NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (56 page)

The stabbing came about in this way. Mahfouz had an informal weekly meeting with his pals in Cairo. They were mainly old men and called themselves “the vagabonds”
(harafish).
But a few weeks before, there had been a quarrel—a trifling matter but it kept Mahfouz at home the following week. When the dispute was patched up, Mahfouz was with his pals again—and that was the night the assassin came for him. He said he was an admirer. He was a member of Sheik Omar’s
Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya
, the fundamentalist Islamic Group.

“If you come here tomorrow at five, you will find him,” Mrs. Mahfouz told them.

No one, not even she, suspected that someone would try to kill Mahfouz. In any case, Mahfouz made no concessions. He was fearless. He walked every day in the open air. Everyone who knew him, knew his movements. He was a familiar figure in Cairo, he walked all over the city, and he lived without a bodyguard. There was a feckless doorman at his apartment house but that man was half-asleep at the time of the attack.

The attacker approached Mahfouz the following day, just before five o’clock, as Mahfouz was getting into a car. Seeing him, Mahfouz in a reflex of courtesy turned to greet him. The man drew out a knife with a seven-inch blade and thrust down, stabbing Mahfouz at the base of his neck on the right side, cutting the carotid artery and slicing the radial nerve.

In his haste, the attacker forgot to cry out “Allah-u-akhbar!” and this omission (so he told police afterwards) explained why he had failed in his mission to murder Mahfouz. For this lapse, Allah delayed the death. He remembered to say it afterwards. “That is why I got away.” Other people said the man was simply unprofessional, since he had used a lowly kitchen knife for this important deed.

“I am being chased by a thief,” the man said to the taxi driver, who, unsuspecting, bore him away.

Meanwhile, Mahfouz had fallen and blood was pumping out of his
severed artery and onto Sharia Nil. The man who had come to give Mahfouz a ride compressed the wound, stanching the flow, and the wounded man was hurried to the Military Hospital, just a few minutes away.

Bleeding profusely but still standing, Mahfouz said to the doctor, “There’s some blood here. I think you should look at it.”

He was immediately given two pints of blood, and during surgery another eight pints.

In another part of Cairo, the attacker was caught and held by some people whose suspicions were aroused by his strange behavior. The man did not deny what he had tried to do.

He said, “If I am released I will try again to kill him.”

In the newspaper
Al-Ahram
, Hasan Al-Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front, said, “The Egyptian fundamentalists’ use of force is a legal and honorable action, as were the attacks in Tel Aviv [the recent bus bomb] by Hamas.”

The most enlightened view—and it underlined the paradoxes of the issue—was that of Professor Edward Said, who wrote in
Al-Ahram
, “Mahfouz’s stabbing highlights the total bankruptcy of a movement that prefers killing to dialogue, intolerance to debate, and paranoia in favor of real politics.”

But the blame had to be shared: “It is hypocritical now to say to Mahfouz’s assailants only that they are crude fanatics who have no respect for intellectuals or artistic expression, without at the same time noting that some of Mahfouz’s work has already been officially banned in the Arab world. One cannot have it both ways. Either one is for real freedom of speech or against it. There is little basic distinction in the end between authorities who reserve the right for themselves to ban, imprison, or otherwise punish writers who speak their minds, and those fanatics who take to stabbing a famous author just because he seems to be an offense to their religion.”

Children of the Alley
had the distinction of being banned in every Arab country, and many of those same countries included other Mahfouz novels in this ban. Small wonder, as Professor Said had suggested, that the fundamentalists seemed justified in their murderous intentions.

“He’s glad to see you,” Raymond said. “I told him you helped get him into the American Academy.”

“He got himself in,” I said.

The smiling man, supine in his bed, his neck bandaged, his hand in a splint, that greeted me in the intensive-care ward did not seem the dangerous man who had been vilified all over the Arab world. His expression was serene, his eyes clear. He was weary from what could have been a mortal wound, but he welcomed his visitors with animated conversation. He was modest, he teased, he even laughed and, soon after, this man who had been stabbed by a religious nut with a kitchen knife said, “It hurts when I laugh.”

Raymond introduced me. He said, “This is the man I told you about. He was one of the people who supported your application to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

Mahfouz began to laugh a little as Raymond repeated this in Arabic, as though a witticism had occurred to him that he was anxious to deliver.

“Raymond’s exaggerating,” I said.

Mahfouz said—his first words a joke—“I am the first person to be stabbed for being a member of the American Academy!”

He then uttered a dry chattering laugh that convulsed him and caused him pain. He was in a ward with about ten other men, all of them bandaged, with drip-feeds, and monitoring devices, and with plastic curtains around their beds. But Mahfouz’s intelligence, and his sweetness, shone in his face.

“How are you feeling?”

“I can’t write,” he said, and swung his splinted right hand on its sling. “That is bad.”

Dr. Yahyah el-Salameh said, “The hand problem was caused by nerve damage. The knife hit the radial nerve. So his hand is paralyzed.”

“My eyesight is bad, and I can’t hear,” he said. “That wasn’t the attack. That is because of my diabetes.”

Some of this was in English, some in Arabic. His accent could have been the accent of one of his characters that he had described: “like the smell of cooking that lingers in a badly washed pan.” Raymond stood behind me, translating. Mahfouz understood most of what I asked him, though from time to time he needed Raymond’s help.

“Tell the people at the American Academy that I am very grateful,” he said, clutching my hand. “Please thank them.”

“I know they’re worried about your health.”

“It was a shock, but—” He smiled, he laughed a little; he did not want to dwell on the attack.

“What do you think about those people?”

“I feel no hatred,” he said, slowly, in English. “But—”

He was gasping, having a hard time getting the words out. Dr. Yahyah looked anxious, but Mahfouz waved him away.

“—it is very bad to try to kill someone for a book you haven’t read.”

He was sniggering again, and seeing me laugh, he kept on talking, gesturing with his wounded hand.

“If you read the book and don’t like it,” he managed to say, stopping and starting, “then, okay, maybe you have a reason to stab the author. Eh? Eh?”

It was as though he was turning the whole attack into a violent absurdity. Something of the same kind occurs in his strange story “At the Bus Stop,” where the passive onlookers to a series of disconnected intrusions and sudden incidents all die in a senseless hail of bullets. That story and some others in the collection
The Time and the Place
have the logic and distortion of a nightmare, a blend of comedy and horror and the lack of logic that life confronts us with. He was saying: As a shy and peaceful man—elderly, deaf, half-blind, diabetic—wasn’t it ludicrous that he had been knifed? He was old and physically shrunken, like the character of whom he wrote: “There’s nothing left for death to devour—a wrinkled face, sunken eyes, and sharp bones.”

“But I am sad,” he said.

And he explained that the whole thing was pathetic. This was silly and futile. The fundamentalists were, most of all, ignorant.

“I thought they had learned something. I thought they were better than before. But they are as bad as always.”

“I think he is getting tired,” Dr. Yahyah said. “Maybe you—”

As though defying the doctor, Mahfouz said, “Fight thought with thought—not thought with violence.”

It was what he had said when defending Salman Rushdie against the supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The effort of his speaking, much of this in English, had wearied him. He saluted us. He said he would be better soon—“Come back to Egypt then—we’ll talk”—and he gripped my hand in his left hand and tugged it with affection.

Afterwards, I realized that I had been the one who had raised the religious issue and harped on the attack. But in retrospect I had the feeling that Mahfouz would have been much happier talking about something else—his work, perhaps, or Islamic aesthetics, or the weather, or Alexandria, or the French philosopher Bergson (who had worked on a theory of humor), or music, for which—before his deafness—Mahfouz had had a passion. He did not regard himself as a victim. His fatalism was part of his humor, and his modesty, and most of all it made him fearless.

My train back to Alexandria was El-Isbani, “The Spaniard,” though no one could explain why it was called that. It was an express, it rushed across the Delta, stopping two or three times, and Alexandria on the return seemed serene, as Mahfouz had described it: “Here is where love is. Education. Cleanliness. And hope.”

I had a drink at the Cecil and walked down the Corniche in the darkness, listening to the waves lap at the shore. “A great blue mass, heaving, locked in as far as the Fort of Sultan Qaitbay by the Corniche wall and the giant stone jetty arm thrusting into the sea.” This is Mahfouz, in his novel
Miramar.
“Frustrated. Caged. These waves slopping dully landwards have a sullen blue black look that continually promises fury. The sea. Its guts churn with flotsam and secret death.”

Alexandria made sense to me now. It was not a derelict or threatening place. It was an ancient city, founded by Alexander the Great around 332
B.C.
, and rising and falling with the fortunes of this end of the Mediterranean, it had been many different cities since then. Mahfouz had been born in 1911 and had witnessed the violent 1919 revolution, the various occupations—Greek, Turkish, British; the Second World War, the rise of Nasser, the fall of Nasser, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the humiliation of the Israeli Six Day War of 1967. He had seen E. M. Forster come and go; he had been in Alexandria in the late 1940s, when the action of Durrell’s novels had unfolded. He had watched these writers and their characters depart. And it was right that after the romantics and the fabulists had finished with the city, and the fantasies had ceased to be credible, the city
had been reclaimed by a realist like Mahfouz, who possessed sympathy, and alarming humor.

I slept in my cabin on the
Akdeniz
, and woke exhausted and enervated by my dreams. Then I went into town again, bought the newspaper, and went to a cafe to read it. An Alexandrian joined me, Mr. Mohammed Ali.

“Cairo people are not like Alexandria people,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“We are Mediterranean people,” he said. “We are used to so many other nations, so many other different people.”

“But everyone in Alexandria is the same now. Isn’t that so?”

“We are people of the shoreline and the water,” he protested. “We have maybe three million people. Cairo has fifteen million!”

While I was in Alexandria, on the evening of my third day, the Arabic newspaper
Al-Ahali
(The People) published Naguib Mahfouz’s offending novel,
Children of the Alley
, in a special edition that sold out within a few hours of its hitting the street. “After 25 years of its absence from the Egyptian people!” the headline said. The whole book, in thirty broadsheet pages, had been printed without permission, infringing Mahfouz’s copyright. At first glance, it seemed a challenge to the hard-liners, but Raymond Stock had lived in Egypt long enough to find a sinister motive possible: Remember when Mao started the Hundred Flowers Campaign in order to get intellectuals and rebels out of the woodwork? he said. Well, this might be something similar, the publication of the blaspheming novel encouraged by the fundamentalist sheiks, to see who would applaud it. In this way, identifying the infidels, and rousing potential stabbers of Mahfouz. Whatever, it was an event, and it seemed to electrify the city. All at once, in the space of a few hours, everyone in Alexandria was reading Mahfouz’s novel.

“All gone,” the newsboys told me.

Looking for someone to help me buy a copy, I met a man who had bought five. They were at his house, he said, or he would have given me one.

“I spent forty pounds [about $14] on one copy last year!”

This man, Mohammed Okiel, asked one of the newsboys who had turned me away earlier, claiming he did not have a copy. Browbeaten by Mohammed Okiel, he found a copy of the special edition under some movie magazines. He had the decency to say “Sorry” to me in English.

“He is ashamed,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed was a lawyer. We found a quiet backstreet cafe, where young men were puffing on hookahs, and we drank a cup of coffee and talked about Mahfouz. I did not say that I had seen him in the hospital in Cairo—it was too improbable, and it was boasting. Besides, I wanted to know what other people thought.

“Naguib Mahfouz is a great man,” Mohammed said. “And he is a very great writer.”

“Have you read the novel?”

“Yes,
Aulad Haratina
is a great novel. I like it very much,” he said. “All the prophets are in it. Jesus, Moses, Mohammed. But it is also about us—we people.”

“Are you a religious person?”

“No. I have no religion,” he said. “Religion is false. Christian, Muslim, Jewish—all false.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because they cause trouble.”

“Don’t they bring peace and understanding, too?”

“People should be friends. I think it is easier to be friends without religion,” he said. “You can have peace without religion. Peace is easier, too, without religion.”

The texture of Alexandria, all the metaphors, and the romance and the layers of history were irrelevant to that simple reflection. It seemed a salutary and humane thought, too, because in a matter of hours the ship’s lines were loosed from the quayside, and we sailed out of this sea-level city, passed the lovely palace of Ras el Tin, and the old yacht club, and the lighthouses, and the ships at anchor. As the sun set directly behind our stern, we plowed east along the crescent of the Delta, towards Israel.