The Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz
Harafish: In this instance, a group of friends—mostly actors, artists, writers, and musicians—to which Naguib Mahfouz belonged since roughly 1942, and which until recently met every Thursday evening without fail. The word itself is the plural of harfush, which originally may have been defined as “a person without a skilled trade.” By the nineteenth century, it generally meant “poor person,” or even “riff-raff.” One of the Mahfouz group’s most prominent members, the late actor Ahmed Mazhar (1917–2002)—who is thought to have given the weekly association its name—said that a harfush is “the agent provocateur found at the edge of every demonstration.”
Husayn district: Named for the Mosque of al-Husayn, which it surrounds, this is part of the larger district of Gamaliya, itself the northern (and largest) section of the former royal city of the Shiite Fatimid dynasty (969–1171). Known as al-Qahira, the Fatimids’ exclusive seat of power eventually formed the core of what became modern Cairo.
kunafa: Vermicelli baked in sugar, honey, and melted butter.
jellaba: A North African garment similar to the Egyptian gallabiya (see above), though usually featuring a hood.
jubba: A wide-sleeved, long outer garment, open in front.
mahmal: Until the advent of easy motorized travel, it was customary for Egyptian and other Islamic rulers to send a camel-borne litter, or mahmal, to Mecca bearing an elaborately embroidered cloth to decorate the Kaaba, or sacred cube-shaped black stone in the holy sanctuary, during the annual Muslim pilgrimage.
rabab: A primitive, usually one-to-three-stringed instrument frequently used to accompany the recital of heroic folk epics, ballads, and other songs.
Rose of the Nile: A name given to differing varieties of aquatic plants that grow in the Nile through the length of Egypt.
shaykh of the hara: A resident put in charge by the authorities to watch over the affairs of a neighborhood (hara, which also means alley or side street) in traditional parts of Cairo.
Shaykh Zakariya Ahmad: Celebrated singer, ‘ud player (see below), and composer (1896–1961), and a close friend of Naguib Mahfouz. Trained at Egypt’s principal Islamic school, al-Azhar, he authored a number of highly popular works sung by Egypt’s greatest diva, Umm Kulthoum (1904?–75), and also created numerous operettas.
Shukuku: Mahmud Shukuku (1912–85) was a popular Egyptian comedian, actor, and singer of monologs. He appeared in over one hundred films between 1944 and 1976.
Sidi Gaber: The first train stop in Alexandria. Mahfouz compared his advanced stage of life to that of a person pulling into Sidi Gaber Station, knowing that the final destination is but a short time away. (See Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber: Reflections of a Nobel Laureate 1994–2001, from conversations with Mohamed Salmawy, AUC Press, 2001.)
tagin: A dish of meat and vegetables baked in individual pots in a rich tomato sauce.
‘ud: A multi-stringed instrument, the Arab version of the lute.
Acknowledgments
As translator, I wish to thank Hussein Abdel Gawad, Roger Allen, Walter Armbrust, Hazem Azmy, Brooke Comer, Jennifer Cranfill, Mohamed el-Kafrawi, Mahmoud el-Shanawani, Ben Fountain, Nadine Gordimer, Fathi Hashem, Shirley Johnston, Klaus-Peter Kuhlmann, Mark Linz, Christian Lorentzen, Ben Metcalf, Fuad Ahmed Noaman, Jessica Papin, Adham Ragab, Michael Ray, Ahmed Said, Tawfik Saleh, Ali Salem, Mohamed Salmawy, al-Hagg Muhammad Sabri al-Sayyid, Ahmed Seddik, Aleya Serour, Sasson Somekh, Willard Spiegelman, Paul Theroux, Deborah Treisman, and especially Husayn Ukasha for their generous help with the current work; Prince Abbas Hilmi and the members of the Abd al-Hamid Shadid family (most notably Sami El-Behiri), for their efforts to help confirm the identity of Aïda Shadid; Zaki Salem and Hassan Ismail for providing me with the Arabic texts of the some of the dreams, as well as Jacinthe Assaad, R. Neil Hewison, Nadia Naqib, and Kelly Zaug of the AUC Press, and Diana Secker Tesdell of Vintage/Anchor, for their skillful editing. Most of all, I am grateful to Naguib Mahfouz, once more for his great openness and forbearance with my multifarious inquiries.
This translation is dedicated to my unwaveringly steadfast parents, John and Helen Stock—without whom it, or any other dreams of my own, would not have been possible. Painfully, my mother, like Naguib Bey, has now passed away—but we hope (and believe) that both have since gone to the Seventh Heaven.
Naguib Mahfouz, The Dreams