Everything Has Changed

The World and Times of Naguib Mahfouz 3

(This essay is the third in a series of essays discussing the lifework of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz.)

New Cairo (1946)

If Old Cairo began in the al-Hussein quarter, that dense historical neighborhood where tradition still breathed through every alleyway, New Cairo opens where the modern world properly begins: the modern university. Following the structural pattern Mahfouz established in its predecessor, the novel revolves around three principal characters — a family of friends, each embodying a distinct philosophical and social force in the emerging contest between the old and the new. And as before, the work tracks a relocation: not, this time, from one neighborhood to another, but from the university, the birthplace of the new, into the real world beyond its gates. The representatives of traditional reaction — superstition, belief in the occult, the whole apparatus of pre-modern certainty — have been left behind in old Cairo. This novel concerns itself solely with what has replaced them.

Yet it is important to register that New Cairo operates at a considerably deeper philosophical level than its predecessor. Here, for the first time, Mahfouz will introduce the question of moral philosophy as such — not as background coloring or social observation, but as the animating problem of the work.

Characteristically, Mahfouz opens New Cairo with a swift and comprehensive survey of the set, the setting, and the characters who will populate the stage. The friends stroll together across the campus of Fouad I University — later known as Cairo University — talking about girls, philosophy, and their prospects after graduation. Ahmed Akif, with his scholastic ignorance and narrow-mindedness, has no place here. Already on the first page, Mahfouz makes the rupture explicit: one of his characters declares that “the university is the enemy of God, not nature” — and with that single line, we know we have entered new territory altogether.

One of the most notable characteristics of Mahfouz’s writing is its impatience. He possesses a remarkable talent for throwing the reader directly into the middle of his world and telling us, quickly and plainly, in very few words, what we need to know about it. From the outset, he makes clear that this is a post-Christian novel in the sense that atheism is a supposed factum. There is no contest between God and faith, religion and irreligion. We are on campus. We should therefore expect a struggle of an altogether different order than what we witnessed in Khan al-Khalili. This is about the battles internal to the new world.

Mahfouz introduces his characters — his walking philosophical metaphors — through a series of debates that begin immediately, the moment the reader is made aware of their existence. Through these exchanges, we come to learn what each character represents. The first debate concerns women: the characters, exclusively male, share views that range from woman as sexual object, to woman as traditional wife, to a modern egalitarian conception of partnership. From this comparatively soft opening, Mahfouz — impatiently, but characteristically — leaps to the core theme of New Cairo: moral philosophy. How does one determine right and wrong in a post-Enlightenment, post-Christian world?

My use of “post-Christian” here is deliberate, for I believe it best describes the atheistic culture and ideology of Mahfouz and his generation. Theirs was not a post-Muslim atheism, and it did not evolve out of any Muslim intellectual development. It was, rather, an influence and indeed an extension of European post-Christian atheism, together with its restless quest for an alternative system of moral justification.

As the friends turn to the question of morality, their respective identities — and the identities of what they represent — are revealed to us:

Mamoun Radwan

There is something at once familiar and genuinely new about Mamoun Radwan. He is a religious man who believes morality comes from God — not a figure we would expect to encounter in the “God-fighting” university or in the new Cairo it represents. Yet it is precisely the novelty of the character, a novelty Mahfouz keenly recognized, that makes Radwan a possibility within the new. Unlike Ahmed Akif, whose reading was confined to medieval poetry, traditional Islamic historiography, and manuals of magical spells, Mahfouz lets us know immediately that Radwan is “obsessively” studying André Lalande’s philosophical encyclopedia, a major early twentieth-century work of French philosophy. Unlike the Ahmed of Old Cairo, he is a genuine match for the modern intellectual world, in both knowledge and formal university training. He has, moreover, an athletic physique; he is healthy, active, well-spoken, diplomatic, motivated, and goal-oriented. Who and what, then, is Mamoun Radwan?

In short, Radwan represents modernist Islamic revivalism, which received its most potent expression in the movement of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood — a force that rose dramatically in number and influence during this period. The Brotherhood constituted something dramatically different from the stale traditionalism of the previous generation of pious Muslim men: a new vitality, self-consciously organized, that had already made its choice to join the new Cairo.

But Radwan’s vital modernism is only one face of a darker personality. His dedication to modern learning is, in Mahfouz’s telling, a compensation mechanism for what amounts to a diseased development. He comes from a family background described as “simple” and “wild” in nature. At an early age, he fell ill with a “mysterious disease” that kept him out of school until he was fourteen, so that “he tasted the bitterness of isolation, pain, and was molded by a harsh experience.” This symbolic absence and isolation describes what Mahfouz understands as an antisocial character, a consciousness that lagged behind its peers and was formed in that lag. The experience produced a personality of impressive resilience — one capable of resisting both the “fad of atheism so common among Egyptian students at the time” and the cult of Egyptian nationalism — yet it also bred a certain latent violence. Mahfouz tells us that his “illness” caused him to harbor “fanaticism and extremism, causing him to suffer from moments of insane cruelty,” a tendency toward loneliness, and a deficit of social grace, humor, and frankness “that often made his tongue a lashing whip, so much so that his critics sometimes call him the peasant student or the unawaited messiah.” One student is quoted as saying: “Mr. Mamoun Radwan is the leader of Islam in our age. In the past, Islam entered Egypt at the hands of the early Muslim conquerors thanks to their cleverness, but it will leave Egypt thanks to Radwan’s brutishness.”

What, then, is Radwan’s view of morality in the new Cairo? His answer is simple and short: “Enough for me to know the moral principles of God.” This declaration comes only a few lines after Mahfouz has told us that the university is the place where God died. Radwan’s answer is therefore not merely out of touch with its context; it is, within that context, altogether incomprehensible. When pressed — as when his Marxist friend challenges him on socialism — he replies: “Islam has its own socialism… social justice… true fraternity, happiness, and justice is in Islam.” Islam becomes, under pressure, Rousseau, Marx, and the American founders simultaneously. Mahfouz is saying, with his typical, masterful subtlety, that despite his modernism Radwan in fact has no answer at all — and that when he does produce one, it is purely mimetic. Radwan’s Islam is merely an empty husk.