Naguib Mahfouz - Khan Al-Khalili

The Akif family moves to Khan al-Khalili from the suburb of al-Sakakini, a change that is in the opposite direction to that of the one Mahfouz himself made as a child. Having been born and grown up in al-Gamaliya, equally close to the al-Husayn shrine, his father moved the family to the more rural (at that time, at least) suburb of Abbasiya. However, as any number of articles and television programs have pointed out, Mahfouz never lost his deep and abiding affection for the quarter in which he grew up, and evidence of that is abundant in the descriptions to be found on the pages of Khan al-Khalili , as well as other novels penned during the 1940s and into the ’50s, culminating in the trilogy, Bayn al-qasrayn, Qasr al-shawq (1957; Palace of Desire , 1991), and al-Sukkariya (1957; Sugar Street , 1992). Many too are the photographs that show Mahfouz, by now the well-known Egyptian novelist, sitting in the Fishawi Café in Khan al-Khalili that, like its analogue, the Zahra Café in the novel Khan al-Khalili , lies in the shadow of the al-Husayn shrine. Is it any wonder then that this novel and the others in this “series,” with their utterly authentic portraits of every aspect of life in these ancient quarters, continue to hold such a central place in the hearts of Egyptian readers?

In this novel, place plays a crucially important role, as it does in all the other “quarter novels,” but so does time. Following Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, we can note that the two are almost inevitably linked to each other. The Akif family’s move to the Khan al-Khalili quarter is not a voluntary one, but is rather the result of panic caused by a bombing raid. The novel’s time period is that of the middle of the Second World War, and Khan al-Khalili records in vivid detail the often-neglected direct effects of the Africa Campaign on the Egyptian capital city. The social effects of the war and the continuing British occupation of Egypt (that started following the ‘Urabi Revolt of 1882) are very much to the fore in the long-famous novel, Zuqaq al-Midaqq (1947; Midaq Alley [sic], 1977), in which the climactic scene sees the young Egyptian, Abbas, battered to death by British soldiers as he confronts Hamida, the quarter’s beauty, who has become a call girl. In Khan al-Khalili however, the impact of the war is, if anything, even more direct and vividly described. The tenants of the neighborhood into which the Akif family moves regularly find themselves being woken up in the middle of the night by the dreadful sound of air-raid sirens. The bomb shelter to which they all descend may be a haven from the potential destruction above, but the descriptions of these panic-stricken hours spent underground are used by Mahfouz as an effective means of portraying the clashing emotions Egyptians feel as they confront the consequences of other people’s wars. The conversations among the group that gathers every night at the Zahra Café are another device whereby the novelist is able to illustrate the wildly contrasting attitudes of the various social strata of Egyptian society as they react to the war going on around them.

Many commentators on Mahfouz’s career have suggested that it was precisely the dire impact of the war on contemporary Egyptian society during the early 1940s that led Mahfouz to abandon his plan, as usual carefully elaborated, to write a whole series of novels set in ancient Egypt. He had, in fact, already published three of them (along with some short stories): ‘ Abath al-aqdar (1939; Khufu’s Wisdom , 2003); Radubis (1943; Rhadopis of Nubia , 2003); and Kifah Tiba (1944; Thebes at War , 2003), but his plans for a whole series of others, based no doubt on his long-standing interest in ancient Egypt, were put aside in favor of a concentration on the current travails of his fellow Egyptians. In this context it needs to be added that, at various stages in his very long career, he was to return to the ancient Egyptian theme, of which Amam al-’arsh (Before the Throne , 1983) and al-’A’ish fi-l-haqiqa (1985; Akhenaton, Dweller in Truth , 1998) are merely two examples.

Mahfouz’s inspiration to write these “pharaonic” novels may well have come from both his youthful enthusiasm for ancient Egypt and its impact on Egyptian nationalist ideals and from his readings of the perennially popular historical novels of Jurji Zaydan (d. 1914), which had taken episodes from Arab and Islamic history as their chronological frame of reference. However, the turn to the contemporary period and to the process of writing novels about the Egyptian society of his own day was clearly the consequence of a concentrated course of study that he had initiated during the 1930s under the inspiration of his mentor and (then) publisher, the renowned Coptic Fabian intellectual, Salama Musa (d. 1958). It was this figure who encouraged the young graduate student in philosophy to consider a career as a writer and suggested that he investigate the tradition of fiction writing in the West. One work that we are told Mahfouz consulted was The Outline of Literature (1923) by John Drinkwater, with its “handy list” of novel titles as an appendix. Mahfouz, it would appear, made his way methodically and steadily through the works on the list, which included the most famous novels from the various European traditions, comprising examples of historical romances, bildungsroman, family sagas, and the like. This ongoing process of reading European fiction (mostly through the medium of English), coupled with his own wide knowledge of and devotion to the pre-modern heritage of Arabic literature, was to provide the inspirational framework for the lengthy and variegated career in fiction writing that was to follow.

Within the earlier phases of this developmental framework, Khan al-Khalili emerges as a remarkably successful contribution to the family saga, a sub-genre of the novel that was to be seen again at the end of the 1940s in his Bidaya wa nihaya (1949; The Beginning and the End , 1985) and, almost immediately afterward, in the three volumes of his trilogy — in which the narrative of the life of the ‘Abd al-Gawwad family is heavily focused on the story of Kamal’s upbringing (a character, the features of whose life and times have long been associated with those of Mahfouz himself). In the case of Khan al-Khalili , we are dealing with the Akif family, although, as the narrative progresses, the narrative focuses in the main on the two sons and, even more specifically on the elder of the two, Ahmad; descriptions of his movements both start and conclude the narrative. Ahmad clearly regards himself as the ill-starred victim of his family’s circumstances: the indolence of his father that leads to his compulsory early retirement and the resulting need for Ahmad to assume the burden of supporting the family as a whole and, in particular, his younger brother, Rushdi, as he goes through school and university. However, the novel’s narrator also provides the reader with a portrait of Ahmad as a rather pathetic middle-aged man whose lack of initiative, intellectual arrogance, escapism, and chronic shyness have all led inexorably to a situation in which life has essentially passed him by. The move from the suburbs to Khan al-Khalili provides a jolt to his complacent existence, but, in spite of the new acquaintances that he makes — most notably at the Zahra Café—his attitude toward life and people remains essentially unaltered. It is his fleeting encounter with the neighbor’s teenaged daughter, Nawal, which rocks the static monotony of his existence. An agonizingly hopeless and unfulfilled “relationship” ensues, involving traditional exchanges of glances across the alleyway and brief encounters in the air-raid shelter during bombing raids.