Bidoun Review of Sons of Gebelawi

Abnaa al Gebelawi (Children of Gebelawi), By Ibrahim Farghali, Cairo: Al Ain, 2009

In Ibrahim Farghali’s Abnaa al Gebelawi, all of the texts of the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz suddenly vanish from the face of the earth. This happens without explanation, reason, or ostensible cause: wherever they might be found – not only in libraries and bookshops but also on bookshelves and bedside bedside tables – novels by Mahfouz in their original Arabic are simply nowhere to be found. The authorities’ attempt to remedy the situation in the face of worldwide and (notably, if somewhat incredibly) popular uproar are juxtaposed with sightings of Mahfouz’s characters in a variety of locales, seldom having anything to do with the settings in which they actually appear in Mahfouz’s books.

With six – now seven – books to his name, Farghali (b. 1967) is among the most prolific novelists of his generation. In his devotion to the genre and his formal conservatism, he is perhaps the worthiest heir to Mahfouz (1911-2006), the Nobel prize winner most known for his mid-century tales of Cairo. Unlike Mahfouz, however, Farghali is firmly steeped in a magical realist tradition. Running through much of his prose are echoes of Jose Saramago’s nightmarish humour or shades of Italo Calvino’s fascination with the fantastical nature of fiction. He is taken by twins, telepathy and teleporting, and his firmly middle-class characters – otherwise utterly ordinary – have been known to reappear after they have died.

In Abnaa al Gebelawi – Farghali’s latest and greatest work – we face the prospect of a world without literature. The myriad voices in the book — for the young narrator cum author assumes many guises throughout these pages — express concern as to the fraught future of Arabic literature, about the erosion of the liberal and humane values that Mahfouz and his work represent, and (reflecting perhaps the essential fear of all true writers) about oblivion at large.

The events of the book are staged around a relatively uncomplex love affair involving the narrator and the eccentric daughter of a well-to-do family— occasion for Farghali to probe the psychology of class and sex in contemporary Egyptian society. Further in, however, the story breaks up and morphs into countless alternative and subordinate plot-lines, until it becomes clear (although it is never stated) that the whole of Abnaa al Gebelawi is but the barely coherent waste of a single pluralistic mind – the mind of a young writer concerned with the literary wasteland around him. The allegorical dimension remains predominant, and in this way recalls Awlad Haretnah (Children of Our Alley, 1959), the title of whose earlier English translation Farghali translates back verbatim for his own.

As it happens, Awlad Haretnah was the only book by Mahfouz to suffer censure from the religious establishment. In it the history of a popular residential quarter in Cairo stands in for the sum total of humanity’s spiritual experience. That quarter’s oldest, strongest and most benevolent resident – for many generations hidden away in his mansion – is called Gebelawi. Gebelawi has envoys or representatives, descendants or grandchildren, whose struggles to spread peace and justice make up episodes of the saga. Each is a retelling of the life of one of the prophets of Islam, starting with Adam and ending with the False Messiah. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad all feature, but at the end a rumour spreads that Gebelawi himself has died. In Arab literary circles it is frequently claimed that if not for Awlad Haretnah, Mahfouz would not have received the Nobel Prize. But it proved too much for orthodox, let alone radical Muslims, for whom Mahfouz would become the enemy soon enough.

a letter from Mahfouz to Mohammad al Badawi

Radical Islam had claimed many lives since the 1980s when in 1994 Mahfouz barely survived being knifed to death outside his house in Cairo. The irony was that, of all the helpless octogenarians his bearded young assailants could have targeted for apostasy, he was probably the least secular. A typical Cairene of the pre-bin ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Laden era, the man had led an all but exemplary (for which read profoundly unadventurous) life. He did not seek revolution, he did not take great risks. He had no utopian or transcendental illusions. And perhaps it was thanks to this and this alone that he was able to invent and reinvent the novel, the youngest genre in the language, defining it for generations of writers down to Farghali.

Applying every novelistic model at his disposal, Mahfouz produced a phenomenal number of readable books: social chronicles, political critiques, philosophical manuals. None was too difficult or experimental to render it inaccessible to even the most common reader. None sought to undermine whatever pillar of the status quo it came in contact with. Notwithstanding the elaborately veiled, painstakingly respectful Ages-of-Man narrative in Awlad Haretnah – a Muslim treatise on the meaning of life if ever there was one – in Mahfouz’s books, the family, the creed, the government are never attacked for what they are or what they stand for, but only for their most striking deviations, omissions or excesses.

For a magic realist like Farghali, Mahfouz may not be the most obvious point of departure; the Nobel laureate is, after all, best known for devotion to the real even in his least realistic works, and one would have trouble imagining him so much as hinting at the paranormal or the fantastical. Yet in Abnaa al Gebelawi, the grand opera to Farghali’s various arias, Mahfouz is an embodiment of something not so different from the sense of sight. His books stand in for almost everything Farghali values: Literature, Thought, Freedom, Knowledge, even Love. The premise could not have been more powerful.

Sons of Mahfouz

Youssef Rakha quizzes out novelist Ibrahim Farghali on his greatest masterpiece to date

Finally, a true event in contemporary Arabic literature: Last month at the Diwan Bookshop, in Zamalek, Ibrahim Farghali (b. 1967) signed copies of his latest novel, Abnaa Al-Gabalwi (Sons of Al-Gabalawi), published by Dar Al-Ain this June, while he was on holiday from his job as a magazine editor in Kuwait. It may seem ironic to call this intimate gathering an event, particularly judged against the much greater media attention paid to much lesser books in the last ten years. Yet from a history-of-literature point of view, Abnaa Al-Gabalwi is probably the closest we have come to a fulfilment of the prophecy that a home-grown magic realist movement would emerge in the new millennium.

The many disparate and as yet shy strands of magic realism linking Farghali’s books with such writers as Mustafa Zikri – it was thought – would eventually cohere into a more readership-oriented, ambitious and articulate body of novels.

Such books would combine the realism and social commitment of the Sixties narrative tradition with the individualism and physicality of the Nineties (the latter thus far accommodated mainly by the prose poem). It would give substance to the notion of an “age of the novel”, espoused by critic Gabir Asfour at millennium’s end, and express a range of recent influences from Gabriel-Garcia Marquez and Jorge-Luis Borges to Umberto Eco to Jose Saramago – all of whom demonstrated how elements of the fantastical could be deployed to intensify reality and/or infuse the public realm with private experience.

Abnaa Al-Gabalwi – and, yes, the title is a translation back into Arabic of the title of the first English translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s Awlad Haretna (1959), also known as Sons of Our Alley – seems to be that rare thing: a self-consciously self-conscious full-length Arabic novel, designed as much as anything to define the language’s most talked about genre and, crucially, conceived on as grand a scale as can be expected.

“Of course Saramago, for me, is the literary model,” Farghali says. “To write a long, big, subtly conveyed text through which to say everything. And with the highest degree of artistic excellency possible, to create a large idea that accommodates numerous smaller ideas, juxtaposes styles and discordant voices. My ambition is a text that could be read and enjoyed and reread and still enjoyed by an ordinary reader as well as a member of the literary elite. It’s an ambition like Dostoevsky’s and Saramago’s, and I hope I don’t sound vain when I say this. I think I had been practising since Ibtisamat Al-Qiddissin,” his 2006 novel, translated by Andy Smart and Nadia Fouad-Smart as The Smiles of the Saints, “to produce a text of this level.”

As a literary critic, Farghali has been the quickest to dismiss such middle-brow, best-selling “phenomena” as Alaa El-Aswany’s The Yaqoubian Building; and his principal argument against such books is that they pander to a growing but limited – and limiting – worldwide market, that “they are not novels at all, but illusions”.

Yet Farghali’s own ambition extends to sales figures too: a fact more evident perhaps in this book than in previous ones. “Aside from theorising or stating the obvious, aside from the conditions of narrative and imagination and construction and the depth of the characters, I think a text to which the term ‘novel’ is applicable must also be an ‘art object’, meaning that it must make sublime, competent and beautiful use of the language, it must use the language in its own specific way. To be called a novel, the text must absorb the narrative methods that have been employed throughout history, it must know its place in the history of narrative. It has to be contemporary, experimental and deep, and work towards abiding by the conditions of the modern as a general context that is influenced in turn by economic, social and historical factors. Only then,” Farghali says, “is a narrative text worthy of being called a novel.”

***

Irrespective of his 1989 Nobel prize – an unprecedented achievement in the Arab world, and one that somewhat overshadowed his already established career – the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) remains an inescapable reference point. His incredibly large body of work acted to define the Arabic novel (the youngest in the language, not having emerged until the turn of the 20th century, and Mahfouz’s preferred genre throughout his life); and in so doing the sheer magnitude of his achievement also seemingly killed it – in time for the so called death of the novel worldwide.

Trying out the widest range of models – Balzak, Dickens, Tolstoy, the historical novel format, the French existentialist novel, the grassroots folk epic – Mahfouz seemed to exhaust the possibilities of the genre. If not, he at least showed up its aesthetic and (more relevantly for the Arab scene) political limitations. He was criticised for being “petty bourgeois”, for standing in the way of social and economic transformation, in effect for importing the one genre that sided with things as they were, not as they should be.

Yet even if a contemporary novelist were to make a point of never reading any Mahfouz, that novelist’s work would still be judged both positively and negatively against Mahfouz’s corpus. Ironically, of course, of the many fiction writers who began their careers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Farghali is probably the most like Mahfouz. His comparatively prolific output – six books of fiction in less than a decade, with the first, Bittijah Al-Maaqi (Towards the irises), appearing in 1997 – recalls Mahfouz’s steady, one might even say plodding, approach to writing. It is driven at least as much by patient daily toil as bouts of inspiration and epiphanies.

“I read Mahfouz for the first time when I was 13 years old. I started with The Cairo Trilogy and decided to finish off his complete works – a feat I had actually accomplished by the time I was 17. He is probably the only writer whose every work I read, rereading many of his books over and over, especially The Trilogy and The Harafish,” Mahfouz’s 1977 epic, “and so he occupies a gigantic space in my consciousness. I started writing in his shadow. I wrote excellent ‘Mahfouzian’ short stories which I subsequently tore up in order to rid myself of his direct influence and discover my own specific voice, but I was never free of the marks he made on me. He taught me the importance of structure, and I followed in his footsteps as regards the geometry of the text, before I finally rebelled against him to create my own structure.”

Even though eschewing politics is typical of his entire generation, Farghali’s mode of (not) engaging with society and/or politics, or neutralising the unfolding of history, is less like the so called Nineties Generation’s than Mahfouz’s. While Zikri, for example, remains painstakingly solipsistic, aggressively rejecting any allusion to society as a whole, and religiously ridding his work of any non-literary purpose, Farghali – like Mahfouz – is keen to preserve geographic locations, time frames and character types; he observes society from afar, subtly registering the relevant dynamics, suggesting a world which, though magical, is never unfamiliar.

Farghali concedes that some of Mahfouz’s characters – Amina, the matriarch of The Trilogy, for example – annoyed and repelled him, “but I do not judge Mahfouz’s characters in this text of mine,” which includes very frequent extended quotations from the Nobel laureate, “but rather meet them as they are, and conduct dialogues with them”, literally pulling them out of a particular moment in a given novel. “

“I liked the idea of creating an illusory yet extremely realistic world,” Farghali explains, “like the one he created in The Harafish. None of the things the things this novel talks about – like the strongmen with their clubs, or the tekkes – ever really existed, but he records them as if they were reality. He creates an alternative reality, an artistic and philosophical reality.” This, then, is what Egypt’s latest offspring of Cervantes can take from Mahfouz:

“I learned to conduct my love life from his characters; the heroes of his novels inspired me intellectually and in terms of my actual behaviour; and he inspired me in terms of writing, his complete independence from cliques and political parties and cultural mafias – and ideology,” the greatest anathema of the Nineties. “He taught me that you are not a writer unless you have to be independent even of the cliches of your own generation.” Farghali certainly is. “Mahfouz had charisma, he had presence, he is the only Arab writer who had a novelistic project in any sustained sense. He was well known for his manner of talking, his jokes and disciples, and his films, long before Nobel was ever on the horizon.”

***

Imagine, then, what it would mean for such a novelist – any Arab novelist, really, but especially such a one as Farghali – if the world were to wake up one morning to discover that every last copy of every last book by Mahfouz in the Arabic original has simply, without a trace, vanished off the face of the earth. Mahfouz’s books disappear not only from bookshops and libraries but from private collections, from bookshelves and bedside tables, from every place where they could conceivably be found.

This, basically, is the premise of Abnaa Al-Gabalwi, which nonetheless incorporates numerous other frameworks, notably the appearance of flesh-and-blood reincarnations of some of Mahfouz’s characters both in and outside their original settings, the government’s efforts to do what it can to have the books back – some people apparently know the texts by heart, others attempt to reconstruct them with the help of their knowledge of Mahfouz’s work from translations – and the very complex, gradual intermingling of the fictional world and the world to which it supposedly refers. There are not only characters but narrators, character narrators, doubles, triples, even quadruples. Subplots take on lives of their own, and there are multiple scenarios with a range of possible resolutions.

The fictional acrobatics are of such intensity they frequently if no doubt intentionally disrupt what suspension of disbelief the reader has managed to maintain, but they also undermine the book’s popular appeal and seem to have no purpose beyond themselves.

“The fictional acrobatics are an end in themselves” Farghali insists, “not a means to something else. You could put it down to taste. I like complexity in a novel. More than one time frame, more than one character, more than one voice. My wish is to alter my voice till it becomes a multiplicity of voices in the manner of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pesão, although of course there is a huge difference and I am still a student compared to him. I managed that somewhat in previous works, I created parallel time frames, but in general I totally incline towards this kind of layering. I like The God of Small Things, for example, for that same reason.”

As in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter night’s a traveller (which is made up of novel openings), by the time you have turned the last page, you have read not a novel as such but a range of possible novels. More than any one character or story-line, you retain a sense of what an Arabic novel is, or what Farghali thinks it might be. More importantly, perhaps, you appreciate the disappearance of Mahfouz’s work as a metaphor for the general social-political malaise the book selectively and somewhat fitfully depicts: corruption, purposelessness, physical and mental repression, and the existential loss not only of the private but of the public self all come to mind. Mahfouz’s books stand in for Egypt and all it means.

“I think I am simultaneously preoccupied, as usual, with two projects,” Farghali outlines his usual plan. “I am not sure which of them my demons will take me to. I haven’t been able to gauge the response to Abnaa Al-Gabalwi yet, but I certainly feel that, in writing it, I have realised one of my greatest ambitions.”

Mahfouz’s Cairo

 

It is early afternoon on the first day of Eid al Fitr, an unusually tranquil time in Cairo. While I drive past the British Council in Agouza, a middle-class residential neighbourhood outside the city proper; it feels pleasantly appropriate that the Corniche on the opposite side of the road, normally a crawling behemoth of traffic, should be lying so quietly in the Nile’s embrace.

Novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo is much greener and slower-paced than today’s Cairo: it was a place where people enjoyed walking and tram and bus rides. Until later in life, Mahfouz, who never drove, was well-known for walking around the city in the early morning; along the Corniche and by Orman Parks near Cairo University.

Now, overcrowding and the the virtual occupation of the pavements by street vendors, beggars and the homeless have made walking unpleasant; the tram only operates in certain parts of the city and the bus, like a giant sardine can tramping around town, is a parody of itself.

Nevertheless I have the impression that the city on Eid day is far more like Mahfouz’s Cairo than it normally is. This is my tour of Mahfouz’s Cairo – in the course of a day, I want to rediscover Cairo as the late novelist, the only Nobel laureate in Arabic literature, experienced and depicted it. The Eid-induced quietude readily evokes that place of imagination and memory.

As I come to Ne’ma, the popular fast-food outlet opposite the Police Hospital (where at the age of 95, Mahfouz died after a fall at his home on August 30, 2006), my impression is confirmed by the fact that there are no vehicles semi-parked around the pavements with trays of shawarma and felafel balanced on their half-closed windows; no beggars or hawkers compete with waiters in soiled uniform for the attention of car drivers; and what little traffic goes by, goes smoothly.

Mahfouz moved into 172 Nile Street, one of several handsome apartment buildings constructed to overlook the water in the 1930s and 1940s, after marrying in 1954 at the age of 43.

The magnitude of Mahfouz’s achievement prior to that point was already impressive: he had concluded the “ancient Egyptian phase” of his work, produced three more noteworthy books including Midaq Alley (1947), one of the first effective works of realism in the Arabic language, and completed his huge, celebrated Trilogy still to be published in 1956 to 1957.

Through the political and military turmoil of the 1950s, the closest Agouza neighbourhood would have come to any evidence of unrest were the demonstrations, many miles further due south-west, at what is now Cairo University, where Mahfouz had studied philosophy from 1930 to 1934.

The remoteness and repose of his house would have afforded Mahfouz an appropriate environment for observing events from afar – what he did best – and registering the effects on his fellow citizens-turned-characters, as he transformed history into lower middle-class drama, following the nap he took on coming home from work each day.

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Edging closer to Mahfouz’s house, my thoughts are interrupted by the realisation that I have just passed the spot where he was stabbed in the neck in 1994 following his identification with such “infidels” as Salman Rushdie, the Indian-British novelist. The thought that by the 1990s, Mahfouz was sufficiently estranged from the city that he had helped to define to be physically assaulted on his own doorstep, takes away from the happy coincidence of having set out on this journey during Eid when most of Cairo’s residents are celebrating.

Even prior to this attempt on his life, Mahfouz had not always had an easy relationship with Islamists. Yet he had done his best to stay on the right side of Muslim orthodoxy embodied by Al Azhar (the mosque-madrasa’s location was, after all, in Fatimid-era Cairo, a part of the city that he was to like above any other until the end of his life).

Though instrumental to his Nobel Prize many years later, Children of Our Alley, an attempt at a spiritual history of humanity, was not a work Mahfouz sought to promote once Al Azhar blocked its publication in book form: his mild personality drove him to downplay its importance. By the time that he condemned Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa on Rushdie’s life – never mind that he did so in a spirit of religious tolerance, not out of sympathy with Rushdie’s portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed in The Satanic Verses – the nature of Islamic practice had so changed that this most conservative of intellectuals, could suddenly be declared “an enemy of religion”. An unprovoked physical assault on an unsuspecting octogenarian, it occurs to me as I step out of the car and walk to the entrance of the building, would not have happened in Mahfouz’s Cairo.

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Signalling the household’s status as a national security liability (Mahfouz is survived by his wife and two daughters, who still live there), there is a lone police guard at the entrance – evidently used to people nosing around. “No, no,” he says when I ask him if he ever witnessed any disturbances, instead attesting to the kindness of the building’s famous occupants and unaccountably urging me (perhaps in hopes of bakshish) to go “upstairs to see the Haggah” – as he refers to Mahfouz’s wife, using the honorific title meaning someone who has made the pilgrimage to Makkah.

The voyeuristic prospect is tempting but I have neither an appointment nor any personal credentials, so I cross the street and walk along the Corniche instead, imagining the novelist in my shoes. It occurs to me that he would probably have taken such walks most frequently in the 1960s, while at the height of his achievement and physical health, working as a scriptwriter and a ministry of culture administrator in areas related to film.

During that decade of disillusionment with the Revolution (which Mahfouz initially supported), I imagine him seeking solace in a Nile houseboat now supplanted by riverside restaurants. A few, mostly derelict, survive on both sides of the river but the houseboat as a place of illicit pleasure is another aspect of Mahfouz’s Cairo that is all but extinct today. In Adrift on the Nile (1966), he used one as the setting for all manner of immoral acts by a cast of corrupt escapists, representing the gamut of professions – in order to prophesy, with terrifying accuracy, the collapse of President Nasser’s regime in 1967 after Egypt’s defeat in the Six Day War with Israel.

After becoming one of the most outspoken supporters of the peace initiative by President Sadat, Mahfouz would reflect on the horrors of Nasser’s police state in novels such as Al Karnak (1974) – named, like several of his works, after a real or imagined café.

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I drive past the island of Gezirah, crossing two bridges on my way into town. Parking is not so readily available off Tal’at Harb Square but eventually, with the help of an unlicensed valet, I’m firmly ensconced just behind Café Riche, where Mahfouz held his weekly gatherings for many years from 1963.

The effervescent hub of artistic life, Westelbalad (as downtown Cairo is known) remains as active and cosmopolitan as he knew it, though there are many more vehicles and the area’s commercial decline is evident. The weekly salon tradition is still upheld, though not in Café Riche, and in a far less gracious and jovial spirit than Mahfouz’s. While intellectual gatherings still take place, they have been polarised into Western or Westernised art-based events or provincial, politicised gatherings.

Better known as the gathering point for activists and intellectuals of the Sixties generation – Mahfouz’s eventual literary heirs whom he found to be “a strange bunch” – Café Riche was shut down in 1990 following ownership disputes, when it reopened in early 2001, neither Mahfouz nor any of its former patrons ever set foot in there again.

The café retains many of its original features: neocolonial decor, marble-topped tables, wooden qahwa – or traditional café-style chairs and an alcohol license but its walls are now lined with black and white portraits of the dead writers and artists who used to patronise it – Mahfouz has now been added. Adopting an increasingly exclusive policy regarding its potential clientele, it feels more like a museum hall than a living, breathing space.

Much like Mahfouz’s five-star namesake in Khan al Khalili (1946), who reduces the atmosphere of his novels to kitsch, today Café Riche is more of a tourist destination than anything else.

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For a while, sipping strong Turkish coffee and reviewing the tiny Cairo map on which I scribbled pointers while surveying the faces of such celebrated writers as Tawfik al Hakim, Youssef Idris and Amal Dunqul, I consider other cafés that I could visit. But both café Qushtumur (also the name of a novel published in 1988) in the upper-turned-lower, middle-class neighbourhood of Abbasia, where Mahfouz spent the greater part of his early life, and the Opera Café, located on the old Opera Square on the way to Fatimid-era Cairo, no longer exist.

I try to imagine a typical Mahfouz salon – a process facilitated by my meeting with the novelist, on the first-floor lounge of the Shepheard Hotel, overlooking the eastern bank of the Nile on the outskirts of Garden City, on one of the last days of 1999. By then, Mahfouz was nearly deaf and blind, his voice still hoarse from the damage to his vocal chords caused by the knife attack five years previously, and his physical condition altogether precarious.

Reflecting the changes in the constitution of the literary scene, he was accompanied, not by his old core group, the Harafish (named after his eponymous 1977 epic), but by younger, mainly pro-establishment figures. Two people sat on either side of him as his eyes and ears, which made our conversation about the role of the cafe in literary life slow and stilted.

Two aspects of Mahfouz’s social persona nonetheless came through clearly: his delight in jokes and laughter and the incredible courtesy with which he could make his point, however negative, to a presumptuous or irritating interviewer. There was about him a peculiar combination of forbidding intelligence and embracing warmth, and I remember thinking at the time that he was, in this sense, the embodiment of an earlier, more liberal and humane Cairo – a far less abrasive, if equally complex Cairo.

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To save myself the trouble of parking on al Azhar Road – due to the presence of its many monuments, Eid or not, this is probably the worst place to park in the entire city – I give my valet some more money and find an old battered taxi playing, to my distress, the Egyptian pop idol Amr Diab – the kind of music Mahfouz, a personal friend of the diva Omm Kukthoum, would not even have recognised.

I exit alongside the newly renovated al Ghouri Complex, the Mameluke monument that had fallen into disrepair by the 1960s. Mahfouz spent some the happiest days of his life, starting in 1945, as a Ministry of Endowments’ librarian here.

Considering my own experience of the area in the 1990s – when it was a squatters’ slum full of drug dealers, where the narrow alleyways were often blocked by tiny pickup trucks and donkey-pulled carts – it is difficult to imagine al Ghouri as the clean, ordered, pedestrian-only neighbourhood it must have been in his time, imbued with an historical, as well as a religious, spirit of Islamic glory.

At least Fatimid-era Cairo’s principal thoroughfare, al Muiz li-Din Allah Street, on the other side of Hussein Mosque, has been converted into a pedestrian-only walkway, its wealth of Fatimid and Mameluke architecture finally attended to.

I cross under the road via a pedestrian tunnel and walk on through al Muiz Street to the neighbourhood of Gamaliyya, where Mahfouz was born on Dec 11, 1911 and spent the first nine years of his life before moving to the then upscale Abbasia neighbourhood. I pause at the Gamaliyya Police Station, looking across at the nondescript small apartment building with which the Mahfouz family home has been replaced. A sense of history still pervades the atmosphere, but hardly any visual clues remain.

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Mahfouz drew on this area for two kinds of book: the realistic novel, exemplified by his Trilogy, which detailed lower middle-class life, and the legendary epic of strongman-controlled communities (set in the 18th and 19th centuries) and exemplified by The Harafish.

Little evidence remains of either world. The prosperous and lower-middle-class household in which the women were barely allowed to look out of the windows have been replaced by overcrowded rooms and women smoking shisha on street corners; and the galibeya-clad strongman holding the thick fighting stick known as the nabbout reincarnated as an unlicensed tour guide-cum-drug dealer, in jeans and beach shirt, likely armed with a hidden knife and looking to trick the hapless tourist into buying an overpriced souvenir.

Avoiding Khan al Khalili’s al Fishawi Café, which Mahfouz patronised briefly as a young man and has since become a perpetually overcrowded cliché of Islamic Cairo, I return by way of the labyrinth of alleyways adjoining the covered souk – from which his realist phase drew its greatest inspiration – asking directions to Bein al-Qasreen, Qasr al Shoq and Al Sukkariyya (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street: the titles of the three novels in question) as I go along. Calls, notably from Gamal al Ghitani, the novelist and editor, for introducing a sign system indicating the locations of these tiny venues and converting the area into a literary walk have so far fallen on deaf ears.

In Palace of Desire, Mahfouz wrote of these alleyways: “Voices were blended and intermingled in a tumultuous swirl around which eddied laughter, shots, the squeaking of doors and windows, piano and accordion music, rollicking handclaps, a policeman’s bark, braying, grunts, coughs of hashish addicts and screams of drunkards, anonymous calls for help, raps of a stick, and singing by individuals and groups.”

Yet all I find of these alleyways are littered, narrow stretches with an excess of pickup trucks and a few barefoot children.

In Qasr al Shoq I meet a mechanic, an affable, sweaty young man in a pink shirt. “What do you think of Naguib Mahfouz?” I ask. “He’s that scientist,” he says, faltering. “That famous scientist who got the Nobel Prize, isn’t he?”

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