Naguib Mahfouz: Karnak Café

The publication date of 1974 for the book version of Karnak Café also has to be placed into its proper chronological framework. Much water had flowed under many bridges in Egypt since Anwar Sadat had assumed the presidency. There had been a purge of leftist politicians and an upsurge in the influence of popular religion (the addition of Muhammad at the front of Sadat’s official name being merely a prominent symptom of that trend). Many secret memoirs had been published detailing the nefarious activities of various agencies during the 1960s. The Egyptian economy, previously tightly controlled, had been opened up to foreign investment, the so-called “infitah” policy, which had the major effect of making the rich richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class flounder somewhere in between (all that being a topic on which Mahfouz was to vent a good deal of anger in some of his novels of the 1970s). And, at the Suez Canal, a kind of continuing confrontation between Egyptian forces on the West Bank and Israelis on the East (the Bar-Lev Line) was a thorn in the side of both parties. In October 1973 this stalemate was brought to a sudden end when Egyptian forces crossed the canal (the ‘ubur [crossing]) and managed to breach the Bar-Lev Line. Their advance was soon stopped however, not least as the result of a massive infusion of armaments to Israel from the United States, but, as the French scholar Jacques Berque noted at the time, Egypt had achieved a kind of psychological victory (at least in comparison with the 1967 debacle). Egypt, Sadat, and the armed forces now rode high on a wave of popular celebration; October 6 became then and still is a national holiday, and Sadat, the long-time assistant and subordinate to Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir (and, as such, the butt of many jokes at the time), was now viewed, at least in Egypt and for the time being, as a real national leader.

And that is where Karnak Café comes into the picture. For here is a work in which Mahfouz reveals in graphic detail everything that had gone wrong in Egyptian society during the 1960s: the atmosphere of suspicion, the omnipresent eyes of the secret police, the tightest possible controls of press, economy, and culture, and so on. In 1975 a film version of Karnak Café appeared, starring one of Egypt’s most famous and beautiful movie stars, Su’ad Husni, as Zaynab (she was to die in tragic circumstances in London in 2001). If some of the previous films based on Mahfouz’s novels had taken liberties with the story line and structure of the original work (most notoriously perhaps, in the insertion of an optimistic ending to the film Miramar) , then this film of Karnak Café transcended such practices by a long way, becoming a case of rampant political exploitation. And here is where the gap between the date of completion (1971) of Karnak Café and of its publication (1974) becomes crucial. The film proceeds to show the miserable way in which the lives of the young students are impacted and changed during the dire days of the 1960s, but then the ‘crossing’ of 1973 is introduced into the story as the great turning point that transforms the situation and renders all these nasty moments a part of previous history. I can still vividly remember watching this film in an Egyptian cinema in 1975, with a group of young Egyptian students — disarmingly the same age as the ones depicted in Karnak Café —sitting directly behind me and, as is the norm, commenting out loud on the film as it proceeded. At one point in the film, an army truck is pulled, with disarming inauthenticity, across a stage with a clearly false backdrop behind it, all this intended to represent the Egyptian army going to its destruction in Sinai in 1967 (as fully described in the novel itself). The young folk behind me all assumed that this had to be the ‘ubur (the triumphant 1973 crossing of the Canal) and said so. At that point I probably should have turned round and told them that it was the 1967 defeat and not the ‘crossing’ and that their sentiments were being shamefully manipulated, but I didn’t. Instead it was left to the film itself to show the few stragglers returning beaten and exhausted from the Sinai Peninsula in 1967. Aided by such manipulations, the film had an enormous effect in Sadat’s Egypt by casting a massive shadow across the ‘Abd al-Nasir presidency; in the commonly used phrase of the time, the rape of Zaynab in prison, or rather the graphic reenactment of it with Su’ad Husni, was regarded as a symbol of the rape of the entire country during the pre-1967 era.

Karnak Café is clearly one of Mahfouz’s angriest and most explicit works of fiction. The treatment to which the young people are subjected, the political discussions both before and after the 1967 defeat, and the stark choices facing the Egyptian people in its aftermath, are all portrayed with disarming accuracy. The setting is a café, and one might suggest that, of all the Egyptian authors of fiction whom one might wish to ask to depict the typical café scenario with complete accuracy, Mahfouz is the one who comes to mind first. Apart from his latter years, he loved nothing more than to spend time in cafés, talking with friends and discussing politics and literature. When I first encountered him in the 1960s, his favorite spot was the renowned Café Riche in central Cairo, but both before and after that there were others as well. Indeed another “story” that I have heard suggests that the advent to Karnak Café of Khalid Safwan is in fact a replication of an actual incident that occurred in a café near the old Opera House.

How ironic is it that Mahfouz puts into the mouth of the villain of this piece, Khalid Safwan, the presentation of the alternatives facing the Egyptian people in the wake of the June 1967 defeat, and indeed places particular stress on the goals of those people who would advocate religion as a basis for finding solutions. One might conclude by suggesting that, while this short novel clearly belongs in and describes a particular chronological context in twentieth-century Egyptian history and social life, the directions that it suggests and the dangers that it identifies make it disarmingly relevant to the situation in Egypt, and the Middle East in general, many years later.