Naguib Mahfouz - Before the Throne

Inspired by the explosion of Egyptian patriotism that sparked the 1919 movement for national independence led by Mahfouz’s lifelong hero, Saad Pasha Zaghlul 1859?–1927), and by the global frenzy at the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, Mahfouz’s first published book was a translation of a brief work on ancient Egypt aimed at young readers by the British scholar, the Rev. James Baikie, in 1932. Though Mahfouz wrote dozens of short stories set in contemporary Egypt, a small number are set in, or use motifs from, Pharaonic times (now collected in English translation in Voices from the Other World ) . The action of his first three novels — Khufu’s Wisdom (‘Abath al-aqdar, 1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (Radubis, 1943) and Thebes at War (Kifah Tiba, 1944), likewise occurs in ancient Egypt. Yet, each, in its own way, obliquely critiques contemporary Egyptian politics — especially the last of these, an allegorical attack on both the British and the Turkish aristocracy. 2But with his next two novels, al-Qahira al-jadida the latter published in English as Cairo Modern and Khan al-Khalili, both set in the twentieth century and both possibly published in 1945, he discovered that the risks of censorship were slight, and abandoned a plan to compose forty novels on ancient Egypt to focus instead on life in his own times. Thus he ultimately created such contemporary masterpieces as The Cairo Trilogy — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street — in Arabic, Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr al-Shawq, and al-Sukkariya) as well as scores of other works in a breathtaking array of styles and genres. 3He did not return to the pharaohs for nearly forty years — with Before the Throne .

Among his wide readings from ancient Egyptian literature as a young man, Mahfouz later confessed that a Middle Kingdom poem, The Dialogue of a Man and His Soul , had deeply impressed him. 4In it, an unnamed man contemplates death, debating its merits and demerits with his ba (a spiritual element released after death that connects the deceased in the burial chamber with the celestial deities). 5The man tells the story, recounting his arguments in favor of earthly life against his ba , which defends the advantages of death as though speaking in a court of law before an audience that may include the gods. 6

Another possible source for the concept of presenting the afterlife trials of earthly movers and shakers is found in the writings of Lucian, a Hellenized Syrian in the Roman administration at Alexandria in the mid-to-late second century AD. Lucian cleverly adapted the judgment of the dead by the Greek underworld court headed by Zeus’ son Minos in order to mock the world of the quick. In his Dialogues of the Dead , the infamously irreverent Diogenes of Sinope (d. approximately 325 BC) invites one of the Cynic philosophers to join him in the House of Hades, lord of the shades:

“Diogenes bids you, Menippus, if you’ve laughed enough at the things on the earth above, come down here, if you want much more to laugh at; for on earth your laughter was fraught with uncertainty, and people often wondered whether anyone at all was quite sure about what follows death, but here you’ll be able to laugh endlessly without any doubts, as I do now — and particularly when you see rich men, satraps and tyrants so humble and insignificant, with nothing to distinguish them but their groans, and see them to be weak and contemptible when they recall their life above.”

As John Rodenbeck writes, the “satirical dialogues and fantastic tales” of the “long-lived Lucian of Samosata … have spawned many imitations.” Dialog as a means to convey abstract argument was itself key to the ancient Greek philosophy that Mahfouz had read.

Both Plato and his mentor Socrates asserted, Anthony Gottlieb notes in his book The Dream of Reason , that “truth emerged only through dialogue,” and Plato’s works were all “at least ostensibly” in that form. This could also explain why Mahfouz’s only published forays into writing for the theater — a series of short plays that he produced intermittently following the cataclysmic Arab defeat of 1967—were really just dialogs, with little or no stage directions or descriptions. Though he loved every aspect of drama, including the omnipresent singing and dancing of Egyptian productions (he apparently didn’t miss an opening night in Cairo’s theater district until at least the mid-1960s), Mahfouz the playwright nonetheless dispensed with everything but raw verbal confrontation between characters. He evidently felt that only ruthless dialog could unflinchingly expose the existential truths behind the naked humiliations and despair of the time.

A further potential model for Before the Throne is an allegory in prose on the fate of the soul by the blind Syrian poet Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri (d. 1058). In al-Ma‘arri’s Risalat al-ghufran (The Epistle of Forgiveness), a shaykh enters the afterlife — but in imagination only — to see how the drunkard poets of the Pre-Islamic “Age of Ignorance” have managed to find divine forgiveness. 7

Or he may have read a work similar to that of al-Ma‘arri’s, Risalat al-tawabi’ wa-l-zawabi’ (Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons), by an Andalusian late contemporary, ibn Shuhayd (d. 1035), who “meets the spirits of a number of prominent littérateurs — poets such as Imru’ al-Qays, Abu Nuwas, Abu Tammam, and al-Mutanabbi, prose writers such as ‘Abd al-Hamid, al-Jahiz and Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani — and critics,” in the other world, as described by Roger Allen. 8

Perhaps a more immediate literary example of a trial involving Egypt’s former rulers is Sir H. Rider Haggard’s “Smith and the Pharaohs.” In this story, an English archaeologist, accidentally locked in the Egyptian Museum overnight, finds himself witness to a ghostly assembly of the kings and queens whose bodies and belongings are housed in the building. After overhearing them gossip about the performance and relative qualities of their respective predecessors and successors, he finds himself brought before them for formal judgment as a despoiler of the royal dead.

And yet another contemporaneous precedent — which Mahfouz may well have read — is George Sylvester Viereck’s eccentric 1937 biography of Wilhelm II, The Kaiser on Trial , apparently ghost-written by “Essad Bey,” a Jewish-cum-Muslim writer (later “Kurban Said,” born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku). Essad Bey was a popular novelist and nonfiction author based in both Weimar and Nazi Germany who was also widely read in the rest of Europe, the U.S., Central Asia, and the Middle East. He died in Italy in service to the Axis in 1942. Tom Reiss, Essad Bey’s own biographer, sketches the essential details of this oddly path-breaking book:

The Kaiser on Trial

is a bizarre historical pastiche written in the form of courtroom testimony. It is ostensibly the trial of the Kaiser for war crimes in front of a tribune of historical figures, both dead and living. It is also a reflection on the first years of the twentieth century and the events that ended the [sic] Europe’s old empires in a vast spectacle of mass killing and destruction. George Bernard Shaw praised it as an effective “new method in the writing of history,” providing “a mine of information … both dramatic and judicious.”

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Mahfouz also had more occult sources of inspiration — and even wrote a kind of prototype of Before the Throne in the form of a long (49 pp.) short story, “The Seventh Heaven” (“ al-Sama’ al-sabi’a ”) in 1979. In “The Seventh Heaven,” a series of famous figures, ranging from Pharaoh Akhenaten (1353–1336 BC), Saad Zaghlul, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1918–1970), and others, face brief afterlife trials conducted by a former Egyptian high priest from ancient Thebes, in their quest to reach the highest (seventh) level of Paradise. Strikingly, in this work influenced by the writings of the Egyptian spiritualist, Ra’uf Sadiq ’Ubayd, 9no one — not even Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin — suffers eternal damnation, only brief spells of penance back on earth. Hitler himself returns as a petty crime capo in a Cairene alley. (For this and other tales of the uncanny by Mahfouz, see his collection, The Seventh Heaven: Stories of the Supernatural , translated by Raymond Stock, American University in Cairo Press, 2005; Anchor Books paperback, 2006.) Many of the Egyptian characters make their afterlife encores in Before the Throne .