The Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz
I cursed the day that I took this job.
Dream 205
I was watching a patrol of foreign soldiers when I pelted them with stones. I went up to our roof then crossed over to our neighbors’, before going downstairs to flee from the door of the house.
But I found it blocked by troops bristling with arms.
Dream 206
I was setting the table and the invitees were in the next room. Their voices came to me—those of my mother, and of my brothers and sisters—while, in the interval, sleep stole me away.
For a moment, terror gripped me, before my memory came back to me. I recalled that they had all gone to dwell close to their Lord—and that I had walked in their funerals, one after the other.
Translator’s Afterword
“Only the past is real.… ”
—Lord Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays1
On Friday, October 14, 1994, an Islamist militant, allegedly acting on orders from blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, stabbed Naguib Mahfouz in the neck with a switchblade as he sat in a car outside his Nileside home in Greater Cairo. The young man who attacked the then–eighty-two-year-old author, the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize in literature, clearly intended to silence him forever. Though the assault,2 which damaged the nerve that controlled his right arm and hand, did prevent him from writing for over four years, the fanatic’s mission failed. Not only did Mahfouz survive this nightmarish crime, he lived to tell us his dreams—which he persistently recorded in his own hand and by dictation, until his death at age 94 on August 30, 2006.
The path to the present innovative and provocative work was not an easy one, and near its end came a brief, but very revealing, musical interlude. On February 14, 1999, after prolonged and intensive physiotherapy, Mahfouz began to unveil his first new writing since the attempt on his life, with a short work called The Songs (al-Aghani),3 in a Cairene women’s magazine, Nisf al-Dunya (Half the World), where he had been publishing all his latest fiction since the periodical first appeared in 1990. More a tribute to memory than imagination, The Songs is a series of deftly chosen quotations from popular Egyptian airs ranging back through more than nine decades that capture the spirit and mood of the various stages of Mahfouz’s life, from childhood to old age. The only work he published in colloquial Egyptian, it was also the only one made up entirely of verse.
A few months later, a new stream of Mahfouz stories once again began to appear in the pages of Nisf al-Dunya. This was a succession of numbered, extremely brief narratives that one could easily term “nanonovellas,” bearing the title, Ahlam fatrat al-naqaha—literally, “dreams of the period of recovery.” (A volume containing Dreams 1–104 appeared in English translation in 2004 from the American University in Cairo Press entitled The Dreams. A second volume, Dreams of Departure, featured the next 108 dreams, comprising numbers 105–206, published in Nisf al-Dunya between January 2004 and September 2006, as well as six dreams numbered I–VI that were published in the Cairo daily al-Ahram shortly before his final birthday in December 2005. Dreams 204–06 had been sent to the magazine just prior to Mahfouz’s death, and the last one, 206, seems uncannily prophetic.)4 They were almost completely unlike anything Mahfouz—or anyone else, for that matter—had published before.
There was one precedent in Mahfouz’s work, however. In a 1982 collection of Mahfouz’s short fiction called I Saw as the Sleeper Sees (Ra’aytu fima yara al-na’im), the title piece is a series of seventeen short, numbered “dreams”—each no more than a few paragraphs in length.5 Meant to read like accounts of actual dreams, each begins with the phrase that gave the work its name. In a study of these “dreams,” Arabic literary scholar Fedwa Malti-Douglas notes that many are drawn from his reading of both the medieval adventures (maqamat) of Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, and the later allegorical ghost story by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi derived from them, The Tale of ‘Isa ibn Hisham (Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham, 1898 in newspaper serial, 1907 as a book). Malti-Douglas also points out that I Saw as the Sleeper Sees deliberately harks back to the ancient (and continuing) Arabic tradition of presenting and interpreting dreams. Even the title itself, she observes, is a variation on the sentence that typically begins a dream narrative in this genre, “Ra’aytu fi-al-manam” (“I saw in a dream”).6 The extraordinary interest that dreams have long aroused among the Arabs can be found, for example, in the often-oneiristic chronicles of Abu Ali ibn al-Banna, who lived in eleventh-century Baghdad. Frequently dreams bring back the dead, who (as in Mahfouz’s Dream 89) scold the living. Here al-Banna recounts that:
Abu’l-’Abbas b. ash-Shatti was accompanying me. He related to me two old dreams about Ibn al-Tustariya al-Hanbali—may God have mercy upon him! He said, ‘I saw him in my dream, and I greeted him. He returned my greeting, and took hold of a kerchief which was on my head, with both hands, tied it, and said, “O Abu-’l-’Abass! What is this rudeness which I have not experienced before?” ’ My informant continued, ‘I had stopped visiting his tomb; so I resumed my visits and continued doing so without interruption.’7
Or such visions could be highly political (a point to which we shall return with regard to Mahfouz). Another medieval dream related by al-Banna warns of foreign invasion—which here could be an omen of ultimate good fortune:
… it appeared as though there were a great swarm of green locusts, each of them holding a pearl in his mouth. They represent armies coming; and it is possible that their coming might be beneficial. For green represents worldly prosperity, and pearls represent the Qur’an and religion. Hence, it is possible that there need be no fear as regards their coming—if God so wills!8
I once asked Mahfouz what he thought was the greatest difference between I Saw as the Sleeper Sees and The Dreams. Without hesitation, he replied, “Composition.” The earlier work, he explained, was entirely a conscious authorial creation, while each episode of the present project is “a[n actual] dream, which I develop into a story.”9 In this, he may have achieved the major ambition of the iconoclast André Breton, who declared in the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), “I believe in the future resolution of these two states—outwardly so contradictory—which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak.”10
Mahfouz began his novelistic career with a series of three books set in the Pharaonic era: Khufu’s Wisdom (‘Abath al-aqdar, 1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (Radubis, 1943), and Kifah Tibah (Thebes at War, 1944), which indirectly critique contemporary society in symbolic terms.11 He is best known for his “realistic” works such as Midaq Alley (1947), The Beginning and the End (1949), The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street (1956–57), and more. Yet Mahfouz has also been experimenting with virtually every style and type of fiction since serializing the book that later nearly got him killed—Awlad Haratina (available in English as Children of the Alley and Children of Gebelawi), itself a highy symbolic allegory of mankind’s corrupt ascent from the days of Adam and Eve to the era of modern science, set in a mythologized Gamaliya. As it ran in daily installments in Cairo’s flagship newspaper, al-Ahram, in the fall of 1959 a group of shaykhs from al-Azhar—Egypt’s great center of Islamic orthodoxy—denounced it for purportedly besmirching God and the prophets by representing them as earthly characters with human flaws. Demonstrations erupted at local mosques, and the government of then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser banned the novel’s appearance as a book in Egypt—though permitting its publication abroad. The ban still held at the time of Mahfouz’s death, at least so far as al-Azhar is concerned—and Mahfouz’s failure to “repent” for it led to his near-murder nearly twelve years before. In early 2006, Mahfouz came under enormous critical fire in Egypt for insisting that al-Azhar rescind condemnation of the novel before he would break this half-century-old “gentlemen’s agreement,” as he called the ban on the Arabic publication of his novel. And, as an additional precondition, he wanted an Islamist to write the book’s preface. As a result of these seeming concessions, fellow Egyp
Intriguingly, both Children of the Alley and the Dreams series marked new beginnings in his use of allegory, and each was connected to the attempt on his life: one as an indirect cause, the other as an indirect result. One of Mahfouz’s most starkly startling allegories is Dream 179—which yields an historic confession. The “big book” on “science, philosophy, and literature” from which the dreamer’s deceased friend has pledged to read a chapter to him each night, along with a chapter from the Qur’an until both books are finished, is undoubtedly Children of the Alley. Since the modern tome also interprets the Qur’an—which, like Children of the Alley, has 114 chapters—here Mahfouz finally admits that his novel really is meant to parallel the stories in the sacred scriptures, a fact he always denied.
The St. Valentine’s Day 1999 publication of Mahfouz’s The Songs, one should note, fell on the tenth anniversary of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the novel The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Shaykh Omar Abdel-Rahman, in issuing his own alleged fatwa against Mahfouz in April 1989, is said to have declared that if Mahfouz had been punished for his novel Children of the Alley when it first appeared in 1959, then Rushdie would not have dared to bring out his own “blasphemous” book in 1988. Abdel-Rahman, a close associate of Osama bin Laden, is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for having plotted to blow up a number of major targets, including the U.N. headquarters and the World Trade Center in New York in the early 1990s.
By the late 1960s, Mahfouz turned to ever-more radical forms, including absurdist plays of pure dialogue, and stories that have grown shorter and increasingly compact over time. And so the view among some literary critics in his country that Mahfouz is a plodding nineteenth-century novelist compared to those of younger generations—none of whom have yet matched his magisterial output in either quality or quantity—would seem to be based on an incomplete view of his remarkably varied oeuvre.
In the case of The Dreams, the effort to produce at all was especially difficult for Mahfouz. Apart from the damage done by the assailant’s knife, he endured diabetes starting in the early 1960s, which enormously weakened his eyesight and hearing. Long before the attack, he could only write “by the feel of the shape of the letters,” as he told me once in the early 1990s. Then in 2003 he was twice hospitalized (once for pneumonia, the second time for a cardiovascular crisis). During his first stay in hospital, he confided to Mohamed Salmawy, who, after his stabbing, interviewed him most Saturday evenings for a weekly column in al-Ahram called “Dialogues with Naguib Mahfouz,” that he no longer dreamt when he slept—though he could continue to publish the material he had already stored for some time to come. “My drawer is still full,” he reassured Salmawy.13
Adding to his travails that season, during a fall in his flat he evidently broke a bone in his right wrist. From that point on,14 if not before, Mahfouz began to dictate his new writing—something he had previously refused even to consider. Luckily, however, he soon had new dreams to relate. Though he complained of little sleep, the time he had to dream was fertile. The result was some of his most remarkable writing. Indeed, his Dreams are a unique and haunting mixture of the deceptively quotidian, the seductively lyrical, and the savagely nightmarish—the richly condensed sum of more than four score and ten years of artistic genius and everyday experience. Toward the end of his life, Mahfouz lamented to reporter Youssef Rakha of al-Ahram that “Now writing is restricted to the dreams.” He added ruefully, “It seems I gave myself the evil eye when I wrote Ra’aytu fima yara al-na’im [I Saw as the Sleeper Sees].”15
According to al-Hagg Muhammad Sabri al-Sayyid, the secretary of the literary section of al-Ahram who read Mahfouz the newspapers in his home each morning, took his dictation, and delivered his manuscripts to Nisf al-Dunya for publication, whether the dreams were “real” or artistic inventions (he believes most were partly both, though some were likely entirely fictional), they all were born fully formed. Mahfouz created each dream in one draft, whether in writing or orally to al-Hagg Sabri (as he likes to be called), who insists that he never revised them at all.16
As in anyone’s nocturnal visions, real memory and experience permeate The Dreams. Close friends long deceased often appear, as in the case of Dr. Husayn Fawzi (1900–88) in Dream 86, former permanent undersecretary to the Minister of Culture, an ophthalmologist famed for his study and patronage of Western classical music, and for his travel writing17—the latter gaining him the sobriquet, “the Egyptian Sinbad.” And there are teachers from his youth, such as Shaykh Muharram (Dream 6), one of the young Naguib’s two Arabic instructors in his secondary school in then-suburban Abbasiya, and his math teacher in the same period, Hamza Effendi (Dream 27). The Dreams recall them less kindly than Fawzi. Some other figures from real life, who receive similarly sarcastic handling, are identified only by their initials, as in Dreams 72 and 73.
Inevitably, there are also references to Mahfouz’s past writings. In Dream 10, the “pharaonic queen” is Nitocris, the widow (and sister) of King Merenra II—characters in Mahfouz’s second published novel, Rhadopis of Nubia—and the “revenge” she takes on her husband’s murderers is from a legend recorded by both the ancient Greek writers Herodotus and Strabo. The woman who endowed the first major literary prize that Mahfouz would win (for Rhadopis of Nubia, in 1940)—Qut al-Qulub al-Damardashiya—is evidently the dangerous lady with a dainty gun in Dream 81. And Mahfouz’s writing for the screen flickers before us, as well. In Dream 13, his unconscious self meets a girl who identifies herself as “Rayya’s daughter.” To his horror, she then adds, “Maybe you remember Rayya and Sakina?” Very few Egyptians who lived through the time of their vicious career or who have seen the 1953 film about them—written by Naguib Mahfouz (who created many of the most praised scenarios in the history of Arab cinema) and directed by the legendary Salah Abu Seif—could ever forget them. Rayya and Sakina were women in their forties who lured gullible young members of their sex to their homes in Alexandria, where they were chloroformed and killed for their jewelry by a gang led by the malignant pair’s husbands. Before their apprehension in 1921, they had claimed up to thirty victims, whom they buried in the houses in which they had died.18
Equally inevitable is an apparition of his greatest personal hero, Sa’d Pasha Zaghlul (1859?–1927), leader of the 1919 movement for Egyptian independence from Britain (Dreams 73 and 158).19 And, in Dreams 30 and 48, Mahfouz rhapsodically resurrects the mightiest musician that movement produced, the Alexandrian minstrel-composer Sayyid Darwish (1892–1923).20 A line from one of Darwish’s most famous songs, that Mahfouz chose to end his novel Palace Walk, the first in the Trilogy, could well represent one of the central themes of his Dreams as well: “Visit me once each year, for it’s wrong to abandon people forever.”21
Perhaps it was both Zaghlul and Darwish who inspired Dream 170, in which Mahfouz revisits the house where he was born in December 1911 in Bayt al-Qadi Square in the old Islamic quarter of Gamaliya. There, aged about seven, he saw demonstrators gunned down by British-led forces in front of the police station—bordered by fragrant Pasha’s Beard trees—during the uprising of 1919. His boyhood friends (none of whom are known to be living), their songs of rebellion, and the army as well all soon visit themselves upon him in turn.
Mahfouz’s fierce nationalism manifests itself further in the frequent spectral appearance of Zaghlul’s Wafdist colleagues—such as his deputy, Mustafa al-Nahhas (1879–1965), in Dream 158. Al-Nahhas’s own depu
Today’s politics naturally intrude in Mahfouz’s dreams. Among the most dramatic are the apparent allusions to his views of the Arab–Israeli conflict (Dream 90) and the war on terrorism (Dreams 74 and 103). But these are in the eyes of the reader, of course—and he has always encouraged others to reach their own conclusions about what he is saying. In this vein, the most jarring to me is Dream 151, which obviously recalls the mysterious case of Dr. Reda Helal, a former regular at Mahfouz’s weekly gatherings at a Garden City hotel. Helal, the dynamic forty-something deputy editor of Cairo’s famous daily, al-Ahram, and a noted pro-Western liberal, reportedly ordered food to be delivered to his flat one afternoon in August 2003. When the deliveryman arrived, he discovered all the doors locked, with no one home to take the meal. The debonair, pipe-smoking book author and columnist, one of America’s few (though not uncritical) defenders in the Arab press, had vanished without a trace. To this day, there has been no public explanation of his disappearance, though rumors abound.22