Before the Throne by Naguib Mahfouz
While his fellow Egyptians largely rejected this idea by the 1940s, Mahfouz did not—at least not completely. Though in his 1988 Nobel lecture,21 delivered for him in Stockholm by Mohamed Salmawy, he declared himself “the son of two civilizations” (the Pharaonic and the Islamic) to the Swedish Academy which awarded the prize, Mahfouz never quite roused himself to the same level of zeal for pan-Arabism or pan-Islam when they became the intellectual vogue in later years, despite enormous peer pressure, and numerous attempts of his own, to get there.”
A sensitive and problematic issue is the treatment of Jews (who are mentioned only three times as a group: twice in chapter 49 and once in chapter 54, in the trial of Ali Bey al-Kabir—Ali Bey the Great), as well as Egypt’s often rocky relations with both ancient and modern Israel. Mahfouz, who as an adolescent grew up in a largely Jewish area of suburban Abbasiya, once told me, “I really miss” the Jews of Egypt,22 all but a few of whom were dispersed from the country in the 1950s and 1960s.
Though the king most often theorized to be the pharaoh of the Exodus—a story found in similar form in both the Old Testament and the Qur’an—is given his own trial in Before the Throne (Merneptah, chapter 27), the tale itself is neither told nor even mentioned. Israel by name appears but twice (both in the trial of Pharaoh Apries, chapter 37)—briefly (and fatally) aligned with Egypt against the Babylonians—while Judah is captured by Egypt in the trial of Pharaoh Nekau II (chapter 35).
In Before the Throne, the current State of Israel does not exist at all except as the formidable but unnamed enemy whose presence dominates much of the proceedings in the final two trials (62 and 63). These are of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, champion of the Arab masses who led them into the catastrophic defeat of 1967, and Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), the “Hero of War and Peace” whose initially successful surprise attack on Israeli-held Sinai in October 1973 revived Egypt’s pride—and whose later bold gambit of peace with the Jewish State would finally cost him his life. Yet, with the successful pacts of peace signed between Seti I (chapter 25) and his son, Ramesses II, and the Hittites, Egypt’s aggressive military rivals based to her northeast, one of the main aims of Before the Throne clearly is to justify the 1979 Peace Treaty that Sadat signed with Menachem Begin.23
In the end, the tribunal apparently feels that Sadat has won the debate. Osiris invites Sadat to sit with the Immortals—though he had only permitted Nasser to do so. The presiding deity had sent Nasser (who had infuriated the court by declaring that “Egyptian history really began on July 23, 1952,” the day of his Free Officers coup) on to the final judgment with but what he termed ‘an appropriate (“munasiba”) recommendation.’ Sadat’s testimonial, however, was qualified as “musharrifa,” or “conferring honor.”
Mahfouz’s defense of Arab–Israeli peace would cost him a great deal, including boycotts of his books and films for many years in the Arab world. And it may have contributed to the attempt on his life by Islamist militants on October 14, 1994, roughly the sixth anniversary of the announcement of his Nobel. Though it is believed the attack was in punishment for his allegedly blasphemous novel, Children of the Alley (Awlad haratina, 1959),24 it fell on the day that Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were revealed to have won the Nobel peace prize in Oslo.25 Then, and even now, accused by some of selling out to Israel (which has no demonstrable influence over the Swedish Academy) for the sake of his prize—despite devoting most of his Nobel lecture, cited above, to a defense of Palestinian rights, and even for a time endorsing Palestinian suicide bombings—he nonetheless never renounced his support for the treaty that followed the Camp David Accords and the dream of a true, lasting, and comprehensive peace between Arabs and Jews someday.26
More than a just record (and judgment) of the past, Before the Throne was prescient in a sense about the uprising that led to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, after nearly thirty years atop the pyramid of power (however nominally in his feeble last years). Again, the probably-apocryphal revolt of Abnum, particularly, in the twilight of the long, declining rule of Pepi II, as Mahfouz saw it, set the precedent and defined the right of Egyptians to rise up against tyranny, something they have seldom done with success in their great history. As Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times has written, “Mahfouz foreshadowed so many of the feelings that drive the Arab Spring in his novel Before the Throne.”27 Intriguingly, the principles that Mahfouz embeds in the novel (especially peace and prosperity, order and security, strong national unity, moderate religious piety, social justice and democracy), also provide the key for how he might view the outcome of what has been the called the January 25th Revolution in Egypt had he lived to see it. Though he backed Mubarak, based on a promise of political reforms, during the last presidential elections (in 2005), he no doubt would have been both worried by the violence and inspired by the courage and the Muslim-Christian solidarity shown in what was quickly called, “the spirit of Tahrir Square,” and the promise of real democracy as well. But no doubt he would have been appalled by the ongoing chaos of relentless strikes; myriad, often-bloody demonstrations, ever-rising crime, the replacement of Mubarak by an even more blatant military dictatorship in the transition, looming national bankruptcy, and most of all by the stunning triumph of the Islamists in the parliamentary elections. Yet as bleak as that seems, Mahfouz—always an optimist in real life, if not often in fiction—would be the last to give up hope for his country’s salvation. And among all his thirty-five novels, Before the Throne—the one he created as the express vehicle for his vision of Egypt’s destiny—is the most hopeful of all, even while unflinchingly recounting the many failures along the way.
Regardless of one’s own views, by the breadth of its historical vision and the painstaking attempt to literally narrate Egypt’s continuous cultural, political, and religious identity throughout the long life of the country, Before the Throne justifies Rasheed El-Enany’s praise of Mahfouz as the “conscience of his nation.” And, one could add, he sought to be her memory as well.
True to his mission, a few years later, Mahfouz sought to balance his books (literally and figuratively) by attacking Sadat’s Open Door economic policy (al-Infitah) and its disastrous effects on Egypt’s poor and middle classes in his brief novel, The Day the Leader was Killed (Yawm qutila al-za‘im).28 Published in 1985—four years after Sadat’s assassination by Islamist extremists—it was so harsh on the martyred president that Mahfouz paid a call on his widow, Jehan Sadat, to reassure her that he had not meant the work to rationalize his murder. Evidently without a sense of irony, he told her: “It’s only a novel—not a work of history.”
Though most of Mahfouz’s works are about the world in which he lived, there remains, wrapped mummy-like within his massive oeuvre, both a deathless love for his nation’s ancient past and a persistent quest for insight into the afterlife—a quest as old as Egypt herself (and no doubt much older). Though we have lost him among us, he has since fittingly gone to his own place in the west (which the ancient Egyptians saw as the land of the dead) in both Pharaonic and Islamic style—a handsome brick tomb, with a stela bearing Qur’anic verses in its ground-level chapel29—in a modern cemetery southwest of Cairo on the road to Fayyum. Meanwhile, his immensely rich and varied literary legacy reminds us of the wisdom in the New Kingdom tome, Be a Scribe :
A man decays, his corpse is dust,
All his kin have perished;
But a book makes him remembered
Through the mouth of its reciter.
Better is a book than a well-built house,
Than tomb-chapels in the west;
Better than a solid mansion,
Than a stela in the temple!30
Mahfouz, clearly, was more than a scribe (in the modern sense, though Egyptologists use it to mean all literate people in the Pharaonic age), a mere recorder of ledger items and lists. In Before the Throne, he ceased to be a teller of imaginary stories, as in most of his fiction. Rather, he became a kind of historian—even a r
Here, the ultimate verdict was his. We can only hope that the Supreme Judge dealt with him as fairly, and according to the same principles—which placed the love and welfare of Egypt (as he saw it) above all others—in his own final trial.
The translator would like to acknowledge Roger Allen, Hazem Azmy, Peter Blauner, Brooke Comer, Humphrey Davies, Johannes den Heijer, Asiem El Difraoui, Mourad el-Shahed, Ismail El Shazly, Mona Francis, Thomas L. Friedman, Gaballa Ali Gaballa, Nermeen Habeeb, Fredrik Hagen, Melinda K. Hartwig, Zahi Hawass, James K. Hoffmeier, Salima Ikram, W. Raymond Johnson, Shirley Johnston, Mary A. Kelly, Klaus-Peter Kuhlmann, Joseph E. Lowry, Yoram Meital, Bojana Mojsov, George Nazzal, Richard B. Parkinson, Adham Ragab, Donald Malcolm Reid, Bruce Redwine, Tawfik Saleh, Ahmed Seddik, David P. Silverman, Sasson Somekh, Rainer Stadelmann, Peter Theroux, Kent Weeks, David Wilmsen, and especially the late (and much-mourned) Husayn Ukasha, for their generous assistance, as well as Noha Mohammed, Nadia Naqib, Kelly Zaug, R. Neil Hewison, and Randi Danforth of the American University in Cairo Press for their always-excellent editing. Diana Secker Tesdell, Naguib Mahfouz’s editor at Anchor Books, also deserves my gratitude for the same, and for her help in so many things. Most of all, I wish to thank my mother, Helen Stock, who passed away in 2007, and my father, John Stock, who followed her in 2010, as well as the also-departed author—who made this wonderful project possible.
This translation is dedicated to Mariangela Lanfranchi.
Notes
1 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz, Maadi, Cairo, February 13, 2006.
2 In English, The American University in Cairo Press published Voices from the Other World: Ancient Egyptian Tales by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Raymond Stock in 2002, published in paperback by Vintage Anchor in New York, 2004. Khufu’s Wisdom, translated by Raymond Stock; Rhadopis of Nubia, translated by Anthony Calderbank, and Thebes at War, translated by Humphrey Davies, in 2003. Vintage Anchor in New York published them all in paperback in 2005, and in 2007, Alfred A. Knopf in New York brought them out as well in an omnibus edition in the Everyman’s Library series entitled Three Novels of Ancient Egypt, introduced by Nadine Gordimer.
3 The Cairo Trilogy was published in Arabic in 1956–67. The American University in Cairo Press published Palace Walk, translated by William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny, in 1989; Palace of Desire, translated by William M. Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny, and Olive E. Kenny, in 1991, and Sugar Street, translated by William M. Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan, in 1992. They published both Cairo Modern, translated by William M. Hutchins, in 2008, and Khan al-Khalili, translated by Roger Allen, in 2008. There has long been controversy over which of the latter two was actually published first, marking the change from Mahfouz’s ‘historical’ phase to his ‘realist’ one.
4 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz, Maadi, December 18, 1996.
5 The description of the ba is from David P. Silverman, Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr., Professor and Curator of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, reading a draft of this passage from an earlier work—the wording is largely his.
6 Richard B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940–1640 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; first published 1997), 152.
Lucian, Vol. VII, translated by M.D. MacLeod (London: William Heinemann Ltd., and Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1961), 3.
John Rodenbeck, “Literary Alexandria,” in The Massachusetts Review, special Egypt issue guest-edited by Raymond Stock (Amherst: Winter 2002, 542; article, 524–72.
Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 218.
Fu’ad Dawwarah, Najib Mahfuz: Min al-qawmiya ila al-‘alamiya (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Amma al-Misriya li-l-Kitab, 1989), 197. Here Mahfouz says that he stopped going to the theater altogether after he began to experience hearing trouble during a performance of Alfred Farag’s play Hallaq Baghdad (The Barber of Baghdad) in 1964.
7 Roger Allen, An Introduction to Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111–12.
8 Ibid., 161–62.
For text, see John Richard Stephens, Into the Mummy’s Tomb (New York: Berkley Books, 2001), pp. 137–78. This story may be the inspiration for the recent Hollywood films starring Ben Stiller, A Night in the Museum (1 and 2). Though Mahfouz could not recall it when asked, he acknowledged having read a great deal of Haggard’s fiction in Arabic translation, which “filled up the bookstores” in his youth. (Raymond Stock, A Mummy Awakens: The Pharaonic Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz, PhD dissertation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2008, 42, n. 80, and 142–43.)
9 Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught between East and West (London: Vintage, 2006), 290.
10 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz, Maadi, February 13, 2002. Herman Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1967), Chapter Two, 85 (the standard reference work on Seth), and David P. Silverman in the article, “Divinity and Deities in Ancient Egypt,” Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths and Personal Practice, ed. Byron E. Shafer, authors John Baines, Leonard H. Lesko and David P. Silverman (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 44. However, J. Gwynn Griffiths in his “Osiris” entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, ed. Donald B. Redford (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001), Vol. 2, 615–19, places Osiris’s origins in Upper Egypt, as most early images of the god depict him wearing the White Crown of the southern kingdom, though this seems a minority view.
11 Bojana Mojsov, Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 33.
For Seth’s prominence in the development of this concept in monotheistic religion, Peter Stanford, The Devil: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 20–23. See more on the sinister aspect of Seth in Marc Étienne, Heka: Magie et envoutement dans l’Égypte ancienne (Paris: Reunions des Musées Nationaux, 2000), 22–39.
12 J. Gwynn Griffiths, entry “Osiris,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, notes that, “Although the Pyramid Texts [afterlife texts found in pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty] do not provide a consecutive account of the Osiris myth, they abundantly supply in scattered allusions the principal details about his fate and especially his relationship with the deceased pharaoh,’ who is identified with him in the underworld.”
H. Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion, Chapter Three, 6.
13 Vincent Arieh Tobin, Theological Principles of Egyptian Religion, foreword by Roland G. Bonnel (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Paris: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 22, notes that the myth was apparently only recorded in full form by the Greek biographer Plutarch, (46?–120?), probably with a Greek narrative and philosophical bias.
14 Richard H. Wilkinson, Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 148, describes Isis’ iconography, and says, “through her great power Isis was able to function as the protector and sustainer of the deceased in the afterlife.” This statement largely explains the role that Mahfouz assigns to the goddess in Before the Throne.
General description of Osiris Court trial scene in B. Mojsov, Osiris, xi. Osiris Court in the Book of the Dead, see Goelet, 101–35. For a harrowing account of the ordeal before the scales of Ma’at, see Dimitri Meeks and Christine Favard-Meeks, Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, translated from French by G.M. Goshgarian (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 142–50. For finds at Bahariya, see Zahi Hawass, The Valley of the Golden Mummies (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000), and his article, “The Legend of the Pharaoh’s Lost Tomb: A Tale from the Valley of the Golden Mummies,” in The Massachusetts Review (Winter 2002), special Egypt issue, 475–88. Also, Raymond Stock, “Discovering Mummies,” Egypt To day, July 1999, 64–69. For Osiris
Najib Mahfuz, Amam a al-‘arsh: Hiwar m a‘a rijal Misr min Mina hatta Anwar al-Sadat (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1983).
15 John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Revised Edition (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 226.
16 Akef Ramzy Abadir, Najib Mahfuz: Allegory and symbolism as a means of social, political and cultural criticism, 1936–1985; PhD dissertation, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, New York University, 1989 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1990), 166–67.
17 Raja’ al-Naqqash, Najib Mahfuz: Safahat min mudhakkiratih wa adwa’ jadida ‘ala adabihi wa hayatih (Cairo: Markaz al-Ahram li-l-Tarjama wa-l-Nashr), 176 and 178.
18 Published in Arabic as al-‘A’ish fi-l-haqiqa, and in English, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by the Tagried Abu Hassabo (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998) and by Vintage Anchor in New York in paperback in 2000. For how the ancient Egyptians might have answered this question, see Erik Hornung, translated from the German by John Baines, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
19 David O’Connor, “Egypt’s View of ‘Others,” in ‘Never Had the Like Occurred:’ Egypt’s View of its Past, ed. John Tait (London: UCL Press, Institute of Archaeology, University of London, 2003), 155–85.