“There was no legacy of the [Arabic] novel that I could depend on… I arrived at the scene that was nearly empty. It was incumbent on me to discover things and to lay the ground by myself.” –Mahfouz
This essay is an installment in a special series.
In 1945, as the Second War was drawing its final chapters, Naguib Mahfouz published his first mature work, Khan al-Khalili, and with it, inaugurated the most transformative career in modern Arabic literature, marking the coming to maturity of the modern Arabic novel. It was also the first work in Mahfouz’s realist phase, or what I call the All or Nothing. In this period, Mahfouz established his name and laid the foundation of his world, his characteristically Mahfouzland, which would largely remain consistent for his entire career: the old Cairo alleys, the new neighborhoods, coffee houses, mosques, and the empty desert surrounding it all. It was a world inhabited by artisans, merchants, junior clerks, students, young lovers, beggars, street thugs, prostitutes, and local chiefs and criminals. As often decried by his progressive critics, Mahfouz, indeed, was a man of the urban Egyptian petit bourgeois in which neither the peasants nor the upper classes had a place.
During this foundational episode, Mahfouz published nine, or seven if we count his Trilogy as one, works. They are, in chronological order, as follows: Khan al-Khalili (1945), New Cairo (1946), Midaq Alley (1947), the Mirage (1948), the Beginning and the End (1951), The Cairo Trilogy (1956-1957), Children of Our Alley (1959).
The first three works, Khan al-Khalili, New Cairo, and Midaq Alley, should be considered an unofficial trilogy on their own. Indeed, and as we will discuss below, they are an earlier form that will get perfected and fully mastered in Mahfouz’s infamous actual Trilogy, the definitive work of modern Arab and Egyptian literature. In these first three works, Mahfouz will lay the foundation of his style's geometric architecture of his stylistic and thematic concerns, which would culminate in his later, more recognized trilogy. It is the hallmark of his work that he received the question of architecture and design to be as important as that of character development and plot. In these works, Mahfouz’s primary interests and preoccupations with the questions of science, nationalism, socialism, the past, modernity, work, religion, and vitalism would find their first expression. The following two works, the Mirage and the Beginning and the End, were two self-contained experiments to which Mahfouz will never return and can be seen as standing independently on their own. The first was an exploration of motifs from Freud, while the second was Mahfouz’s most depressive work, from Marx, in which Mahfouz will come the closest to the form of Gorky’s Marxist social realism.
Beginning turned out to be the last of Mahfouz’s work to be published in monarchic pre-revolutionary Egypt. The Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which brought Gamal Abdel Nasser, Third Worldism, Arab Socialism, and Arab Nationalism to power, seemed to have brought to life the fantasies and dreams of Mahfouz’s characters. The young men of Mahfouz’s alleys and coffee shops dreamt of a radical break with their past, their present, and their lives. They longed for socialism, patriotism, atheism, and a brave revolutionary world. They got what they wanted. Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, his masterful roman-fleuve, published in three volumes between 1956 and 1957, was the multigenerational saga of modern Egypt’s transformation from a post-Ottoman colonial backwater in the interwar years to a new independent modern nation. His last work of the period, which marked the peak and the end of an epoch, was his allegorical Children of Our Alley, in which a newly liberated world had to face the death of patriarchal authority in its metaphysical, social, and historical dimensions and decentering of the world.
The Unofficial Trilogy:
Khan al-Khalili, New Cairo, Midaq Alley
Mafhouz’s first three mature works share remarkable structural similarities and can also be seen as different executions, extensions, and explorations of the same modernist drama, in which the same character types, tropes, and motifs are examined from various directions. They are all about the onset of modernity and its disenchantments in a society at a loss for what to do with its history. Although published at the end of World War II, Khan al-Khalili was likely written during the war, with its events unfolding between 1941 and 1942, during the peak of the German air raids on Cairo.
Khan al Khalili (1945) revolves around the life of one Cairo family during the period of intense German bombing of the city and starts with the family planning to move from their home to the old and historical Cairo neighborhood of al-Hussein, hoping it would be safer from German air raids. The hope for safety rests on their belief that the presence of the Shrine of Imam al-Hussein, Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, in the new neighborhood would protect them from danger. Moreover, they trusted that the German respect, almost following, of Islam, which is assured to them daily through the barrage of German wartime propaganda, would guarantee their safety. The Germans would leave the Hussein neighborhood in peace for its namesake. The family thus willingly and happily moves to the old neighborhood that, while old, decaying, and narrow, remains their only hope for safety.
The impressive and thick layers of symbolism that the young Mahfouz was able to condense in the first few pages of the story is a remarkable feat for a man who used to write crude and grotesque romantic juvenilia about ancient Egypt shortly before. Mahfouz used war as a symbolic occasion to express the advances of the modern world, which is intrusive, technological, unstoppable, and possibly dangerous. The abrupt sound of an air raid siren, the confusion and fear of the unknown, and the sudden landing of bombs and missiles from the skies on one’s head are devices weaving the psychological experience of the intrusion of the new on traditional life. So is the flight of the family to the neighborhood named after the Prophet’s grandson, seeking safety and comfort in the old from the dangers of the new.
In the first chapter, the father explains the move, laying the premise of the family’s decision based on a mix of religious faith and political propaganda, saying, “This neighborhood is in the protection of al-Hussein; may he be blessed by God. It is the neighborhood of religion and the mosques, and the Germans are too wise to bomb it while they are trying to win the favor of Muslims.” And he further assures his son,
“You know nothing of this place. Here, you find the best falafels, the most delicious foul (fava beans), the most succulent kebabs, delectable meats… Here, you will sip the best tea and unmatched coffee… Here, you will find constant daylight and lively nights. Here lies the son of the daughter of the Prophet of God, and he is a worthy guardian.”
Falafels, foul, tea, and coffee are not merely culinary specialties but also cultural treasures of a whole civilization, and, the father tells his son, they can be experienced in their best and most authentic form in their own home. Already introduced in the first few chapters, this dichotomy between the fears of the new and the comforts of the old would become the main faultline running through all of Mahfouz’s work up until 1959. It is the struggle that permeates all places, objects, events, and characters of Mahfouzland.
The characters of the novel are then used as walking metaphors, each representing a social, philosophical, or historical force that is either already spent, remaining, or being born. The father, Akif Effendi, who persuaded the family to move to the old neighborhood, is an old, pious man for whom the world no longer has any use. He used to work for the government, that is to say, adjacent to power, until he was forced to retire. Mahfouz notes that his retirement was not an easy matter, and he objected in the most rebellious manner and heaped scorn at the heads of the officials who forced him out of the government. Yet, eventually, he had to accept his fate and stay home, enjoying his time with his wife and family and spending his time reading the Quran and visiting mosques in peace. This allegorical telling of the death of official institutional religion and the birth of personal religion is briefly told, almost as a prehistory of the characters and the events of the novel. He represents the dying force of traditional and official religion, now relegated to a personal sphere of piety and domestic tranquility. The father himself never becomes a central figure in the story but is merely present as a background figure. As a matter of fact, in the first few pages, the father already makes the only possible contribution he has to the plot by persuading the family to move to the Hussein neighborhood and providing them with romantic knowledge of the place’s virtues. Although not a central character, his influence on the family’s decisions and his nostalgic view of the neighborhood anchor the novel’s thematic core.
The central character of the story is the eldest son, Ahmed, who is a single man in his 40s still living with his parents. Ahmed’s life, which is hard to see as anything but a failure and stunted growth, was somewhat determined by his decision to stay home with the family after the sudden retirement of his father. He committed himself to providing for them and ensuring his younger brother received a decent education. There is admirable sacrifice in what Ahmed did, yet the moral portrait that the stern moralism of Mahfouz gave to Ahmed refuses to exonerate him from guilt on the basis of life’s coercive conditions and insists on exposing the megalomaniac, antisocial, and erratic man hiding behind the mask of fate and sacrifice. Mahfouz sees Ahmed as an intellectually deformed man who, despite his interest in knowledge, reading, and education, never specialized in anything and remained fascinated with old books. His knowledge is stagnant in Aristotle, the medieval Brethren of Purity, and old poetry. According to Mahfouz, this deformed intellect “did not let his mind descend to imbecility or stupidity. But his love of his own genius and his desire for vainglory deceived him and made him go astray. His sensitive nature made him more stable and prevented him from being resilient, patient, or thoughtful. All of this made his confused head a pot of loose and disconnected knowledge and not a thinking mind.” Moreover, Mahfouz alludes to some mysterious episode in Ahmed's life in which he got obsessed with jinnis and magic and spent weeks trying to summon the occult until he went mad and nearly died before he abandoned his quest.
His superstitious nature is as antisocial as his megalomania and arrogance, which, given the difficult life conditions, fills him with bitterness and anger. Together, the unrestrained internal narcissism and the clear external failure generated in Ahmed a toxic victimhood complex through which he views himself as the heroic victim of cosmic forces. This feeling of constant persecution, in turn, generates a certain sense of masochistic joy, which results in his unstable political opinions obsessed with victimhood and martyrdom.
Deformed intellect, incomplete education, stagnation, superstition, obsession with old books, narcissism, and masochistic obsession with victimhood are clearly Mahfouz’s scathing critique of traditional society's intellectual class that never outgrew medieval scholasticism. The price paid for these flaws is nothing less than the loss of vitality. Ahmed remains pathetic, single, lonely, and bitter. He can advance neither in his personal nor professional life and is left to mourn his condition in complete pathos.
On this foundation, Mahfouz goes on to explore the Hussein neighborhood itself, the place of piety and purity. Yet, not a chapter goes by without one of the characters mourning the internal conditions of the neighborhood, lamenting how it's not the same sincere, genuine piety is no longer, and religious rituals are a shadow of their former selves. The men, once eager to spend the nights in Sufi and spiritual gatherings, are now addicted to opioids, hashish, and other drugs. The women are licentious and unrestrained. The father who told his son they would be moving to the neighborhood of the grandson of the Prophet didn’t know he would be taking his son to drug dealers, unhygienic bars, and promiscuous friends. The entire neighborhood is more of a shell hiding in it a fully rotten seed.
Even worse, the German “love for Islam” didn’t seem to guide the Luftwaffe raids away from the neighborhood successfully. The raids and the sirens continued in the new neighborhood as they did in the old. The locals still insist, following the Berlin Arabic radio propaganda, that Hitler loves Islam and even that he is “secretly a Muslim,” targeting only the Jewish neighborhoods. A local imam announced he had a dream of Imam Ali handing the sword of Islam to Hitler, a sign that “Hitler will return to Islam its first glory and unite all Muslim nations,” despite that Hitler’s bombs are still falling on their heads. (You can read my account of the wartime propaganda here.)
The pathos in the father's life matches the one in the son's life and ultimately matches the life of the entire neighborhood. The disruption of this pathetic harmony is brought about by the war, the young revolutionary figure of Rashid, and the return of Rushdie, Ahmed’s hedonist and selfish younger brother, from his travels. Together, this trinity of characters will become Mahfouz’s primary stock of character types representing the confrontation of the different modern ideas and social forces competing over the future, which will be continuously replayed, reimagined, redrawn, and re-portrayed in his future works: impotent traditional reaction, revolutionary radicalism, and ruthless selfishness.
Rashid is a young lawyer whom Ahmed met in the local coffee house, which became his second home after he moved to the neighborhood. Since the first time he found his way to the place, Ahmed found Rashid to be both the most intriguing and the most threatening character. Ahmed does not seem to be able to have one pure sentiment towards Rashid, but his curiosity is always mixed with alarm, and his attraction to him is always mixed with revulsion. The reason is that, naturally, Ahmed would be automatically considered the most learned and esteemed man in the neighborhood. But since now there is a young man with a modern college education, Ahmed would always have to prove himself. This is not merely for social reasons, but the need for validation is much as inner as it is external since Ahmed feels envious of Rashid’s modern academic credentials, which he secretly covets but does not have.
The ambivalent relationship often led the two characters into conversational duels, of which the first directly addressed the value of the old neighborhood. After hearing people praising the neighborhood of al-Hussein, Rashid interjected, “This [Hussein] neighborhood is old Cairo. It is old ruins that can only generate fantasy, longing, and pathos. If you look at it rationally, then you see nothing but filth, which we are sacrificing human lives to protect. We should erase it so we may allow people to enjoy a happy and healthy life.”
This is the first-ever elucidation of the spirit of revolution, which Mahfouz put in the mouth of one of his characters. It summarizes, with great clarity, the all or nothing vision of the young socialist generation impatient for a different present. The “old Cairo” is not merely abandoned but must be erased to make way for the new Cairo. It has nothing to offer but “fantasy, longing, and pathos.” Indeed, Rashid would become one of the main character archetypes in Mahfouz’s works during the episode.
Ahmed disagrees and insists that “being old does not equal being filthy, but it is a memory that may be dearer than any fact of the present.” Together, Ahmed and Rashid constitute a philosophical dichotomy and a social struggle between the memory of the past and the hope of the future. Their duel is replayed on various symbolic levels, ultimately casting a web of dichotomies throughout Mahfouz’s work. Of such dichotomies, one of the most fateful is that of knowledge. In one of their coffee house meetings, Ahmed shows off his scholastic knowledge by reciting old poetry, to which Rashid scoffs dismissively. Ahmed takes offense at such behavior, and the following dialogue, which deserves quoting at some length, takes place,
“I wanted to say I don’t like poetry because I don’t like going back to the past. I want to live in the present for the sake of the future, and we have enough wise men our age to guide and instruct us.” But Ahmed Akif, unlike Rashid, had thought that true genius existed only in the past and did not think that “our age” had any great men. He got furious and he said in anger, “Why are you denying the greatness of the men of the past whom they were prophets?” “Our age has prophets, too!” Rashid responded. Ahmed almost exploded in shock, but he restrained himself… and asked calmly, “Who are the prophets of the current age?” Rashid replied, “I will give you, for instance, the two geniuses Freud and Karl Marx.”
Ahmed felt as if hands were around his neck, strangling him. He felt a deep wound since he never heard of those two names. He felt enraged towards Rashid but couldn’t show his ignorance, so he nodded his head while asking if they were as great as the geniuses of the past. Rashid said, “Freud’s philosophy opened the way for the individual to be saved from the sexual pathologies that are central to our lives. And Karl Marx opened the way for our liberation from social oppression, don’t you think so?”
Rashid is a disenchanted, idealistic young man of science, socialism, and atheism. He has no trace of pathos or vanity. For him, religion is a myth. Old Cairo is an obstacle that is to be razed to the ground, so it makes way for new Cairo. He dreams of the revolution that “Marx says will liberate the proletariat of the world, making all humanity one class.” This is the archetype on which the character of Kamal in the Trilogy will be based, a character which Mahfouz later would admit was influenced by his own life. This is, then, the first appearance of Mahfouz’s own literary alter-ego. In the Trilogy, Mahfouz will trace the young man’s journey of disenchantment from his childhood around men who, like Ahmed, believe in superstitions and propaganda to the ideas of Marx, Freud, and Darwin. Yet, the disenchantment carries with itself new enchantments, ones that, like jealous gods, accept no competition and to which Mahfouz was blind: socialism, nationalism, and revolution. Could it be that Mahfouz’s idealistic protagonist was replacing one set of superstitions, one set of idols, with new ones?
On his part, Ahmed is enraged by the realization that he is no intellectual match for Rashid. He knows nothing of the modern world or its intellectuals. He never heard of Freud, Marx, or Nietzsche. Ahmed was happy compensating for his impotence in love and work with his intellectual self-esteem, but now, thanks to Rashid, even that is gone. His character flaws mean that he could only respond in more anger, increasing frustration and resentment.
Ahmed’s younger brother, Rushdie, whose untimely death will provide the climax and the end of the story, will also serve as a character archetype in Mahfouz’s world and which will be explored more thoroughly in Mahfouz’s following work, New Cairo. If the war symbolizes the onset of the new world and Rashid represents its hope and political messianism, Rushdie represents the other side of modernity, its danger: ruthless selfishness, absolute individualism, and unmitigated hedonism. Mahfouz’s revulsion and hatred towards such a possibility are so severe that it is safe to say that in Mahfouzland, they were considered significantly worse and more detestable than the traditional reaction and religious superstition that Mahfouz wanted to “raze to the ground” with old Cairo. As a matter of fact, the climax events of each work in what I dubbed the unofficial trilogy of Khan al-Khalili, New Cairo, Midaq Alley, are all different forms of the same self-destruction event brought about by the selfish character. In Khan al-Khalili, after stealing the girl his older brother wanted to marry, Rushdie’s unrestrained hedonism and selfish lifestyle led him to catch a fatal disease, which he, out of sheer selfishness, keeps a secret from the people around him at the risk of infecting them before he eventually dies. In Mahfouzland, Ahmed’s impotence, stagnation, and narrowmindedness deprive him of the vitality of life, symbolized by old age and the inability to pursue the woman he wanted. He is sentenced to a life of inner resentment and repressed anger. Yet, these flaws do not seem to condemn him in Mahfouz’s view irredeemably. Mahfouz still finds much to be admired in the man, especially his willingness to sacrifice for the sake of his family. For selfishness, however, Mahfouz had no problem condemning Rushdie to death.
Rashid, the alter-ego of young idealistic Mahfouz and his generation, described “old Cairo” as “nothing but filth” and dreamed of a new Cairo that will be built, not on the words of the sages of the past, but the prophets of the present, Freud and Marx. What is new Cairo? And what can the age’s prophets, Freud and Marx, tell us about Mahfouzland? These are exactly the themes to which Mahfouz will turn, respectively, in New Cairo, a philosophical sequel of Khan al-Khalili, or maybe better to be called Old Cairo, Midaq Alley, which is an astonishing refurnishing of the same story and architecture, the Freudian themes of the Mirage, and Marxist realism in the Beginning and the End. He will do so using the foundation he already established of architectural designs and character types and recycling many of his devices in more perfected form. But in all these works, the stern socialist moralism of a young and idealistic Mahfouz will remain: it’s all or nothing.
New Cairo (1946)
If Old Cairo had started in the al-Hussein historical neighborhood, New Cairo starts where the modern world begins: the modern university. Following the same structure Mahfouz established in its predecessor, New Cairo revolves around three main characters, a family of friends, each representing a certain philosophical and social force in the emerging battle between the old and the new. This work also revolves around their relocation, not from one neighborhood to another this time, but from the university, the birthplace of the new, to the real world. The representatives of traditional reaction, superstition, belief in the occult, etc., are left behind in old Cairo. This work is solely about the new one.
Yet, it is important to emphasize that New Cairo has a much deeper philosophical nature than the previous novel. In New Cairo, Mahfouz will introduce the question of moral philosophy.
Characteristically, Mahfouz starts New Cairo with a quick and comprehensive overview of the set, setting, and characters that will form the stage and populate the current work. The friends stroll together on the campus of Foud I University (later known as Cairo University), talking about girls, philosophy, and their dreams after graduation. Ahmed Akif, with his scholastic ignorance and narrow-mindedness, has no place here. Already on the first page, Mahfouz makes it clear, through one of his characters, that we are in a new territory, declaring, “The university is the enemy of God, not nature.”
One of the most notable characteristics of Mahfouz's writings is its impatience. He has a great talent for throwing the readers right into the middle of his world and telling us, quickly and clearly in very few words, what we need to know about it. From the get-go, he makes it clear 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, etc. We are on campus. We should then expect a whole different struggle and battle than we saw in Khan al-Khalili. This is about the battles internal to the new world.
Mahfouz introduces the characters, his walking philosophical metaphors, through a series of debates that start immediately as soon as the reader is made aware of their existence. Through these debates, we come to learn what each of these characters represents. The first debate is about women and in which the characters, exclusively males, share their views of women, which range from being a sexual object to a traditional wife to a modern egalitarian conception of partnership. From this soft opening, Mahfouz impatiently, nevertheless characteristically, jumps 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 as I believe it best describes the atheistic culture and ideology of Naguib Mahfouz and his generation. It was not post-Muslim, for it wasn’t an atheism that evolved out of a Muslim intellectual development, but it was an influence, indeed an extension of European post-Christian atheism and its quest for an alternative system of moral justification.
As the friends start discussing morality, their respective identities and the identities of what they represent are revealed to us: