Before the Throne by Naguib Mahfouz
Why did Mahfouz choose this particular allegorical device? And why did he want to render an historical verdict upon so many of Egypt’s rulers? His exposure to classical literature, dating back to his studies of Greek thought published as a young man (obtaining a degree in philosophy from the Egyptian University, now Cairo University, in 1934), and his lifelong self-study of Egyptology may provide the answer.
Inspired by the explosion of Egyptian patriotism that sparked the 1919 movement for national independence led by Mahfouz’s lifelong hero, Saad Pasha Zaghlul 1859?–1927), and by the global frenzy at the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, Mahfouz’s first published book was a translation of a brief work on ancient Egypt aimed at young readers by the British scholar, the Rev. James Baikie, in 1932. Though Mahfouz wrote dozens of short stories set in contemporary Egypt, a small number are set in, or use motifs from, Pharaonic times (now collected in English translation in Voices from the Other World). The action of his first three novels—Khufu’s Wisdom (‘Abath al-aqdar, 1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (Radubis, 1943) and Thebes at War (Kifah Tiba, 1944), likewise occurs in ancient Egypt. Yet, each, in its own way, obliquely critiques contemporary Egyptian politics—especially the last of these, an allegorical attack on both the British and the Turkish aristocracy.2 But with his next two novels, al-Qahira al-jadida the latter published in English as Cairo Modern and Khan al-Khalili, both set in the twentieth century and both possibly published in 1945, he discovered that the risks of censorship were slight, and abandoned a plan to compose forty novels on ancient Egypt to focus instead on life in his own times. Thus he ultimately created such contemporary masterpieces as The Cairo Trilogy—Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street—in Arabic, Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr al-Shawq, and al-Sukkariya) as well as scores of other works in a breathtaking array of styles and genres.3 He did not return to the pharaohs for nearly forty years—with Before the Throne.
Among his wide readings from ancient Egyptian literature as a young man, Mahfouz later confessed that a Middle Kingdom poem, The Dialogue of a Man and His Soul, had deeply impressed him.4 In it, an unnamed man contemplates death, debating its merits and demerits with his ba (a spiritual element released after death that connects the deceased in the burial chamber with the celestial deities).5 The man tells the story, recounting his arguments in favor of earthly life against his ba, which defends the advantages of death as though speaking in a court of law before an audience that may include the gods.6
Another possible source for the concept of presenting the afterlife trials of earthly movers and shakers is found in the writings of Lucian, a Hellenized Syrian in the Roman administration at Alexandria in the mid-to-late second century AD. Lucian cleverly adapted the judgment of the dead by the Greek underworld court headed by Zeus’ son Minos in order to mock the world of the quick. In his Dialogues of the Dead, the infamously irreverent Diogenes of Sinope (d. approximately 325 BC) invites one of the Cynic philosophers to join him in the House of Hades, lord of the shades:
“Diogenes bids you, Menippus, if you’ve laughed enough at the things on the earth above, come down here, if you want much more to laugh at; for on earth your laughter was fraught with uncertainty, and people often wondered whether anyone at all was quite sure about what follows death, but here you’ll be able to laugh endlessly without any doubts, as I do now—and particularly when you see rich men, satraps and tyrants so humble and insignificant, with nothing to distinguish them but their groans, and see them to be weak and contemptible when they recall their life above.”
As John Rodenbeck writes, the “satirical dialogues and fantastic tales” of the “long-lived Lucian of Samosata … have spawned many imitations.” Dialog as a means to convey abstract argument was itself key to the ancient Greek philosophy that Mahfouz had read.
Both Plato and his mentor Socrates asserted, Anthony Gottlieb notes in his book The Dream of Reason, that “truth emerged only through dialogue,” and Plato’s works were all “at least ostensibly” in that form. This could also explain why Mahfouz’s only published forays into writing for the theater—a series of short plays that he produced intermittently following the cataclysmic Arab defeat of 1967—were really just dialogs, with little or no stage directions or descriptions. Though he loved every aspect of drama, including the omnipresent singing and dancing of Egyptian productions (he apparently didn’t miss an opening night in Cairo’s theater district until at least the mid-1960s), Mahfouz the playwright nonetheless dispensed with everything but raw verbal confrontation between characters. He evidently felt that only ruthless dialog could unflinchingly expose the existential truths behind the naked humiliations and despair of the time.
A further potential model for Before the Throne is an allegory in prose on the fate of the soul by the blind Syrian poet Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri (d. 1058). In al-Ma‘arri’s Risalat al-ghufran (The Epistle of Forgiveness), a shaykh enters the afterlife—but in imagination only—to see how the drunkard poets of the Pre-Islamic “Age of Ignorance” have managed to find divine forgiveness.7
Or he may have read a work similar to that of al-Ma‘arri’s, Risalat al-tawabi’ wa-l-zawabi’ (Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons), by an Andalusian late contemporary, ibn Shuhayd (d. 1035), who “meets the spirits of a number of prominent littérateurs—poets such as Imru’ al-Qays, Abu Nuwas, Abu Tammam, and al-Mutanabbi, prose writers such as ‘Abd al-Hamid, al-Jahiz and Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani—and critics,” in the other world, as described by Roger Allen.8
Perhaps a more immediate literary example of a trial involving Egypt’s former rulers is Sir H. Rider Haggard’s “Smith and the Pharaohs.” In this story, an English archaeologist, accidentally locked in the Egyptian Museum overnight, finds himself witness to a ghostly assembly of the kings and queens whose bodies and belongings are housed in the building. After overhearing them gossip about the performance and relative qualities of their respective predecessors and successors, he finds himself brought before them for formal judgment as a despoiler of the royal dead.
And yet another contemporaneous precedent—which Mahfouz may well have read—is George Sylvester Viereck’s eccentric 1937 biography of Wilhelm II, The Kaiser on Trial, apparently ghost-written by “Essad Bey,” a Jewish-cum-Muslim writer (later “Kurban Said,” born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku). Essad Bey was a popular novelist and nonfiction author based in both Weimar and Nazi Germany who was also widely read in the rest of Europe, the U.S., Central Asia, and the Middle East. He died in Italy in service to the Axis in 1942. Tom Reiss, Essad Bey’s own biographer, sketches the essential details of this oddly path-breaking book:
The Kaiser on Trial is a bizarre historical pastiche written in the form of courtroom testimony. It is ostensibly the trial of the Kaiser for war crimes in front of a tribune of historical figures, both dead and living. It is also a reflection on the first years of the twentieth century and the events that ended the [sic] Europe’s old empires in a vast spectacle of mass killing and destruction. George Bernard Shaw praised it as an effective “new method in the writing of history,” providing “a mine of information … both dramatic and judicious.”10
Mahfouz also had more occult sources of inspiration—and even wrote a kind of prototype of Before the Throne in the form of a long (49 pp.) short story, “The Seventh Heaven” (“al-Sama’ al-sabi’a”) in 1979. In “The Seventh Heaven,” a series of famous figures, ranging from Pharaoh Akhenaten (1353–1336 BC), Saad Zaghlul, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1918–1970), and others, face brief afterlife trials conducted by a former Egyptian high priest from ancient Thebes, in their quest to reach the highest (seventh) level of Paradise. Strikingly, in this work influenced by the writings of the Egyptian spiritualist, Ra’uf Sadiq ’Ubayd,9 no one—not even Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin—suffers eternal damnation, only brief spells of penance back on earth. Hitler himself returns as a petty crime capo in a Cairene alley. (For this and other tales of the uncanny by Mahfouz, see his collection, The
And in Before the Throne, more striking than even the glittering visual splendor of the supernatural backdrop is Mahfouz’s choice of the Osiris Court as the vehicle for delivering his own historical judgments. God of the afterlife and chief of the tribunal that judges the souls of the deceased, Osiris is one of ancient Egypt’s oldest known deities, his roots sunken and decayed in the mud and clay of the northeastern Delta. An ancient folk belief held that he was an actual—and prodigious—king in Predynastic times (a view still debated by Egyptologists), but the first known image of him dates to the Fifth Dynasty, one of many minor deities grouped around the king, “with a curled beard and divine wig in the manner of traditional ancestral figures.”11 In the Old Kingdom, he was associated with the royal dead only, mainly in the great necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt, though gradually, his popularity grew. His nemesis was Seth, who eventually became an Egyptian prototype of Satan, the Evil One. In one of Pharaonic Egypt’s most famous myths, Seth twice attacks Osiris, the second time cutting him up into sixteen pieces and throwing them into the Nile. All the pieces are recovered by his sister–wife, the goddess Isis, except one—his penis.12 That critical lacuna aside, one should note that, to the ancient Egyptians, “the dying of Osiris does not seem to be a wrong thing,” as Herman Te Velde says, “for death is ‘the night of going forth to life.’ ”
Crucial to Before the Throne is the role Osiris plays in the passage of the dead into the next world—or into nonexistence. In the ancient myth,13 Osiris, in the shape of a man wrapped in mummy bandages, bearing the symbols of royal power (the elaborately plumed atef crown on his head, a false beard on his chin, the crook and flail in his hands crossed over his chest), presided. Meanwhile the jackal-headed god of embalming, Anubis, introduced the deceased and weighed his or her heart on a great double-scale against a feather representing Ma‘at, the principle of divine order and justice. If the defendant had committed no grave sins on earth, the heart would balance with the feather—and the deceased would be pronounced “true of voice” (a concept that resonates strongly in Mahfouz’s work) and given the magic spells necessary to enter the underworld, Duat.
But if there was no balance with the feather, the heart was fed to “the devourer,” Ammit, a terrifying female beast with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hind legs of a hippo. As all of this transpired, the ibis-headed Thoth, god of writing and magic, supervised and recorded the judgments and reported them to Osiris. (Another representation of Thoth, a baboon, sat atop the scale.) Meanwhile Isis (a radiantly beautiful woman with either a throne—which was her emblem—or a solar disk and horns upon her head),14 her son, the falcon-headed Horus (who introduced and pleaded for each defendant), and other deities looked on.
The Osiris Court, carved and painted in tombs, and depicted on papyrus in the Book of the Dead, is the most vivid and enduring image from old Egyptian beliefs regarding the fate of the individual after death. It has even been found, crudely but beautifully displayed, on the gilded cartonnage covering the chests of Roman-era mummies excavated by Zahi Hawass at the Bahariya Oasis in 1999 (and later). The artisans who made them came from a society that had already forgotten most of the other elements of ancient Egyptian religion—including, apparently, even the knowledge of how to correctly write the sacred (hieroglyphic) script.
Perhaps further proof of the Osiris Court’s persistently haunting imagery is that Mahfouz, who had set aside Pharaonic Egypt as a central setting or theme in his fiction for nearly forty years, then seized upon it as the framework for one of his strangest and most explicitly ideological books. In Before the Throne, subtitled Dialogs with Egypt’s Great from Menes to Anwar Sadat, Mahfouz dramatically presents his views on many of Egypt’s political bosses from the First Dynasty to the current military regime. And he does so by putting words in their mouths as they defend their own days in power before the tribunal of Osiris. In Before the Throne, those whom Mahfouz sees as the greatest leaders of ancient Egyptian civilization, under the aegis of the ancient Egyptian lord of the dead, judge those who followed them, from the unification of the Two Lands through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, right to his own times. This continuum of Egyptian history showcases his essentialist vision of a sort of eternal Egyptian ka (the living person’s undying double who, in the afterlife, receives mortuary offerings for the deceased, thus ensuring their immortality).15
From pharaohs to pashas, and from prime ministers to presidents, only those who serve that great national ka—according to Mahfouz’s own strict criteria—are worthy of his praise and a seat among the Immortals. The rest are sent to Purgatory (the counterintuitive destiny, in chapter 22, of the youthful king whose tomb’s discovery spurred the young Naguib’s love of ancient Egypt)—or even to Hell (like the hapless governor Nesubenedbed in chapter 32).
That he used an ancient Egyptian mode of judgment (albeit his own version of it) to hold these leaders to account, rather than a more conventional setting speaks loudly of his conviction that Egypt is different and must look to herself for wisdom—as well as offer it to the world. The Immortals even proclaim an Egyptian “ten commandments” in the final chapter.16
Despite the historical mission behind Before the Throne, some of the characters are seemingly the products of Mahfouz’s mind—and his need to invent voices for a cherished idea. An outstanding example is Abnum, who emerges as the leader of the “rebels of the Age of Darkness” (the First Intermediate Period) in chapter 5, and thereafter throughout the book as the bloody-minded champion of the oppressed. Mahfouz claimed that Abnum, who embodies the right of the common people to rise up against injustice, was a real figure he’d found in his research.17 Yet I have found no trace of him in the available sources that the author likely consulted, while the ‘revolution’ he allegedly led probably never occurred, at least not in the way that Mahfouz portrays it.
Mahfouz also uses terms, both religious and racial, that some readers might find strange. To him, historically, ‘Copt’ means ‘native Egyptian’ (derived from Aegiptos, the name the Greeks gave the country in antiquity), though today it refers to the indigenous Christian minority, who are thought to be the most direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians.
More confusingly, Mahfouz sometimes refers, not to God (in the monotheistic sense), or the gods (in the pantheistic one), but to a being called ‘the God.’ This partly reflects Mahfouz’s knowledge of the ancient Egyptian practice of adopting local divinities as objects of special devotion, and the worship of certain gods such as Amun, Horus, Khnum, Osiris, Ptah, and Ra as deities linked to kingship. For example, Ramesses II (chapter 26) invokes Amun—without naming him—as a patron, protective god when cut off by the Hittites at Kadesh. Moreover, Mahfouz, like many of his fellow Muslims, tended to view the ancient Egyptians as proto-Muslims, who would have regarded each minor god as but a manifestation of a grand single godhead. (In chapter 21, Imhotep even enunciates the kernel of this idea to Akhenaten—whose role as the first known monotheist made him the subject of Mahfouz’s 1985 novel, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth).18 Nonetheless, many characters speak of the various gods as actual beings. Above all, Mahfouz employs the conceit of the Osiris Court, with four of the ancient deities very much active in it (though shorn of their famous physical attributes), perhaps—but not necessarily—representing aspects of God. To finesse the theological conundrum this creates, the ancient gods do not render final judgment on defendants from the Christian and Islamic eras, but leave that task to a higher authority.
Just as curiously, the author’s view of international relations seems to be based on ancient Egyptian logic. Though he praises his hero Saad Zaghlul as well as several pharaohs, such as the doomed Seqenenra (chapter 10) and Psamtek III (chapter 39) and others for bravely fighting foreign occupation, Mahf
Whatever its original source, this paradoxical attitude toward empire and occupation is remarkably similar to that of the “Pharaonists,” a group of intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s to which Mahfouz belonged. Led by such luminaries as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963), first rector of the Egyptian University, Taha Hussein (1889–1973), the great blind Egyptian belles-lettrist and novelist, and Mahfouz’s “spiritual father,” the Coptic thinker and publisher Salama Musa (1887–1958)—the Pharaonists believed that Egypt was both much older and much closer to Europe and the Mediterranean in culture than to her Arab and African neighbors.19