[DEBATE] : In Egypt at Crossroads, a Faustian Arrangement

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/books/19smith.html>
June 19, 2008
Books of The Times
In Egypt at Crossroads, a Faustian Arrangement
By DINITIA SMITH
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CAIRO MODERN
By Naguib Mahfouz
Translated by William M. Hutchins. 242 pages. The American University
in Cairo Press. $19.95.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, who died in 2006, was
Egypt's Balzac. In his 33 novels, including his masterpiece, "The
Cairo Trilogy"; his 16 short story collections; 30 screenplays; and
several plays he invented a vast human comedy populated by the
inhabitants of Cairo's sprawling metropolis whose lives embodied the
history of his country: wily shopkeepers and heartless bureaucrats,
wheedling beggars, voluptuous women, whores and holy men, desperate
parents and starving students.

Mahfouz's early novels are about Egypt's Pharaonic past: Khufu
(Cheops), builder of the Great Pyramid; the Hyksos invaders. But in
the 1940s he began to confront what could only be called the country's
crisis of modernity. From that period came "Cairo Modern," originally
published in 1945 (a little before his better-known work, "Midaq
Alley"), now translated into English for the first time.

The novel takes place in the 1930s, with Egypt at a crossroads. Its
traditional mores are being increasingly undermined by European
influences. It is a period when cloistered women still peer down from
latticed balconies into Cairo's alleyways, while others stroll the
city's wide boulevards dressed in the latest Parisian couture. For the
first time Egyptian universities are open to women. The country is
still under British influence and ruled by the corrupt and gluttonous
King Farouk, along with a degenerate bureaucracy of Turks and
Circassians, while unemployment is rampant and students go hungry.

At the novel's heart is an intriguing premise. The central character
Mahgub, 24, is, as Mahfouz was, a philosophy student at King Fuad
University (now Cairo University). Mahgub is a lean and literally
hungry man from a peasant background. To assuage his grinding hunger
and to help his ailing father, Mahgub enters into a devil's bargain.
He agrees to marry, sight unseen, the mistress of a prominent — and
married — government official in return for a good job that will
enable him to send money home to his pious family in the dusty
provincial town of al-Quanatir. But lo, on their betrothal day he
discovers that the woman, Ihsan, is not only the former girlfriend of
his own good friend, but a high school student who, with "her jet
black hair, her pure, ivory complexion and her rosy lips," he has long
desired.

Mahfouz's portraits of Ihsan and other women are especially
compassionate and complex. Ihsan is Egypt's new woman, a lover of
Goethe and Italian painting who planned to go to the university and
have a career. But the threat of hunger is there for her too, and it
will destroy her youthful radiance.

She has entered into this arrangement through the connivance of her
greedy father, who has lost his money on drugs and gambling and wants
her to marry a rich man for his own gain. Ihsan will be Mahgub's wife,
but she will also allow her husband's employer, Qasim, to visit her on
certain nights while Mahgub makes himself conveniently scarce,
wandering the bars and cafes of the city.

Needless to say, things do not turn out as expected. Mahfouz's
brilliance lies in portraying the mixture of good and evil in human
character. Mahgub and Ihsan develop a tenderness toward each other
and, it seems, a passionate sex life, while sustaining their Faustian
agreement with the wealthy Qasim. They become enamored of the comforts
this arrangement brings — a good apartment, a big office and a
telephone for him — and of having enough to eat.

The book contains vivid descriptions of the social life of the city's
young set, a riverboat party on the Nile, the yacht progressing
"through the waves as if swimming through the resplendent light," a
society benefit featuring a performance of Molière in a mansion
surrounded by luxuriant gardens.

Yet Mahgub is a Dostoyevskyan character and moral nihilist, and caught
up in his new comforts, he neglects to send money to his parents. The
novel's climax, when all the characters come together at once, takes
on the feeling of a French farce, and Mahgub is left with a horrifying
realization about himself.

Unfortunately this central story is book-ended by schematized
philosophical discussions between the characters, who are made to
represent different positions: Mahgub the nihilist of course, and
three others who practically disappear after the first five chapters:
Ali Taha, a Comtean and socialist; Ahmad Badir, a journalist and a
member of the nationalist Wafd party; and Ma'mun Radwan, an Islamic
fundamentalist. (In 1994 Mahfouz survived an attack by a
knife-wielding fundamentalist after renewed controversy over his
portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer in his 1959 novel
"Children of the Alley.")

Mahfouz wrote in a classical Arabic, which is comparable to
Shakespearean English and doesn't lend itself easily to translation,
especially in the dialogue. Yet the sometimes stilted, decorous
language in "Cairo Modern," punctuated by its moments of sensuality
and vibrant description, takes on a kind of pleasing rhythm of its
own.

Despite its flaws the novel is a singular look at a historical moment
in the lives of Egyptians raised in traditional households whose
existences were rocked by modernity. If you want to understand the
hunger, the corruption, the bitterness that led to Gamal Abdel
Nasser's 1952 coup against Farouk, the rise of fundamentalism and the
intense Arab nationalism that accompanied it, you will find it played
out here in this book.