Preface
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) became the Arab world’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1988. His 34 novels include the Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street) and his dozens of movie scripts number among the top films of the Arab cinema. In addition, his essays were featured in the main Arabic newspapers of the day. Little known beyond his native region before his Nobel, his works now appear in at least thirty languages. This fame also brought with it new perils. In 1994, Mahfouz narrowly survived an attempt on his life by an Islamist fanatic. His writing hand was partially paralyzed by the attack, but after several years of intensive physiotherapy, Mahfouz resumed his creative output in 1999.
The present piece offers a portrait of Egypt’s political turmoil and obsessions in the Mahfouz’s final years, which have largely continued until the present. Mahfouz’s final work was serialized in a Cairo women’s magazine called Nisf al-Dunya (Half of the World)..
In the summer of 2001, nearly seven years after the attack on his life, the dogged, hyper-disciplined Mahfouz is back to writing. The would-be assassin’s blade had touched the base of the nerve that controls Mahfouz’s right arm and hand. As a result, it took more than five years of intense physiotherapy for him to write much more than his name again.
Regardless of his physical progress, the trauma still haunts him. Mahfouz’s latest creative effort is a series of short (one-to-two paragraph) epigrammatic stories called Dreams of the Period of Recovery (Ahlam fatrat al-naqaha). Dream five is notably nightmarish:
I am walking aimlessly without anywhere in particular to go when suddenly I encounter a surprising event that had never before entered my mind–every step I take turns the street upside-down into a circus. The walls and buildings and cars and passersby all disappear, and in their place a Big Top arises with its layered seats and long, hanging ropes, filled with trapezes and animal cages, with actors and acrobats and musclemen and even a clown. At first I am so happy that I could soar with joy. But as I move from street to street where the miracle is repeated over and over, my pleasure subsides and my irritation grows until I tire from the walking and the looking around, and I long in my soul to go back to my home. But just as I delight once again to see the familiar face of the world, and trust that soon my relief will come, I open the door–and find the clown there to greet me, giggling.
Revival of the Mahfouz Salon
Since the early 1940s, Mahfouz has maintained a weekly nadwa, or literary salon, at a variety of venues throughout Cairo. He was en route to one of these, in the Casino Kasr el-Nil, at the moment he was stabbed in the neck. These public sessions were then cancelled but their cessation left a great void in his life. To stem post-assassination attempt depression, a psychiatrist friend, Dr. Yahya al-Rakhawi, suggested a series of rotating sessions with friends to keep the shocked and debilitated writer engaged with the world. And it works. Mahfouz now spends six nights a week outside his modest flat where he lives with his wife Atiyatallah and his two children, daughters Hoda (née Umm Kulthoum) and Faten (née Fatima), both in their early forties. They never accompany him on these evening forays.
The salon, attended by anywhere from five to fifteen of his devoted friends and their guests, starts with the arrival of the eternal Mahfouz, usually at 6:30 in the evening, walking in on the arm of his driver for that evening (often a civil engineer and fiction writer named Zaki Salem). He greets his friends, whom he can hardly see or hear, with a gallant wave of his weakened right arm and his sweet, magnetic smile. The atmosphere is thick with love, neither sentimental nor reverential. He is as familiar to all of them as their own fathers or grandfathers.
The talk is loud, always. For more than thirty years Mahfouz has been slowly going deaf. He cannot hear anything not shouted directly into his left ear, from only inches away. (His right ear has long been totally useless.) This makes talking with him an intimate experience—one that he is accustomed to after so many years, but which often unnerves first-time visitors. He listens carefully and often stuns you with what he has perceived.
The typical evening sails along on long-winded tales of politics and strife; Israel and the Palestinians; the seemingly insoluble problems of bureaucracy, poverty, and corruption in Egypt. An attendee wants to read an article to him. He usually accepts. Another requests that Mahfouz allow him to read aloud a short story that he has just composed, in the hope that the Ustaz (a common honorific, loosely “professor”) will comment on its quality. Mahfouz seldom says no, and his remarks afterwards are somehow always a pithy, sensitive blend of honesty and helpful criticism.
One evening, Zaki is accompanied by his six-year old son named Naguib Mahfouz Salem. “He was born the night after Naguib Bey’s attack,” the father explains. The boy poses for a picture with his namesake. Ironically, Mahfouz himself was named after Dr. Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s first obstetrician, who delivered the future writer in a difficult birth. In gratitude for saving mother and child, the future writer’s father, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibrahim Ahmad al-Basha, named the boy “Naguib Mahfouz” (which later became his nom de plume.)
And Revival of the Attacks on Mahfouz
Mahfouz continues to face persistent rhetorical assaults and repeated threats of death, for causes both old and new, despite massive public sympathy and honors both at home and abroad. Before the Nobel, he was little known outside the Arab world, where he has been the most-renowned writer since the mid-1950s. He said that when his Nobel was announced at the Swedish Academy, “a silence fell, and many wondered who I was.” The obscurity did not last.
Mahfouz is reviled by Islamist militants mainly for one novel. Cited among several works by the Swedish Academy in justifying his prize, this is his Awlad Haratina (published in English as Children of the Alley), an allegory of mankind’s fate from the Garden of Eden to the age of science, with characters based on Biblical and Koranic figures such as Adam and Eve, the Devil, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. It remains banned in Egypt by order of al-Azhar, the nation’s official guardian of Islamic orthodoxy. The Academy’s praise of this work led to many accusations in the Arab world that Mahfouz had been rewarded with a Nobel for his services in slandering Islam, just as some also taunted him for receiving his prize as payment for his repeated calls for peace with Israel since 1973.
Many secularist critics have also denounced Mahfouz. After a book of his interviews with critic Raja’ al-Naqqash appeared in 1998, he came under attack for repudiating the policies of the still popular President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Mahfouz felt that Nasser, who established a dictatorship that was responsible for the disastrous Arab defeat in 1967 and other military debacles, had also turned the world’s oldest bureaucracy into one of the world’s biggest, bankrupting the nation for generations to come. He felt this, he said, despite the fact that Nasser’s personality was so strong that “He gave me mythic feelings of immortality.”
A Brouhaha over Hebrew
Following publication of his views on Nasser, Mahfouz faded somewhat from the pages of the national press. Then a new ruckus threatened to engulf him in what—after the fading trauma of his near-assassination—had seemed to be something like a quiet life in venerable age.
In the summer of 2001, Mahfouz meets several friends in a private home in the rocky Moqattam hills overlooking the Citadel of Saladin. One of the stalwarts of this salon, Osama ‘Urabi—a descendant of the leader of Egypt’s 1882 military uprising that provided the excuse for Britain’s seventy-six-year occupation of Egypt—reads an article from that day’s edition of the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat. It tells of the abrupt decision, after a two-year investigation, by the Egyptian Writers Union to expel Ali Salem, the first time the body has ever taken such an action. Salem’s crimes were visiting Israel, maintaining contact with Israelis, appearing on Israeli television, and related offenses. Mahfouz listens, clearly dismayed, but says very little.
The fifteen or so people clustered around Mahfouz are not so silent. They deplore the Writers Union’s decision against Salem. They believe Salem may have been punished not (only) for his abrasive sarcasm, often aimed at government bureaucracy, but for having defied the societal injunction to reject any contact with Israel, even with members of that country’s own peace camp, even if it means eliminating any chance to influence the public in that country.
Two days later, Mahfouz himself is on the front page of al-Hayat. The headline over the photo of the smiling Nobelist is “Naguib Mahfouz on Ali Salem: Question Him before You Expel Him.” In the article, a clearly exasperated Mahfouz complains that the Writers Union, to which he also belongs, should have listened to Salem before condemning him. He welcomed Ali Salem’s intent to challenge the union’s judgment.
“It is necessary to hear his point of view, as we are all part of the same union. If one of us violates one of the rules, he must be questioned before being judged,” he declared. Yet the decision had been made without either calling Salem in for interrogation, or even informing him directly of his fate.
Then Mahfouz suddenly finds himself the object of an inquisition. Faruq Khurshid, head of the Egyptian Writers Union, announces that Mahfouz was under investigation for allegedly signing contracts with Israeli publishers to render his works into Hebrew. If it could be proven that Mahfouz had truly signed contracts with Israelis, the union would take unspecified “measures” against the octogenarian.
At the time this issue developed, up to twelve of Mahfouz’s books had been published in Hebrew in Israel, the last in 1993. His works have long been available in the Jewish state, where publishers, with or without his or his agents’ knowledge, pioneered the translation of his works, few of which were available at the time in any language besides Arabic. Indeed, at the time Mahfouz won his Nobel, his masterwork, The Cairo Trilogy, had been fully translated into only one language, Hebrew (by leading Israeli novelist Sami Mikhail).
Egypt’s “anti-normalization” hysteria effloresced during the 1990s era of the Oslo Accords. The hysteria remains especially acute among the nation’s intellectuals, who for years have been gripped with fears that Israel would somehow steal the most precious elements of Egyptian culture and contaminate what they could not. This fear can reach absurd proportions. For example, a Japanese-financed project to trace the lineage of Pharaoh Tutankhamun by testing his mummy’s DNA was abruptly cancelled by the Egyptian authorities, officially on grounds of “national security.” Antiquities’ officials then intimated tthat they believed the Japanese had hired an Israeli consultant, who would try to prove that King Tut and his family were actually Jews.
The wave of intolerance engulfing the country is particularly distressing for the aging Mahfouz and it includes some of his closest associates. For instance, the novelist Yusuf al-Qa’id publishes an article on the appearance of Mahfouz’s works in Israel. Citing a recently published study by a scholar of comparative literature at Egypt’s Tanta University, al-Qa’id complains that a number these novels had been grossly misrepresented as “influenced by Jewish heritage” in the press of the “eternal enemy” (many of whose members are welcomed at the Mahfouz nadwas said al-Qa’id).
Whatever the measures against Mahfouz the union contemplated, they could not be as draconian as those imposed by the late President Anwar al-Sadat in February 1973. Sadat banned Mahfouz and scores of other writers from having their works published, and from appearing on radio and TV broadcasts, for signing a public letter urging him to end the state of “No War-No Peace” between the Arabs and Israel. For Mahfouz, then a columnist for the semiofficial newspaper al-Ahram, there was the added punishment of proscribing any film bearing his name from broadcast in Egypt. Sadat had reinstated all the proscribed writers in September 1973, only days before he went to war to break that very stalemate. Ironically some years later the Arab Gulf states banned Mahfouz’s works after he voiced support for Sadat’s search for peace. But when he won his Nobel, the award was instantly embraced by most (though not all) critics throughout the Arab world as “a prize for the Arabs.”
In earlier times, non-membership in the government-controlled Egyptian Writers
Union could ruin one’s career. But the implications of expulsion are different today. As Ali Salem defiantly declared to al-Hayat, “I welcome my transformation from writer to reader,” adding that he could still publish nearly anywhere he pleased. Union membership was no longer crucial.
For Mahfouz, about to enter his tenth decade, the sanctions could only be symbolic. The attempt to intimidate him by his own union no doubt hurt his feelings. But he continues to serialize his new work in Nisf al-dunya magazine. And he lives largely on the royalties from his books, most of which are sold abroad.
Indeed, it all seemed to subside rather soon, at least for Mahfouz. Filmmaker Tawfik Saleh, who hosts the Thursday evening gathering called the Harafish (“the riffraff”), says, “The issue (of Hebrew translations of Egyptian books) was very hot for a while, until it came to Naguib, then it cooled down straight away.” No further action is now likely, he believes. Yet, in Egypt’s volatile political climate, nothing can be ruled out. Like the mummies of Hollywood, issues long buried have a way of rising again, wreaking havoc whenever and wherever they can.
Most Respected Sir
During the salon, friends drop by and a few also leave. He has been pulling cigarettes out of his jacket at regular intervals all night, his companions competing for the honor of lighting them.
At about 9 pm, Mahfouz asks Zaki, “What time is it?” To which Zaki responds, “We still have ten minutes”, and Mahfouz nods. “Aah,” he says, and settles back in his seat with a look of expectant satisfaction on his sphinx-like face.
And at 9:30, the appointed hour having come round at last, he stands up.
Someone helps him put on his coat again, and all the members of the nadwa file out together. Mahfouz, always in the company of his volunteer driver and his State-supplied plainclothes guard, and perhaps one or two friends, goes back home for dinner. This loyal little band is gathered around a man whose only weapons are his vast arsenal of books, and the spirit that a would-be killer’s knife evidently only made stronger. But still it is continually tested and he is never allowed to rest on a lifetime of extraordinary laurels.
