Drunk with Resignation

Naguib Mahfouz has been praised by many as a 'Dickens of the Cairo cafés' and the 'Balzac of Egypt'. Now the Nobel laureate's 1965 novel Al-Shahhad has been translated into German. Read Fahimeh Farsaie's review of a novel about the mid-life crisis of an Egyptian lawyer

​​Naguib Mahfouz' latest novel has just been translated into German, under the title Der Rausch (Engl.: Intoxication). The book was first published in Cairo in 1965 as Al-Shahhad, of which the English title is a direct translation: The Beggar. But the protagonist Omar, a smart ex-Socialist lawyer, begs for nothing. Instead, he is tormented by a mysterious "intoxication", which gradually robs him of his sanity and his connection to the real world.

Back in the old days, before the Egyptian revolution of 1952, he had felt as tough and invulnerable as steel; with his friends Osman and Mustafa, he had wanted "to bring into being the ideal world of tomorrow" - and they might have succeeded, if only a stray bullet hadn't hit Osman in the leg. Osman is captured, while Mustafa and Omar manage to escape.

Under torture, Osman refuses to crack and betray his friends; but after his release, he still wants to conquer the world. Meanwhile, Omar is just about to leave it: after abandoning his pregnant wife, he throws himself into a series of affairs with prostitutes and bar-girls, before finally fleeing to a shack in the middle of nowhere. There, he waits for the day "when memories of the past will no longer besiege him".

Mahfouz' novels of ideas

The Egyptian literary critic Hamdi Sakkut assigns the novel Al-Shahhad to the "third period" in Mahfouz' literary career: the "novels of ideas". This period began in 1959 with the publication of Children of Gebalawi, and was followed by a series of allegorical fictions.

His "first phase", by contrast, had consisted of historical tales set in the Pharaonic period. The Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911. Like other great Arabic writers, the young Mahfouz produced several novels about the Pharaohs. He wrote the earliest tales while still at school, and these were followed by others in the early 1930s. In the colonised Egypt of the time, depictions of the splendour of ancient Egyptian civilisation were interpreted as a signpost towards a progressive, independent future.

The period of critical realism

From 1945 to 1952, and then from 1957 onwards, Mahfouz wrote a series of books that Sakkut characterises as "novels of life". Mahfouz himself has described his work of this period as "critical realism"; referring to his completion of the trilogy in April 1952, he claimed he "would have had enough material for seven more novels in the same critical-realistic mode."

During this period, Mahfouz was more preoccupied with contemporary realities - and searching for the meaning of life. His works deal with an extremely wide range of topics, from religion, science, love and everyday life to the ideals behind the revolutions of 1919 and 1952.

The Cairo Trilogy was published in 1956-57, but Mahfouz had already written all three volumes between 1946 and 1952, i.e. before the Revolution. Bina al-Kasrain, Kasr asch-Schauk, As-Sukkarijja: each volume of the trilogy is named after a street in a petty-bourgeois quarter of the Egyptian capital. (Titles of the novels in English: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street.)

Mahfouz' natural milieu: the Old Town of Cairo

The trilogy describes the history of a middle-class family in Cairo during the first half of the 20th century; and Mahfouz found the models for his characters in the milieu he knew best and loved most: the Old Town of Cairo, with its coffee houses, intellectuals and small businesses.

The writer himself was born in Jamaliyya, one of the oldest quarters of the Egyptian capital, and he has never left Cairo. He walked through the narrow lanes of this quarter under the watchful eyes of his neighbours; in the afternoons, he met his friends in the coffee houses here; and eventually, he wrote more than 40 novels about these people.

Losing and regaining the critical edge

After the Egyptian revolution of 1952, Mahfouz wrote nothing for five years. It seemed as though Mahfouz, like the young revolution itself, would have to find a new direction. "Once the old society was gone", explained Mahfouz in an interview, "I also lost all desire to criticise it. There was nothing more that I wanted to say or write. It went on like that from 1952 till 1957. And I really thought the whole [writing] thing was over and done with, until I eventually found myself writing Aulad Haratina (Children of Gebalawi), which was published in 1959."

In the novel Children of Gebalawi, Mahfouz places the "children of God" – such as Adam, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and others – in a family relationship dominated by violence and murder. As the subject matter was so sensitive, the novel was originally published in Lebanon rather than Egypt; and nearly all of Mahfouz' works since then have shown a critical attitude towards Islam. But although Mahfouz is a fierce opponent of religious extremism, he also believes that Islam still bears a universal message.

Inspired by western minds

From an early age, his contact with Western streams of thought allowed Mahfouz to distance himself from traditional ways of thinking. These "modern" ideas were brought back to Egypt in the 1930s by writers and social critics (Taha Hussein, Lutfi as Syyad, Muhammed Hassan Haykal) who had spent years studying in Europe.

These intellectuals made a deep and lasting impression on the literary and social identity of Naguib Mahfouz, as he came into contact with the leading minds of Western civilisation - from Darwin, Kant, Marx and Freud to Tolstoy, Ibsen and H. G. Wells.

Egypt's attitude towards democracy in the Nasser era

Mahfouz' growing sympathy for Modernist ideas was greatly strengthened by his work in the Ministry of Culture (from 1954 to 1966) and as Director of the state-run Egyptian National Film Society (until 1968). These positions enabled him to acquire a clear and well-founded impression of the spectrum of political opinion amongst Egyptian intellectuals of the time – and to construct the backgrounds to his socially critical novels.

In Adrift on the Nile and The Beggar, he settled his accounts with the Nasserites. As Naguib Mahfouz and his friends saw it, the Nasser regime had been unable to solve Egyptian society's most fundamental problem – its attitude to democracy. Torture, repression and arbitrary violence had thrown the Egyptian people into a state of hopelessness and terror, while the country's enlightened intellectuals were confused and helpless.

Mahfouz: a champion of modern-day enlightenment

Omar, the protagonist of The Beggar, is one of these intellectuals: he sinks into a morass of misery and despair, so intoxicated with resignation that he neglects every opportunity to ensure his survival. In the end, he is shot dead by a Secret Service agent. It's an astonishing feat: the characterisation is so assured and psychologically convincing that the ending seems inescapable and utterly plausible.

And this ambitious and controversial novel is also touchingly and demonstratively symbolic: in describing the life, resignation and death of the ex-socialist and ex-lawyer Omar, Mahfouz passes judgement on an entire historical epoch. The Beggar is a splendid literary achievement, and it underscores Mahfouz' reputation as a master of the Egyptian novel and a champion of modern-day enlightenment.

Fahimeh Farsaie

© Qantara.de 2003

Translation from German: Aingeal Flanagan

Find more information on Mahfouz at the following sites
Egyptian Ministry of Information
Nobel e-Museum