In modern Arab historiography, it is traditionally maintained, almost by consensus, that the emergence of Arab Nationalism was the culminating achievement, following a direct, linear trajectory, from nearly a century of the Arab Nahda. The Nahda, awakening or renaissance in Arabic, is the term used to refer to over a century of cultural, intellectual, and literary revival in the Arab world, primarily during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sparked by the contact with European colonialism with its wealth, science and Enlightenment. This distorted historical construct, like all modern Arab historiography, is an ideological fraud passed as a self-evident historical axiom now widely accepted with a finality that is quite rare in the world of contemporary historians. If anything, the emergence of revolutionary Arab Nationalism signaled the end and the destruction of a long period of remarkable intellectual and cultural free innovation that the Arabic language and culture had enjoyed. If one were to look for what could, with some justification, be described as an actual culminating achievement of the Nahda, one needs not look any further than the lifework of the Egyptian author and literati Naguib Mahfouz. His works embody the mature century-long assimilation of European post-Enlightenment thought and a modern re-assimilation of Arab and Islamic history and heritage, impacting conscious thought, sentiment, and mature judgment. Much of the contributions of Mahfouz—who had originally planned to become a philosopher—in fiction, metaphor, allegory, and symbolism would likely not have seen the light of day in a post-colonial authoritarian single-party state without the stylistic veils afforded by literature.
Mahfouz was born in 1911 in the historic Cairo neighborhood of al-Gamaliya, destined to become the central backdrop of his literary works until his passing in 2006. The period in which he was born marked nearly a century since Muhammad Ali Pasha, then the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, had initiated massive state modernization efforts, effectively lifting the Nile Valley out of the world of medieval Turkic imperialism. These efforts ultimately led to the creation of the Egyptian nation-state, emerging from the fetters of Ottoman imperialism after a century notable for its feverish cultural and intellectual endeavors from Egypt's and the Levant's literary elites. Thus, Mahfouz emerged as part of the first distinctly consciously Egyptian generation, unburdened by allegiance to a distant Ottoman sultan and unrestrained by the traditional confines of scholastic Arabic and the religious sciences.
The climate of Mahfouz's youth was characterized by a burgeoning secular public education system, a growing body of secular Arabic literature heavily reliant on translations, and an Arabic language that, in its modern form, aligned more closely with European languages than with its classical forebears. This era also saw the rising tides of patriotism and nationalism. These elements collectively wove the cultural fabric of Egypt's new bourgeois class, a class shaped by the nascent nation-state's bureaucracy and British colonial influence yet still imbued with the genetic legacy of a bygone legacy that was both cherished and discordant.
As Mahfouz would put it later, he was a member of the generation of crisis and decision. It was precisely for his generation that the past became truly past, separating from the present and the future. The sudden outbreak of existential disharmony in time itself, the stress and despair that followed, the pains of old and new delusions, and the futility of the individual in the face of historical forces are the main fountains from which Mahfouz’s work drew. Arguably, more than anyone among his peers, Mahfouz was keenly aware of the transitional function of his generation, standing between the old and the new. One had to choose either to die with the old, to embrace the new, perhaps to the extent of self-annihilation, or to stand helplessly waiting for the judgment of fate. One could also eschew the decision altogether, opting instead to use whatever little time one has to live a life of unapologetic selfishness. Most importantly, transitional states are also full of pain, riddled with illusion. One can lose oneself without gaining another, permanently arresting our development at the caricature level. In his stories, Mahfouz explored every possible fate that comes out of the riddle of time, not as a removed observer but as, first and foremost, a modern moralist with a stern and uncompromising judgment.
The themes of time, alienation, decision, transition, illusion, past, present, God, death, modern science, religion, individualism, collectivism, Europe, and Egypt together formed the real protagonists of the world of Mahfouz. Most of his characters were walking metaphors for one or, as is often the case, a combination of many of them. His events were symbols of pivots, convulsions, entries, or exits of such protagonists. This symbolic world and its concerns permeate all of Mahfouz's works throughout his entire career, and the great discontinuities in Mahfouz’s orientations and styles happened within the greater continuity of this structure itself.
Traditionally, critics divide Mahfouz’s prolific career into three chronological stages: romanticism, realism, and experimental modernism. These descriptors do make sense in terms of style and aesthetic classification to draw boundary lines between each episode in which Mahfouz broke some new aesthetic grounds. And while questions of style are inseparable from the questions of meaning and acknowledging that no system of classification can ever be so neat as to be completely free from some arbitrariness, here I opted to make my own periodization of the man’s work dependent on my attempt to provide my own reading of it within the historical context of modern Egypt. Thus, I divided his career into three episodes corresponding to the historical episodes of modern Egypt, which together constitute a unitary saga of his works and modern Egyptian history: All or Nothing, Hesitations, and Reconciliation.
The All or Nothing period was the one in which a young Mahfouz, following the Aufklärer’s dogmatic moralism, held a stern system of ethics in which an uncompromising belief in the historical progress of humanity was used as the measure with which he judged, accused, punished, or celebrated his characters. The past is dead, and those who seek to take refuge in it shall die with it, while the modern future is life, and those who seek to embrace it, even by dying for its sake, should live with it forever. It was Mahfouz, being a man not above the prejudice of his age, who followed a culture of atheism, romantic socialism, modern science, work, and a desire to pull down the old order all working together in an interrelational morality from which a certain irrational concept of freedom of a German lineage emerged. (Ironically, most of these works are identified by critics as the realist phase, while I see nothing in them but romantic socialism.) It is a period that corresponded with the beginning of his career in the interwar years and continued only briefly after the rise of Nasser’s revolutionary Egypt.
The Hesitations period is the one in which Mahfouz’s hesitation about atheism, socialism, and revolution started haunting his work, first as a gentle sub-current and then as an avalanche of skepticism. Indeed, once it becomes obvious, Mahfouz's previous work reveals that it has always included the nucleus of this skepticism, which later took over the man and his work. Sir Roger Scruton once wrote of modern conservatism that it “began life more as a hesitation within liberalism than as a doctrine and philosophy in its own right.” This was certainly the case of Mahfouz, whose expressions of these hesitations didn’t take long after the 1952 revolution, which was first seen by Mahfouz as the complete fulfillment of his and his generation’s dream and revolutionary program, to be formalized. Mahfouz’s themes of the lost prodigal son who, one way or the other, lost his father served as a complex and multilayered symbolic structure for both hesitations over atheism, in which Mahfouz’s work acquired a strong mystical quality indicative of a personal inner pilgrimage, and political revolution, in which he refused to give up on the idea of progress yet doubted the revolution. This is a period that corresponded with the height of Nasser’s power until shortly after his death and the beginning of the reign of Sadat.
The Reconciliation period is the most mature and final period in which Mahfouz’s saga reaches its completion in the wisdom of the old man, who understood that some questions were never meant to be answered and some were too absurd to ask. It is the period in which Mahfouz, in a mature synthesis, reconciles the dualities that haunted his world all along to find himself back home, both in the stories of the Sufi mystics chasing a taste of the divine and modern travelers seeking the enlightenment of modern science. In his most mature voice, Mahfouz became somewhat of a Burkean voice calling for moderation and respect for authority, echoing Burke’s beliefs that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. (No wonder it is the period in which Edward Said dropped him.) Metaphysically, after banishing the father from his throne, Mahfouz discovers it was himself that he banished and that the father had always been on his throne all along. It is the period of peace accords with Israel, the end of Egypt’s revolutionary socialism in which Sadat announced Egypt’s “Search for Identity” was over, and the attempt to transcend the delusions of painful transitions. Lasting well into the Mubarak years, all concerns and questions recede gradually into the background until they suddenly vanish in the wake of the failed Islamist assassination attempt at his life, leaving no image but that of Mahfouz’s passionate love for the divine.
This essay is the first installment in a series that should form my modest attempt to describe the world and times of Naguib Mahfouz as I understand them. In them, I will try to provide both the literary subtext and the historical context of his literature in a way that hopefully will illuminate not just his work but our modern history itself. The reader is strongly encouraged to read Mahfouz, whose entire work is widely available today in English and other languages. Nothing you could glean from my articles should substitute reading his stories both for the incredible depth of a man who spent his life in an honest pursuit of truth, a fragile and risky endeavor in a world so hostile to truth that it had to be veiled in symbol and metaphor, and for the pleasure that comes from reading a superb author and stylist.