decisive achievement is as the writer of novels and short
stories. His production has meant a powerful upswing for the novel as a genre
and for the development of the literary language in Arabic-speaking cultural
circles. The range is however greater than that. His work speaks to us all.

The earliest novels are set in the Pharaonic milieu of ancient Egypt. But here
already there are side-long glances at today's society.

A series of Cairo novels takes place at the present day. To them belongs Midaq
Alley (1947). The alley becomes a stage, which holds together a motley
crowd, all drawn with telling psychological realism.

Mahfouz really made his name with the big Trilogy (1956-57). In the centre is a
family and its vicissitudes from the end of the 1910s to the middle of the
1940s. The series of novels has autobiographical elements. The depiction of the
individuals relates very clearly to intellectual, social and political
conditions. On the whole through his writings Mahfouz has exerted considerable
influence in his country.

The theme of the unusual novel Children of Gebelawi (1959) is
man's everlasting search for spiritual values. Adam and Eve, Moses, Jesus,
Mohammed and others, as well as the modern scientist, appear thinly disguised.
It is the scientist who ultimately is responsible for the primeval father
Gebelawi's (God's) death. Different norm systems are confronted with tension in
the description of the conflict between good and evil. On account of the way in
which higher things are treated the book could not be printed in the author's
own country but was published elsewhere.

A Houseboat on the Nile (1966 - not yet translated into English) is an
example of Mahfouz's impressive novellas. Here metaphysical conversations are
carried on in the borderland between reality and illusion. At the same time the
text forms itself into a comment on the intellectual climate in the country.

Mahfouz is also an excellent short story writer. In the volume of selected
stories God's World (1973) we get a very good view of what he has achieved in
this field. The artistic treatment of the existential questions is forceful and
the formal solutions often striking.

There has been a tendency to divide Mahfouz's writings into a number of
periods, e.g. a historical, a realistic and a metaphysical-mystical. Naturally
this has not happened without reason. However, the illumination throughout of
human life in general should also be emphasized.

"If the urge to write should ever leave me", Mahfouz said in an
interview recently, "I want that day to be my last."

Many things
combine to show that Midaq Alley is one of the gems of times gone by and that
it once shone forth like a flashing star in the history of Cairo. Which Cairo
do I mean? That of the Fatimids, the Mamlukes or the Sultans? Only God and the
archaeologists know the answer to that, but in any case, the alley is certainly
an ancient relic and a precious one. How could it be otherwise with its
stone-paved surface leading directly to the historic Sanadiqiya Street. And
then there is its coffeeshop known as "Kirsha's". Its walls decorated
with multicolored arabesques, now crumbling, give off strong odors from the
medicines of olden times, smells which have now become the spices and
folk-cures of today and tomorrow ...

Although Midaq Alley lives in almost
complete isolation from all surrounding activity, it clamors with a distinctive
and personal life of its own. Fundamentally and basically, its roots connect
with life as a whole and yet, at the same time, it retains a number of the
secrets of a world now past.

The sun began to set and Midaq Alley was
veiled in the brown hues of the glow. The darkness was all the greater because
it was enclosed like a trap between three walls. It rose unevenly from
Sanadiqiya Street. One of its sides consisted of a shop, a café and a bakery,
the other of another shop and an office. It ends abruptly, just as its ancient
glory did, with two adjoining houses, each of three storeys.

The noises of daytime life had quieted now
and those of the evening began to be heard, a whisper here and a whisper there:
"Good evening, everyone." "Come on in; it's time for the evening
get-together." "Wake up, Uncle Kamil and close your shop!"
"Change the water in the hookah, Sanker!" "Put out the oven,
Jaada!" "This hashish hurts my chest." "If we've been
suffering terrors of blackouts and air-raids for five years it's only due to
our own wickedness!''

Two shops, however, Uncle Kamil's, the
sweets seller to the right of the alley entrance and the barber's shop on the
left, remain open until shortly after sunset. It is Uncle Kamil's habit, even
his right, to place a chair on the threshold of his shop and drop off to sleep
with a fly-whisk resting in his lap. He will remain there until customers
either call out to him or Abbas the barber teasingly wakes him. He is a hulk of
a man, his cloak revealing legs like tree trunks and his behind large and
rounded like the dome of a mosque, its central portion resting on the chair and
the remainder spilling over the sides. He has a belly like a barrel, great
projecting breasts, and he seems scarcely to have any neck at all. Between his
shoulders lies his rounded face, so puffed and blood-flecked that his breathing
makes its furrows disappear. Consequently, scarcely a single line can be seen
on the surface and he seems to have neither nose nor eyes. His head topping all
this is small, bald and no different in color from his pale yet florid skin. He
is always panting and out of breath, as if he has just run a race, and he can
scarcely complete the sale of a sweet before he is overcome by a desire for sleep.
People are always telling him he will die suddenly because of the masses of fat
pressing round his heart. He always agrees with them. But how will death harm
him when his life is merely a prolonged sleep?

The barber's shop, although small, is
considered in the alley to be rather special. It has a mirror and an armchair,
as well as the usual instruments of a barber. The barber is a man of medium
height, pallid complexion and slightly heavy build. His eyes project slightly
and his wavy hair is yellowish, despite the brown color of his skin. He wears a
suit and never goes without an apron; perhaps in imitation of more fashionable
hairdressers.

These two individuals remain in their
shops while the large company office next to the barber closes its doors and its
employees go home. The last to leave is its owner, Salim Alwan. He struts off,
dressed in his flowing robe and cloak and goes to the carriage waiting for him
at the street's entrance. He climbs in sedately and fills the seat with his
well-built person, his large Circassian moustaches standing out before him. The
driver kicks the bell with his foot and it rings out loudly. The carriage,
drawn by one horse, moves off towards Ghouriya on its way to Hilmiya.

The two houses at the end of the street
have closed their shutters against the cold, and lantern-light shines through
their cracks. Midaq Alley would be completely silent now, were it not for
Kirsha's coffeeshop; light streaming from its electric lamps, their wires
covered with flies.

The café is beginning to fill with
customers. It is a square room, somewhat dilapidated. However, in spite of its
dinginess, its walls are covered with arabesques. The only things which suggest
a past glory are its extreme age and a few couches placed here and there. In the
café entrance a workman is setting up a second-hand radio on a wall. A few men
are scattered about on the couches smoking and drinking tea.

Not far from the entrance, on a couch,
sits a man in his fifties dressed in a cloak with sleeves, wearing a necktie usually
worn by those who affect Western dress. On his nose perches a pair of
expensive-looking gold-rimmed spectacles. He has removed his wooden sandals and
left them lying near his feet. He sits as stiffly as a statue, as silent as a
corpse. He looks neither to the right nor to the left, as though lost in a
world all his own.

A senile old man is now approaching the
café. He is so old that the passing of time has left him with not a single
sound limb. A boy leads him by his left hand and under his right arm he carries
a two-stringed fiddle and a book. The old man greets all those present and
makes his way to the couch in the middle of the room. He climbs up with the
help of the boy, who sits beside him. He places the instrument and the book
between them and looks hard into the faces of the men present, as though
searching for their reaction to his coming there. His dull and inflamed eyes,
filled with expectation and apprehension, settle on the café's young waiter,
Sanker. Having sat patiently waiting for some time and having observed the
youth's studied disregard for himself, he breaks his silence, saying thickly:

Naguib Mahfouz - The Son of Two Civilizations

"I am the son of two
civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The
first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the
second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization."
Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel Lecture

The Arabic Renaissance and the Rise of the Egyptian
Novel

Arabic literature can be traced back
almost two thousand years. Poetry has always been its most prominent genre, but
there is also an ancient tradition of narrative that expresses itself in a
wealth of different oral forms. In Egypt, the collection of stories called The
Arabian Nights, a series of tales of Indian, Iranian, and Iraqi origin,
was brought to its final and most developed form. This coincided with an
ancient Egyptian tradition of storytelling which has remained vivid and alive
to this day, the public storyteller having been a cultural institution for
ages.

The birth of the Egyptian novel, however,
could not take place until the modern era, when five preconditions had been
fulfilled: 1) the influence of European literature, where the novel developed
into a major genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; 2) the
establishment of Egyptian printing works and pressrooms in the nineteenth
century along with the rise of newspaper production; 3) public education and
the spread of literacy; 4) a gradual liberation from oppression by foreign
powers, starting with the reign of Muhammad Ali in the aftermath of the
Napoleonic occupation in the early 1800s; and 5) the emergence of an
intellectual class with broad international learning.

Thus an Arabic Renaissance finally arose;
its Janus face turned as much to the past as to the future. The concept of Nahdah
in Arabic literary criticism and historiography, meaning a "rising
up" or revitalisation, refers in part to a period of neo-classicism, an
awakening of old literary traditions following a time of decline or stagnation
since the eleventh century. The term also refers to creativity, new syntheses,
modernisation, dynamic experiments, and progress (- as described by, for
instance, J. Brugman in An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic
Literature in Egypt, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984, Ch. "The
Nahdah"). The Egyptian novel matured in great works by twentieth century
writers such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1888-1956), Taha Husayn (1889-1973),
Ibrahim al-Mazini (1890-1949), Mahmud Tahir Lashin (1894-1954), and Tawfiq
al-Hakim (1898-1987).

Muhammad Husayn Haykal's novel Zaynab,
published in 1912, is often regarded as the first true Arabic novel, but there
were many forerunners. The most important successor, however, was born about
the time of the completion of Husayn Haykal's work. The development of the
modern Egyptian novel is reflected by - and reaches a peak in - the half
century of work by Naguib Mahfouz (1911-), Nobel Laureate in 1988, the first writer in
Arabic to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Naguib Mahfouz – Biography Clip_image001

Naguib Mahfouz,
1988 Nobel Laureate in Literature
Photo: Mohamed Hegazy

Mahfouz's Perennial Quest

Many Egyptians know the stories by Mahfouz
from the cinema. This fact brings the central facets of the continuation of the
so-called Renaissance into immediate focus. The introduction of new genres and new
media provided new means of expression, reflection, and creativity, and, in the
opposite direction, influenced the creators of literary arts and genres as well
as society as a whole. Taking an active part in the Egyptian film industry,
both as an official and as a producer of manuscripts, Mahfouz is also part and
parcel of a modernisation process that comprises the leading film-producing
country in the Arab world. The Egyptian film industry is, next to that of the
U.S.A. and India, the largest in the world.

The development of his writings is also
connected with the constantly growing importance of news media, magazines,
daily papers since Mahfouz himself is, for example, a contributor to and reader
of the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram (The Pyramids), founded in 1875.

In Layali alf layla (1982),
translated as Arabian Nights and Days, Mahfouz, adopting the story
telling fashion of The Arabian Nights, writes riddles which can be
read against the background of contemporary politics and society, in particular
perhaps the open-door policy introduced by President Sadat. Using the traditional types - ruler, ruled, the
mystic guide, the secret connection - his tales are open to various
interpretations. They are principally stories of good and evil, right and
wrong, truth and betrayal, which make them of universal concern. They tell us
of dreams and teach manners, as tradition has always done. Ultimately this
collection of stories has, like classical fables, a moral status. However, the
author is never a fabulist in any other sense, but looks upon himself as having
a mission and a deep responsibility as a writer. In a way, Naguib Mahfouz seems
to have taken the place of honour among ancient Egyptian scribes. As in the Teaching
of Cheti, probably from the twelfth dynasty, in which books are praised as
being "of superior value", as essential "as water", the
writer has a moral calling. Even the Arabic word for literature, adab,
originally refers to a high level of culture, i.e., good behaviour and exalted
manners. Novels (rumaniyat) were originally also accepted and
developed for the teaching of adab. The best-known stories by Mahfouz
depict the lives and manners of lower middle-class families in Cairo and their
environment. In particular, he tells us about the alleys of the El Gamaleya
area (al-Jamaliyya), the neighbourhood in which he spent his childhood and
youth.

To see his works as mainly political
fables or allegories is fallacious. It is a most misleading simplification,
since there are many levels of interpretation and reception. His novels and
short stories are works of art. They picture Egyptian milieus from the most
ancient of times to contemporary everyday life, deal with questions of broad
human concern, raise philosophical and existential questions. The author is
always guided by a belief in Egyptian continuity and greatness, from time to
time shaken to its foundations by tumultuous history, the corruption of thought
and disaster. In his novels there is a staunch belief in moral right and a
constant seeking for Egyptian identity behind the weft of illusion and reality.
A dweller in truth, unable to define it, Mahfouz is - like the investigator,
Meriamun, in his novel on the enigmatic Akhenaten - perpetually pursuing his
own self.

In the narrative stream of his short
stories and his novels, the reader encounters a great variety of characters,
people described as soon as they appear before us (or the other way round).
They leave lasting impressions but also hold back something essential that does
not come within our grasp. They turn up and disappear, leaving traces and
clues, but remain enigmatic, ambiguous. They are figures in a greater story, or
pieces in a puzzle, that is the œuvre of Mahfouz. Their lives are texts,
continually being written and rewritten, as is Egyptian history. Their
appearance changes as the context alters with time and setting. Likewise their
meaning and purport depend upon viewpoint and perspective, and there are many
layers of interpretation, from the gross to the subtle and inexpressible. A
correct hermeneutics or a right understanding is as evasive as al-sarab,
the mirage of al-sahra, the nothingness of a vast expanse of desert.
So do human illusions appear before us, materialise, and fade away, leaving
voids pregnant with meaning.

The Pertinence of the
Past

Naguib Mahfouz started his career as a
writer by exploring ancient Egyptian history. He did not do so to understand
the contemporary scene, still less was it to criticise it in a covert fashion.
His aim was to seek the identity of his own country in the space-time of his
existence and the sphere of his Self. He also obviously sought for a reliable
anchorage in the distant past during years of war, upheaval, and calamity. Being
an Arabic author, he transcends the limits of Arabic and Moslem tradition, to
which he belongs, tracing his heritage and seeking his identity as an Egyptian.

Naguib Mahfouz – Biography Clip_image002

Old Cairo, scene
of many of Mahfouz's novels and short stories.
Photo: The Royal Library,
National Library of Sweden

His first published book was a translation
of James Baikie's concise history of Ancient Egypt (Misr Al-Qadimah,
1932), published by the periodical Al-Majalah Al-Jadidah (The New
Magazine). Between 1939-1945, that is, during the years of the Second World
War, he published three novels about ancient Egypt. His first published novel 'Abath
al-Aqdar (1939), "Ironies of Fate", dealing with "the
malediction of Ra", was followed by two other historical novels about
ancient Egypt. It was the beginning of a gigantic plan for forty projected
novels. The author's aim was to employ the novel form to relate the history of
Egypt from the earliest times up to his own day. However, writing about the
past, he found himself writing about the present. Then he turned to the life of
modern Egyptians, first of all to those in his own Cairo quarters. Later on he
was to find that when writing about the present he was also writing about the
past. It is no mere coincidence that he returns to the perspective of ancient
Egypt in novels written in the 1980s, forty years later. In a way, the history
of Egypt from past to present is the framework of all his writing.

The 'Abath al-Aqdar (1939), is
based on an ancient Egyptian legend. Originally the novel was entitled Hikmat
Khufu, "The Wisdom of Cheops". This pharaoh, who lived about
2680 BC, during the fourth dynasty of the Old Kingdom, has been told by a
soothsayer that after his death, his son will not inherit the kingdom. Instead,
it will fall in the hands of Dedef, the son of the high priest of the temple of
Ra. Cheops consequently takes every measure to change the future. In this drama
of confusion, as intricate as the fate of King Oedipus and the legend of Moses,
all attempts to interfere with destiny prove to be in vain.

It is notable that when the author later
on turns to social and contemporary issues, something of this early belief in
fate, destiny, dispensation or providence remains. People in his novels are
often, like reeds in the wind, almost powerless in the face of circumstance and
chance.

The second historical novel, Radubis
(1943), is a story about a courtesan in ancient Egypt, and is named after her.
She is the lover and mistress of the Pharaoh Mernere II, and the novel is about
the romance between them. Not much is known about kings called Merenre or
Mernere in the most ancient list of kings; we hardly know more about this king
than that he ruled for a year at the end of the sixth dynasty, and that there
was a queen Nitocris at the time, famous for her beauty. These facts make the
subject different from the first novel, giving imagination an even freer rein.
The love between the pharaoh and the courtesan Radubis is a pure love of
devotion. The gods sanction it, and at last he gives up all resistance, driven
by forces beyond his control. Finally, he uses the assets of the country to
celebrate the wonderful woman who captivated the heart of the pharaoh by means
of divine forces.

In his book about the Hyksos wars, the
author turns his attention to the decline and fall of the Middle Kingdom during
its last period (1785-1575 BC). Kifah Tiba (1944), "The Struggle
of Thebes", describes the wars against a foreign power of Asiatic origin
which ruled over Egypt for a long time. It is a story of the end of an era. But
when the Hyksos were finally expelled, Egypt became independent and began
building a new and prosperous empire, The New Kingdom. The historical framework
is itself a story of archetypal dimensions. Mahfouz is writing about a
renaissance, the rise of Egyptian nationalism, the fight for independence and
regained self-confidence reflected in his own times, as many times before.

Power and Social Issues

The series of historical books was
followed by records of modern Cairo, the Khan al-Khalili (1945), the
author turning abruptly but quite naturally to his own era. The novel describes
the life and final tragedy of a family which, during the war, was forced to move
to a less fashionable part of the city. The narrator-seeker walks freely and
unhindered, as it were, in the same places in different times, sensing
continuity, in pursuit of the red thread in the story that is made up by
history and in which he is himself a part.

In many of the novels by Mahfouz, women
play a central part. Western critics have sometimes remarked that novels are
built up round women who can match the men in the narrative, and there are many
of them in the Egyptian novels. In Mahfouz's works, prostitutes and other
fallen females are often the strongest and the wisest characters. Mothers and
other women constitute a secret net of devotion, passion, and care that holds
the chaotic world of men together. The author's sympathy is with the oppressed
and the miserable, with the weak and the loving. Women are often viewed as
victims, as the victims of cruel circumstances, even when they are blamed and
mocked. And that is true of men, too.

After the Khan al-Khalili, named
after a working class area, he wrote Zuqaq al-midaqq (1947),
"Midaq Alley", named in a similar fashion after a street in
Cairo. The main character is a lower-class woman during the Second World War. A
hairdresser is madly in love with her, but the open-handed British soldiers in
the city also tempt her. Her Egyptian lover is finally crushed by unhappy love
and jealousy, and she ends up as a lady of the night.

A special portrait of motherhood was
presented in the next novel belonging to this socially concerned and realistic
series of contemporary novels leading up to the Cairo Trilogy. Al-Sarab
(1948), "The Mirage", tells about the crucial point where
maternal instincts, motherly love and mother-fixation intersect. It is a
psychological novel but, as many times before and afterwards, issues of fate,
destiny and free will are raised but not answered. There is shame, but there is
no guilt.

A mother who cannot let her son go after
her husband/his father has left her, brings up the protagonist. He is the apple
of her eye, and there is no lack of love during the years when he is growing
up. He is unhappy and miserable at school and at the university, however, and
he gets an insignificant government post. He marries, but cannot establish a
good relation with his wife, who is unfaithful, she has a love affair, and dies
after an abortion. When he finally dares to revolt against his mother and
reproaches her, arguing with her for the first time, she dies of a heart
attack.

Power and decline is the theme of many
novels and stories about old and modern Cairo, including the realistic
masterpiece that brought the author universal fame and the Nobel Prize, the
Cairo Trilogy (al-Thulathiyya, 1956-1957):
Bayn al-qasrayn (1956), "Palace Walk"
Qasr al-shawq (1957), "Palace of Desire"
al-Sukkariya (1957), "Sugar Street"

The shadow of a dominant father, al-Sayyid
Abd al-Jawad, falls over three generations of an ordinary Cairo family,
whose fate and strivings we follow over the first part of the twentieth
century. In this comprehensive family saga in three parts (the second of its
kind in Egyptian literature after Taha Husayn's book about another family tree
of misery, Shajarat al-bu's (1944), different streams in contemporary
Egypt are reflected in individual preferences and attempts at liberation among
the siblings. These attempts include hedonism, intellectual life, communism as
well as fundamentalist Islam. The novels present a variety of outlooks from a
local perspective, as does the work of Mahfouz as a whole. We get to know a
genuine Cairo environment, are introduced to the private life both of an
oppressed wife who is the source of love and care, and her closely guarded
daughters. There are three very divergent sons, heading in opposite directions
and in increasingly rebellious ways, as eventually the grandsons also do,
though in an even more radical manner. The dignity or karâma of the
father and the tradition, alongside the guidance of women, in a way holds the
narrative as well as the family together. This is the basis of continuity as
well as of opposition during the turbulent times of English occupation, and the
constant confrontation of Occidental and Oriental values.

The Children of
Gebelawi

In actual fact, a similar theme runs
through Awlad haratina ("Children of our quarter", 1959;
translated as Children of Gebelawi), which created the greatest stir
in Mahfouz's life, and determined his fate in a violent way.

When the rich and powerful Gebelawi
banishes his children he casts a spell on his family in doing so, as if he were
expelling them from the Garden of Eden. Patriarchal power determines their fate
in this very complex narrative, where the incomprehensible main character has
withdrawn from the scene and retreated to the house that can be seen at a
distance. That is the closed core of all events, the invisible force in an
expansive web of life.

In his novel, Mahfouz in a way writes a
history of humankind up to the 1950s, starting with the Dawn of Creation. At
the same time, it is a story about children in a Cairo suburb and their
difficulties. For his narrative he has drawn on - or sometimes paraphrased - Al-Qur'an
and the traditional Islamic Hadith literature for many figures and
events, freely transforming them and inserting them into a new historical and
completely fictional context. Leading characters in the novel were early
identified as religious figures: Gebelawi (Jabalawi) himself has been
identified as God (Allah), the Almighty Creator and Supreme Being. Similarly
other main characters like Idris, Adham, Jabal, Rifa'a, Qasim, and 'Arafa have
been seen as representing or symbolising Satan, Moses, the prophets Jesus and
Muhammad, and modern science respectively. But the framework and the
environment is a local area on the outskirts of Cairo at the foot of the
Moqattam Hills, in a small-town atmosphere of family quarrels, hopes, and
cares. Some inhabitants fear or follow local chiefs (politics?), whereas others
turn to higher ideals (religion?).

When Awlad haratina was
serialised in the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram 1959, leaders of the Islamic university
Al-Azhar, the custodian of faith and morals, called for the banishment of the
'heretical' book, and crowds of people marched on the streets to the big
Al-Ahram building shouting their protests against the blasphemous book by
Naguib Mahfouz. The ban was never officially sanctioned, the serialisation did
not stop, but the novel was only published abroad in book form. In her
well-informed dissertation, The Limits of Freedom of Speech: Prose
Literature and Prose Writers in Egypt under Nasser and Sadat (Stockholm
University, 1993), Marina Stagh showed the secret forces at work behind this
public drama, and the final agreement reached between the author and the
government in this affair. Today, there is no official ban on this book, and in
fact, there never has been.

However, the publication of Salman
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in 1988, famous as well as infamous for
its international consequences, raised the almost thirty-year old question of
Mahfouz's blasphemy and his alleged undermining of the dignity of the Prophets.
Suddenly Naguib Mahfouz found himself paired with a foreign author with whom he
had nothing in common. Himself a pious Moslem believer, an author of
international repute and learning and an earnest moralist, he felt obliged
officially to defend Rushdie and the freedom of speech as a holy right of
humanity. This made some of Rushdie's enemies compare The Satanic Verses
to the Children of Gebelawi, concluding that a similar fatwa should
have been pronounced on Mahfouz, too.

Naguib Mahfouz then summarised his
moderate and very measured standpoint in this way:

"I have condemned Khomeini's fatwa to kill Salman
Rushdie as a breach of international relations and as an assault on Islam as we
know it in the era of apostasy. I believe that the wrong done by Khomeini
towards Islam and the Muslims is no less than that done by the author himself.
As regards freedom of expression, I have said that it must be considered sacred
and that thought can only be corrected by counter-thought. During the debate, I
supported the boycott of the book as a means of maintaining social peace,
granted that such a decision would not be used as a pretext to constrain
thought." (Al-Ahram, 2 March, 1989; for a detailed account
see Samia Mehrez, "Respected Sir", in: Michael Beard and Adnan
Haydar, eds., Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global
Recognition, Syracuse, UP, 1993.)

This did not finally settle the matter,
however; nor could the stigma and the suspicion ever be effaced. The Egyptian
Government offered the bigoted "infidel" (kafir) protection,
but the author always refused, keeping to the simple routines of his private
life in Cairo. One day in October 1994, however, on one of his regular visits
to the Qasr Al Nil café, an attempt was made on his life by a follower of al-Jihad,
the same religious group that assassinated Sadat. He was stabbed in his neck
with a knife and was seriously injured, but survived.

Naguib Mahfouz – Biography Clip_image003

Mahfouz (center)
chatting with admirers in Cairo.
Photo: Pressens Bild

The Enigmatic and
the Absurd

It is easy, all too easy, to descry
literary traces of the chaotic world of his life and times. There are many
stories of modern decline and lack of order and confidence, but they are also
literary experiments in modern prose genres.

In Tharthara fawq al-Nil
(translated as Adrift on the Nile), 1966, a complete opposite
to Meriamun's floating along the Nile in Dweller in Truth, we are on a
house-boat on the Nile among disillusioned and cynical gamblers, loafers and
addicts. The government official, Anis Zaki, who has lost his wife and his
daughters, is the centre of a whirl of frustrated talk and passivity. He and
his friends are involved in a fatal accident where a peasant is killed, but
they let the matter rest there. In the Alexandria novel Miramar
(1967), set in the early 1950s, a maid, Zahra, attracts the attention of a
number of men in the neighbourhood. Different narrators tell different stories
in this little drama, which mirrors the various current political and social
views of the revolutionary years. The author shows a complex setting, but does
not supply us with a key to show us how to interpret the set of narratives. Taht
al-Mizalla ("Under the [bus] Shelter") is a collection of short
stories from 1969. In
the title story, we are presented with a crowd of people at a bus stop,
waiting, watching. The most horrifying and upsetting things happen before their
eyes while they are standing there, odd occurrences and violent accidents to
which they are passive witnesses. We do not know what they think, nor do we
know the meaning of the scene. It is like a late surrealistic film by Luis
Buñuel or an absurd drama by Eugène Ionesco. In Hadrat al-Muhtaram,
"Respected Sir" (1975), Mahfouz satirically portrays a civil servant
and government employee, 'Utman Bayyumi, in which he most probably also
ironically portrays himself as an aspiring official, a part of the system and
the class he satirises.

The Court of Osiris

The author's concern with power is
obvious, but his main question is the following: What have the leaders of Egypt
- pharaohs, sultans, khedives, kings, presidents, fathers, invaders, occupants
- done for (or done to) his country? In this comparative study of politics,
focused both on the past and on the present, parallels and repetitions stand
out, and the observer seems to behold an eternal return of decline and fall,
nationally as well as individually. He does not hesitate to let the high and
the mighty confront each other, and there are some extreme and highly
controversial examples of this feature.

In Amam al'arsh ("Before the
Throne"), published in 1983, Egyptian leaders of different eras are
assembled and committed for trial at a court. The justice in this Supreme Court
is the sun god Osiris, sitting on his throne. The goddess Isis and their son,
falcon-headed Horus, assisting him, sits by his side. It is like a scene from
the ancient Egyptian The Book of the Dead, written in hieroglyphs.
That is the manual for the dead, a guide-book for those who are about to be
tried by the eternal court, a fragmentary "book" that has been found
in scrolls and mural paintings in tombs throughout the country.

Now the court of Osiris is going to judge
the rulers of Egypt, from the founding father of the country, Menes (the
Pharaoh Narmer, who united Upper and Lower Egypt five thousand years ago)
through the Ottoman rulers down to Anwar al-Sadat, killed in 1981, shortly
before the novel was written. Pre-Arabic history thus blends and intertwines
with Islamic history and contemporary politics. The author perceives, or tries
to establish, a deeply felt continuity. Sticking to his identity as an
inhabitant of Old Cairo, al-Qahirah, he has also publicly objected to
various kinds of pan-Arabic movements in the Muslim world, stressing that the
Al-Azhar mosque and university in his vicinity is the centre of the teaching of
sunnah. Being the child of two civilisations, the Egyptian
civilisation is as important to him as the Islamic one.

In the crowded court room where the voices
of poets, khedives, Sufi women, patriarchs, kings, pharaohs, presidents,
courtiers and many others are heard, examination and interrogation sometimes
turn into heated accusations and debates, since the defendants partake in the
trial of the accused. From the 19th dynasty (1308-1186 BC), a period of
military campaigns against Hittites and others, strong domination, and the
building of great temples in Abu Simbel, Karnak, Luxor and Thebes, the Pharaoh
Rameses II appears. After being questioned, he compliments his late successor,
the revolutionary Gamal Abd el-Nasser.

Nasser seized power in 1956 after the
overthrow of King Faruq in 1952 and the abolition of the monarchy in 1953, when
the Republic of Egypt was proclaimed. The ancient king's admiration of the
republican may in part be the author's assessment of Nasser, emphasising
parallels between the two characters. Judge Osiris furthermore points out that
President Nasser was the first ruler to care for his people. But Rameses II,
the ruler of an empire, blames Nasser for reducing Egypt to an insignificant
state, and the founder of Egypt, the Pharaoh Menes, chimes in accusing Nasser
of having let the features of majestic Egypt dissolve into the vague outlines
of Arabism.

Nasser, in his turn, attacks his
successor, Anwar al-Sadat, for having destroyed the country by his open
door-policy, the infitah, "opening up" of Egypt, leaving the
door ajar for capitalism, American influence, and corruption. Sadat defends
himself very ably, but Nasser's reproaches are sharp and to the point. It is
almost impossible to settle the proportion of inequity between them: in the
course of the dialogue, both are harshly criticised. However, Sadat gets
unexpected support from one of the most controversial among the famous pharaohs
- Akhenaten, the "heretical" pharaoh, Amenophis IV.

Whereas the warrior-king Rameses II partly
recognised himself in Nasser, the first president of Egypt, a peace-making
predecessor of the 18th dynasty thus sides with the president's successor and
heir, murdered in 1981. Akhenaten meddles in the dispute, stating that Sadat
aimed at peace, that he worked for peace as he, Akhenaten, had done in his day,
and that they were both unjustly denounced for faithlessness. The monotheist
Akhenaten thus identifies with Sadat. But who was Akhenaten, then? The question
seems to be of central importance to the author.

Who Was Akhenaten?

Two years later, Naguib Mahfouz published
one of his most intriguing and perhaps most revealing books; his novel on
Akhenaten, al-'A’ish fi-l-haqiqa (1985), "Dweller in Truth".
Adopting the narrative method of multiple narrators, the novelist approaches a
well-known enigma, the identity of Akhenaten, the author of beautiful hymns to
the sun and the predecessor of Tutankhamun. King Amenophis IV, who ruled
between about 1375 and 1358 BC, abandoned the dynastic cult of Amun and other
gods in Thebes and left the capital, aiming to build a new one in the place now
known as Tell El-Amarna. He devoted all his worship to the solar disc of Aten,
the sun god, represented by rays that terminate in hands holding the signs of ankh,
"the force of life". In a similar fashion, the famous Egyptian
obelisks are holy representations of sunrays.

Aten, a form of the ancient solar god Re
or Ra, was hailed as the almighty, universal god. The king himself changed his
name into Akhenaten, "he who is useful to Aten", and he called his
new city Akhet-Aten, the "horizon of Aten". During his reign, Egypt
was weakened by his revolutionary religious and political reforms and finally
the non-belligerent dissenter was overthrown. His successor Tutankhamun
(Tut-Ankh-Amun) abandoned all the reforms and reinstated Thebes as the capital.
The city of Akhet-Aten was deserted and fell into decay.

At that point in history, Mahfouz's novel
begins. Some years after the fall of Akhenaten, the protagonist Meriamun (whose
name deceptively reminds us of Meritamun's mummy in the Egyptian Museum of
Cairo) and his father are sailing along the Nile on a voyage from their home in
Sais during the inundation. Suddenly they pass a strange city. Meriamun
observes that the roads are empty, that the trees have no leaves, and that all
the gates and windows are closed like the eyelids of the dead. It is completely
silent. From his father he learns that this is the city of the heretical and
faithless pharaoh. It is not completely deserted, though. The former wife of
the deceased apostate is still living there. The foremost among Egyptian
beauties, Queen Nefertiti, is living alone in the empty city, as though in a
jail. The name Nefertiti means "the beautiful (one) is come".

Meriamun then recalls what he has heard
about the whirlwind that devastated the Egyptian empire, the era called the War
of the Gods, and the stories about the young pharaoh who revolted against his
father, challenged the priests and fate itself. Meriamun's curiosity grows into
a passion to know the truth about the strange king. His prominent father
assents, himself being "a dweller in truth". But unlike his father,
the boy has another mission: not rooted in "truth" or in any
conviction as his father's was. He starts his pursuit of knowledge, eager to
find out on his own. He acts like a modern investigator, a scholar and a
sceptic, a believer in science and free inquiry. It is easy, perhaps too easy,
to regard him as an alter ego of the author, and his perennial pursuit of truth
as a guideline to the works of Mahfouz. Nevertheless, just as Meriamun becomes
eager to learn about Akhenaten, so do we become eager to know the fictional
Meriamun.

Meriamun goes to Thebes to see people who
knew the king, and finally he visits Nefertiti in the fallen city. This way
fourteen different stories are told, and equally many versions of the truth. He
interviews Akhenaten's high priest Meri-Ra, and then we observe that Meriamun
is himself named after the reinstalled god Amun. He asks the king's mother Tiye
about her son, he interrogates his secretary, the chief of the police,
Nefertiti's father, and so forth. Meriamun (or the reader) is left none the
wiser. Or rather: the conclusion is that it is up to the reader to determine
the truth about Akhenaten's character, his regime and his times. Alternatively,
truth is pictured as unattainable, invisible, evasive, like the person called
Akhenaten and the god called Aten. These features of the god and the king are
those that stand out in the variety of accounts, and perhaps one more: a
dislike of warmongering.

Nefertiti, the last person interviewed,
does not really know either, but says her former husband was assassinated. (He
thus met with the same fate as Anwar al-Sadat, the late pharaoh the king
identified with in the novel Before the Throne.) She looks forward to
see her beloved in the next life, reuniting with him forever, and she hopes to
sit at his dear side at the Throne of Truth. Akhenaten will thus be exalted as
Osiris, the Supreme Judge in Before the Throne. As Meriamun observes,
the way to truth in this world is without beginning and end, since those who
are drawn to eternal truth will always extend it. Consequently, history is
without beginning or end, like the existential Hikaya bi-la bidaya wa la
nihaya, the 1971 story without beginning or end.

Meriamun afterwards tells everyone he
knows about his investigations, and what various people have told him, but two
things he discloses only to us: his increasing admiration of the hymns to the
one and only God, and his love of the beautiful Nefertiti. In these concluding
words of the novel, one may sense a combined veneration of literary and
religious values, deference to the sublime, the invisible and unattainable, be
it Allah (the one God) or the truth of humankind or that of any single
individual. They all harbour the mystery of Aten and Akhenaten.

Like Osiris, Mahfouz examines and assesses the
standards of Egyptian rule, life and manners. Just as at the court of Osiris,
Isis, and Horus, there are a number of questions and responses, but we are left
without answers. The author's
quest is a pursuit without end.