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December 15, 2001
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
December 10, 2001
Robert
Dunham
Race
and the Death Penalty:
Partners in Injustice
Andy Kershaw
Chamber of
Horrors
Near the Garden of Eden
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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bin Laden and Bush
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The New Intifada:
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December 16,
2001
Naguib Mahfouz and the
Cruelty of Memory
by Edward Said
Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib
Mahfouz was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab
or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque
stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life. In 1980 I tried
to interest a New York publisher, who was then looking for "Third
World" books to publish, in putting out several of the great
writer's works in first-rate translations, but after a little
reflection the idea was turned down. When I inquired why, I was
told (with no detectable irony) that Arabic was a controversial
language.
A few years later I had an amiable and,
from my point of view,  encouraging
correspondence about him with Jacqueline Onassis, who was trying
to decide whether to take him on; she then became one of the
people responsible for bringing Mahfouz to Doubleday, which is
where he now resides, albeit still in rather spotty versions
that dribble out without much fanfare or notice. Rights to his
English translations are held by the American University in Cairo
Press, so poor Mahfouz, who seems to have sold them off without
expecting that he would someday be a world- famous author, has
no say in what has obviously been an unliterary, largely commercial
enterprise without much artistic or linguistic coherence.
To Arab readers Mahfouz does in fact
have a distinctive voice, which displays a remarkable mastery
of language yet does not call attention to itself. I shall try
to suggest in what follows that he has a decidedly catholic and,
in a way, overbearing view of his country, and, like an emperor
surveying his realm, he feels capable of summing up, judging,
and shaping its long history and complex position as one of the
world's oldest, most fascinating and coveted prizes for conquerors
like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, as well as its own natives.
In addition Mahfouz has the intellectual
and literary means to convey them in a manner entirely his own--powerful,
direct, subtle. Like his characters (who are always described
right away, as soon as they appear), Mahfouz comes straight at
you, immerses you in a thick narrative flow, then lets you swim
in it, all the while directing the currents, eddies, and waves
of his characters' lives, Egypt's history under prime ministers
like Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa El-Nahhas, and dozens of other
details of political parties, family histories, and the like,
with extraordinary skill. Realism, yes, but something else as
well: a vision that aspires to a sort of all-encompassing view
not unlike Dante's in its twinning of earthly actuality with
the eternal, but without the Christianity.
Born in 1911, between 1939 and 1944 Mahfouz
published three, as yet untranslated, novels about ancient Egypt
while still an employee at the Ministry of Awqaf (Religious Endowments).
He also translated James Baikie's book Ancient Egypt before undertaking
his chronicles of modern Cairo in Khan Al-Khalili, which appeared
in 1945. This period culminated in 1956 and 1957 with the appearance
of his superb Cairo
Trilogy. These novels were in effect a summary of modern
Egyptian life during the first half of the twentieth century.
The trilogy is a history of the patriarch
El- Sayed Ahmed Abdel-Gawwad and his family over three generations.
While providing an enormous amount of social and political detail,
it is also a study of the intimate relationships between men
and women, as well as an account of the search for faith of Abdel-Gawwad's
youngest son, Kamal, after an early and foreshortened espousal
of Islam.
After a period of silence that coincided
with the first five years following the 1952 Egyptian revolution,
prose works began to pour forth from Mahfouz in unbroken succession--novels,
short stories, journalism, memoirs, essays, and screenplays.
Since his first attempts to render the ancient world Mahfouz
has become an extraordinarily prolific writer, one intimately
tied to the history of his time; he was nevertheless bound to
have explored ancient Egypt again because its history allowed
him to find there aspects of his own time, refracted and distilled
to suit rather complex purposes of his own.
This, I think, is true of Dweller in
Truth (1985) translated into English in 1998 as Akhenaten,
Dweller in Truth, which in its unassuming way is part of
Mahfouz's special concern with power, with the conflict between
orthodox religious and completely personal truth, and with the
counterpoint between strangely compatible yet highly contradictory
perspectives that derive from an often inscrutable and mysterious
figure.
Mahfouz has been characterised since
he became a recognised world celebrity as either a social realist
in the mode of Balzac, Galsworthy, and Zola or a fabulist straight
out of the Arabian Nights (as in the view taken by J M Coetzee
in his disappointing characterisation of Mahfouz). It is closer
to the truth to see him, as the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury
has suggested, as providing in his novels a kind of history of
the novel form, from historical fiction to the romance, saga,
and picaresque tale, followed by work in realist, modernist,
naturalist, symbolist, and absurdist modes.
Moreover, despite his transparent manner,
Mahfouz is dauntingly sophisticated not only as an Arabic stylist
but as an assiduous student of social process and epistemology--that
is, the way people know their experiences--without equal in his
part of the world, and probably elsewhere for that matter. The
realistic novels on which his fame rests, far from being only
a dutiful sociological mirror of modern Egypt, are also audacious
attempts to reveal the highly concrete way power is actually
deployed. That power can derive from the divine, as in his parable
Awlad Haritna (Children
of Gebelaawi) of 1959 in which the great estate owner Gebelaawi
is a godlike figure who has banished his children from the Garden
of Eden or from the throne, the family, and patriarchy itself,
or from civil associations such as political parties, universities,
government bureaucracy, and so on. This isn't to say that Mahfouz's
novels are guided by or organised around abstract principles:
they are not, otherwise his work would have been far less powerful
and interesting to his uncounted Arab readers, and also to his
by now extensive international audience.
Mahfouz's aim is, I think, to embody
ideas so completely in his characters and their actions that
nothing theoretical is left exposed. But what has always fascinated
him is in fact the way the Absolute--which for a Muslim is of
course God as the ultimate power--necessarily becomes material
and irrecoverable simultaneously, as when Gebelaawi's decree
of banishment against his children throws them into exile even
as he retreats, out of reach forever, to his fortress--his house,
which they can always see from their territory. What is felt
and what is lived are made manifest and concrete but they cannot
readily be grasped while being painstakingly and minutely disclosed
in Mahfouz's remarkable prose.
Malhamat Al-Harafish (1977), Epic
of the Harafish, extends and deepens this theme from Children
of Gebelaawi. His subtle use of language enables him to translate
that Absolute into history, character, event, temporal sequence,
and place while, at the same time, because it is the first principle
of things, it mysteriously maintains its stubborn, original,
if also tormenting aloofness. In Akhenaten the sun god changes
the young, prematurely monotheistic king forever but never reveals
himself, just as Akhenaten himself is seen only at a remove,
described in the numerous narratives of his enemies, his friends,
and his wife, who tell his story but cannot resolve his mystery.
Nonetheless Mahfouz also has a ferociously
antimystical side, but it is riven with recollections and even
perceptions of an elusive great power that seems very troubling
to him. Consider, for instance, that Akhenaten's story requires
no fewer than fourteen narrators and yet fails to settle the
conflicting interpretations of his reign. Every one of Mahfouz's
works that I know has this central but distant personification
of power in it, most memorably the dominating senior figure of
El-Sayed Ahmed Abdel-Gawwad in the Cairo Trilogy, whose authoritative
presence hovers over the action throughout the triology.
In the trilogy his slowly receding eminence
is not simply offstage, but is also being transmuted and devalued
through such mundane agencies as Abdel-Gawwad's marriage, his
licentious behavior, his children, and changing political involvements.
Worldly matters seem to puzzle Mahfouz, and perhaps even compel
as well as fascinate him at the same time, particularly in his
account of the way the fading legacy of El-Sayed Abdel-Gawwad,
whose family is Mahfouz's actual subject, in the end still manages
to hold together the three generations, through the 1919 Revolution,
the liberal era of Saad Zaglul, the British occupation, and the
reign of Fouad during the interwar period.
The result is that when you get to the
end of one of Mahfouz's novels you paradoxically experience both
regret at what has happened to his characters in their long downward
progress and a barely articulated hope that by going back to
the beginning of the story you might be able to recover the sheer
force of these people. There is a hint of how gripping this process
is in a fragment called "A message" contained in the
novelist's Echoes
from an Autobiography (1994): "The cruelty of memory
manifests itself in remembering what is dispelled in forgetfulness."
Mahfouz is an unredemptive but highly judgemental and precise
recorder of the passage of time.
Thus Mahfouz is anything but a humble
storyteller who haunts Cairo's cafes and essentially works away
quietly in his obscure corner. The stubbornness and pride with
which he has held to the rigour of his work for a half-century,
with its refusal to concede to ordinary weakness, is at the very
core of what he does as a writer. What mostly enables him to
hold his astonishingly sustained view of the way eternity and
time are so closely intertwined is his country, Egypt itself.
As a geographical place and as history, Egypt for Mahfouz has
no counterpart in any other part of the world. Old beyond history,
geographically distinct because of the Nile and its fertile valley,
Mahfouz's Egypt is an immense accumulation of history, stretching
back in time for thousands of years, and despite the astounding
variety of its rulers, regimes, religions, and races, nevertheless
retaining its own coherent identity. Moreover, Egypt has held
a unique position among nations. The object of attention by conquerors,
adventurers, painters, writers, scientists, and tourists, the
country is like no other for the position it has held in human
history, and the quasi-timeless vision it has afforded.
To have taken history not only seriously
but also literally is the central achievement of Mahfouz's work
and, as with Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, one gets the measure of
his literary personality by the sheer audacity and even the overreaching
arrogance of his scope. To articulate large swathes of Egypt's
history on behalf of that history, and to feel himself capable
of presenting its citizens for scrutiny as its representatives:
this sort of ambition is rarely seen in contemporary writers.
Mahfouz's Egypt is a charged one, strikingly
vivid for the accuracy and humour with which he portrays it,
in a mode that is neither completely taken with great heroes
nor able to do without some dream of total harmony of the kind
Akhenaten so desperately strives to keep but cannot sustain.
Without a powerful controlling centre, Egypt can easily dissolve
into anarchy or an absurd, gratuitous tyranny based either on
religious dogma or on a personal dictatorship.
Mahfouz is now ninety years old, nearly
blind, and, after he was physically assaulted by religious fanatics
in 1994, is said to be a recluse. What is both remarkable and
poignant about him is how, given the largeness of his vision
and his work, he still seems to guard his nineteenth- century
liberal belief in a decent, humane society for Egypt even though
the evidence he keeps dredging up and writing about in contemporary
life and in history continues to refute that belief. The irony
is that, more than anyone else, he has dramatised in his work
the almost cosmic antagonism that he sees Egypt as embodying
between majestic absolutes on the one hand and, on the other,
the gnawing at and wearing down of these absolutes by people,
history, society. These opposites he never really reconciles.
Yet as a citizen Mahfouz sees civility and the continuity of
a transnational, abiding, Egyptian personality in his work as
perhaps surviving the debilitating processes of conflict and
historical degeneration which he, more than anyone else I have
read, has so powerfully depicted.
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