Children of Gebelaawi (3 page)

Children of Gebelaawi

p hors of religion li terally and have not found the transcendent

Being behind the anthropomorphic language; Gebelaawi 's

death leaves a great void. This is seen at once by Arafa, the hero

who has caused the old man's death. He makes it his mission

to 'bring Gebelaawi back to life', not as an external agent but

as a transcendent reality in the heart of each person.

lf Gebelaawi does not represent the true God, one may ask

whether anythi ng in the novel does. When I put this question

to Mahfouz, he said: ' Nothing can represen t God. God is not

like anything else. God is gigantic. ' It would be hard to give a

more impeccably Islamic reply.

There is nevertheless one element i n the novel that seems

to point to the Eternal, without representing i t: the sky and the

heavenly bodies are mentioned in almost every chapter, even

though so much of the action takes place in poky rooms,

shadowy courtyards or narrow alleys. The heroes in particular

frequently gaze up at the sky, Adham through the foliage of the

trees in his father's garden, Humaam, Gebel, Rifaa and Qaasim

as they muse in the desert, and Arafa at night in the garden or

on the roof of his house. I asked Mahfouz what this signified

and he said: ' the greatness of the cosmos, which is the greatn ess of us, since we are part of the cosmos. '

However, Mahfouz was writi ng fiction, not theology, and

this prevented him from spelling out clearly how he saw the

true religion that is threatened by worship of the anthropomorphic god, so the field has been left open to his critics. The author's view is nevertheless clearly Islamic in many respects.

Firstly there is the very rejection of anthropomorphism, a

rejection that is peculiar to Islam and judaism, since all other

theistic religions believe in incarnation. Then there is the

choi ce of subjects: Adam, Moses,J esus and Muhammad - the

supreme prophets of Islam - with no sign of, say, Krishna or

Buddha. Of these the greatest by far is Qaasim/Muhammad,

whose reign is a period of peace and happiness unparalleled

before or since. As for Rifaa/Jesus, Mahfouz has the common

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Introduction

Muslim difficulty in seeing him as other than a lovable but

finally a defeated figure. Islamic too is Mahfouz's amalgamation of religious and social concerns.

The whole ethical framework of the novel is deeply Islamic.

In Egypt, as in most of the Muslim world, the head of a family

is expected to treat his children equally, making it easy for

brothers to stick together and in due course i n many cases to

marry their daughters to each other's sons, creating a cooperative society of cousi ns. There is no place i n Islam for the u nequal treatment of brothers that is so prominent in the

Bible, with the consequ ent conflicts between Cain and Abel,

Isaac and Ishmael, jacob and Esau ... and ultimately between

Jews, Christians and Muslims. It is against this background that

one should see Gebelaawi 's repeated favouritism and the

restoration of justice between cousins that Qaasim alone is

able to achieve.

The last chapter of the book may seem to pose problems for

the above interpretation. Writing i n the 1950s, the era of Ho

Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and the Algerian maquis, was Mahfouz

prophesying a world revolution? His Marxist readers thought

so, and many Muslim critics shared their view. The ending of

his later novel, 'The Epic of the Have-nots' ( malhamat alharafish) may seem to confirm it. However, this is hard to square with the 'Animal-Farm ' theme that runs through the

rest of the book, and the repeated observation that violence

produces no lasting solution. It seems more plausible that

Mahfouz was pointing forward to a spiritual revolution.

Clues to all this may be found in G B Shaw's Back to

Methuselah, which Mahfouz mentioned to me in 1962 as having

particularly influenced him. It is the one Western book that

can be suspected of havi ng contributed to the genesis of

Children of Gebelaawi. The play i Lse If bears certain resemblances

to the novel; it too is a history of humanki nd in five parts,

begin ning with Adam and Eve and reaching into the fu ture,

and it too has longevity as a prominent theme. It ends not wi th

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Children of Gebelaawi

proletarian victory in a Marxian class war, but with a world in

which humans have evolved beyond their preoccupation with

wealth, power and sensual pleasure and spend their lives i n

mystical contemplation.

Shaw's introduction is equally relevant. In it he explains

that he has written to rescue true religion from the loss of faith

caused by Darwi nism. Mahfouz himself had undergone a

religious crisis on reading Darwin , as described i n the autobiographical portrait ofKemal in Palace ofDesire, and Shaw's ideas must have seemed personally addressed to him. Shaw contends that it is only the an thropomorphic God, William Blake's

'Nobodaddy', who has been killed off by Darwin, leaving the

way clear for faith in the Creative Power that presides over an

evolving universe.

For Western readers unfami liar with the rest of Mahfouz's

work, there is another way in which this book may be misunderstood. It seems to be a work of great naivety, its characters drawn in black and white and with little psychological depth,

its narrative hurrying along from event to melodramatic even t,

its language stripped down to a simplicity devoid of all pretension. This however is deliberate self-limitation by an author whose earlier work, particularly the Cairo Trilogy, had shown

him to be a master of deep and subtle analysis. Mahfouz is here

evoking the style and conventions of the folk-epics chanted

unti l the advent of radio by the bards of Cairo's cafes.

Closer inspection reveals in fact that the book is not by any

means as naive as it seems at first sight. In particular, a general

atmosphere of tentativeness is created by the way that events

are recou nted at several rem oves from their occurrence. The

author puts the stories into the mouth of a narrator who

derives them from bards who learnt them from a succession of

earlier bards whose sources are obscure. Mahfouz once remarked that in this work, unlike Swift who in Gulliver's Travels

'made a critique ofreality by meansofmyth ', he had 'subjected

xvi

Introduction

myth to the cri tique of reality'. But because the reality that he

uses is seen through so many veils, the critique is often very

subtle, and the reader must frequently ask what Mahfouz

himself thi nks or intends, as opposed to what is said.

Not only does the book need to be seen in the context of

Mahfouz's work as a whole; it also provides an essential clue to

an understanding of the rest, for it marks the turning point

between the copious early novels with their lovingly detailed

description of ordinary reality, and the spare later novellas

with their exploration of in ner experience and their fasci nation with Sufism. lt was written in 1958after six years ofsilence following the Young Officers' Revolution of 1952 - six years

that had seen his marriage, his move from his mother's home

to a houseboat on the Nile, the birth of his elder daughter, the

diagnosis of his diabetes, the beginning of therapeu ti c summers in Alexandria, the award to him of the State Prize for Literature and his transfer from the Ministry of Religious

Trusts to the Ministry of Cu lture. Its completion was followed

by a further two years of silence. The book cannot be seen as

merely transi tional; rather, it makes up by i tself a whole period

in the author's work, reflecting an exceptionally eventful

chapter in his life.

This biographical background suggests a deeper level of

symbolism i n the book. It can be read not just as a veiled

account of the prop hets, but also as an allegory of the interior

life of a man , with the vari ous characters representing different facets of his personali ty, their successes and failures his internal conflicts. It ends wi th the search for the truth and

hope hidden in a garbage heap - symbolizing the spiritual

quest for the eternal amid the vanities of worldly existence.

Mahfouz told me: 'When I finished it, I felt that I had fou nd my

faith . '

As if its other difficulties were not enough, Children of

Gebelaawi is unusual among modern novels in that it poses

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Childrm of Gebelaawi

textual problems. The version published in Beirut i n 1967

( hereafter referred to as B) differs at many points from the first

version, published in the newspaper Al-Ahram ( hereafter referred to as A). I have counted 961 discrepancies between the two texts, (not including the thousands of differences i n

punctuation ) . They involve 12 41 Arabic words, i ncluding 12 9

removed by the editors of Bin a vain attempt to avoid offence.

A couple of hundred of the discrepancies are attributable to

an obvious mistake in one text or the other, A being marginally

the less inaccurate, bu t otherwise choice between the alternatives is a matter of taste. In some two hundred cases the difference is significant even in translation, affecting who does

what, with what or to whom.

Mahfouz told me in 1962 that his manuscript had not come

back from Al-Ahram and that he feared it was lost. He later

informed me that he had not approved the Lebanese publication and had not participated in its production. From this one might conclude that B had been typeset from A and had no

value as an i ndependent witness to the author's original

intentions. However, careful comparison of the two texts

suggests that Bwas almost certainly based on the manuscript,

for in 75 places it adds a word or phrase missing from A- a

total of 145 words which no typesetter could have felt the need

to i nvent. In 54 places, A supplies a word or phrase missing

from B, a total of 188 words, so both texts are indispensable.

One day there may be a critical edition of the Arabic.

However, unless and unti l the original manuscript resurfaces,

the author's exact i ntentions will have to be deduced from

comparison of A and B. In the meantime, this revised English

edition can claim to be the only version in any language to take

full account of both the original sources.

The translation here offered is aimed at the general reader

with no prior knowledge of the Arab world; no words have

been used that cannot be found i n a good English dictionary.

A few words need a little explanation. 'Trust' has been used to

xviii

Introduction

translate waqf, the technical term for property held i n trust

under Islamic law to provide an income in perpetuity either

for an institution, such as a mosque or school, or, as i n this

novel, for the descendants of a particular family. The rationale

for such a trust is that it avoids the division of the property

between various heirs, which would otherwise be required by

Islamic law. Mahfouz worked for many years as a civil servan t

in the Ministry for Religious Trusts.

The key term futuwwa is translated as 'strongman'. Its

original meaning is 'young-manliness' , from the word Jata,

'young man ' . In the middle ages it became the name of

something between a gui ld and an order of chivalry, but by

modern ti mes this had degenerated and most strongmen had

become the protection-racketeers met with in Mahfouz's work.

It is i mportant, however, not to use a word such as 'gangster' ,

which necessarily implies someone bad, because ambiguity is

needed, especially when the term is applied to Gebelaawi and

Qaasim.

Hara is translated as 'alley', and it is worth insisting on the

fact that this is correct. Several learned critics have imagined

that it means 'quarter' or 'district' , and one has even claimed

that it is the whole of the old city. Any attentive reader wi ll

agree that i n this book 'alley' is right; it is a single thoroughfare

(chapter 67) , short enough for someone at one end to follow

what goes on at the other (chapter 104) , and narrow enough

for conversation to take place across it ( chapter 97) . Its people

live in appanments opening on to the stairways to the central

courtyards of tenement-houses. These form two facing terraces, and their flat roofs provide alternative routes from one end of the Alley to the other ( chapters 33, 60, 83) .

The hookah that the men of the Alley use for smoki ng

hashish is not the heavy narghile, which stands on the floor or

on a table, and which is smoked through a flexible tube. It is

a smaller version, in Esryptian Arabic the gow, 'coconu t', from

the shape of the brass reservoir that is held in the hand of the

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Children of Gebelaawi

smoker. A vertical stem carries the smoke from the clay bowl,