This compromise seemed to have headed off confrontation with the religious authorities. In 1988, however, the award of the Nobel Prize brought renewed pressure for the book, now almost thirty years old, to be published in Egypt. When, shortly thereafter, the storm burst out over Rushdie, Children of Gebelawi was coupled in the media with The Satanic Verses and Mahfouz was pressed to make public statements on the position of the writer in Islamic societies. He spoke openly in favour of freedom of speech and condemned Khomeini’s fatwa on Rushdie. Fundamentalists counterattacked, accusing him of, blasphemy, apostasy, and Freemasonry’, and a fatwa was pronounced on him by the mufti of a fundamentalist group: ‘Mahfouz . . . is an apostate. Anyone who wrongs Islam is an apostate . . . If they do not repent, they must be killed.’ There can be little doubt that behind this proscription lay resentment against Mahfouz’s support for some form of coexistence with Israel.8
IV
The 1960s were dark times for Egypt. As Nasser’s regime took on an increasingly repressive aspect, disillusionment set in, particularly among the country’s intellectuals. Mahfouz expressed his own distress – somewhat obliquely – in novels such as The Thief and the Dogs (1961). Adrift on the Nile (1966), which used parody to attack the frivolity and escapism of Egyptian high society, aroused Nasser’s particular ire; publication was allowed only after interventions on the author’s behalf. After the military defeat of 1967 the environment grew distinctly uncomfortable for doubters and Mahfouz could no longer count on patrons like the then Minister of Culture, Tharwat Ukasha, to protect him. Nasser’s death brought relief; in Al-Karnak (1974) – published, it must be said, only after Nasser’s excesses had already been criticised by Anwar Sadat – Mahfouz documented some of the more gruesome practices of Nasser’s secret police.9
Mahfouz has never been a full-time writer. Between 1934 and 1971 he was employed in the Civil Service, for part of that time as head of film and theatre censorship. After retiring in 1971, he joined the editorial staff of the prestigious newspaper Al-Ahram. In this role he recommended in 1975 that the Arab states should seek a way of coexisting with Israel. Subsequently he openly supported the Camp David accords. He was the first major Arab writer to take up such a stance; as a result his books were for a while banned in certain Arab countries. In his newspaper articles he also expressed his distaste for Sadat’s economic policies, which led, in his view, to the poor becoming poorer and the rich richer.10
Despite this honourable if cautious record of independence, Mahfouz was criticised for falling behind the times. In the view of the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, for instance, Mahfouz was failing to resolve the tension between his large project of chronicling the rise to power of the class he knew, the older petit-bourgeoisie, and the pressure – felt particularly after the 1967 war – to give voice to wider ethical and political concerns. Khoury suggests that Mahfouz’s turn away from realism towards symbolism and allegory was a symptom, at a literary level, of loss of contact with the classes really at the centre of the social struggle in present-day Egypt.11
A comparable criticism has been made by feminist commentators. According to them, Mahfouz’s retreat from the complex, socially significant women characters of his realist period, like Nefisa in The Beginning and the End – an unattractive woman ready to submit to poverty and spinsterhood for the sake of her brother’s career but unable to overcome her need for sex, and therefore doomed to humiliating contacts with men who use her and then jeer at her – to the more stereotyped women of his later work is no more than a defensive reaction to a newly assertive feminist movement.12
To those who have criticised his turn to allegory and symbol, Mahfouz has responded that, while in the 1950s he felt it appropriate to write in the manner of European realism, he thereafter lost interest in the individual as individual in a specific, concrete, historical milieu.13 In his subsequent work he prefers to exploit a more concentrated, more poetic, but also less ‘modern’ fictional language than the European masters of his early years could provide.
V
By itself, the title of the sixteenth in Doubleday’s admirable Mahfouz series, The Harafish, is enigmatic. The word harafish is Arabic, but has fallen out of use in the modern language. In medieval times it meant the mobile vulgus, the poor of society in their more volatile and threatening aspect. Thus the Arabic title Malhamat al-harafish could be – and has been – Englished as ‘The Epos of the Rabble’14 or ‘The Epic of the Riffraff’. Yet neither ‘rabble’ nor ‘riffraff’ is fair to the harafish as we see them in the book: volatile, certainly, but fundamentally fair-minded and responsive to benevolent leadership. For her translation, Catherine Cobham retains the Arabic word, noting that Mahfouz uses it for ‘the common people in a positive sense’ (for which concept the English language, one may observe, lacks a specific yet down-to-earth word – why?).
The Harafish (first published in 1977) is set in one of the alleys of old Cairo. It deals with the life of the common people, but more specifically with the leaders of the gang – or ‘clan’ – that generation after generation runs the affairs of the alley. The first of these clan leaders is a humble carter named Ashur. After foreseeing in a dream a plague that is about to hit Cairo, Ashur retreats into the desert with his wife and child. When the plague is over he returns to the decimated city, takes over an abandoned mansion, and redistributes the wealth it contains to revive the economy of the alley. A spell in prison only boosts his reputation among the poor; as Ashur al-Nagi, Ashur the Survivor, he comes home to a hero’s welcome, takes over as clan chief, and inaugurates a golden age, ‘restraining the powerful, protecting the rights of the humble breadwinners, and creating an atmosphere of faith and piety’.15
Then one night Ashur mysteriously disappears. The merchants are delighted, but their relief is shortlived. In a series of battles with neighbouring clans, Ashur’s son Shams al-Nagi confirms the preeminence of the al-Nagi clan; under its new leader the harafish continue to prosper and live in justice.
With the third al-Nagi, Sulayman, however, the dynasty starts to go into decline. Sulayman diverts to clan members protection money which had previously been distributed among the poor; the people suffer while the clan grows rich. As for Sulayman’s sons, they fail to understand that prosperity – their own and that of the alley – depends on the power and prestige of the clan. They devote themselves to making money; the chieftainship leaves the al-Nagi family, and soon the clan has become more an exploiter than a protector of the common people. (As they veer between these two roles, the clans of Mahfouz’s old Cairo are in essence little different from gangs in the ghettos of any great city today.)
For three more generations the downward slide of clan and alley continues. The harafish live in idleness and poverty, despairing that the days of Ashur will ever return. The chieftainship passes to Galal, a gloomy tyrant who uses bribery and extortion to build himself a huge, art-stuffed mansion, then hires a famous necromancer and devotes himself to attaining immortality. The covenant of Ashur has been betrayed; the clan system, mutter the harafish – who double as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the doings of the powerful – has become ‘one long-standing calamity’. (p. 335)
Famine strikes Cairo. The merchants hoard food; when the harafish rebel, the clan strikes back, punishing the poor, protecting the wealthy. Against this tumultuous background a humble descendant of Ashur, Fath al-Bab, lights the spark that sets off an explosion of popular violence. The clan leader is vanquished and driven out and Fath al-Bab is installed as the new chieftain. He tries to end the predatory ways of the clan and return it to the road of service; but his followers murder him and the harafish sink back into their ‘deep sleep’. (p. 393)
Meanwhile, in an obscure corner, a young man named Ashur, a distant relative of Fath al-Bab, is growing up. Meditating on his mythical namesake, on how he managed to reconcile power and virtue, he is vouchsafed a vision. He challenges the clan and in a rather unbelievable episode the harafish rally spontaneously to his ban
ner. ‘The harafish, the overwhelming majority of the populace, had suddenly joined forces and prevailed over the clubs and long sticks . . . The thread holding things in place had been broken. Anything was possible.’ As their new leader, Ashur transforms the harafish ‘from layabouts, pickpockets, and beggars into the greatest clan the alley had known’. He imposes heavy taxes on the rich, establishes a popular militia, creates jobs, founds schools. ‘So began an epoch in the history of the clan which was distinguished by its strength and integrity.’ (pp. 402–4)
A summary such as the above conveys little of the flavour of Mahfouz’s book. The Harafish is not a novel but a sequence of linked tales. The tales do not have a common hero, though they can be said to have a common victim: the suffering people. For his narrative models Mahfouz has gone back to indigenous oral storytelling. In this sense the book is part of an enterprise in which Mahfouz is only one participant (perhaps taking his lead from such younger Egyptian writers as Gamal al-Ghitani): to redefine modern Arabic prose fiction, building upon its classical and folk antecedents, distancing it from the conventions of Western realism it had earlier embraced.
Western readers of The Harafish may have trouble with a huge cast of ephemeral characters with unfamiliar names and with the story’s thoroughly traditional preoccupations with ancestry and inheritance. Halfway through, in the chapters on the ‘bad’ al-Nagi generations, readers may begin to lose track of (and perhaps cease to care) who married whom and begat whom. At such moments it is salutary to recall that oral cultures – or cultures with a strong oral substratum – train the faculty of memory in a way that cultures of writing – to say nothing of the new electronic culture – do not find necessary (writing was invented, after all, to cope with the impossibility of remembering everything).
The prose of The Harafish may seem formulaic, but there is no doubt that Mahfouz draws strength from the formulae. At the emotional highpoints of his earlier realist novels, particularly in his descriptions of falling in love – something that happens very often in his world, where boys and girls brimming with sexual vigour have few opportunities to meet, and must fall back on the lightning of the occasional charged glance, followed by weeks of erotic musing and fevered plotting – Mahfouz lapses too easily into what Galen Strawson calls ‘the fioriture of classical literary Arabic’ – the fluttering heart, the blood afire, etc.16 In its storytelling context, however, the old language comes back to life with surprising crispness.
He . . . noticed her for the first time at the Feast of the Dead . . . She was slim, with sharp features, well-proportioned limbs, a smiling face, and she exuded life and femininity. He felt a surging desire to be joined to her. Their eyes met in mutual curiosity, responsive like fertile earth. The scorching air, the heavy sighs of grief, the fragrance of cut palm leaves, basil, and sweet pastries for the festival fused with their secret desires. He inclined toward her like a sunflower. The death all around spurred him on. (p. 145)
Though, by any computation, the chronology of The Harafish must take in several centuries, there is no evidence of changes in the outside world penetrating the closed-off existence of the alley. It is not so much a question of the alley sealing itself off from Egyptian history as of Mahfouz ignoring or wishing away the tyranny of historical time. Even in the days of the first Ashur, for instance, people are building houses with sheet-metal roofs and applying to the authorities for licences to sell alcohol; thirteen generations later nothing in the detail of their daily lives has changed and the agencies of the modern state, particularly the police, remain remote, alien, predatory forces.
The Harafish is built around the lives of a succession of strongmen, some of whom give in to private vices or the temptations of luxury, others of whom keep a vision of greatness before their eyes like a lodestar. The fortunes of clan and common people rise and fall with the fortunes of their leaders. What the clan seeks is a powerful general; what the people need is a protector, a man of justice. The elusive combination of strength and political farsightedness on the one hand, and justice and compassion on the other, constitutes that quality of greatness which is the underlying theme of Mahfouz’s book and makes it into a fable about Egypt’s search for a just ruler.
Mahfouz’s concern to link private virtue with civic justice, his interest in character and his indifference to systems, give his political thought a refreshingly simple if old-fashioned colour. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss him, on the evidence of books like The Harafish, as stuck in the past. It is rather the case that as a social thinker the later Mahfouz became more interested in salvation than in history. There are two contending tones to be heard in The Harafish. One, poignant and elegiac, emerges in the second Ashur’s meditations on a world in which the get-rich-quick methods of his businessman brother Fayiz seem to be rampant.
At night he still went to the monastery square, wrapped in darkness, guided by the stars . . . He sat down in al-Nagi’s old spot and listened to the dancing rhythms. Didn’t these men of God care about what happened to God’s creatures? When would they open the gate or knock down the walls? He wanted to ask them . . . why egotists and criminals prospered, while the good and loving came to nothing. Why the harafish were in a deep sleep. (p. 392)
It is telling that while Fayiz is allowed to scoff at the conservative ways of the alley, he is given little chance to speak for his chosen life of ‘brokerage’ and ‘speculation’, that is to say, for the methods of modern capitalism: he is soon killed off, and we are told that his fortune has been based not on business at all but on the crime of murdering rich men and taking their money. (p. 377)
The other tone – less true, perhaps – is to be heard in the fairytale ending: in the ascendancy of Ashur, the eclipse of the bourgeois ‘notables’, the awakening of the harafish, and intimations that the day of revelation is at hand.
[Ashur] looked at the great door [of the monastery] in astonishment. Gently, steadily, it was opening. The shadowy figure of a dervish appeared, a breath of night embodied.
‘Get the flutes and drums ready,’ the figure whispered . . . ‘Tomorrow the Great Sheikh will come out of his seclusion. He will walk down the alley bestowing his light and give each young man a bamboo club and a mulberry fruit. Get the flutes and drums ready . . .’
[Ashur] jumped to his feet, drunk on inspiration and power. Don’t be sad, his heart told him. One day the door may open to those who seize life boldly, with the innocence of children and the ambition of angels. (p. 406)
The Harafish is not only, in the main, about men and their fortunes, but sets before itself a particularly male ideal. Nevertheless, it includes several piquant seduction scenes (Mahfouz’s men are rarely a match for the wiles of women), while the most striking, and certainly the most lively, character in the book is Zahira, mother of Galal. Restless in the role of dutiful wife, mother and daughter-in-law, she uses the liberal divorce laws of Islam to rid herself of a succession of unsatisfactory husbands, only to be murdered by a deus ex machina ploy that leaves one wondering whether her author had not begun to grow anxious at the thought of where the trajectory of this furious, volatile and ambitious woman might take her.
With no Arabic, one should not pretend to judge the quality of the translation. Catherine Cobham’s version reads both authoritatively and fluently. Certain colloquialisms – ‘cover my back’, ‘son of a gun’, ‘getting stoned’ – carry American connotations which sit uneasily with the faintly (and appropriately) archaic English of the rest. (pp. 9, 148, 202) ‘Call girl’ (p. 370) surely depends on the existence of telephones; and ‘crusade’ is perhaps the wrong word for the campaign for justice mounted by one of the better clan leaders. The text is punctuated with fragments of Persian poetry – songs wafting down the alley from a nearby Sufi monastery – which have been left untranslated. This decision seems to me contestable but probably correct: the harafish of yore would have understood the Persian no better than would Mahfouz’s readers in Cairo today.
20 Ali Mazrui, The Afr
icans
ONE YEAR THE image of Africa is of herds of giraffe sailing across boundless sunlit plains. The next year it is of stick-like starving children with ballooning bellies and great sad dark eyes. Another year it is of soldiers in tattered fatigues lobbing mortar shells into the bush in yet another incomprehensible war. Africa is still peripheral enough to the West for the West to be able to afford to see it in terms of a repertoire of images like these, purveyed by journalists to a public impatient of far-off complexities.
For centuries, in fact, it has been the fate of Africa to be used by the West as a kind of image bank from which emblems, sometimes of savagery, brutality and hopelessness, sometimes of innocence, simplicity and good nature, can be drawn at will. Even to well-disposed outsiders, Africa remains a place that one studies, to which one sends teachers and aid: Africans are not people from whom one learns. The richness of Africa’s resources is acknowledged, but the resources referred to are natural, not human. What Africa has to offer is always raw: raw produce, raw ores, raw people, raw experience. What Africa gets in exchange is finished: systems of government, health clinics, computers.
Ali Mazrui is a political scientist from Kenya with a distinguished academic career behind him. He has written authoritatively on subjects important to post-colonial Africa, such as the notion of national identity, the role of the army in the State, the function of Third World intellectuals. In 1986 he put together a television series, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation and other bodies and intended primarily for Western consumption, whose purpose was not only to correct Western images of Africa but to confront these images in the most direct way. This approach promised a degree of discomfort to the politically sensitive viewer. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided some of the funding, was upset enough when it previewed the series to withdraw its name from the credits, though in fact Mazrui treats the United States quite kindly by comparison with Britain and France. The series has been screened widely; it is used as a resource in many schools and colleges.
Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 Page 23