Khan Al-Khalili (38 page)

Once in his room, he opened the window and looked out on the quarter. It was the middle of the month of Shaaban, and the moon was gleaming brightly in the clear August sky. All around it stars were twinkling coyly as though to express their regret that the moon had again appeared in its youthful guise, something that they had always known would not last. The moonlight bathed the entire quarter in a shimmering silver glow that banished the lonely darkness of night and imbued street corners and alleyways with a particular magic.

It was the night of mid-Shaaban, and the prayers for
that holy night could be heard through the neighboring windows. You could hear a boy shouting in his high-pitched voice: “O God, the one and only Bestower, Possessor of Majesty and Honor,” and the family repeated it after him. And he was the only silent one among them. What kind of prayer could he offer to his Lord, he wondered? He thought for a while, then lifted his hands toward the shining moon.

“O God,” he said humbly, “Creator of the universe, Ordainer of everything, envelop him in the broad expanse of Your mercy and let him dwell in Your spacious heavens. Grant to his grieving parents solace and perseverance, and to my own heart bring peace and tranquility. In the days ahead grant that I may find consolation for what is past” (and at this point Ahmad put his hand over his heart). “This heart of mine has endured a great deal of pain and swallowed failure and frustration.”

Was he remembering the day he had arrived in this old quarter, with the same quest for change in mind? Well, change had certainly taken place, but all it had brought were tears and despair. Ramadan would soon be here again. What memories! Could he still remember the last Ramadan, with him poised by the window waiting for the sunset prayer, then looking upward and seeing her there?

Now here was history itself, passing in front of his eyes just as it had been recorded by the onward march of days and nights, written with the ink of hope, love, pain, and sorrow. So this was the final night. Tomorrow he would be living in a new home, in a different quarter, turning his back on the past … a past with all its hopes and dashed aspirations.

Farewell then, Khan al-Khalili!

A
t my first meeting with Naguib Mahfouz (d. 2006) in 1969, the discussion began with the topic of translation, but not of his own work. At the time I was revising my doctoral dissertation on the renowned narrative of the Egyptian writer Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (d. 1930),
Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham
(which was originally published in 1907; my translation and study of it eventually appeared in book form as
A Period of Time
in 1992). Mahfouz was delighted to hear of my interest in that work, since he acknowledged to me that it had long been a favorite of his family and had had a great influence on him as a teenager as, it would appear, it did on another great Egyptian storyteller, Mahmud Taymur (d. 1973). Inevitably, however, the conversation gradually shifted to his own works, and I told him that I had read and greatly admired many of the short stories in his recently published collection,
Khammarat al-qitt al-aswad
(Black Cat Tavern, 1967). When I asked him if he would allow me to translate some of them, he
readily agreed and asked me to make a list of the ones I particularly liked. Once I had recorded the names of five or six stories, he asked if I was interested in any of the novels. Because its political context is set during and after the 1952 revolution, I had recently purchased
al-Summan wa-l-kharif
(1962;
Autumn Quail
, 1985), and thus that title was added to the list. Mahfouz signed his name to the paper (which I still cherish in my files), and my career as a translator of Mahfouz began.

In fact, it began, somewhat unusually perhaps, not with his novels, but rather with a collection of short stories—the ones on the list that I had chosen myself, and others that I proceeded to translate with an Egyptian colleague, Akef Abadir. The collection,
God’s World
, containing a selection of short stories culled from all his collections up until the year 1970, was published in 1973 and was mentioned in the Nobel Committee’s citation in October 1988 (although most critics in the Arab world incorrectly assumed that it was a reference to the Arabic collection
Dunya Allah
(1962), from which we had selected its title story for inclusion in our own collection).

Over the ensuing decades that short story collection was to be followed by my translations of
Autumn Quail
(1985),
Mirrors
(1977, 1999, based on
al-Maraya
, 1972), some individual short stories, and finally
Karnak Café
(2007) (a translation of the highly controversial novel,
al-Karnak
, 1974). This translation into English of
Khan al-Khalili
(1945), certainly one of the earliest, if not
the
earliest, of his “novels of the 1940s,” thus takes me back to a much earlier period in his novelistic output. It is to the impressions that such a return to beginnings has brought about for a translator that I would now like to turn.

The novel,
Khan al-Khalili
, is named for one of the most famous quarters of the old city of Cairo, the one founded in the tenth century following the invasion of Egypt by Shi’ite Fatimid forces. The new city was constructed in the area immediately below the Muqattam Hills. At its center was the mosque of al-Azhar, originally established in 972
CE
as a center for Shi’ite learning but one that over the centuries has become a primary source of both education and doctrinal discussion within the Sunni community. However, the most prominent Islamic monument in the Khan al-Khalili quarter itself is the mosque–shrine of al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was slain during the tragic schism that, within decades of Muhammad’s death in 632, had split the early Islamic community in two. The mosque itself contains some of the relics of al-Husayn and is thus a shrine frequently visited by devout Muslims, among whom we may list both the father of the Akif family in the present novel and the mother of the ‘Abd al-Gawwad family in Mahfouz’s renowned trilogy of novels; during her visit to the al-Husayn shrine, she is knocked down, with tragic consequences for herself and her family, as recounted in
Bayn al-qasrayn
(1956;
Palace Walk
, 1990).

The Akif family moves to Khan al-Khalili from the suburb of al-Sakakini, a change that is in the opposite direction to that of the one Mahfouz himself made as a child. Having been born and grown up in al-Gamaliya, equally close to the al-Husayn shrine, his father moved the family to the more rural (at that time, at least) suburb of Abbasiya. However, as any number of articles and television programs have pointed out, Mahfouz never lost his deep and abiding affection for the quarter in which he grew up,
and evidence of that is abundant in the descriptions to be found on the pages of
Khan al-Khalili
, as well as other novels penned during the 1940s and into the ’50s, culminating in the trilogy,
Bayn al-qasrayn, Qasr al-shawq
(1957;
Palace of Desire
, 1991), and
al-Sukkariya
(1957;
Sugar Street
, 1992). Many too are the photographs that show Mahfouz, by now the well-known Egyptian novelist, sitting in the Fishawi Café in Khan al-Khalili that, like its analogue, the Zahra Café in the novel
Khan al-Khalili
, lies in the shadow of the al-Husayn shrine. Is it any wonder then that this novel and the others in this “series,” with their utterly authentic portraits of every aspect of life in these ancient quarters, continue to hold such a central place in the hearts of Egyptian readers?

In this novel, place plays a crucially important role, as it does in all the other “quarter novels,” but so does time. Following Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, we can note that the two are almost inevitably linked to each other. The Akif family’s move to the Khan al-Khalili quarter is not a voluntary one, but is rather the result of panic caused by a bombing raid. The novel’s time period is that of the middle of the Second World War, and
Khan al-Khalili
records in vivid detail the often-neglected direct effects of the Africa Campaign on the Egyptian capital city. The social effects of the war and the continuing British occupation of Egypt (that started following the ‘Urabi Revolt of 1882) are very much to the fore in the long-famous novel,
Zuqaq al-Midaqq
(1947;
Midaq Alley
[sic], 1977), in which the climactic scene sees the young Egyptian, Abbas, battered to death by British soldiers as he confronts Hamida, the quarter’s beauty, who has
become a call girl. In
Khan al-Khalili
however, the impact of the war is, if anything, even more direct and vividly described. The tenants of the neighborhood into which the Akif family moves regularly find themselves being woken up in the middle of the night by the dreadful sound of air-raid sirens. The bomb shelter to which they all descend may be a haven from the potential destruction above, but the descriptions of these panic-stricken hours spent underground are used by Mahfouz as an effective means of portraying the clashing emotions Egyptians feel as they confront the consequences of other people’s wars. The conversations among the group that gathers every night at the Zahra Café are another device whereby the novelist is able to illustrate the wildly contrasting attitudes of the various social strata of Egyptian society as they react to the war going on around them.

Many commentators on Mahfouz’s career have suggested that it was precisely the dire impact of the war on contemporary Egyptian society during the early 1940s that led Mahfouz to abandon his plan, as usual carefully elaborated, to write a whole series of novels set in ancient Egypt. He had, in fact, already published three of them (along with some short stories): ‘
Abath al-aqdar
(1939;
Khufu’s Wisdom
, 2003);
Radubis
(1943;
Rhadopis of Nubia
, 2003); and
Kifah Tiba
(1944;
Thebes at War
, 2003), but his plans for a whole series of others, based no doubt on his long-standing interest in ancient Egypt, were put aside in favor of a concentration on the current travails of his fellow Egyptians. In this context it needs to be added that, at various stages in his very long career, he was to return to the ancient Egyptian theme, of which
Amam al-’arsh (Before
the Throne
, 1983) and
al-’A’ish fi-l-haqiqa
(1985;
Akhenaton, Dweller in Truth
, 1998) are merely two examples.

Mahfouz’s inspiration to write these “pharaonic” novels may well have come from both his youthful enthusiasm for ancient Egypt and its impact on Egyptian nationalist ideals and from his readings of the perennially popular historical novels of Jurji Zaydan (d. 1914), which had taken episodes from Arab and Islamic history as their chronological frame of reference. However, the turn to the contemporary period and to the process of writing novels about the Egyptian society of his own day was clearly the consequence of a concentrated course of study that he had initiated during the 1930s under the inspiration of his mentor and (then) publisher, the renowned Coptic Fabian intellectual, Salama Musa (d. 1958). It was this figure who encouraged the young graduate student in philosophy to consider a career as a writer and suggested that he investigate the tradition of fiction writing in the West. One work that we are told Mahfouz consulted was
The Outline of Literature
(1923) by John Drinkwater, with its “handy list” of novel titles as an appendix. Mahfouz, it would appear, made his way methodically and steadily through the works on the list, which included the most famous novels from the various European traditions, comprising examples of historical romances, bildungsroman, family sagas, and the like. This ongoing process of reading European fiction (mostly through the medium of English), coupled with his own wide knowledge of and devotion to the pre-modern heritage of Arabic literature, was to provide the inspirational framework for the lengthy and variegated career in fiction writing that was to follow.

Within the earlier phases of this developmental framework,
Khan al-Khalili
emerges as a remarkably successful contribution to the family saga, a sub-genre of the novel that was to be seen again at the end of the 1940s in his
Bidaya wa nihaya
(1949;
The Beginning and the End
, 1985) and, almost immediately afterward, in the three volumes of his trilogy—in which the narrative of the life of the ‘Abd al-Gawwad family is heavily focused on the story of Kamal’s upbringing (a character, the features of whose life and times have long been associated with those of Mahfouz himself). In the case of
Khan al-Khalili
, we are dealing with the Akif family, although, as the narrative progresses, the narrative focuses in the main on the two sons and, even more specifically on the elder of the two, Ahmad; descriptions of his movements both start and conclude the narrative. Ahmad clearly regards himself as the ill-starred victim of his family’s circumstances: the indolence of his father that leads to his compulsory early retirement and the resulting need for Ahmad to assume the burden of supporting the family as a whole and, in particular, his younger brother, Rushdi, as he goes through school and university. However, the novel’s narrator also provides the reader with a portrait of Ahmad as a rather pathetic middle-aged man whose lack of initiative, intellectual arrogance, escapism, and chronic shyness have all led inexorably to a situation in which life has essentially passed him by. The move from the suburbs to Khan al-Khalili provides a jolt to his complacent existence, but, in spite of the new acquaintances that he makes—most notably at the Zahra Café—his attitude toward life and people remains essentially unaltered. It is his fleeting
encounter with the neighbor’s teenaged daughter, Nawal, which rocks the static monotony of his existence. An agonizingly hopeless and unfulfilled “relationship” ensues, involving traditional exchanges of glances across the alleyway and brief encounters in the air-raid shelter during bombing raids.