Khan Al-Khalili by Naguib Mahfouz
“Do you think you’ll forget us?” Boss Nunu asked.
“Heaven forbid, Boss!” Ahmad replied, entirely unclear as to whether or not he was telling the truth.
“Al-Zaytun’s a long way away,” Boss Zifta said. “You can only get there by train.”
“Train rides shouldn’t keep friends apart!” Ahmad replied with a smile.
Abbas Shifa raised his eyebrows as though he were recalling something significant. “I know al-Zaytun just as well as I know Khan al-Khalili,” he said. “A while back I used to go there at least once a week. I’d come back with the very best hashish!”
Ahmad grinned. “So can I expect to be seeing a lot of you?” he asked.
“Oh, those days are long gone!” Abbas Shifa said sadly. “They threw the seller into prison, and that’s where he died.”
Everyone said how sorry they were that he was leaving. They complimented him on his fine family and gave their condolences for the loss of his brother. Even Sulayman Ata had nice things to say. At this final moment Ahmad’s heart was bursting with affection for all of them, the ones he liked such as Boss Nunu and the others he did not like such as Ahmad Rashid. He was surprised to realize that, when it came time to say farewell, his heart was always sorry to leave anything, however tedious and burdensome it might have been.
At this point everyone started talking as usual about the war situation. They mentioned that the German advance had been halted at al-Alamein. It was Ahmad Rashid’s opinion that the Germans had now lost the battle for Egypt. Sayyid Arif had another take on it. According to him, Hitler had ordered Rommel to halt so as to avoid attacking Egypt—the throbbing heart of Islam—and all the suffering that an invasion would cause. If it weren’t for the Fuhrer’s merciful judgment, the Germans would already have been in Cairo a month ago. Ahmad stayed with them, listening to their conversation and banter, but when it was nine-thirty, he stood up to say farewell for the last time. Shaking their hands one by one, he received their best wishes with thanks. With that he headed back to the apartment.
Once in his room, he opened the window and looked out on the quarter. It was the middle of the month of Shaaban, and the moon was gleaming brightly in the clear August sky. All around it stars were twinkling coyly as though to express their regret that the moon had again appeared in its youthful guise, something that they had always known would not last. The moonlight bathed the entire quarter in a shimmering silver glow that banished the lonely darkness of night and imbued street corners and alleyways with a particular magic.
It was the night of mid-Shaaban, and the prayers for that holy night could be heard through the neighboring windows. You could hear a boy shouting in his high-pitched voice: “O God, the one and only Bestower, Possessor of Majesty and Honor,” and the family repeated it after him. And he was the only silent one among them. What kind of prayer could he offer to his Lord, he wondered? He thought for a while, then lifted his hands toward the shining moon.
“O God,” he said humbly, “Creator of the universe, Ordainer of everything, envelop him in the broad expanse of Your mercy and let him dwell in Your spacious heavens. Grant to his grieving parents solace and perseverance, and to my own heart bring peace and tranquility. In the days ahead grant that I may find consolation for what is past” (and at this point Ahmad put his hand over his heart). “This heart of mine has endured a great deal of pain and swallowed failure and frustration.”
Was he remembering the day he had arrived in this old quarter, with the same quest for change in mind? Well, change had certainly taken place, but all it had brought were tears and despair. Ramadan would soon be here again. What memories! Could he still remember the last Ramadan, with him poised by the window waiting for the sunset prayer, then looking upward and seeing her there?
Now here was history itself, passing in front of his eyes just as it had been recorded by the onward march of days and nights, written with the ink of hope, love, pain, and sorrow. So this was the final night. Tomorrow he would be living in a new home, in a different quarter, turning his back on the past … a past with all its hopes and dashed aspirations.
Farewell then, Khan al-Khalili!
Translator’s Afterword
At my first meeting with Naguib Mahfouz (d. 2006) in 1969, the discussion began with the topic of translation, but not of his own work. At the time I was revising my doctoral dissertation on the renowned narrative of the Egyptian writer Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (d. 1930), Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham (which was originally published in 1907; my translation and study of it eventually appeared in book form as A Period of Time in 1992). Mahfouz was delighted to hear of my interest in that work, since he acknowledged to me that it had long been a favorite of his family and had had a great influence on him as a teenager as, it would appear, it did on another great Egyptian storyteller, Mahmud Taymur (d. 1973). Inevitably, however, the conversation gradually shifted to his own works, and I told him that I had read and greatly admired many of the short stories in his recently published collection, Khammarat al-qitt al-aswad (Black Cat Tavern, 1967). When I asked him if he would allow me to translate some of them, he readily agreed and asked me to make a list of the ones I particularly liked. Once I had recorded the names of five or six stories, he asked if I was interested in any of the novels. Because its political context is set during and after the 1952 revolution, I had recently purchased al-Summan wa-l-kharif (1962; Autumn Quail, 1985), and thus that title was added to the list. Mahfouz signed his name to the paper (which I still cherish in my files), and my career as a translator of Mahfouz began.
In fact, it began, somewhat unusually perhaps, not with his novels, but rather with a collection of short stories—the ones on the list that I had chosen myself, and others that I proceeded to translate with an Egyptian colleague, Akef Abadir. The collection, God’s World, containing a selection of short stories culled from all his collections up until the year 1970, was published in 1973 and was mentioned in the Nobel Committee’s citation in October 1988 (although most critics in the Arab world incorrectly assumed that it was a reference to the Arabic collection Dunya Allah (1962), from which we had selected its title story for inclusion in our own collection).
Over the ensuing decades that short story collection was to be followed by my translations of Autumn Quail (1985), Mirrors (1977, 1999, based on al-Maraya, 1972), some individual short stories, and finally Karnak Café (2007) (a translation of the highly controversial novel, al-Karnak, 1974). This translation into English of Khan al-Khalili (1945), certainly one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of his “novels of the 1940s,” thus takes me back to a much earlier period in his novelistic output. It is to the impressions that such a return to beginnings has brought about for a translator that I would now like to turn.
The novel, Khan al-Khalili, is named for one of the most famous quarters of the old city of Cairo, the one founded in the tenth century following the invasion of Egypt by Shi’ite Fatimid forces. The new city was constructed in the area immediately below the Muqattam Hills. At its center was the mosque of al-Azhar, originally established in 972 CE as a center for Shi’ite learning but one that over the centuries has become a primary source of both education and doctrinal discussion within the Sunni community. However, the most prominent Islamic monument in the Khan al-Khalili quarter itself is the mosque–shrine of al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was slain during the tragic schism that, within decades of Muhammad’s death in 632, had split the early Islamic community in two. The mosque itself contains some of the relics of al-Husayn and is thus a shrine frequently visited by devout Muslims, among whom we may list both the father of the Akif family in the present novel and the mother of the ‘Abd al-Gawwad family in Mahfouz’s renowned trilogy of novels; during her visit to the al-Husayn shrine, she is knocked down, with tragic consequences for herself and her family, as recounted in Bayn al-qasrayn (1956; Palace Walk, 1990).
The Akif family moves to Khan al-Khalili from the suburb of al-Sakakini, a change th
In this novel, place plays a crucially important role, as it does in all the other “quarter novels,” but so does time. Following Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, we can note that the two are almost inevitably linked to each other. The Akif family’s move to the Khan al-Khalili quarter is not a voluntary one, but is rather the result of panic caused by a bombing raid. The novel’s time period is that of the middle of the Second World War, and Khan al-Khalili records in vivid detail the often-neglected direct effects of the Africa Campaign on the Egyptian capital city. The social effects of the war and the continuing British occupation of Egypt (that started following the ‘Urabi Revolt of 1882) are very much to the fore in the long-famous novel, Zuqaq al-Midaqq (1947; Midaq Alley [sic], 1977), in which the climactic scene sees the young Egyptian, Abbas, battered to death by British soldiers as he confronts Hamida, the quarter’s beauty, who has become a call girl. In Khan al-Khalili however, the impact of the war is, if anything, even more direct and vividly described. The tenants of the neighborhood into which the Akif family moves regularly find themselves being woken up in the middle of the night by the dreadful sound of air-raid sirens. The bomb shelter to which they all descend may be a haven from the potential destruction above, but the descriptions of these panic-stricken hours spent underground are used by Mahfouz as an effective means of portraying the clashing emotions Egyptians feel as they confront the consequences of other people’s wars. The conversations among the group that gathers every night at the Zahra Café are another device whereby the novelist is able to illustrate the wildly contrasting attitudes of the various social strata of Egyptian society as they react to the war going on around them.
Many commentators on Mahfouz’s career have suggested that it was precisely the dire impact of the war on contemporary Egyptian society during the early 1940s that led Mahfouz to abandon his plan, as usual carefully elaborated, to write a whole series of novels set in ancient Egypt. He had, in fact, already published three of them (along with some short stories): ‘Abath al-aqdar (1939; Khufu’s Wisdom, 2003); Radubis (1943; Rhadopis of Nubia, 2003); and Kifah Tiba (1944; Thebes at War, 2003), but his plans for a whole series of others, based no doubt on his long-standing interest in ancient Egypt, were put aside in favor of a concentration on the current travails of his fellow Egyptians. In this context it needs to be added that, at various stages in his very long career, he was to return to the ancient Egyptian theme, of which Amam al-’arsh (Before the Throne, 1983) and al-’A’ish fi-l-haqiqa (1985; Akhenaton, Dweller in Truth, 1998) are merely two examples.
Mahfouz’s inspiration to write these “pharaonic” novels may well have come from both his youthful enthusiasm for ancient Egypt and its impact on Egyptian nationalist ideals and from his readings of the perennially popular historical novels of Jurji Zaydan (d. 1914), which had taken episodes from Arab and Islamic history as their chronological frame of reference. However, the turn to the contemporary period and to the process of writing novels about the Egyptian society of his own day was clearly the consequence of a concentrated course of study that he had initiated during the 1930s under the inspiration of his mentor and (then) publisher, the renowned Coptic Fabian intellectual, Salama Musa (d. 1958). It was this figure who encouraged the young graduate student in philosophy to consider a career as a writer and suggested that he investigate the tradition of fiction writing in the West. One work that we are told Mahfouz consulted was The Outline of Literature (1923) by John Drinkwater, with its “handy list” of novel titles as an appendix. Mahfouz, it would appear, made his way methodically and steadily through the works on the list, which included the most famous novels from the various European traditions, comprising examples of historical romances, bildungsroman, family sagas, and the like. This ongoing process of reading European fiction (mostly through the medium of English), coupled with his own wide knowledge of and devotion to the pre-modern heritage of Arabic literature, was to provide the inspirational framework for the lengthy and variegated career in fiction writing that was to follow.
Within the earlier phases of this developmental framework, Khan al-Khalili emerges as a remarkably successful contribution to the family saga, a sub-genre of the novel that was to be seen again at the end of the 1940s in his Bidaya wa nihaya (1949; The Beginning and the End, 1985) and, almost immediately afterward, in the three volumes of his trilogy—in which the narrative of the life of the ‘Abd al-Gawwad family is heavily focused on the story of Kamal’s upbringing (a character, the features of whose life and times have long been associated with those of Mahfouz himself). In the case of Khan al-Khalili, we are dealing with the Akif family, although, as the narrative progresses, the narrative focuses in the main on the two sons and, even more specifically on the elder of the two, Ahmad; descriptions of his movements both start and conclude the narrative. Ahmad clearly regards himself as the ill-starred victim of his family’s circumstances: the indolence of his father that leads to his compulsory early retirement and the resulting need for Ahmad to assume the burden of supporting the family as a whole and, in particular, his younger brother, Rushdi, as he goes through school and university. However, the novel’s narrator also provides the reader with a portrait of Ahmad as a rather pathetic middle-aged man whose lack of initiative, intellectual arrogance, escapism, and chronic shyness have all led inexorably to a situation in which life has essentially passed him by. The move from the suburbs to Khan al-Khalili provides a jolt to his complacent existence, but, in spite of the new acquaintances that he makes—most notably at the Zahra Café—his attitude toward life and people remains essentially unaltered. It is his fleeting encounter with the neighbor’s teenaged daughter, Nawal, which rocks the static monotony of his existence. An agonizingly hopeless and unfulfilled “relationship” ensues, involving traditional exchanges of glances across the alleyway and brief encounters in the air-raid shelter during bombing raids.
Into this painfully slow scenario bursts the figure of the younger son, Rushdi, returning from a period working in the southern city of Asyut. The two brothers, who dearly love each other, could hardly be more different. Rushdi is young, handsome, dashing, and reckless, devoted to a nightlife of carousing, drinking, sex, and gambling. Having spotted the beautiful Nawal, he chases her, walks her to school, and wins her heart. However, just as a genuine love is blooming (and gradually being acknowledged and even accepted by both families), Rushdi becomes ill. Tragedy has struck the Akif family once again. It is tuberculosis, and Rushdi needs to go to the sanitorium. In spite of Ahmad’s pleas and eventual anger, Rushdi refuses to acknowledge the extent of his illness and carries on with his reckless behavior. Eventually he cannot avoid accepting the inevitable and goes to the sanitorium. By this time, however, it is much too late, and Ahmad brings his brother back to Khan al-Khalili where he dies in the arms of his devastated mother.
The family now decides that it must move again. As t
Khan al-Khalili shows clearly that Mahfouz is already the master of novel construction, albeit within a series of modes that, from a twenty-first–century perspective, can be described as “traditional” (and certainly based on European models). The novel opens with detailed descriptions of time and place, as Ahmad travels along an unfamiliar route to his family’s new abode. Khan al-Khalili and its denizens are lovingly described, and Ahmad and his career are placed within this changing framework as the family sets itself to adjust to new surroundings. The first glimpse of Nawal in the stairway leads to a series of chapters in which Ahmad contemplates his career and his future. The return of Rushdi (chapter 16) changes everything, and the center of the novel is concerned about his developing love affair with Nawal and Ahmad’s silent agony as he watches it develop. It is on the day of the Eid al-Adha (chapter 33) that the dreadful news of Rushdi’s illness is first revealed, and the developing tragedy leading to his death and burial follows its inexorable course. At the end of the novel the family’s second move in such a short period is placed once again within the broader framework of Egyptian society as it tries to cope with the consequences of a global conflict on its soil.
Many commentators have remarked about the accuracy of Mahfouz’s description of place in this series of “quarter novels,” but we need also to point to the poetic quality of some of his descriptions, a feature that is to emerge in starker relief in his later novels, especially those of the 1960s. Here, for example is his description of the sky as Rushdi is walking Nawal to her school in Abbasiya: