Original article was published on Madamasr here.

1988

As usual I sat at the front, close to the
blackboard because I’m short-sighted, and to the left, so the teacher’s
body wouldn’t hide what he wrote.

On that particular day the
teacher was absent. I don’t remember what he taught us or even who he
was, but I remember the substitute who came instead: An Arabic teacher
who had taught me the year before and whom I had understood very little
from. Instantly the memory of incomprehension came back, along with the
idea that he was a bad teacher. A few of my classmates surrounded him,
but he didn’t seem to care for the mess, the shouting or the kids
standing around him, or even for the kids sitting like me, chatting with
their neighbors.

Suddenly I heard someone ask him about Naguib Mahfouz,
who had won the Nobel Prize a few days before. I’d heard about it in
the news and what he did wasn’t a mystery to me — I knew he was a
novelist and I knew of the prize-winning novel, but I didn’t remember
who had told me.

As if he had been waiting for a question to bring
order to the class, the sub said: “If you want to know about Mahfouz,
you have to return to your seats.” Those around him did sit down, the
rest quickly followed, and we all listened.

He said that Naguib
Mahfouz was an atheist Egyptian writer who did not believe in God and
that he had written an atheist, infidel book, which said “God has died”
on the first page. He didn’t tell us the title of the book, of course,
fearing that we would read it and be tempted, and none of us asked for
further details because of his excessive harshness and the idea of
Mahfouz-ian heresy that was deserving of execution.

Maybe many of
us didn’t give much thought to the awful details related by the
substitute teacher, but something settled in my mind and refused to
leave. For years I kept asking around and looking for Mahfouz’s phrase,
“God has died,” in every magazine or newspaper I put my hands on. I
eventually learned that it appeared in his novel Awlad Haretna (Children of Gebelawi, 1959). I read a lot about it, but never succeeded in finding a copy.

1994

I
heard the news on the car radio. Unusually, my father was driving me to
school and he was listening very carefully: Naguib Mahfouz had been
stabbed while walking down the street, but he hadn’t died and was in a
stable condition in hospital.

Dozens of images came to my mind of
his turtleneck sweater, his neutral grey jacket, his slow walk and his
back bent under the brunt of something I didn’t comprehend. I remembered
that I’d lazed around a lot and hadn’t yet finished all of his novels,
as I’d planned to do that year. Something told me that if I didn’t
finish, the man would die and it would be my fault.

It didn’t take
much intelligence to realize that the teacher who called Mahfouz an
infidel had something to do with what had happened that day. Disbelief
flies in the air and stabs with a sharp blade. The desire to enter
heaven, to purge an infidel society or to set the rules of Islam — these
are three of many motives driving that stabber or other potential
stabbers, and it all starts in school when a person we trust, whom our
parents also trust, tells us without doubt that Mahfouz is an infidel.

I was still faced with a dilemma — I had yet to find Children of Gebelawi.
Perhaps I’d have to skip it, but I didn’t want that. For some reason
I’d decided to read Mahfouz by order of publication date, but my
terrible mistake was to neglect his short stories, so I only read them
later. Anyway, the absence of Children of Gebelawi from the shelves of our small library was an inescapable stumbling block.

1996

One of my friends was holding a copy of Al-Tariq
(The Search, 1964) and saying: “Mahfouz, that infidel!” We met at a
bookstand in Heliopolis, and he pulled the book from its place and put
the stigma of disbelief on the man, just like that. The stabbed man was
still in recovery, but the blasphemy accusations never ceased, even from
a young man my age who drank beer, smoked hashish and listened to heavy
metal.

We proceeded together toward downtown Cairo, walking a
long way before he took his leave and left me at Taalat Harb Square.
There, at one of the bookstands, I finally found Children of Gebelawi
— and in an unusually large size. The vendor handed it to me with a
beautiful smile and said: “Absolute infidelity!” This was getting
boring.

I went home and started reading the book, fell asleep
three hours later from fatigue, then woke up after dawn and continued to
read. When I read that Gebelawi had died, I was shaking.

***

But this did not start in the 1980s.

It’s said that when Thartharah fawqa al-Nil
(Adrift on the Nile) was published in 1966, military commander Abdel
Hakim Amer was infuriated by its descriptions of hash-smokers’
gatherings, possibly somehow reading it as slandering his person. It’s
also said that he called Gamal Abdel Nasser and said Mahfouz should be
imprisoned, to which Nasser responded: “How many Mahfouzes do we have,
Amer?”

The story is clearly false. It’s one of those stories “the
Egyptian state” (that complex and mysterious phrase) spread to put
Nasser in a good light and everyone else in a bad light. It reeks of the
Egyptian state not only because it presents Nasser as aware and
understanding, but also because it treats Egyptians — in this case
Mahfouz — as chess pieces manipulated by the state to tell stories with a
specific purpose and for complete control over the board, attributing
absolutely no will or choice to the pieces themselves.

But this
wasn’t the state’s only interaction with Mahfouz. It’s also said that
Nasser once asked journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal about Mahfouz’s
next work, and Heikal responded laughingly that he was about to publish a
novel by the author that would “bring disaster” in Al-Ahram. “Only to
you,” Nasser told him. I have no doubt that both stories come from the
same person. Nasser has the same quick wit in both, and in both the
narrator dismisses Mahfouz as a chess piece to be shamelessly
manouvered.

Stories about the state’s maltreatment of Mahfouz are many. They include harassment from Al-Azhar University because of Children of Gebelawi, forcing him to resign as head of the censorship authority. They include the censor’s brutal treatment of Karnak Café
(1974), cutting so much that it became riddled with plot-holes and
appeared more like a draft than a novel by Mahfouz at the height of his
craft and creativity. They include Anwar Sadat’s insulting treatment of
him — and others — for signing Tawfiq al-Hakim’s 1972 petition
denouncing the state of “no war and no peace” since Israel occupied
Sinai in 1967. And there are stories about security reports that
criticized Mahfouz for talking about “democracy” and other heresies that
threatened the Egyptian state.

2016

On social media website Goodreads, readers trade their views about books. On the Karnak Café page,
I was surprised to find that someone wrote that it’s the best book he
had read by Mahfouz, and that he personally envied Farag for what he
did.

The name Farag does not appear in the novel. It’s the name of the man who raped Souad Hosni’s
character in the film of the book, in a scene where we see her in total
breakdown, degraded, afraid and wishing for death because of the
brutality she’s confronted with, a scene that depicts rape as an
atrocious act against the victim, and a crime not only against the
victim, but against the country itself.

Maybe the commenter
imagined himself raping Souad Hosni. Mahfouz did not write the details
of the rape in the novel, but described it metaphorically in a single
line, leaving the rest to the imagination of the reader who lived
through that awful era of Egyptian history, and was familiar with what
was going on. Or perhaps the censor removed part of the account. We’ll
never know.

What saddened me was that the commenter didn’t notice
the plot-holes and confusion obvious to anyone reading the novel with
care, only seeing the rape incident as an act to be envied.

2014

Here’s
a story I never get tired of telling. I was attending an event in
Mansoura, in a large theater where some veteran actors were preparing to
read selections from Mahfouz’s Ahlam fatrat al-Naqaha (Dreams
of the Rehabilitation Period, 2004). Helmy al-Namnam (then a
representative of the Culture Minister) was speaking onstage about the
connection between Mahfouz and Egypt getting rid of the Muslim
Brotherhood a few months before. He said the knife that stabbed the
author was close to stabbing Egypt itself. He was cleverly tying
together the fates of Mahfouz and Egypt, alive and timeless, now and
forever.

Namnam then left the stage and the actors went on, each
reading a “dream,” each with their own style and voice. It seems the
person who chose the texts was smart, as half of the “dreams” read
included harsh criticisms of the Egyptian state, of a ruler who is a
fraud, a thief, an embezzler, an oppressor and who treats Egyptians like
chess pieces to move as he pleases, without care for their will or
desires.

2016

The same year again. On the
sidelines of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, on a panel I
participated in, an Egyptian reacted sharply when I criticized how
Egyptians dealt with their colonizers. Angrily, she asked me not
interfere with history, not to mess with it, and unhesitatingly used the
example of Mahfouz, who “told the history” of Egypt in his novels.

The first thing that came to my mind was Mahfouz’s Zaqaq al-Midaq
(Midaq Alley, 1947), which was written when Egypt was still under
British occupation yet has no depiction of the Egyptian resistance, even
though the freedom fighter is ubiquitous in television, movies and
books about that era. I thought of citing Midaq Alley and
Mahfouz’s dismissal of the “freedom fighter,” maybe because he thought
the resistance was not serious, not enough to warrant the label, or
maybe because he was writing a novel not a history book, writing down
his view not “telling the history” of Egypt. But I chose to stay silent.
It was obvious the woman had not read the book that the panel was
about. It also seemed she had never read a word by Mahfouz.

1988

The
Egyptian state was in crisis, as usual. A weak economy, meager
industry, endless fights, a “democracy” with one party monopolizing
everything and Hosni Mubarak, who knew almost nothing of what was
happening around him, earning an enduring nickname: “la vache qui rit”
(the laughing cow). If not for a few smart advisors, it would have been a
disaster for all. Suddenly, everyone got a surprise: Naguib Mahfouz had
won the Nobel Prize. The first Arab, the first Egyptian, and not in a
scientific field but a creative field that everyone finds mysterious and
attractive.

Mahfouz instantly became a star and the state decided
to forget the grudge it bore with this old chess piece, but without
forgetting the role it gave him. Indeed, it planned to make him the
best, most active piece in the coming years: massive praise in
newspapers, endless articles, countless titles (“Egypt’s fourth
pyramid,” “the Arabs’ Nobel,” etcetera), magazine pullouts, books and
the Order of the Nile awarded by Mubarak — the highest praise the state
can offer a chess piece.

Mahfouz, intelligently, accepted all this
with contentment. An elderly man cannot face the Egyptian state. Even a
young man full of enthusiasm can’t. I think he thought it was all
serving his literature in some way, that the state’s interest in him
would create wider readership for his work.

He only hoped to
spread his word more, and the state hoped to put itself in a good light,
betting on the idea that Egyptians don’t read, an idea it planted in
everyone’s mind years ago: books will ruin your head, drive you mad, get
you arrested. In the end, Mahfouz’s hope didn’t materialize but the
state’s plan worked to completion.

2016

Yes, a third time. It was a dark year.

The fallout of novelist Ahmed Naji’s
case is endless, even after his recent release, because he “violated
the decency” of a citizen with his writings. Part of this fallout was an
Egyptian prime minister announcing that Mahfouz had also “violated
public decency” with his Cairo Trilogy (1956-7), and he was not tried
then only because no one presented a case against him, but he was still a
criminal in the eyes of Egyptian law. If Mahfouz was alive today, he
added, he would have been tried and sentenced. Rejoice, Naji — your name
was mentioned the same sentence as Mahfouz, you were accused of the
same thing and if he were alive you could have been cellmates.

It
was truly a rare moment. The Egyptian state announced its secret view of
Mahfouz, the chess piece used for years against his will. Such moments
come after the state has an overwhelming triumph, as we see in every
corner in Egypt right now: no one objects, no one opposes, whoever
speaks is a traitor, whoever writes is immoral, whoever comments must be
tried and whoever thinks is an infidel. Intellectual terrorism with
every sentence and every thought. Nothing can stop the Egyptian state’s
holy march. It hasn’t beaten the other chess player; there is no other
player. The state has defeated the chess pieces themselves: Mahfouz and
all other Egyptians.

But the state has not been the only one to
wrong Mahfouz. We have all wronged him: when we called him an infidel,
envied Farag, claimed Mahfouz “wrote the history” of Egypt and called
for his imprisonment. We, fellow oppressed chess pieces, wronged someone
who wrote for us and showed us everything that was inside him, all his
puzzlement, questions, doubt, faith and the love with which he replaced
everything. We wrong him more than the state does, because we never read
what he wrote.

___________________________________________________________

This piece originally appeared in Arabic. It was translated by Ahmed Bakr.