Naguib Mahfouz

by Edward Said

This article was originally published on counterpunch.org

Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life. In 1980 I tried to interest a New York publisher, who was then looking for “Third World” books to publish, in putting out several of the great writer’s works in first-rate translations, but after a little reflection the idea was turned down. When I inquired why, I was told (with no detectable irony) that Arabic was a controversial language.

A few years later I had an amiable and, from my point of view, encouraging correspondence about him with Jacqueline Onassis, who was trying to decide whether to take him on; she then became one of the people responsible for bringing Mahfouz to Doubleday, which is where he now resides, albeit still in rather spotty versions that dribble out without much fanfare or notice. Rights to his English translations are held by the American University in Cairo Press, so poor Mahfouz, who seems to have sold them off without expecting that he would someday be a world- famous author, has no say in what has obviously been an unliterary, largely commercial enterprise without much artistic or linguistic coherence.

To Arab readers Mahfouz does in fact have a distinctive voice, which displays a remarkable mastery of language yet does not call attention to itself. I shall try to suggest in what follows that he has a decidedly catholic and, in a way, overbearing view of his country, and, like an emperor surveying his realm, he feels capable of summing up, judging, and shaping its long history and complex position as one of the world’s oldest, most fascinating and coveted prizes for conquerors like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, as well as its own natives.

In addition Mahfouz has the intellectual and literary means to convey them in a manner entirely his own–powerful, direct, subtle. Like his characters (who are always described right away, as soon as they appear), Mahfouz comes straight at you, immerses you in a thick narrative flow, then lets you swim in it, all the while directing the currents, eddies, and waves of his characters’ lives, Egypt’s history under prime ministers like Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa El-Nahhas, and dozens of other details of political parties, family histories, and the like, with extraordinary skill. Realism, yes, but something else as well: a vision that aspires to a sort of all-encompassing view not unlike Dante’s in its twinning of earthly actuality with the eternal, but without the Christianity.

Born in 1911, between 1939 and 1944 Mahfouz published three, as yet untranslated, novels about ancient Egypt while still an employee at the Ministry of Awqaf (Religious Endowments). He also translated James Baikie’s book Ancient Egypt before undertaking his chronicles of modern Cairo in Khan Al-Khalili, which appeared in 1945. This period culminated in 1956 and 1957 with the appearance of his superb Cairo Trilogy. These novels were in effect a summary of modern Egyptian life during the first half of the twentieth century.

The trilogy is a history of the patriarch El- Sayed Ahmed Abdel-Gawwad and his family over three generations. While providing an enormous amount of social and political detail, it is also a study of the intimate relationships between men and women, as well as an account of the search for faith of Abdel-Gawwad’s youngest son, Kamal, after an early and foreshortened espousal of Islam.

After a period of silence that coincided with the first five years following the 1952 Egyptian revolution, prose works began to pour forth from Mahfouz in unbroken succession–novels, short stories, journalism, memoirs, essays, and screenplays. Since his first attempts to render the ancient world Mahfouz has become an extraordinarily prolific writer, one intimately tied to the history of his time; he was nevertheless bound to have explored ancient Egypt again because its history allowed him to find there aspects of his own time, refracted and distilled to suit rather complex purposes of his own.

This, I think, is true of Dweller in Truth (1985) translated into English in 1998 as Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, which in its unassuming way is part of Mahfouz’s special concern with power, with the conflict between orthodox religious and completely personal truth, and with the counterpoint between strangely compatible yet highly contradictory perspectives that derive from an often inscrutable and mysterious figure.

Mahfouz has been characterised since he became a recognised world celebrity as either a social realist in the mode of Balzac, Galsworthy, and Zola or a fabulist straight out of the Arabian Nights (as in the view taken by J M Coetzee in his disappointing characterisation of Mahfouz). It is closer to the truth to see him, as the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury has suggested, as providing in his novels a kind of history of the novel form, from historical fiction to the romance, saga, and picaresque tale, followed by work in realist, modernist, naturalist, symbolist, and absurdist modes.

Moreover, despite his transparent manner, Mahfouz is dauntingly sophisticated not only as an Arabic stylist but as an assiduous student of social process and epistemology–that is, the way people know their experiences–without equal in his part of the world, and probably elsewhere for that matter. The realistic novels on which his fame rests, far from being only a dutiful sociological mirror of modern Egypt, are also audacious attempts to reveal the highly concrete way power is actually deployed. That power can derive from the divine, as in his parable Awlad Haritna (Children of Gebelaawi) of 1959 in which the great estate owner Gebelaawi is a godlike figure who has banished his children from the Garden of Eden or from the throne, the family, and patriarchy itself, or from civil associations such as political parties, universities, government bureaucracy, and so on. This isn’t to say that Mahfouz’s novels are guided by or organised around abstract principles: they are not, otherwise his work would have been far less powerful and interesting to his uncounted Arab readers, and also to his by now extensive international audience.

Mahfouz’s aim is, I think, to embody ideas so completely in his characters and their actions that nothing theoretical is left exposed. But what has always fascinated him is in fact the way the Absolute–which for a Muslim is of course God as the ultimate power–necessarily becomes material and irrecoverable simultaneously, as when Gebelaawi’s decree of banishment against his children throws them into exile even as he retreats, out of reach forever, to his fortress–his house, which they can always see from their territory. What is felt and what is lived are made manifest and concrete but they cannot readily be grasped while being painstakingly and minutely disclosed in Mahfouz’s remarkable prose.

Malhamat Al-Harafish (1977), Epic of the Harafish, extends and deepens this theme from Children of Gebelaawi. His subtle use of language enables him to translate that Absolute into history, character, event, temporal sequence, and place while, at the same time, because it is the first principle of things, it mysteriously maintains its stubborn, original, if also tormenting aloofness. In Akhenaten the sun god changes the young, prematurely monotheistic king forever but never reveals himself, just as Akhenaten himself is seen only at a remove, described in the numerous narratives of his enemies, his friends, and his wife, who tell his story but cannot resolve his mystery.

Nonetheless Mahfouz also has a ferociously antimystical side, but it is riven with recollections and even perceptions of an elusive great power that seems very troubling to him. Consider, for instance, that Akhenaten’s story requires no fewer than fourteen narrators and yet fails to settle the conflicting interpretations of his reign. Every one of Mahfouz’s works that I know has this central but distant personification of power in it, most memorably the dominating senior figure of El-Sayed Ahmed Abdel-Gawwad in the Cairo Trilogy, whose authoritative presence hovers over the action throughout the triology.

In the trilogy his slowly receding eminence is not simply offstage, but is also being transmuted and devalued through such mundane agencies as Abdel-Gawwad’s marriage, his licentious behavior, his children, and changing political involvements. Worldly matters seem to puzzle Mahfouz, and perhaps even compel as well as fascinate him at the same time, particularly in his account of the way the fading legacy of El-Sayed Abdel-Gawwad, whose family is Mahfouz’s actual subject, in the end still manages to hold together the three generations, through the 1919 Revolution, the liberal era of Saad Zaglul, the British occupation, and the reign of Fouad during the interwar period.

The result is that when you get to the end of one of Mahfouz’s novels you paradoxically experience both regret at what has happened to his characters in their long downward progress and a barely articulated hope that by going back to the beginning of the story you might be able to recover the sheer force of these people. There is a hint of how gripping this process is in a fragment called “A message” contained in the novelist’s Echoes from an Autobiography (1994): “The cruelty of memory manifests itself in remembering what is dispelled in forgetfulness.” Mahfouz is an unredemptive but highly judgemental and precise recorder of the passage of time.

Thus Mahfouz is anything but a humble storyteller who haunts Cairo’s cafes and essentially works away quietly in his obscure corner. The stubbornness and pride with which he has held to the rigour of his work for a half-century, with its refusal to concede to ordinary weakness, is at the very core of what he does as a writer. What mostly enables him to hold his astonishingly sustained view of the way eternity and time are so closely intertwined is his country, Egypt itself. As a geographical place and as history, Egypt for Mahfouz has no counterpart in any other part of the world. Old beyond history, geographically distinct because of the Nile and its fertile valley, Mahfouz’s Egypt is an immense accumulation of history, stretching back in time for thousands of years, and despite the astounding variety of its rulers, regimes, religions, and races, nevertheless retaining its own coherent identity. Moreover, Egypt has held a unique position among nations. The object of attention by conquerors, adventurers, painters, writers, scientists, and tourists, the country is like no other for the position it has held in human history, and the quasi-timeless vision it has afforded.

To have taken history not only seriously but also literally is the central achievement of Mahfouz’s work and, as with Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, one gets the measure of his literary personality by the sheer audacity and even the overreaching arrogance of his scope. To articulate large swathes of Egypt’s history on behalf of that history, and to feel himself capable of presenting its citizens for scrutiny as its representatives: this sort of ambition is rarely seen in contemporary writers.

Mahfouz’s Egypt is a charged one, strikingly vivid for the accuracy and humour with which he portrays it, in a mode that is neither completely taken with great heroes nor able to do without some dream of total harmony of the kind Akhenaten so desperately strives to keep but cannot sustain. Without a powerful controlling centre, Egypt can easily dissolve into anarchy or an absurd, gratuitous tyranny based either on religious dogma or on a personal dictatorship.

Mahfouz is now ninety years old, nearly blind, and, after he was physically assaulted by religious fanatics in 1994, is said to be a recluse. What is both remarkable and poignant about him is how, given the largeness of his vision and his work, he still seems to guard his nineteenth- century liberal belief in a decent, humane society for Egypt even though the evidence he keeps dredging up and writing about in contemporary life and in history continues to refute that belief. The irony is that, more than anyone else, he has dramatised in his work the almost cosmic antagonism that he sees Egypt as embodying between majestic absolutes on the one hand and, on the other, the gnawing at and wearing down of these absolutes by people, history, society. These opposites he never really reconciles. Yet as a citizen Mahfouz sees civility and the continuity of a transnational, abiding, Egyptian personality in his work as perhaps surviving the debilitating processes of conflict and historical degeneration which he, more than anyone else I have read, has so powerfully depicted.

Without literature my life would be miserable.

We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don’t forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights.

There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.

-Naguib Mahfouz

Yet again Kamal and his volatile heart:

“How could these hearts, hardened by the coarseness of life, love anyone? Yet what experience did he have of hearts generous with love or eager for it? The daughter of the snack shop owner had been in love with him, but he had ignored her. He had loved Aida, but she had spurned him. In his living dictionary, the only meaning for love was pain … an astonishing pain that set the soul on fire. By the light of its raging flames amazing secrets of life become visible, but it left behind only rubble.”

Kamal was the most interesting character of The Cairo Trilogy. Mahfouz did a fantastic job putting him through phases of life.

I finally got done reading Sugar Street. Comments to follow soon …

So I finally managed to put away some books and get back to Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy.

Kamal yet again lets loose his thoughts: “Perhaps patriotism, like love,” he thought, “is a force to which we surrender, whether or not we believe in it.”

After reading most of the trilogy, I feel the book is truly about human emotions and how they react to each other. It defines the meaning of friendship and companionship. True, Mahfouz covers many troublesome details about Egypt under occupation and its fractured infrastructure. But if you read deeper, its all about love and hatred for one another.

I’ll be posting more thoughts soon.

by Dara Rateb

Naguib mahfouz, an Egyptian screenwriter, playwright and novelist passed away Aug. 30, 2006. He was 94. Mahfouz, already recognized in Egypt as one of the Arab world’s finest writers, was the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, bringing modern Arabic literature into the international spotlight. The oddity, however, lies in the fact that the novel chosen for the Nobel was written 30 years before his nomination.

Mahfouz was born Dec. 11, 1911, in a modest home in Gamaliyya, a heavily populated, 1,000-year-old urban city. With its narrowly networked alleyways, street bakers, centuries-old mosques, animated artisans and clustered buildings, it was his upbringing in this area that would affect the intricate details of much of his future writing. Mahfouz’s father, an old-fashioned civil servant, and his illiterate mother were very patriotic Egyptians with a passion for history, often taking the young Mahfouz and his six older siblings to museums. Although he had never traveled outside Egypt, the young Mahfouz became a voracious reader of foreign literature, from Russian classics to American detective stories.

Read the full article here … (please note, you will have to register in order to view the entire article)

This site has really come to a standstill with all the traveling and side tracking. I haven’t had a chance to continue reading Sugar Street. Inshallah I plan to get back into it soon.

I’ve actually stopped reading the Sugar Street but will resume soon after I complete some other books in my must read list. I’m leaving for Istanbul very soon and it would be a perfect time to finish the last of the Cairo Trilogy and also retouch upon My Name is Red.

I apologize for the absence of posting, but just haven’t had the time to sit down and further explore Palace of Desire, will come back to it in a few days hopefully.

In the meantime, found this piece on the web by Larry Luxner.

Nobel Prize for literature was won by Egyptian novelist and short-story writer Naguib Mahfouz, chronicler of enduring human values from pharaonic Thebes to modern Cairo’s back alleys. On the following pages are Larry Luxner’s interview with Mahfouz, and Edward Fox’s appreciation of his work.

After I had searched nearly an hour in Cairo’s Khan al-Khalili bazaar for the legendary Zuqaq al-Midaq - the eponym of Naguib Mahfouz s most popular novel, Midaa, Alley - a young Egyptian noticed the Mahfouz paperbacks I was carrying and, in near-perfect English, asked me if I really expected to find the famous street.

“Lately, many people are looking for Zuqaq al-Midaq,” he said, “but the real Midaq exists only in their minds.”

After some polite conversation, however, Muhammad pointed out the tiny winding street that had - since the novel’s publication - come to be known as Zuqaq al-Midaq. Once inside the narrow passage where Mahfouz used to walk daily, I spotted many shopkeepers who could easily have passed for Abbas the barber, Uncle Kamil the candy-seller, Kirsha the cafe-owner and other inhabitants of Mahfouz’s fictional alley.

The alley is in the heart of the ancient Jamaliyya quarter of Cairo, where Mahfouz was born and spent his childhood and where much of his best work is set. His attachment to the quarter is still strong, decades after leaving it for the suburbs, but at 77he laments that he is not able to visit it as often as he used to. The great boulevardier has cut down on the long walks for which he was famous; now he goes mainly to the Ali Baba Cafe on Thursday nights, often in a car, to see his old friends. Last December, the writer’s frail health prevented him from traveling to Stockholm to receive personally the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature: His two daughters accepted the award in his name.

Even so, the recognition of his accomplishment means the world to Mahfouz.

“The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level,” Mahfouz told Aramco World. “The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.”

Hussein al-Habrouk, the writer’s long-time interpreter and colleague, recalled that on the day of the announcement of Mahfouz’s selection by the Swedish Academy last October, Mahfouz found ten reporters at his home who had heard the news before he had.

Since then, Mahfouz has been interviewed well more than 125 times. When I spoke to him in his sixth-floor office in the modern headquarters of Cairo’s leading daily, Al-Ahram, at least a dozen other people were standing in line to see him - including an Egyptian reporter for a Spanish-language weekly in Madrid, television crews from Sweden and East Germany, and a middle-aged couple from Milwaukee.

That Mahfouz talks to the press at all is surprising, considering his near-deafness, his ill health and his hectic schedule. But Mahfouz - a practicing journalist who still writes a weekly column for Al-Ahram entitled “Point of View” - has never had trouble managing his time.

“Frankly, I am one of those people who have prepared my life well,” he said. “I wake up early in the morning and walk for an hour. If I have something to write, I prefer to write in the morning until midday, and in the afternoon, I eat. At night, I prefer to sit and watch television. Thursdays and Fridays I consider my holiday, when I meet my friends and my literary colleagues.”

According to Habrouk, journalists may no longer tag along with Mahfouz on his daily walks, and television reporters are now banned from the Ali Baba Cafe because their lights and camera equipment disturb the other patrons. Al-Ahram has even purchased a car and hired a driver for Mahfouz, to help him avoid the crowds that invariably pop up wherever he goes.

Mahfouz, whose office is decorated with a self-portrait, various paintings and a window from which he can look across most of downtown Cairo, had simpler beginnings.

He was born in 1911, the son of a middle-class Jamaliyyah merchant, and graduated from Cairo University in 1934 with a degree in philosophy. Following that, he worked in the university administration and then for the government’s Ministry of Waqfs, or religious foundations.

“I started writing while I was a little boy,” said the author, who wears thick bifocals and speaks passionately. “Maybe it’s because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.”

By 1939, Mahfouz had already written his first three novels, one of which - The Struggle of Thebs - drew a parallel between the Hyksos invasion of ancient Egypt and the pre-war British occupation of modern Egypt. He later began work on The Cairo Trilogy, a monumental, 1500-page work that has been published in French and Hebrew but only partly translated into English.

Then, in 1959, Mahfouz serialized one of his most unusual novels, The Children of Gebelawi, in the pages of Al-Ahram. This book, which portrays average Egyptians living the lives of Cain and Abel, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, was so controversial that it was banned in all of the Arab world except Lebanon.

Despite the notoriety that Children of Gebelawi attracted, Mahfouz considers the trilogy to be his most important work by far. “If the point of view of the writer is important to his books, then I think The Cairo Trilogy and El-Harifish are much more important works than Children of Gebelawi,” he said.

The Nobel Prize is by no means the first recognition of Mahfouz’s stature as a writer. In 1970 he received Egypt’s National Prize for Letters, and in 1972 won the Collar of the Republic, his nation’s highest decoration. In addition, many of his novels have been made into films, and the characters of his stories have become household names throughout Egypt. But the Nobel Prize is the first time Mahfouz has ever received international acclaim.

Arnold Tovell, director of the American University in Cairo Press, says Mahfouz has been overwhelmed by all the resulting attention.

“From Egypt’s point of view, it’s a major event in cultural life, and Mahfouz sees it as a celebration of Arab literature in general,” said Tovell, who says he visits the author at least once a day. “The reason for the worldwide response to Nobel Prize winners in literature varies enormously. Mahfouz is indeed a novelist in the classic sense. What he writes about is so accessible, so human, that it both literally and figuratively translates around the world in a way some other novelists’ works do not.

“Through his collected works, you also get a portrait of 20th-century Egypt. Miramar, for example, is a reflection of what Egypt was like for the middle class, but with very specific characters, very real people dealing with extraordinary events in their lives.”

The broad appeal of Mahfouz’ works has meant that the AUC Press has had to reprint six of his titles because of unprecedented demand for the books. In addition, he said, Mahfouz books are now being translated into Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, French and Icelandic.

“The amount of attention paid to Mahfouz in the Arab press has been stunning,” he said. “The whole business got started in these offices. One of the first things we had to do was make sure Mahfouz knew he had won. Since then, we have done nothing but represent him around the world to foreign publishers. We have licensed 20 foreign-language editions of varying titles, and there are probably another 20 which we’re in the process of negotiating. In addition, Doubleday in New York has committed itself to publish 14 books by Mahfouz.”

Throughout his career, Mahfouz has chronicled the vicissitudes of modern Egypt, and he has often been affected by them himself. Children of Gebelawi is still unpublished in full in Arabic, and until he won the Nobel Prize his works were banned in many Arab countries because of his outspoken support for President Anwar Sadat’s Camp David peace treaty with Israel. In 1985, Mahfouz wrote The Day the Leader was Murdered, a description of the Sadat years.

“We are passing through a very sensitive time,” Mahfouz said, “and on the whole, this country is facing very big problems. We are like a woman with a difficult pregnancy. We have to rebuild the social classes in Egypt, and we must change the way things were during [President Gamall Abdel Nasser’s time. As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.”

Taken from here …

This morning I revisited chapter 88(everyman’s edition) or 17(anchor books) from Palace of Desire.
It was a chilly morning, with the bus not so crowded, and piloted by a chirpy bus driver. I cracked open the book, and reread Kamal’s undying desires for Aida.

I love the way how the chapter opens.

“Holding a small bag under his arm, Kamal stood in front of the Shaddad family mansion. He was wearing an elegant gray suit, and his black shoes were gleaming. With his fez perched securely on his large head, he looked tall and thin. Portruding from his shirt, his neck seemed nonchalant about supporting this large head and huge nose. The weather was pleasant, although ocassionally a chilly breeze announced that December was on its way.”

Its amazing how boys and men go to extreme lengths in order to attract the female kind. We overlook subtle stupidities and childish foolishness to win someones heart, but usually, it turns out sour.

I’m assuming that Mahfouz wrote about what he felt and mostly experienced, either in reality or up in dreams. He paints a vivid picture of human understanding and emotions.

More posting to follow.

Ramadan is finally over and schedules are back on track.

Eid mubarak.