Before the Throne (17 page)

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 chapel
²⁹
—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 righteous judge of the dead—personally choosing who was worthy of a hearing, the evidence presented, and their sentences as well.

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.