Riley Kellogg

HONS 301.43 Topics in Arabic Culture and Literature Professors Shannon and Stone Spring, 2007 Religious Ideas in Naguib Mahfouzs Fountain and Tomb Introduction

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Riley Kellogg

The subject of religion arises again and again in the fiction of Naguib Mahfouz. He has said in interviews that he will not discuss the topic, and that his fiction is neutral on the subject. Rasheed El-Enanys article Religion in the Novels of Naguib Mahfouz paints a picture of Mahfouz as a strict secularist, with no room in his view of the ideal world for religion. In discussing characters from The New Cairo, one a fundamentalist...content with the principles of Islam the other a socialist whose principles consist in belief in science instead of superstition, society instead of Heaven, and socialism instead of competition, El-Enany quotes Mahfouz as saying that the neutrality between ideas [in his novels] is only technical... I am not neutral to the end.1 El-Enany then says let us establish without further ado that the social creed which the novelist adopts is that of the secularist and the one he discards is that of the revivalist Islamist.2 The dichotomy presented above presents a limited palette of attitudes, based only on the characters in one novel; I do not think one can generalize from that to Mahfouzs views in general, if only because it is too limiting a set of choices. Although I see him as coming down clearly on the side of secularism in governmentas a social creedEl-Enany goes further than I would in placing Mahfouz in complete opposition to religion; I think that he has more intellectual sympathy with the characters representing the religious side of the science & socialism vs. religion debate than El-Enany would have it. In Mahfouzs next novel, once again there are two characters in contrast, one religious, the other a socialist who is preaching the same new religion as his predecessor in [The New Cairo]. And again this new credo consists in social progress and science; Just as religion had saved us from idolatry, science must save us from religion, he declares...and casts doubt on the value of pondering insoluble questions while we faced with innumerable questions which can and must be solved [sic].3 This same character praises modern science for dissecting the atom and exploring outer space; these are both achievements that are not exactly the practical problem-solving mentioned above; indeed seem more like the pondering of insoluble questionslike religious inquiry, a search for pure knowledge for its
1

R. El-Enany. Religion in the Novels of Naguib Mahfouz. Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 15, No. 1/2. (1988), pp. 21-22. 2 ibid., p. 22 3 ibid., p. 22-23.

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own sake. Even El-Enanys languagepreaching the same new religion and elsewhere a plea for the new faith (ibid., p. 24)equates the socialism-science viewpoint with religion in some way. Allow me to make a distinction between Religion and religion: the latter refers to established practices and communities with a set of teachings, adherents, and usually some professional practitioners/leaders; the former refers to the spiritual source of the latter, the experience of the holy, that which is absoluteor the search for it. By this definition, while Mahfouz is often critical of religion, I find in his work evidence of a search for, and sympathy with the aims and experience of, Religion. Biographical background Naguib Mahfouz was born December 11, 1911, the youngest of seven children in a middle-class family in the al-Gamaliya district, one of the oldest sections of Cairo. Mahfouz had early exposure to political and literary thinking. His father was a government clerk devoted to the cause of independence from British rule, and to the heroes of that movement. A family friend and frequent guest in their home was ElMuwaylili, a journalist and satirist whose Hadith Issa Ibn Hisham, sometimes considered a forerunner of the novel in Egypt, was dedicated to Mahfouzs father.4 Mahfouzs childhood and youth came during a period of great changes in Egypt, and saw the upheavals of war, martial law, the rebellion of 1919, the deportation of Saad Zaghloul in 1921, the stormy promulgation of the unsatisfactory constitution of 1923, the return of Zaghloul from exile, and his death in 1927, events which provide the political context of Fountain and Tomb.5 Mahfouz parents were both devout Moslems, and Naguib was sent to Mosque school when young. His education continued after that, and he began studying philosophy in high school. He entered the Philosophy Department of Cairo University, choosing this discipline over literary studies.6 After completing his Masters degree in Aesthetics, also at Cairo University, he entered the Civil Service. He worked for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and then worked as director of the Foundation for Support of the Cinema, the State Cinema Organization as the Director of Censorship (quite ironic, since some of Mahfouzs own works were censored in much of the Arabic world). Beginning in 1969 he was a consultant on cinema to the Ministry of Culture until his retirement in 1972. During this entire government career he wrote and published extensively, and continued to do so for thirty years more, until close to his death in 2006.

Sobhi, Fattouh, Kenneson, introduction to Mahfouz, Naguib. Fountain and Tomb. Trans. Soad Sobhi, Essam Fattouh, James Kenneson. Boulder: Three Continents/Lynne Reinner, 1998. p. 2. 5 ibid. 6 One must wonder here what a literary-studies department in Cairo would have been like at that time, since what we in the West commonly think of as comprising the bulk of literatureprose fictionbarely existed in Egypt or the rest of the Arabic-speaking and -writing world at that time. One can conjecture that Quranic studies and poetry would have been at the center of the program, with perhaps world-literature added.

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In 1994, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by militant Islamists, who objected to his treatment of religious and social themes in his fiction. In particular, Children of Gebelawi was considered to be blasphemous. Also, Mahfouz had defended Salman Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeinis fatwa was issued, following publication of The Satanic Verses. Although his defense of Rushdie was of Rushdies right to write and publish, and not of what he had written,7 this had made him anathema to al-jihad, the faction that had assassinated Sadat. Though paralyzed in his right arm for some time as a result of the attack, he escaped permanent harm. Mahfouz is perhaps the writer of fiction in Arabic best known in the English-speaking world. One of the most prolific writers in Arabic with over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories to his credit, he has been called the Balzac of the Arabs.8 His works include novels, short stories, plays, journalism, memoirs, essays, and screenplays (in addition, some of his work has been adapted for the screen and for television serials). He has been so prolific, and his work so wide-ranging, that he has been compared to such diverse writers as Hugo, Dickens, Galsworthy, Mann, Zola, Romains, and Taha Husayn, 9 Tolstoy,10 as well as Camus, Sartre, and Melville11, Joyce and Proust. His winning of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988 brought him increased notice in the West.12 His awards include the State Recognition Award in Literature, 1968; the Decoration of Republic of the 1st Order, 1972; the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, and the Collar of the Nile 1988 (the highest order in Egypt)13. It is interesting that a writer whose work has generated so much controversy and has been so politically outspoken should be so honored by the states official bodies. Egypt went so far as to place Mahfouzs image on their 5-pound note following his receipt of the Nobel. Bibiliographical background Mahfouzs first publications were of short stories and philosophical articles in periodicals, starting while he was a University student. Scholars and critics generally divide Mahfouzs work into four stages, which are roughly both chronological and thematic. The first of these is made up of the three Pharaonic novels,
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Mahfouz said that I believe that the wrong done by Khomeini towards Islam and the Muslims is no less than that done by the author himself. As regards freedom of expression, I have said that it must be considered sacred and that thought can only be corrected by counter-thought. During the debate, I supported the boycott of the book as a means of maintaining social peace, granted that such a decision would not be used as a pretext to constrain thought." AlAhram, 2 March, 1989, quoted in Hallengren, Anders, Naguib Mahfouz The Son of Two Civilizations. 8 Julia Clancy-Smith. Review of Fountain and Tomb. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Aug., 1990), p. 368. 9 Eastern Africa Center for Constitutional Development. Nahguib Mahfouz. 10 Egypt State Information Service. Naguib Mahfouz. 11 Interestingly, I have not, in my English-language sources, come across any comparisons of Mahfouz to other Arabic writers. Presumably these associations are made for the benefit of English-speakers, who are (reasonably) assumed to be less familiar with Arabic writers. 12 Jacqueline Onassis, in her position as an acquiring book editor, was among Mahfouzs early champions in the United States. 13 Egypt State Information Service. Naguib Mahfouz.

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often seen as allegorical of the Egyptian sociopolitical scene at the time of their writing. His next novel, A New Cairo (1945), was set in the harsh reality of the time in which it was written. This marks the beginning of the second stage in his career, which culminated in the publication in 1956-57 of his most famous (and some say best) work, The Cairo Trilogy. Most of the novels of this stage were set in contemporary time and focused on the sociopolitical problems of his country, using realism and naturalism, and the analytic approach they afforded. An exception to the prevailing style and theme of this stage was The Mirage (1948), an experimental, psychoanalytically-based novel. After the publication of the Trilogy (which was completed four years before publication), Mahfouz stopped publishing for several years. There are, of course, many theories as to why this was. Whatever the reason, his next novel was released in 1959, serialized in the Cairo daily newspaper Al-Ahram, starting the third stage of his career as a novelist. This novel, Our Quarter (the English translation is titled Children of Gebelawi) is a unique allegory of human history from [its] beginning to the present day. 14 References to and paraphrases of stories from the Quran and the hadiths were woven throughout the novel. No longer viewing the world through realist/naturalist eyes, he was now to write a series of short powerful novels at once social and existential in their concern. Rather than presenting a full colorful picture of the society, he now concentrated on the inner working of the individuals mind in its interaction with the social environment. In this phase his style ranges from the impressionistic to the surrealist, a pattern of evocative vocabulary and imagery binds the work together, an extensive use is made of the stream of consciousness... On the other hand, while the situation is based on reality, it is often given a universal significance through the suggestion of a higher level of meaning.15 This stage lasted through approximately the mid-1970s, at which point Mahfouz adopted a different style once again. Some of the novels of this period recall, or make reference to, the classical Arabic narrative forms, such as the episodic form of the Arabian Nights and other indigenous, folk-narratives.16 While these novels do not have the linear continuity and wholeness of plot of the traditional Western novel, each has a coherence of its own. Fountain and Tomb, originally published as Hikayat Haritna, in 1975, is of this stage and category. Fountain and Tomb Fountain and Tomb has been described as a novel disguised as a collection of tales.17 The seventy-eight stories or episodes that make up the novel are not connected in any linear fashion, either chronological or strictly thematic. They cover the period, as noted above, from the end of the First World War forward, and are narrated, for the most part, by a young boy who sees these events through a childs eyes. But the
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Cornell University Library Online. Middle East & Islamic Studies Collection. Naguib Mahfouz : A Biography. This is also the novel which, some 25 years later, was to be cited by Mahfouzs attackers. 15 ibid. 16 ibid. 17 Julia Clancy-Smith. Review of Fountain and Tomb. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Aug., 1990), p. 369.

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narration moves back and forth between the narrator as boy and as older man, recalling scenes; and some stories are told through the voices of other neighborhood characters as heard by the narrator. The stories casually relate rich detail of daily life in urban Egypt. The careful reader can learn more about Egyptian society and its values from this small book than he could from several dozen volumes of history and anthropology.18 Mahfouz traces the stirrings of political consciousness on the part of the young narrator; these alternate with the awakening of sexual yearnings and the development of intellectual curiosity.19 The book also shows the turmoil of intellectual life in Egypt at the time. Egypts ancient history, its national pride and desire to break free of foreign domination, its Islamic identity, the appeal of modern scientific and philosophical thought and the lure of Western modernization and capitalism were pulling society in many directions, and sometimes warring within individual psyches. In the specific details Mahfouz provides of individuals lives and experiences he manages to educe the universal human experience. Mahfouzs work, though deeply steeped in local reality, appeals to that which is universal and permanent in human nature20 The social message [in Mahfouzs writing] is aptly woven into the texture of the work: man is not meant to spend his life on Earth in a futile search and his only true hope of salvation is the exertion of a positive and responsible effort to better his lot and that of others. That Mahfouz has always been a socially commit-ted writer with a deep concern for the problem of social injustice is an incon-testable fact. To him individual morality is inseparable from social morality.21 The stories of Fountain and Tomb bear out the futility of the search referred to above, but understanding that a goal cannot be reached is not the same thing as agreeing that the effort does not have its own rewards; the hope of salvation in this life is not as clear. The style of writing in this work is spare; events, and the feelings of the tales teller, are related; but the cause, purpose, significance, and truth of what the tales tell are never explicit. The stories often seem to end abruptly, leaving the reader to wonder at the vagaries of life, and to decide for himself whether fate or chance or Gods will is at work. One scholar refers to the notorious impersonality of Mahfouz's narrative voice, which sounds unproblematic and stable, but on interrogation yields to another voice, one that flirts with chaos and abuts on experiences inaccessible to language.22 The stories all take place in the narrators neighborhood, an alley that opens at one end on a large square, leading off to other alleys and neighborhoods, to the rest of vast Cairo, and the vaster world beyond. On
18

Sobhi, Fattouh, Kenneson, introduction to Mahfouz, Naguib. Fountain and Tomb. Trans. Soad Sobhi, Essam Fattouh, James Kenneson. Boulder: Three Continents/Lynne Reinner, 1998. p. 5. 19 Julia Clancy-Smith. Review of Fountain and Tomb. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Aug., 1990), p. 369. 20 Cornell University Library Online. Middle East & Islamic Studies Collection. Naguib Mahfouz : A Biography 21 ibid. 22 Terri DeYoung. Review: Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning by Rasheed El-Enany and Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition by Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, editors. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Feb., 1995), p. 134.

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the other end, the alley is capped by an archway leading to a small square, and then to the Sufis takiya, or monastery, surrounded by a garden filled with mulberry trees, and beyond that down a path that winds around the takiya wall, to the local cemetery. The wider world beyond the alley at the first end is depicted as dangerous; filled with rival gangs, British soldiers who come into the alley to squash rebellion, and other manifestations of change such as the government office where a girl from the alley goes to work, scandalizing her neighbors. At the other end of the alley is the monastery, the seat of spiritual reflection and retirement from the mundane concerns of life and, past this, the grave. The takiya is a serene, green, beautiful oasis in the midst of the city, but utterly impenetrable: ...[It] stands like a fortress, this takiya, circled by its garden wall. Its stern gate is broken and always, like the windows, shut. Aloof isolation drenches the whole compound. Our hands stretch toward this wallreaching for the moon.23 The first story centers on the takiya. When the neighborhood children see the Sufis walking in the garden, they throw taunts at them, but the Sufis give no sign that they have heard. Playing in the small square in front of the takiya, our narrator dozes off. He wakes to an empty square, and starts to rush to reach home before it is dark. But then comes the uncanny feeling that Im not alone, that Im roaming in some pleasant magnetic field. When a warm breeze flows over me, I peer toward the takiya. There, under the central mulberry tree, stands a man, a dervish unlike those Ive seen before. He is great with age but extremely tall, his face a pool of glowing light...Everything about him is munificent beyond imagining. I look at him so intently that I become intoxicated, the sight of him filling the whole universe. It comes to me that he must be the owner and overseer of the place, and I see that he is loving, not like those others. I go up to the wall and say most respectfully, I love mulberries.... I believe that his single glance takes in everything and that his deep, melodious voice says, My nightingale, khoon deli khord wakuli hasel kared. Then I think I see him tossing me a berry. I bend down to pick it up. I find nothing. When I stand up again, the place is empty. Darkness veils the inner gate. 24 He tells this tale to his father, who is skeptical; the father says that the description could be of no one but the High Sheikh of the monastery, but that he never ventures outside. The narrator returns to the takiya on another evening, and calls out for the figure using the words he had heard the figure say. But he never sees the figure again. In later years, he wonders whether he must have made up the whole thing, looking for attention and then coming to believe his own fabrication. He never saw the sheikh again; everyone knew that he never went outside; so our narrator, he reasons, must have made the story up. Thats how I created a myth and then destroyed itexcept that this supposed vision of the sheikh burrowed deep down into my very marrow, a memory of great purity. And except that I still love mulberries.
23

Naguib Mahfouz. Fountain and Tomb. Trans. Soad Sobhi, Essam Fattouh, James Kenneson. (Boulder: Three Continents/Lynne Reinner, 1998.) p. 11. 24 ibid.

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This story, or episode, is dense with religious imagery and meaning. The takiya may be read as a symbol for the spiritual life. The narrator finds it to be always closed off, isolated, and as unattainable as the mulberries growing in its garden. His uncanny feeling, his intoxication at the sight of the figure, and his conviction of the figures loving nature, seem signs of a spiritual experience, or of the presence of a supernatural being. The vision of the High Sheikh, whether real or imagined, is an encounter with a figure of spiritual significance and authority. The Sheikh is as real as the mulberry he gave our narrator which is to say that the experience had real impact on and meaning for the boy. Whether he saw the High Sheikh taking an unaccustomed stroll around the grounds, had a dream, invented a story, or was visited by God himself, the story relates a palpable experience of contact with a spiritual facet of reality that the narrator normally experiences as unattainable. The words he heard the sheikh say in this story (which he tells his father he has heard in the Sufis chants25) stay with him, as a sort of incantation he uses at a later time when he is Engulfed by the flood of life in all its obscurity. It seems something invoked as a signifier of another profound experience. The girls by whose beauty he is dazzled and so affected as to say this to them laugh to one another that He must be a dervish. The middle one adds, He must be crazy. I fling myself into archway darkness and stagger around until I reach the daylight of the takiya square. My head buzzes and my heart whispers like the ecstasy of buds before blooming.26 Life is obscure, veiled, its truths hidden. The archway, the passageway between the mundane world and the spiritual realm, is darkness, and the takiyas square is light, or enlightenment. The narrator is stumbling between the mundane and spiritual, the actual and the potential. What is happening to the world? one story opens; demonstrations and calls for change have reached the ears of our narrators district. And I tell myself that what is happening is strange but exciting and entertaining, truly magnificent. But then he sees a chase through the streets; British soldiers are chasing demonstrators, and he hears gunfire, loud voices, screams of those shot. And I tell myself that what is happening is strange and terrifying and dreadful. Um Abdu, a well-know woman of the alley, swears that the soldiers horses became headstrong and uncomfortable in front of the takiya and threw their riders to the ground...And I tell myself that what is happening is an exciting and unbelievable dream.27 Um Abdu here illustrates the prevalence of religious superstition in the alley. Superstition has no real weight in the religious discussion presented here, but merely illustrates that belief in powers beyond this
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Mahfouz provides no translation of this phrase. It seems to be in Persian, and is perhaps a part of the Sufis chants; whatever the meaning, the narrator does not know it. It is the sound of the voice of the Sheikh saying them that impresses the words on the childs mind, not their meaning. 26 Naguib Mahfouz. Fountain and Tomb. Trans. Soad Sobhi, Essam Fattouh, James Kenneson. (Boulder: Three Continents/Lynne Reinner, 1998.) p. 16. 27 ibid. pp. 25-26.

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world are common among the residents of the alley. Other stories illustrate this: the local police prefects wife who believes that demons live in the archway connecting the alley with the takiya28, the consultation of Sheikh Labeeb for prophesies29, and others. In this story involving Sheikh Labeeb, the woman for whom he prophesies gets the husband the Sheikh had predicted, but she then disappears, disgracing her family. The narrator runs into her many years later, a singer and dancer. She seems happy enough, and glad to see her old friend from the alley, but the implication is that she is a fallen woman; she has no contact with her family and asks our narrator for news of them. When he asks her How did you get here? She laughs and says sarcastically, The same way you did! So the Sheikhs prophesies may be true, but not complete; there is no explanation for what took the woman down this path, a very different one from what she envisioned when she asked the Sheikh her future; nor is there any moral judgment passed on her or her fate. In another story, the narrators cousin has inherited a great deal of money, but it is bound up in the bureaucracy of the waqf that prevents him from receiving it. The man spends an entire lifetime bitter about this. When he finally receives the inheritance at about 70 years of age, he rejoices. He takes a second, young, beautiful wife who carries his child. He takes to his deathbed after six months of marriage, having overindulged in food. He dies happy, though he has little enjoyment on this earth of the riches he spent his life pining for. He avers that he has no regrets, and orders a new beautiful tomb to be built.30 This story poses the question, what makes a person happy? Should we pass any judgment on this man for wasting his life yearning for something over which he had no control? Or for squandering the riches he got and the life he should have appreciated for its own sake by bringing on his own premature death? As he is wont to do, Mahfouz raises questions without answering them. The story that is perhaps the most overtly critical of religion as embodied in its adherents is the one about the Imam of the mosque, Sheikh Aml Al-Mahdi. This story is unusual in that it opens with the statement, almost a disclaimer, This story is from old times; I didnt see it myself.31 The Sheikhs character is weak. When he goes to the minaret to make the call to prayer, he witnesses a murder committed by his patron, the man who built the mosque, and will not speak up. No one, not even the murderer, knows that he saw. And he sat in his house for three days, without opening his mouth. Another man is charged with the murder. The Sheikh lies at the inquest, saying he did not go to make the prayer call that night, and thus did not see or hear anything. He is wracked with guilt. Interestingly, but typically for this novel, Mahfouz does not follow through on this thread of the storywas the innocent man convicted? Was Sheikh Aml devastated by his complicity in the unjust fate of this man (and the unjustly good fate of the
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ibid., p. 17. ibid., p. 24. 30 ibid., p. 41-42 31 ibid., pp. 63-64

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murderer), or by having confronted the inability of his faith to sustain him and guide him to do the right thing? Finally, one day he accosts the murderer in the street with his knowledge. He does not wait for an answer but runs in fear to lock himself in the mosque. He stays there for two days and then on the third night appears at the window to make the call to prayertotally naked. The song he sings is: Why did you fall into a love so deep If its promises you couldnt keep? Though he was pious and devout, his piety and fear of God were one thing, his courage another. The song is directed at himself; the love whose promises are unkept is his love for God. He is pious, yes, and fears God, yes, but he fears the pain and suffering that this man could bring upon him in this life more than he fears Gods punishment. This is an indication of what he truly believes.32 One of the most interesting stories33 is about a character, Shalaby Ilaly, who has learned that his father had a dark spot in his past. Shalaby broods over his worries alone,...and shows me his buried skeletons not to share his troubles with someone but merely because he imagines his fathers tale is something every droll tongue is already clucking over. The naked facts ram a brutal contradiction through the center of his life. On one hand he leads a pure, steady, even exemplary existence while on the other hes becoming, because of his humiliation, quite free of the influence of public opinion, figuring it will look down on him no matter what he does. He begins doing what is right without caring what others may say How odd. Doing right no matter what people may say. But really not odd at all. Shalaby Ilaly says that The most important thing in the world is knowing the truth. Then through a mixture of confidence and dismay, he mutters: The whole truth and nothing but the truth. Leaving aside the phrase being identical to the well-known American oath of testimony, the character has discovered that the truth and the right are more important to him than doing what is expected and wanted of him by his community. This can be seen as a distinctly religious stance: Shalaby is trying to live in relation and connection to that which is absolute rather than that which is relative. The right thing whether others agree that it is right; the truth even when it is painful and humiliating: these are guideposts of the absolute, which is arguably what Religion is trying to get at. This stance bears a complex
32

The three days of silent isolation, both after witnessing the murder and after confronting the murderer, are interesting. The number three, of course, comes up repeatedly in religious traditions, including the three days of fasting recommended to Muslims in the middle of each month, the three days that Jesus is said to have spent in his tomb before the resurrection (not to mention the Christian Trinity, and the Zoroastrian male trinity/female quaternity that combine to make the number seven of special religious significance to them). Many religious observances and festivals last for three days, including Id al-Adha. http://www.purdue.edu/HUMANREL/contribute_pdf_docs/ DiversityCalendar_06A_path.pdf 33 Naguib Mahfouz. Fountain and Tomb. Trans. Soad Sobhi, Essam Fattouh, James Kenneson. (Boulder: Three Continents/Lynne Reinner, 1998.) p. 68-69.

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relationship to Mahfouzs position that individual morality is inseparable from social morality.34 Sometimes individual and social moralities can be at odds with one another. Which, then, is to take precedence? Mahfouz leaves this question without an answer. There are many stories that show fate to have no justice: unexplained murders and suicides; unfulfilled desires; senseless, purposeless suffering; mysterious strangers who know more than they ought to. Life and death roll on, with no regard for the righteousness or intentions of the individual. Several stories near the end of the book deal directly with religious skepticism. Mustafa Al-Dashoory is a teacher35, one of the few educated people in the alley. He is a friend of the narrators father, and while visiting one day says to him, So tell me: whats the meaning of life? The father tells him what he knows about the beginning and the end, life and death, resurrection and judgment.... Dont you believe in God? Yes. Nothing else makes sense. But...God doesnt relate to us and I cant relate to him. There is nothing but dead silence between us. I cant explain the evil in life and dont understand the weaknesses and inadequacies of nature. I have therefore concluded that God praise be to himhas decided to leave us to our own devices.... Therefore, belief in God demands belief in his lack of concern for our world, just as it implies that were on our own.... And some day mankind will achieve a certain wholeness in themselves and in society. Then and only then, by virtue of this new human personality, will we understand the meaning of divinity. The father calls this Dangerous blasphemy and, indeed, rumors get out about the teachers views. An uproar erupts around him and he is driven from his job. Life in our alley ignores him. Is this necessary for the cohesion of the society, or more unjust, pointless suffering? Al-Dashoorys views provide a midroad approach; he advocates the secular approach to the practical matters of life, and scientific inquiry to better the human condition, but without denying the ultimate truth of and need for God. In fact he is more optimistic about the possibility of a meaningful relationship with God than most of the conventionally devout. In the final story of the collection, the narrator, still a boy, is talking with Sheikh Omar Fikri, a powerful and knowledgeable lawyer. He asks for Sheikh Omars help to see the High Sheikh, who had appeared to him in the first story. Sheikh Omar tries to discourage him in this desire, but when he persists, admits that he himself once, as a child, wanted the same thing. Having determined that there was no legal way to fulfill this wish, Omar asked the old and pious of the neighborhood about the High Sheikh. All the descriptions he heard were different, and he concluded that no one had ever seen the High Sheikh . We see the takiya and the dervishes, but we dont see the High Sheikh.
34 35

op. cit. Mahfouz, Naguib. Fountain and Tomb. Translated by Soad Sobhi, Essam Fattouh, James Kenneson. Boulder: Three Continents/Lynne Reinner, 1998. pp. 110-111

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Can that be taken as proof of his non-existence? my father asked. No, it doesnt prove that, it just states what we all know: we see the takiya and the dervishes, but we dont see the High Sheikh.... Ive given you all the information you could possibly want. It may be useless for the fulfillment of your wish, but at least it makes it clear that you cant fulfill it without breaking the law.... This is an unforgettable memory. To this very day Ive never been able to muster enough courage to break the law, but, at the same time, I cant imagine a takiya without a High Sheikh. As days go by, I stop looking at the takiya except when we pass it to visit the tombs. Then I throw it a smiling glance and let a few memories come back. I try to remember the figure of the Shikhor whoever it was I once upon a time thought was the Sheikhand then I just go on the narrow path leading to the cemetery. This conversation can be seen as referencing God, as well as the mysterious High Sheikh; we cannot say he is not there, but we can say that we never see him. And the narrator stops thinking about him, except on occasion, and goes on his way down the path to the grave. Conclusion Mahfouz does not seek to explain or moralize his stories. They are what they are, and end as they end. But the fact that he is telling the stories is itself an inquiry into the meaning of events and circumstances; of human life. The telling of a story says, It matters what happens to people; here it is, let me tell you what happens to these. We may come away with the conclusion that understanding the cause or purpose of events is impossible; but the conclusion that they occur and have profound effects in peoples lives is inescapable. Does Mahfouz conclude that because religion can ultimately neither explain the cause and purpose of life and its events, nor ease mans suffering, it is therefore of no use? Perhaps. But Religion seeks to find meaning in even the meaninglessness. One interviewer suggested to Naguib Mahfouz (Najib Mahfiiz) that his work revolves around three axes, viz. politics, sex and religion. Mahfouz accepted the suggestion and proceeded to comment at length on the first two axes, arguing that his concern about sex was perhaps a subsidiary of his concern for politics and that his interest in religion was probably yet another subsidiary. At this point, however, he warned his hapless interviewer not to proceed with the next inevitable question, and declared solemnly, I will not speak on the thorny question of religion... This is a subject that I prefer to leave open for the investigation of the critics.36

36

R. El-Enany, Religion in the Novels of Naguib Mahfouz. Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 15, No. 1/2. (1988), pp. 21.

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