Naguib Mahfouz: The Seventh Heaven

Yet, as viewed from within the Arab political scene since World War II, Mahfouz — who has denounced the Nazis since their heyday, and who has told this writer that “I really miss” the Jews of Egypt 9(all but a handful of whom left in the 1950s and ’60s) — actually reverses here the popular order of villainy in his neighborhood. Throughout the Middle East, Balfour — whose declaration led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and later (as well as the establishment of a haven for Jews persecuted throughout the world) — is widely seen as sinister. Yet Hitler — who millions of Arabs believed would “liberate” them from either British or French colonial rule — has unfortunately been seen as a hero by many in the region. Moreover, in “The Seventh Heaven,” Mahfouz makes a sort of benevolent secular prophet out of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), the ruthless founder of Soviet Communism and instigator of an enormous, and merciless, civil war throughout the Russian empire. He uses a common comparison between the allegedly just and saintly figure of Lenin and the malignant menace of his successor, Stalin. This view was and probably still is popular among many who consider themselves socialist — and Mahfouz still holds it today. 10

British philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who visited Moscow in 1920 to conduct research as a socialist on the new Bolshevist system established in formerly Czarist Russia, draws a different parallel entirely — between Lenin and the nineteenth-century Liberal statesman William Gladstone (1809–1898). In Unpopular Essays (1950), Russell recalls:

Of the two, I would say that Gladstone was the more unforgettable as a personality…. When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, “and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree — ha! ha! ha!” His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold. 11

Whatever one’s own views, Mahfouz dexterously deploys the series of afterworld scenes in “The Seventh Heaven” to convey, in extremely brief, deft strokes, his feelings about many of his country’s — as well as the world’s — most influential figures. In the course of following the poetically interchangeable personae of the story’s initial hero (Raouf Abd-Rabbuh) and villain (Anous Qadri) as they each return to earth “condemned” to live once again, Mahfouz has more and more fun with the destinies of the exalted dead. They include a number of Egypt’s rulers (such as the “first to bring the news that God is one,” Akhenaten (r. ca. 1372–1355 B.C.), who are each assigned as earthly guides to prominent national personalities living at the time the story was written — some of whom are still with us today. There is even an incongruous parallel drawn between Mahatma Gandhi and the early Muslim general Khalid bin Walid (d. 642), who defeated the Byzantines at Yarmouk in 636, clearing the way for the stupendous expansion of Islam in the decades that followed.

Raouf’s persistent queries disclose the individual verdicts on many major actors. These include a leader of at least two uprisings in Cairo against Napoleon, Umar Makram (1755–1822), dispatched to guide the (still active) newspaper columnist, memoirist, and travel writer Anis Mansur (b. 1924). Another patriotic icon, Ahmad Urabi, leader of the 1882 military revolt that prompted prolonged British control of Egypt, is sent to guide Lewis Awad (1914–1990), the prominent poet, novelist, and critic. Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), a founder of the National Party, serves Fathi Radwan (1911–1988), an activist in the fascist-inspired Young Egypt movement who later served under Nasser as a minister of information and diplomat. Muhammad Farid (1868–1919), Kamil’s successor at the National Party’s helm, is assigned to the founder of modern Egypt’s greatest construction firm, Osman Ahmed Osman (1917–1999). Only one of the persons that Raouf asks about, Sa‘d Zaghlul — Mahfouz’s lifelong idol for his role in the early nationalist movement in Egypt — is sent upward to the Second Heaven without having first to do penance as a guide on earth, “because of his triumph over his own human weakness!”

But Zaghlul’s successor, Mustafa al-Nahhas — presumably because he was tainted by numerous scandals during his time as Wafd Party leader after Zaghlul, and because he was made prime minister with the aid of British tanks in February 1942—gets off less lightly. First he is sent back down to guide Anwar al-Sadat (still alive at the time this story appeared). But after Sadat’s successful military assault on the supposedly impregnable Bar-Lev Line in Israeli-occupied Sinai on October 6, 1973, al-Nahhas is finally allowed to join Zaghlul in the Second Heaven. This neatly permits Mahfouz to unabashedly praise Sadat, the self-styled “Hero of War and Peace,” while exonerating the most popular historical figures in his own favorite political party (the Wafd), Zaghlul and al-Nahhas. The censors (and Sadat himself) no doubt took note.

One of the most telling historical cameos is that of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), who was reviled in Egypt for not pressing one of the basic principles enshrined in his famous Fourteen Points — the self-determination of peoples — upon the British and French empires in the Paris Peace Conference organized by the Allies after World War I. Strangely, in “The Seventh Heaven,” Wilson — who did succeed in founding the League of Nations, yet was unable to get the U.S. Congress to approve America’s membership in it — is chosen as the spiritual guide for Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987), Mahfouz’s own acknowledged mentor and author of Egypt’s first nationalist novel, Return of the Spirit (‘Awdat al-ruh, 1933).

Raouf Abd-Rabbuh asks Abu about Sadat’s former patron and immediate predecessor, Gamal Abd al-Nasser. Abu tells him, “He is now guiding al-Qaddafi.” In other words, Mahfouz is mocking Nasser by making him serve the mercurial young colonel who seized power in Libya one year before the Egyptian dictator-colonel’s own death in 1970. After all, Mahfouz seems to remind us, al-Qaddafi’s idol is Nasser himself; at least in part, we can probably thank Nasser’s guidance for the survival of the erratic leader in Tripoli through his shaky early days in power.

Raouf’s greatest shock comes when Abu reveals to him that his mother is none other than Rayya, who, with her sister, Sakina, and their respective husbands, had murdered at least thirty women in Alexandria for their jewelry and other valuables by luring them to their homes. Mahfouz wrote the scenario for a renowned 1953 film, Rayya wa Sakina (directed by the legendary Salah Abu Seif) about the frightening pair of nefarious forty-somethings and their capture in 1921. 12

Four years after “The Seventh Heaven” appeared, Mahfouz published a powerful, if peculiar, novel-in-dialogue, Amam al-‘arsh (Before the Throne, 1983). In Amam al-‘arsh, Mahfouz hauls three score of Egypt’s former rulers, from Mina (the possibly apocryphal unifier of ancient Egypt in the First Dynasty), to Anwar al-Sadat, before the Osiris Court for judgment of their performance in power. Asked if “The Seventh Heaven” may have led in any way to his writing Amam al-‘arsh, Mahfouz would only say, “Not necessarily.” 13Yet the Egyptian leaders who star in the foggy firmament of this “long short story,” as the author describes it, 14had their first taste of Mahfouzian justice in its pages, under the guidance of a priest — however deracinated — from ancient Thebes.

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