Naguib Mahfouz - Before the Throne

Just as curiously, the author’s view of international relations seems to be based on ancient Egyptian logic. Though he praises his hero Saad Zaghlul as well as several pharaohs, such as the doomed Seqenenra (chapter 10) and Psamtek III (chapter 39) and others for bravely fighting foreign occupation, Mahfouz paradoxically loves Egypt as an empire, lauding such conquerors as Amenhotep I (chapter 13), Thutmose III (chapter 17), and Muhammad Ali (chapter 56) — though the latter was not a native Egyptian. Whether aware of it or not, here Mahfouz demonstrates the divide between what the ancient Egyptians saw as Ma’at and its opposite, Isfet (chaos, hence injustice). In their conception, foreigners were always inferior to Egyptians (though an Egyptianized foreigner would be accepted among them). Thus Egypt’s control and even seizure of neighboring lands in the Near East and Nubia were considered a fulfillment of Ma’at , while an alien power invading Egypt was the triumph of evil over the proper cosmic order. 20Hence Mahfouz bars all but a few non-native rulers who either had become Egyptian or otherwise acted in Egypt’s best interest from the right to trial and thus the chance for immortality in Before the Throne . Indeed, the work as a whole seems but an expression of Mahfouz’s own personal version of Ma’at as embodied in his nation’s history.

Whatever its original source, this paradoxical attitude toward empire and occupation is remarkably similar to that of the “Pharaonists,” a group of intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s to which Mahfouz belonged. Led by such luminaries as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963), first rector of the Egyptian University, Taha Hussein (1889–1973), the great blind Egyptian belles-lettrist and novelist, and Mahfouz’s “spiritual father,” the Coptic thinker and publisher Salama Musa (1887–1958) — the Pharaonists believed that Egypt was both much older and much closer to Europe and the Mediterranean in culture than to her Arab and African neighbors. 19

While his fellow Egyptians largely rejected this idea by the 1940s, Mahfouz did not — at least not completely. Though in his 1988 Nobel lecture, 21delivered for him in Stockholm by Mohamed Salmawy, he declared himself “the son of two civilizations” (the Pharaonic and the Islamic) to the Swedish Academy which awarded the prize, Mahfouz never quite roused himself to the same level of zeal for pan-Arabism or pan-Islam when they became the intellectual vogue in later years, despite enormous peer pressure, and numerous attempts of his own, to get there.”

A sensitive and problematic issue is the treatment of Jews (who are mentioned only three times as a group: twice in chapter 49 and once in chapter 54, in the trial of Ali Bey al-Kabir — Ali Bey the Great), as well as Egypt’s often rocky relations with both ancient and modern Israel. Mahfouz, who as an adolescent grew up in a largely Jewish area of suburban Abbasiya, once told me, “I really miss” the Jews of Egypt, 22all but a few of whom were dispersed from the country in the 1950s and 1960s.

Though the king most often theorized to be the pharaoh of the Exodus — a story found in similar form in both the Old Testament and the Qur’an — is given his own trial in Before the Throne (Merneptah, chapter 27), the tale itself is neither told nor even mentioned. Israel by name appears but twice (both in the trial of Pharaoh Apries, chapter 37) — briefly (and fatally) aligned with Egypt against the Babylonians — while Judah is captured by Egypt in the trial of Pharaoh Nekau II (chapter 35).

In Before the Throne , the current State of Israel does not exist at all except as the formidable but unnamed enemy whose presence dominates much of the proceedings in the final two trials (62 and 63). These are of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, champion of the Arab masses who led them into the catastrophic defeat of 1967, and Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), the “Hero of War and Peace” whose initially successful surprise attack on Israeli-held Sinai in October 1973 revived Egypt’s pride — and whose later bold gambit of peace with the Jewish State would finally cost him his life. Yet, with the successful pacts of peace signed between Seti I (chapter 25) and his son, Ramesses II, and the Hittites, Egypt’s aggressive military rivals based to her northeast, one of the main aims of Before the Throne clearly is to justify the 1979 Peace Treaty that Sadat signed with Menachem Begin. 23

In the end, the tribunal apparently feels that Sadat has won the debate. Osiris invites Sadat to sit with the Immortals — though he had only permitted Nasser to do so. The presiding deity had sent Nasser (who had infuriated the court by declaring that “Egyptian history really began on July 23, 1952,” the day of his Free Officers coup) on to the final judgment with but what he termed ‘an appropriate (“ munasiba ”) recommendation.’ Sadat’s testimonial, however, was qualified as “ musharrifa ,” or “conferring honor.”

Mahfouz’s defense of Arab — Israeli peace would cost him a great deal, including boycotts of his books and films for many years in the Arab world. And it may have contributed to the attempt on his life by Islamist militants on October 14, 1994, roughly the sixth anniversary of the announcement of his Nobel. Though it is believed the attack was in punishment for his allegedly blasphemous novel, Children of the Alley ( Awlad haratina , 1959), 24it fell on the day that Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were revealed to have won the Nobel peace prize in Oslo. 25Then, and even now, accused by some of selling out to Israel (which has no demonstrable influence over the Swedish Academy) for the sake of his prize — despite devoting most of his Nobel lecture, cited above, to a defense of Palestinian rights, and even for a time endorsing Palestinian suicide bombings — he nonetheless never renounced his support for the treaty that followed the Camp David Accords and the dream of a true, lasting, and comprehensive peace between Arabs and Jews someday. 26

More than a just record (and judgment) of the past, Before the Throne was prescient in a sense about the uprising that led to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, after nearly thirty years atop the pyramid of power (however nominally in his feeble last years). Again, the probably-apocryphal revolt of Abnum, particularly, in the twilight of the long, declining rule of Pepi II, as Mahfouz saw it, set the precedent and defined the right of Egyptians to rise up against tyranny, something they have seldom done with success in their great history. As Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times has written, “Mahfouz foreshadowed so many of the feelings that drive the Arab Spring in his novel Before the Throne .” 27Intriguingly, the principles that Mahfouz embeds in the novel (especially peace and prosperity, order and security, strong national unity, moderate religious piety, social justice and democracy), also provide the key for how he might view the outcome of what has been the called the January 25th Revolution in Egypt had he lived to see it. Though he backed Mubarak, based on a promise of political reforms, during the last presidential elections (in 2005), he no doubt would have been both worried by the violence and inspired by the courage and the Muslim-Christian solidarity shown in what was quickly called, “the spirit of Tahrir Square,” and the promise of real democracy as well. But no doubt he would have been appalled by the ongoing chaos of relentless strikes; myriad, often-bloody demonstrations, ever-rising crime, the replacement of Mubarak by an even more blatant military dictatorship in the transition, looming national bankruptcy, and most of all by the stunning triumph of the Islamists in the parliamentary elections. Yet as bleak as that seems, Mahfouz — always an optimist in real life, if not often in fiction — would be the last to give up hope for his country’s salvation. And among all his thirty-five novels, Before the Throne —the one he created as the express vehicle for his vision of Egypt’s destiny — is the most hopeful of all, even while unflinchingly recounting the many failures along the way.