Naguib Mahfouz - Before the Throne

Regardless of one’s own views, by the breadth of its historical vision and the painstaking attempt to literally narrate Egypt’s continuous cultural, political, and religious identity throughout the long life of the country, Before the Throne justifies Rasheed El-Enany’s praise of Mahfouz as the “conscience of his nation.” And, one could add, he sought to be her memory as well.

True to his mission, a few years later, Mahfouz sought to balance his books (literally and figuratively) by attacking Sadat’s Open Door economic policy (al-Infitah) and its disastrous effects on Egypt’s poor and middle classes in his brief novel, The Day the Leader was Killed (Yawm qutila al-za‘im) . 28Published in 1985—four years after Sadat’s assassination by Islamist extremists — it was so harsh on the martyred president that Mahfouz paid a call on his widow, Jehan Sadat, to reassure her that he had not meant the work to rationalize his murder. Evidently without a sense of irony, he told her: “It’s only a novel — not a work of history.”

Though most of Mahfouz’s works are about the world in which he lived, there remains, wrapped mummy-like within his massive oeuvre, both a deathless love for his nation’s ancient past and a persistent quest for insight into the afterlife — a quest as old as Egypt herself (and no doubt much older). Though we have lost him among us, he has since fittingly gone to his own place in the west (which the ancient Egyptians saw as the land of the dead) in both Pharaonic and Islamic style — a handsome brick tomb, with a stela bearing Qur’anic verses in its ground-level chapel 29—in a modern cemetery southwest of Cairo on the road to Fayyum. Meanwhile, his immensely rich and varied literary legacy reminds us of the wisdom in the New Kingdom tome, Be a Scribe :

A man decays, his corpse is dust,

All his kin have perished;

But a book makes him remembered

Through the mouth of its reciter.

Better is a book than a well-built house,

Than tomb-chapels in the west;

Better than a solid mansion,

Than a stela in the temple!

30

Mahfouz, clearly, was more than a scribe (in the modern sense, though Egyptologists use it to mean all literate people in the Pharaonic age), a mere recorder of ledger items and lists. In Before the Throne , he ceased to be a teller of imaginary stories, as in most of his fiction. Rather, he became a kind of historian — even a righteous judge of the dead — personally choosing who was worthy of a hearing, the evidence presented, and their sentences as well.

Here, the ultimate verdict was his. We can only hope that the Supreme Judge dealt with him as fairly, and according to the same principles — which placed the love and welfare of Egypt (as he saw it) above all others — in his own final trial.

The translator would like to acknowledge Roger Allen, Hazem Azmy, Peter Blauner, Brooke Comer, Humphrey Davies, Johannes den Heijer, Asiem El Difraoui, Mourad el-Shahed, Ismail El Shazly, Mona Francis, Thomas L. Friedman, Gaballa Ali Gaballa, Nermeen Habeeb, Fredrik Hagen, Melinda K. Hartwig, Zahi Hawass, James K. Hoffmeier, Salima Ikram, W. Raymond Johnson, Shirley Johnston, Mary A. Kelly, Klaus-Peter Kuhlmann, Joseph E. Lowry, Yoram Meital, Bojana Mojsov, George Nazzal, Richard B. Parkinson, Adham Ragab, Donald Malcolm Reid, Bruce Redwine, Tawfik Saleh, Ahmed Seddik, David P. Silverman, Sasson Somekh, Rainer Stadelmann, Peter Theroux, Kent Weeks, David Wilmsen, and especially the late (and much-mourned) Husayn Ukasha, for their generous assistance, as well as Noha Mohammed, Nadia Naqib, Kelly Zaug, R. Neil Hewison, and Randi Danforth of the American University in Cairo Press for their always-excellent editing. Diana Secker Tesdell, Naguib Mahfouz’s editor at Anchor Books, also deserves my gratitude for the same, and for her help in so many things. Most of all, I wish to thank my mother, Helen Stock, who passed away in 2007, and my father, John Stock, who followed her in 2010, as well as the also-departed author — who made this wonderful project possible.

This translation is dedicated to Mariangela Lanfranchi.

1 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz, Maadi, Cairo, February 13, 2006.

2 In English, The American University in Cairo Press published Voices from the Other World: Ancient Egyptian Tales by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Raymond Stock in 2002, published in paperback by Vintage Anchor in New York, 2004. Khufu’s Wisdom , translated by Raymond Stock; Rhadopis of Nubia , translated by Anthony Calderbank, and Thebes at War , translated by Humphrey Davies, in 2003. Vintage Anchor in New York published them all in paperback in 2005, and in 2007, Alfred A. Knopf in New York brought them out as well in an omnibus edition in the Everyman’s Library series entitled Three Novels of Ancient Egypt , introduced by Nadine Gordimer.

3 The Cairo Trilogy was published in Arabic in 1956–67. The American University in Cairo Press published Palace Walk , translated by William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny, in 1989; Palace of Desire , translated by William M. Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny, and Olive E. Kenny, in 1991, and Sugar Street , translated by William M. Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan, in 1992. They published both Cairo Modern , translated by William M. Hutchins, in 2008, and Khan al-Khalili , translated by Roger Allen, in 2008. There has long been controversy over which of the latter two was actually published first, marking the change from Mahfouz’s ‘historical’ phase to his ‘realist’ one.

4 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz, Maadi, December 18, 1996.

5 The description of the ba is from David P. Silverman, Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr., Professor and Curator of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, reading a draft of this passage from an earlier work — the wording is largely his.

6 Richard B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and other Ancient Egyptian Poems , 1940–1640 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; first published 1997), 152.

Lucian , Vol. VII, translated by M.D. MacLeod (London: William Heinemann Ltd., and Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1961), 3.

John Rodenbeck, “Literary Alexandria,” in The Massachusetts Review , special Egypt issue guest-edited by Raymond Stock (Amherst: Winter 2002, 542; article, 524–72.

Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 218.

Fu’ad Dawwarah, Najib Mahfuz: Min al-qawmiya ila al-‘alamiya (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Amma al-Misriya li-l-Kitab, 1989), 197. Here Mahfouz says that he stopped going to the theater altogether after he began to experience hearing trouble during a performance of Alfred Farag’s play Hallaq Baghdad (The Barber of Baghdad) in 1964.

7 Roger Allen, An Introduction to Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111–12.

8 Ibid., 161–62.

For text, see John Richard Stephens, Into the Mummy’s Tomb (New York: Berkley Books, 2001), pp . 137–78. This story may be the inspiration for the recent Hollywood films starring Ben Stiller, A Night in the Museum (1 and 2). Though Mahfouz could not recall it when asked, he acknowledged having read a great deal of Haggard’s fiction in Arabic translation, which “filled up the bookstores” in his youth. (Raymond Stock, A Mummy Awakens: The Pharaonic Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz , PhD dissertation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2008, 42, n . 80, and 142–43.)