Incendiary Circumstances (38 page)

If there is something suspect, in the end, even about Mahfouz's indignation, it is probably because it never appears to be turned against his People's own ethic of respectability. His mother figures are impossibly good and forbearing, and girls who leave the sanctuary of the home and go out to work all too often fall prey to temptation. At its best, Mahfouz's work has some of the texture and the richness of detail of the nineteenth-century masters whose influence he acknowledges—Balzac, Tolstoy, Flaubert—but even at its bleakest and most melancholy (as in
The Beginning and the End
), his writing never approximates real tragedy. Its pathos seems to spring almost entirely from a sense of violated gentility. Even for a writer with Mahfouz's skill, it is hard to create tragedy out of the scramble for respectability.

It is in the observation of the small details on which the edifices of respectability are constructed that Mahfouz is really acute about his society. What the foreign reader needs explained is the real meaning of what it is to be a "salaried employee" in Egypt, the importance of the baccalaureate examinations, what it is to be an eighth-grade functionary. These are arcane and peculiarly Egyptian details, although they have nothing to do with the Egypt of the pharaohs or Mamelukes, or with anything particularly exotic. But it is those details that make up the fabric of respectable middle-class life in Egypt, and it is Mahfouz's singular gift that he is able to transform them into the stuff of fiction.

The American University in Cairo Press has long been doing a difficult and thankless job in making good writing in Arabic available in English translation. With Mahfouz's Nobel Prize and the sale of rights to their translations, their efforts have been richly rewarded. It is to be hoped that more and still better translations will be forthcoming soon, so that a wider spectrum of modern Arabic writing will receive the kind of attention it deserves. The four novels published by Doubleday are revised versions of the original American University in Cairo translations. Two of them were written in Mahfouz's early "realistic" period.
The Beginning and the End
is the melancholy but compelling story of a family pauperized by a sudden death.
Palace Walk
is the first book of Mahfouz's Cairene trilogy, written in 1956–1957, in which each book is named after a street in the old city. The trilogy, which charts the history of a Cairene family during the period between the wars, is a chronicle of the changes that occurred in Egyptian society over that period.

Palace Walk
sets the stage for the later books; it is a depiction of what went before the changes, so to speak. The central figure in the book is a patriarch of rather extreme convictions: he has never once, in their decades-old marriage, allowed his wife to leave the house. This is a condition with which she is entirely satisfied, for she reveres her husband, except for one small thing—she longs to visit the mausoleum of Sayidna Hussein, which is down the road. One day one of her sons persuades her to venture out. She does, and for her pains she is struck by a motorcar. (Why do such terrible things happen, in Mahfouz's work, to women who leave their houses?) Worse still, the wrathful patriarch, upon discovering her dereliction, packs her off to her mother's, where she languishes, wringing her hands, until he summons her back. In the end, however, the turmoil of Egyptian politics—the last part of the book is set in the period of the 1919 riots against the British presence in Egypt—catches up with the apparently invincible patriarch and leaves him a broken man.

The novel has the feel of the sort of stories people tell about the old days, when they want their children to marvel at how much the world has come on since then. In a sense, of course, it is exactly that: Mahfouz was a very young child in the years in which his book is set, and his family had already moved out of the old part of the city. There are some perceptive observations about the psychology of patriarchy—there is a wonderful scene, for example, in which the patriarch's son, a brave and ardent nationalist, finds himself reduced to a quaking heap by the tone of his father's voice. But the reader would be better able to savor those moments, perhaps, if Mahfouz's sympathy with the patriarch were not so patent, if the book were not so pervaded by nostalgia for a time when men were men.

 

The other two novels,
The Thief and the Dogs
(1961) and
Wedding Song
(1981), date from Mahfouz's later period, which was less realistic and more experimental, and they are, frankly, awful. When the spirit moves Mahfouz to be technically adventurous, it also tends to push him away from his accustomed material, leaving him stranded in various exotic enclaves of society.
Wedding Song
is set among a group of raffish theater people who drink, gamble, take drugs, and have sex (the underworld again). A particularly disreputable couple has a son who is an idealistic young man; appalled by the lasciviousness and the immorality of his parents' circle, he exposes them in a play before staging his own death.
The Thief and the Dogs
is about ... well, it's about an idealistic sort of fellow who becomes a thief because he is shocked by how rich some people are.

Unfortunately for Doubleday, and fortunately for English readers, the most delightful of Mahfouz's translated works,
Midaq Alley,
has long been available in a good translation by Trevor Le Gassick. It has recently been reissued by the Quality Paperback Book Club, and it is more worth reading than any of Doubleday's four. The novel is set in Mahfouz's familiar world—in a street in the old city—but it lacks the portentousness of some of his other work. It
is written tongue-in-cheek, almost as self-parody, and it brims with moments of pure delight.

For instance: the homosexual café owner Kirsha—inevitably of dark and sullen aspect—is interrupted by his wife while entertaining a youth in his café. His wife marches up to the boy and screams, "Do you want to ruin my home, you rake and son of rakes ... Who am I? Don't you know me? I am your fellow-wife..." The boy escapes, and she turns upon her protesting husband and shouts, in a "voice loud enough to crumble the walls of the café," "Shut your mouth! You are the ... lavatory around here, you scarecrow, you disgrace, you rat-bag!" Among the awestruck spectators is the baker's wife, who regularly beats her husband. She turns to him now and remarks, "You're always moaning about your bad luck and asking why you're the only husband who is beaten! Did you see how even your betters are beaten?" But eventually Kirsha has his say as well. "Oh you miserable pair, why on earth should the government punish anyone who kills off people like you?" His son declares that he wants to leave home and live in a place where houses have electricity. "Electricity?" retorts Kirsha. "Thanks be to God that your mother, for all her scandals, has at least kept our house safe from electricity!"

The inhabitants of this alley are a world away from the mythologized patriarch and his family on Palace Walk.

The Nobel Prize has had an unhappy consequence for Mahfouz. Soon after the announcement, possibly as a result of the Rushdie crisis, he began to receive death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. At issue was a book he wrote in 1959 called (in its English translation)
Children of Gebelawi.
It was an allegorical novel, in which three of the principal characters were said to represent the prophets Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. The
'ulema,
the Muslim doctors of theology and religious law, declared Mahfouz's book to be offensive to Islam. The book was never published in Arabic in
Egypt, and for a while Mahfouz stopped writing altogether. But there were more books in time, and the controversy was largely forgotten—until the threats began.

 

An epoch passed in the Middle East between the late fifties and the late eighties. There is a world of difference between a group of learned scholars pronouncing an anathema and the death threats issued by bands of young men barely out of college. The evolution of the Mahfouz controversy is one very small indication of how dramatically the Middle East has changed within the lifetime of his own generation.

In Mahfouz's youth, Islam had been largely sidelined as a political ideology. In Turkey, Ataturk, with the power of the army behind him, appeared intent on pushing everything religious into the wings. During Mahfouz's college years in the late twenties and early thirties, the principal intellectual influence on him was a group of nationalists who had set themselves the task of creating a national culture for Egypt that would be distinctively Egyptian. The path they took lay in emphasizing Egypt's pharaonic and Hellenistic roots, to the point of disavowing all connections with the Arab and Islamic world. It was a time when everything was thinkable in Egypt and nothing was blasphemy.

If
Children of Gebelawi
had been written in those years, it would probably have passed without comment: every writer in Egypt, it would seem, was writing an allegory of some kind. But the book was written in the late fifties, when the political and religious climate in the Middle East had been profoundly altered by the establishment of Israel and then by the Nasserite revolution in Egypt. In Egypt, Islam acquired a new vitality and assertiveness, and the religious establishment was keen to remind everybody of that fact. But even then the
'ulema
followed procedure in condemning the book. There were no calls for bloodshed or retribution, just a clear message that those who persisted in the intellectual habits of the thirties would now have to contend with the doctors of religious law and their followers.

But now even the learned doctors are being slowly consumed by the fires that were kindled at that time. They have not the remotest connection with the bearded young men who now speak in the name of Islam in Egypt; they have themselves been declared unbelievers, pagans—even the most learned of the sheiks at Al-Azhar, for centuries the theological center of Sunni Islam. In 1977 one of their number, Mohammad al-Dhahabi, a religious scholar and a minister of the government department in the Ministry of Religious Endowments where Mahfouz worked for much of his life, was kidnapped and killed by a fundamentalist group called the Society of Muslims. At the subsequent trial, conducted by the army, the presiding general in so many words declared the
'ulema
incompetent.

The scholars' only recourse now is to call the preachings of the fundamentalists un-Islamic, as indeed they are by scholastic standards. The Society of Muslims have effectively scorned Muslim history: they have rejected all of medieval Muslim scholarship, including the great jurists who set up the four major schools of Islamic law, and they have also claimed the right to interpret the Koran. A century ago it is they who would have been counted the blasphemers, and any one of their current claims would probably have cost them their lives. They have, in effect, vacated the whole concept of Islam as we know it, for Islam is a history as well as a doctrine and a practice. Yet today, for millions of Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere, it is they, and not the sheiks of Al-Azhar, who are the true Muslims.

 

The power of the fundamentalists has grown so phenomenally in Egypt over the past few years that they are now in a position to fight pitched battles with the police. Every so often they even claim to have "liberated" parts of Cairo and some other cities. Why, then, should these fundamentalists revive the charges brought against Mahfouz by their enemies, the learned doctors of religion? It must be the first matter on which they have been in agreement with them in several years. Mahfouz's book is evidently
a pretext: their hostility almost certainly stems from his public support of the Camp David accords.

In responding to the threats against him, Mahfouz has shown an exemplary courage. Despite the ominous drift of the political life of his city, he has turned down the government's offer of bodyguards and has refused to change his life in any way. For the time being he appears to have faced down his enemies and shamed them into leaving him alone. In doing so, he has demonstrated the kind of heroism that is both the most necessary and the most rare in his volatile corner of the world: the quiet kind.

I
T WAS A WHILE
before the others at the table had finished pointing out the celebrities who had come to the restaurant for the gala benefit: the Broadway actresses, the Seventh Avenue designers, and the world's most famous rock star's most famous ex-wife, a woman to whom fame belonged like logic to a syllogism, axiomatically. Before the list was quite done, I caught a glimpse of something, a flash of saffron at the other end of the room, and I had to turn and look again.

Peering through a thicket of reed-necked women, I saw that I'd been right: yes, it was a monk in saffron robes, it really was a Buddhist monk—Tibetan, I was almost sure. He was sitting at the head of a table on the far side of the room, spectral in the glow of the restaurant's discreetly hidden lighting. But he was real. His robes were real robes, not drag, not a costume. He was in his early middle age, with clerically cropped hair and a pitted, wind-ravaged face. He happened to look up and noticed me staring at him. He looked surprised to see me: his chopsticks described a slow interrogative arc as they curled up to his mouth.

I was no less surprised to see him. He was probably a little less out of place among the dinner jackets and designer diamonds than I, in my desert boots and sweater, but only marginally so.

He glanced at me again, and I looked quickly down at my plate.
On it sat three dumplings decorated with slivers of vegetables. The dumplings looked oddly familiar, but I couldn't quite place them.

"Who were you looking at?" said the friend who'd taken me there, an American writer and actress who had spent a long time in India and, in gratitude to the subcontinent, had undertaken to show me the sights of New York.

I gestured foolishly with a lacquered chopstick.

She laughed. "Well, of course," she said. "It's his show—he probably organized the whole thing. Didn't you know?"