LOOKING BACK
Witness to history
MEENAKSHI PAWHA
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Naguib Mahfouz inscribed Cairo, its spaces and its lives in the hearts of his readers.
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It is perhaps fitting that the centenary of the birth of the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich should witness the death of a great Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz (August 30, 2006). Born in Cairo, December 11, 1911, this is his first death anniversary. He wrote more than 30 novels and in 1988 became the first, and remains the only, Arab to win the Nobel prize for literature. Naguib Mahfouz was arguably the greatest Arab novelist of the 20th century.
Mahfouz, who died aged 94, was the Arab world’s most prominent literary figure. From being a writer known only in the Arab world and to a handful of Orientalists, he sprang to world attention with the Nobel. Overnight, he was taken up by a leading American publishing house and became a bestseller. He rose to prominence with his portrayals of Egypt under British occupation and the subsequent autocratic rule of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. His gently sardonic style of writing influenced writers across the Arab world. His development of the realistic novel in his earlier works about Cairo life and his later adoption of a more fantastical and mystical style, profoundly influenced three generations of Arab writers, as well as giving birth to a host of characters taken up by Arab film and television. He inscribed Cairo’s life, space and modern history in the hearts of the readers, from the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean, and familiarised them with its ways and norms.
Lasting influence
Born in Gamalia, in the old city of Cairo, the son of a minor official, the writer spent his first years in a distinctive medieval atmosphere with its narrow lanes and clustered overhanging buildings. Its features became part of his consciousness and are brought to life in some of his early realistic novels and more particularly, in his Cairo Trilogy that brought his name to the forefront of Arab literature and on which his fame came to rest in the West. The Cairo Trilogy, a monumental work, has been published in French, Hebrew and English.
The crowded neighbourhood of alleys and centuries-old mosques is the setting for this masterpiece . The trilogy, Palace Walks, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street (all of which appeared between 19
55 and 1957) details the adventures and misadventures of a Muslim merchant not unlike Mahfouz’s own. The trilogy deals with three generations of the Abd-al-Jawad family and extends from 1917 to just before the end of the Second World War, while Egypt was engaged in a struggle for independence from British rule. The trilogy introduced a character who became an icon in Egyptian Culture: Si-Sayed, the domineering father, who lords his authority over his wives and daughters but holds the family together — a character Mahfouz drew from his own father.
The three volumes describe in minute detail the daily events in a middle-class Egyptian family, recording for history as no other book does a way of life that has disappeared under the impact of Western influence and the pressures of modern life. The political happenings of the times are interwoven into the lives of the many characters. Members of the protagonist family represent the main trends in the political life of the country, the Wafd party, with its heroes Saad Zaghloul and Mustapha Nahhas (the party with which Mahfouz associated himself), the burgeoning socialist movement as exemplified by the writings of Salama Mousa, and the beginnings of a fundamentalist Islamic movement. Then, in 1959, Mahfouz serialised 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, Abel, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad was so controversial that it was banned in all of the Arab worl
d except Lebanon. In a society with religious susceptibilities, exception was taken to a novel dealing with issues that were considered unacceptable subjects for fiction. Many years later, it became the reason for the attack on his life on October 11, 1994. The novel shows a departure in his approach, being written in an episodic form, a structure that he was to adopt later in other works. While the themes that preoccupy him often repeat themselves, Mahfouz continued throughout his career to seek new techniques.
Despite the notoriety that Children of Gebelawi attracted, Mahfouz considered the Trilogy to be his most important work. “If the point of view of the writer is important to his books, then I think The Cairo Trilogy and El-Harafish are much more important works than Children of Gebelawi”, he said. El-Harafish (1977) too is written in episodic form and takes place in an alleyway
of Cairo’s old city. It deals with several generations of the same family universalising the alley into an image of the human condition. The myth here is of his own invention, unlike his use of the fall of Adam in Children of Gebelawi.
Portraits of women
Mahfouz’s fiction echoes with women’s voices as they act out their lives in society. Through the study of Hamida (Midaq Alley) and Nafisa (The Beginning and the End), one can easily tell that Mahfouz gives great importance to his female characters. He used them as a mirror in which the evolution of customs is reflected.
Mahfouz does not portray Hamida and Nafisa as fallen women, but rather as modern women who have been exposed to new options and values and who have rebelled against traditional social expectations. They are forging a different future during a period of transition. Mahfouz’s oeuvre does emanate from feminist concerns by giving attention to the multiplicity and evolving nature of urban Egyptian women’s experience by opening up the deprived and angry lives of women; instead, he focuses on changing marriage customs, proceeding from a time when neither men nor women could see their prospective partners to a time when they were introduced through a photograph. He has concentrated on the workplace and shown how time has changed men’s attitudes. He recognises that this new economic freedom also entails emotional freedom — that women have earned the right to choose whom to love and especially whom not to love. Thus, his oeuvre reflects the trends that are part of a larger movement transforming the face of contemporary Arabic literature.
Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing over the years a form of language in which many of the archaisms and clichés that had become fashionable were discarded. Neither the fame nor the considerable monetary reward afforded by the Nobel Prize altered his life. He continued to live in his modest ground floor flat in the middle class district of Agouza with his wife and two daughters and changed nothing in his daily routine. He remained until the day of his death a modest man with a ready smile and that sense of humour for which Egyptians are famous.
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