A Writer for the Ages
Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian novelist who died last week at the ripe old age of 94, was first and above all the quintessential Cairene. It was Cairo that gave him his material, and it was its charm and disappointments that nourished his fiction. In an astonishingly productive and long career that spanned more than six decades of writing, and bequeathed Arabic and Egyptian letters more than 50 works of dazzling fiction, Cairo's alleyways, and Cairo's tumult, remained the inspiration of that immensely wise and decent man. There may have been one or two works that were set in Alexandria; there were works of historical allegory set against the background of ancient Egypt. But Cairo was the canvas on which he drew.
Arabs beyond Egypt may claim Mahfouz as the sole Arab Nobel laureate in literature. But the man never ventured into neighboring Arab lands. Mahfouz was an Egyptian who cast a skeptical glance at Egypt's Arab vocation. That pan-Arab idea that came to Egypt in the era of the legendary leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the 1950s and 1960s, and plunged it into Arab fights beyond its borders, was not a Mahfouzian calling. Born in 1911, he had been given an entirely different inheritance. He would have been 40 years of age when the Free Officers' Revolution sought to recast the life of Egypt. His generation had been given a firm sense of the country's history-its distinctiveness, its pharaonic heritage, the early leap that Egypt took into statehood and modernity in the 19th century, the Sisyphean quest of its politically literate and sensitive classes for national independence and for a secular political order. Mahfouz was an impressionable boy of 8 when his country erupted into open revolution against British rule. He felt intensely his country's wounds, and his most sharply drawn characters were young idealists who never gave in to despair and never gave up on their country's struggle for self-rule. He belonged to that rare breed of liberal nationalists who fought the West but passionately admired its culture, books, and ideas.
Not for this man of incredible moral clarity were the furies of the fight with Israel that would consume Egypt until Anwar Sadat's diplomacy took Egyptians out of the crippling captivity and burden of that futile struggle. Mahfouz gave the peace of Camp David his avid support; this put him at odds with the vast majority of the literary and intellectual class in Egypt. But he never wavered; he knew the terrible price his country paid for recurrent wars it could not win. Always with Mahfouz, the gentility of manners and the grace of expression concealed a stubborn sense of the proper order of things.
Dreams. There came a time, in old age, in a cultural landscape that pitted the authoritarian regime against an angry breed of Islamists, that nostalgia for a simpler and a better Egypt became a Mahfouzian trademark. Things had been better, he said, when Egyptians still believed that they had a shot at modernity. This is the way he put it to a visiting American journalist a dozen years back: "We sat in the coffeehouses late into the night and discussed the world. We did not have to worry about what life would bring us the following day. We could choose our political party, and we could choose our government. We had the hope to rule and to have a chance. But the young men of today don't have our hopes and our opportunities. They also don't have our dreams."
It was vintage Mahfouz that these forgiving words were made shortly after one of these unsettled young men of Egypt, an Islamist who had never read a line of Mahfouz's fiction, had stabbed the great novelist in the neck, paralyzing his writing hand. This happened in 1994, and what "writing" remained for Mahfouz would now be dictated to his countless devotees. At his funeral, Egyptians wept for him, and perhaps for their troubled land. In seeing him to his resting place, in the Cairo neighborhood where he was born, Egyptians no doubt allowed themselves a moment's nostalgia for an irretrievable past of far greater grace and mercy than the angry world that now contains their lives. "The land, the land is full of bigotry," an old character, clearly standing in for Mahfouz, is made to say in a novella written in 1985. Egyptians recognize the sad truth of that remark about the brittle temper of their land.
This story appears in the September 11, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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