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By Judith L. Brown
In 1988, Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arab author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he is still considered by many to be the Arab world’s foremost novelist. Mahfouz died August 30 at the age of 94. Newspapers all across the country, including the Daily News, carried obituaries full of praise for his life and works.
For me the news of Mahfouz’s death was a poignant coincidence, for I had just finished reading the Cairo trilogy — his masterwork — the evening before. “Palace Walk,” “Palace of Desire,” and “Sugar Street,” known collectively as the Cairo trilogy, had been my main summer reading project. My book group, but not me, read “Palace Walk” several years ago. I started out playing “catch up,” then got caught up in this saga of an upper-middle class conservative Muslim family from about 1910 through the early 1950s. In the end, I read the whole fascinating trilogy.
I think these books — and undoubtedly Mahfouz’s other novels too — have a lot to offer American readers in the early 21st century as we attempt to keep our families strong in the midst of an ever-changing world around us, to live side by side with compassion with people of different faiths, to understand the rise of fundamentalist religions all around the world, and to adjust to living in the presence of ongoing terrorist threats that all too often have ties to fundamentalist religion and nationalist movements.
The Cairo trilogy centers on three generations in the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad, a merchant who lives in old Cairo, and his second wife Amina. Al-Sayyid Ahmad rules his family according to a strict and very conservative Muslim creed — much more conservative than that of his friends and colleagues — while directing his own behavior according to the pursuit of pleasure. As a result, al-Sayyid Ahmad lives a double life: authoritarian, humorless and rigid at home; jovial, generous and libertine away from home. Meanwhile Amina, a submissive and pious woman, is kept cloistered in the family home, where she oversees the family’s daily routine.
Around the al-Sayyid Ahmad family are other peripheral families — families of friends and neighbors, families of the children’s school chums, eventually the families of in-laws. There are also some important extra-familial communities, most importantly the community of entertainers and prostitutes, women who occupy much of the time that al-Sayyid Ahmad and his friends spend away from home.
Within this rich panoply of day-to-day life, children grow up and choose careers, search for suitable husbands and wives, and adjust to births and deaths and divorces. Increasingly, the second and third generations also search for meaningful modes of civic engagement and political activism as Egypt chafes under British occupation and quests for independence.
Inevitably, change encroaches and life adapts. Mahfouz’s treatment of women and the slow, agonizing, but eventually significant changes in their roles and status are particularly fascinating. A son marries a former prostitute and she quietly insists on being treated with dignity and respect. A daughter-in-law opts to continue working as a journalist after her marriage. Al-Sayyid Ahmad dies from advancing age and unhealthy living, and the story continues on. It continues on until Amina dies also, a subtle recognition that, invisible and submissive as she may have seemed throughout the trilogy, she was the matriarch of this family, and the family chronicle was not finished until the lives of both patriarch and matriarch were done.
The Arabic tradition is rich in poetry. The novel, however, is a much less common or familiar medium. Mahfouz read Western literature widely and avidly — Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust and others — and then set about writing novels in Arabic. Over the course of his long life, he wrote more than 30 novels (in addition to short stories, plays and screenplays) and is credited with having made the novel “accessible” to Arabic readers.
In so doing, he also made accessible to those of us in the West a realistic and richly detailed portrait of the daily lives of ordinary people in Cairo during a formative period in the history of modern Egypt, ordinary people living in a particular context yet dealing with the same issues that crop up in all our lives.
What a wonderful contribution to the family of man — to all humankind.
* Judith L. Brown is an economist and director of the Idaho Center on Budget and Tax Policy. She lives in Moscow with her family and can be reached at jlbrown@turbonet.com.
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