Naguib Mahfouz: The Seventh Heaven

Mahfouz’s lifelong obsession with departed spirits also marks his most recent work. The Dreams (Ahlam fatrat al-naqaha), published in English by the American University in Cairo Press in 2004, is a series of extremely brief vignettes, each said to be based on an actual dream. Like most people’s nocturnal visions, Mahfouz’s are frequently inhabited by persons long deceased — though most often they are definitely visiting from the land of the Dead, and not simply seen as they were when alive. An excellent example is his old Arabic teacher, Shaykh Muharram, who telephones the dreamer sixty years after his own passing to confess he has learned that many of the lessons he taught him had turned out to be wrong. As a result, the shaykh has come back to give him the corrections. “Having said this,” Mahfouz writes, “he laid a folder on the table, and left.” 15

And in the thirteen stories presented here, the same oneiric and unworldly forces are at work in the writer’s mind. For example, both “A Man of Awesome Power” (“al-Rajul al-qawi,” 1996), and “Forgetfulness” (“al-Nisyan,” 1984) feature recurring portentous dreams. Another piece, “The Vapor of Darkness” (“Dukhan al-zalam,” 1996) may itself be merely a nightmare — or a frightening memory. In “The Garden Passage” (“Mamarr al-Bustan,” 1984), whose name is drawn from an alley in a part of downtown Cairo famed for its secluded bars and artists’ cafés, vaguely celestial symbolism mixed with Sufism, a hint of prostitution, and the uncertain elapse of great spans of time all invoke a feeling of mystic hope and dread combined. “The Rose Garden” (“Hadiqat al-ward,” 1999) explores the conflict between the age-old Egyptian reverence for the dead and their tombs as houses for eternal life, and the modern needs of the living in mega-crowded Cairo.

Mahfouz published this story, set in one of Cairo’s surviving medieval haras (alleys, quarters), on January 16, 1994, in the women’s magazine Nisf al-dunya (Half the World), where he has debuted nearly all his new fiction since its first issue in February 1990. Nine months later, on October 14, 1994, the then eighty-two-year-old Mahfouz (born December 1911) would be stabbed in the neck, almost fatally, by a religious fanatic in an eerie echo of the fate of this story’s unfortunate victim, Hamza Qandil. The attack damaged the nerve that controls his right arm and hand, rendering him able to write little more than his name for over four years. Though by early 1999 he had partially regained his ability to handle a pen, he has lately been forced to dictate new work.

Like Qandil (whose last name means “lamp”), Mahfouz displays more learning than his peers, and his ideas have sometimes put him at odds with local traditions. And he almost paid the same price, exacted in the same way, for roughly the same reasons as his fictional bearer of light. And yet the message of this story, which later appeared in his 1999 collection Sada al-nisyan (The Echo of Forgetfulness), is somehow ambiguous.

Meanwhile, Qandil’s antagonist, Bayumi Zalat, may have been based on a real local thug of the same name that the young Mahfouz likely knew in the Darrasa district near his birthplace in the old Islamic quarter of Gamaliya — and whose grandson I encountered as he worked parking cars in the neighborhood. Curiously, Mahfouz’s own family’s tombs and many others in the Bab al-Nasr cemetery, likewise close to Gamaliya, were moved by government decree in an urban renewal scheme in the 1970s. 16When asked if “The Rose Garden” had been inspired by this event, he denied it vehemently. “No!” he said. “It is a symbolic story — simply!”

Meanwhile, the figure of Death itself materializes not only in “The Rose Garden” but also in the “The Reception Hall” (“al-Bahw,” 1996), in “The Vapor of Darkness” (“Dukhan al-zalam,” 1996), and in “Room No. 12” (“al-Hujra raqm 12,” 1973) — in the latter, once as the contractor Yusuf Qabil (“Qabil” is the Qur’anic name for Cain, the first murderer), and as Blind Sayyid the Corpse Washer. 17“The Reception Hall” also highlights Mahfouz’s abiding passion for Sufi imagery, with its moth fluttering raptly toward the flame, a metaphor favored by the great Muslim martyr Mansur al-Hallaj, crucified for heresy in 922. 18Queried jokingly if he had “been inspired by” al-Hallaj, or had resorted to “literary theft,” he chuckled. “Consider it theft,” he quipped. 19

Another spectral figure who appears more than once in these stories does so openly in “The Only Man” (“al-Rajul al-wahid,” 1996). But he might also be found more covertly in “The Disturbing Occurrences” (“al-Hawadith al-muthira,” 1979) as the preternaturally clever character with a split demonic/angelic personality, and the devilish ability to turn the words of his accusers against them with ease. A further possible clue: he possesses the one trait that in Mahfouz’s fictional universe always indicates either a grave moral defect or raving depravity — blond hair. A different kind of deviltry infests “The Haunted Wood” (“al-Ghaba al-maskuna,” 1989), an allegory about the literal demonization of dissent in an authoritarian society— amid an ambiguous setting that seems both part of this dimension, and what the narrator calls “the life of the wood.” The closing piece, “A Warning from Afar” (“Nadhir min ba‘id,” 1999) is a kind of prophecy, or a terrorist videotape from the beyond, threatening that the forces of religious fanaticism will sweep in someday to clean out the corruption of this world if we don’t watch out. Ironic from a person who was nearly killed by a similar extremism a few years before this story was published— but, as in “The Rose Garden,” such nagging nuance is another of Mahfouz’s many specialties.

All the stories in this collection of Mahfouz’s little-known fiction exploring questions of death, the afterlife, and the disturbingly metaphysical embody what German theologian Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige, 1917; English, 1923) called “the numinous.” This, as S. L. Varnado says in Haunted Presence, his 1987 book reviving Otto’s work, “can be summed up as an affective state in which the precipient — through feelings of awe, mystery and fascination — becomes aware of an objective spiritual presence.” 20

The expression “awe, mystery and fascination” derives from Otto’s Latin phrase, mysterium tremendum et fascinans. 21 That “affective state” is not only invoked by Mahfouz’s works dealing with the dead, but by his writings as a whole. Indeed, even by his very being, which exerts awe, mystery, and fascination upon all who know him— whether through his books alone, or in the perishable flesh as well.

As translator, I wish to thank Roger Allen, Hazem Azmy, Eric Banks, Brooke Comer, Shirley Johnston, Mary A. Kelly, Ben Metcalf, Abdel Aziz Nossier, Michael Ray, Everett Rowson, Tawfik Saleh, Matthew Stadler, Peter Theroux, Husayn Ukasha, Patrick Werr, and David Wilmsen for their helpful comments on the present work, and Abdalla F. Hassan and R. Neil Hewison for their very fine and proficient editing. And, as always, above all I am grateful to the author, not only for his thoughtful answers about these stories — but for everything.

This translation is dedicated to my sister, Carole Anne Huft, and her husband, David.

NOTES:

1.The lines from “If Ever You Go to Dublin Town” by Patrick Kavanagh are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.