TRIBUTE
Between civilisations
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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Though marked by the challenge of reconciling multiple histories, Mahfouz was primarily a storyteller.
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Naguib Mahfouz: Appeal across languages. Photo: AP
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ was ushered into truly global fame when he became the first, and so far the only, Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Every obituary will mention that fact, but it is an unfortunate, narrow tribute to a man who spoke to many more beyond the confines of his own language. There is, in particular, in Mahfouz and his books, much that Indian readers will recognise with a warm glow of familiarity and appreciation.
Multiple identities
In his acceptance lecture after winning the Nobel Prize in 1988, the Egyptian Mahfouz famously described himself as "the son of two civilisations" — the Pharaonic and the Islamic. "It was my fate, ladies and gentlemen, to be born in the lap of these two civilisations, and to absorb their milk, to feed on their literature and art." That statement could so easily describe India, another land of ancient religions and cultures. Indeed it could, very appropriately, be the leitmotif of Indian novelists, faced with the challenge of reconciling multiple histories and identities in their work.
It was in the throes of one of these reconciliations, which resulted in the novel Children of Gebelawi, that Mahfouz had his Salman Rushdie moment — except that it came much before Rushdie's own excoriations, and that it was not so much a moment as 30 years of opposition. The novel, Islamic authorities said, contained inappropriate allegories of Allah and his Prophet, and Egypt had banned the book until earlier this year.
Subject of intense debate
Mahfouz spoke up in his defence, protesting that he had meant no harm. At one point, he even supported the boycott of The Satanic Verses as a "means of maintaining social peace, granted that such a decision would not be used as a pretext to constrain thought." It did little good; in 1994, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by a religious extremist when he was making his measured way to his favourite café. As with The Satanic Verses, the fate of Mahfouz and Children of Gebelawi became the trigger for an intense debate on freedom of expression.
Above all else, though, Mahfouz subscribed gleefully to the power of the long-told tale as much as we in India do. His books and short stories have been called political allegories and pertinent fables, and yet those are certainly secondary readings. Mahfouz was primarily a storyteller, and his Cairo trilogy, which sealed his Nobel win, is proof of it.
The trilogy — comprising Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street — was finished in the late 1950s, and it steered the extensive family of al-Sayyid Abd al-Jawad through the choppy waters of Egypt in the early 20th century. Undoubtedly, Mahfouz unships some commentary — political, on Egypt's budding nationalism; social, on an inflexibly patriarchal age that was drawing to a close; cultural, on Arabic Africa's mores.
But Mahfouz rightly believed that if he paid attention to the micro, the macro would take care of itself. There is in the Cairo trilogy a love of domestic detail right out of R.K. Narayan, and a devotion to the vagaries of a chaotic city that we have seen with Rushdie and Mumbai. His finest trick is to write with near-clinical observation and still ensnare us in passionate involvement with this one family — and then to patiently show how even the story of one family in one big city in a big country on a big continent in this teeming world can be universal.
Fitting tribute
There is a peculiar, but perhaps fitting, sort of tribute that I wish to pay Mahfouz. I was recently introduced to a woman named Khadija, and for 10 subsequent minutes, my mind absently reverberated with a consciousness that I already knew — and knew well — somebody of that name. Only later did I remember that Khadija was a prominent character in the Cairo trilogy — and yet Mahfouz had realised her so vividly that she had ceased to be just a creation on paper. She had become a living, breathing being, as had the entire clan of al-Sayyid Abd al-Jawad. For a storyteller like Mahfouz, there can be no greater satisfaction.
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