Children of Gebelaawi (2 page)

Children of Gebelaawi

publication. Serialization could be carried through to the final

episode on 25 December only thanks to the personal support

of President Abdul-Nasser.

As soon as the last chapter had been printed, all public

mention of the work was banned by the censor, and i ts

publication i n book form was prohibited. As the sets lovingly

cut from the newspaper yellowed and frayed, so the memory

of the novel gradually faded. There was a limited revival of

interest i n 1967, when an edition in book form was published

by a Beiru t publisher, but the work remained banned in Egypt

and was officially condemned i n 1968 by a committee of

theologians from Al-Azhar. It conti nued to be quietly bought

by those with a special interest in Arabic literature, but there

was no repeat of the ou tcry of 1959. The present English

translation, made as a scholarly exercise in 1962 with the

author's assistance, was published as an academic paperback

i n 1981. It sold only four thousand copies i n its first eight years.

By 1988 the novel had been largely forgotten, to the extent

that Mahfouz said: ' Even I forgot it. ' . The award to him of the

No bel Prize for li terature in October � 988 reopened the

controversy, for Children oJ Gebelaawiin the present translation

was one of the five works cited i n the Nobel Committee's press

release ( the others bei ng The Cairo Trilogy, Midaq Alley, Adrift on

the Nile and a collection of short stories, This World of God's) .

President Mubarak let i t be known that he wished the banned

novel to be issued in Egypt. However, Al-Azhar renewed i ts

opposition, and Mahfouz indicated that for the sake of peace he

would not support publication.

The fatwa issued agai nst Salman Rushdie on 14 February

1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini brought a new element of

danger to the situation. In March, the blind Egyptian Muslim

leader, Sheikh Omar Abdurrahman, said i n an interview with

a Kuwai t newspaper, Al-Qabas, that if Mahfouz had been

punished for his blasphemous novel, Rush die would not have

dared publish his. Soon after this, the sheikh was arrested on

viii

Introduction

other charges, but he escaped by way of Sudan to New Yor k,

where he was eventually found guilty - in spite of his protestations of innocence - of conspiring to plant bombs. I n January 1996 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Mter the Sheikh's remarks of 1989, Mahfouz was offered

police protection but refused it, except for a token guard i n

front of his home for the sake of his family. H e conti nued to

go about Cairo as before, confident that he would be protected

by his manifest innocence and his enormous popularity. For

six years he was proved right, but in 1994, the day after the

anniversary of the Nobel Prize, Mahfouz was stabbed as he

boarded a friend's car to go to his usual Friday literary evening.

Sixteen men were tried for their alleged part in the attempt on

his life and thirteen of them were found guilty. They had,

however pleaded not guilty, and it was claimed by their

supporters that the attack had been organized by the Egyptian

secret services, with the aim of discrediti ng Islamic activists.

According to the prosecution, they confessed under interrogation that they were trying to execute Sheikh Omar's 'fatwa'.

The Nobel Prize and the subsequent events made the novel

a subject of morbid interest for journalists, and of speculation

for unscrupulous publishers who had never shown any concern for Arabic literature, butwho wereready to sensationalize what is essentially a serious book for commercial gain . I n

particular, much was made, even by academics who should

have known better, of the supposed similarity between Children of Gebelaawi and The Satanic Verses, and of the 'fatwa'

supposedly pronounced by Sheikh Omar.

This so-called fatwa is widely assumed to be real. However,

we have Sheikh Omar's own authority for the fact that he did

not pronoun ce a fatwa. Interviewed in his New York prison by

Mary Anne Weaver (The New Yorker, 30th january 1995), he

reacted indignantly when she put it to him that:

'It has been reported that you issued a Jatwaagainst Mahfouz,

ix

Children of Gebelaawi

by declaring him an apostate. '

'No, no, no,' he replied, and his voice began to rise. 'This

whole matter is so misunderstood. What I said - and this was

when 'The Satanic Verses' - was making headlines - was, if

we had punished Naguib Mahfouz for what he wrote i n

'Children of Gebelaawi', then Salman Rush die never would

have dared to write that book. This was a reply to a question

asked by a journalist. It was a reply, an opinion. It was not a

Jatwa.'

' How should he have been punished? '

'You 've got to understand the rule of shari a law. Al-Azhar

should have brought Mahfouz before a committee where he

would have been judged. He would have been given an

opportunity to defend himself, and, if found gui lty, he would

have been given an opportunity to repent. '

[Italics i n the origi nal.]

There was no apostasy trial, no formal charges were brought,

and Mahfouz never offered any coherent defence of his novel.

Readers must make up their own minds whether what he wrote

was -or was i ntended to be - anti-religious or anti-Islamic.

Three main complai nts were made in 1959 against the work:

that in general the allegorical treatment of the lives of the

prophets in modern dress was irreverent, that in particular the

treatment of the character who relives the life of Muhammad,

the Seal of the Prophets, was unworthy of him, and above all

that the death of the patriarchal figure Gebelaawi signified the

'death of God'. A fourth charge, even more serious, was added

retrospectively: that Mahfouz had written an 'anti-Koran', as

i ndicated by the fact that the number of its chapters, 114, was

the same as that of the suras of the Holy Koran. Mahfouz

vigorously rejected all four charges, maintaining that his novel

was 'a deeply religious work'.

The last charge is the most easily dealt with, for i t does not

bear exami nation and cannot be made without malice; the

X

Introduction

novel bears no resemblance to the Holy Book, apart from the

coincident numbering of the last subdivision. When I put it to

Mahfouz in 1962, his first reaction was 'a 'udhu billah - God

forbid!'. His longer reply was: firstly that, i ncluding the Prologue, the novel has 115 chapters; secondly that he numbered the chapters consecutively all the way through only after he

had finished writing the five constituent parts; fi nally that a

chapter is not at all the same as a sura. The most cursory

inspection of the Holy Koran will confirm this last point; the

suras into which it is organized vary in length between three

very short verses and nearly three hundred very long ones, and

the longer suras could easily be subdivided - as indeed they

are in some translations. In any case Muslims do not usually

refer to the suras by their numbers but by their names.

A5 regards comparison between the prophets and normal

human beings, this is refused by many religious people. Similar objections were raised by some Christians to Kazanzakis'

novel Christ Recrucified. At the root of such criticism lies a fear

of accepting the humanity of the prophets; if we imagine them

dressed like us, eating like us, walking about ordinary streets,

talking abou t ordinary subjects, is there not a danger that we

shall decide that they were after all not such special people? A

contrary view is that un less we see the prophets as flesh-andblood human bei ngs in the real world, their message will seem not to apply to normal men and women. Defenders ofMahfouz

can find support in the Holy Koran itself, which describes the

enemies of Islam as asking: 'What is it with this "apostle" who

eats food and goes in the markets?' (25:7). In any case,

Mahfouz was not wri ting biographies of the prophets; his

concern was only to throw light on certain aspects of their lives

and missions. Even if he showed occasional lapses of taste or

judgement, it is hard to believe that he intended disrespect to

his heroes.

The portrayal of Qaasi m, whose role recalls that of the

Prophet Mu hammad, was si ngled out for special cri ticism,

xi

Children of Gebelaawi

partly because he was thought to be made less attractive than

Rifaa, who relives the life ofj esus, partly because he was shown

- un like Rifaa - as smoking hashish, and partly because his

work is so soon undone. It is true that Qaasim is a more abrasive

character than Rifaa, but he is a man of action while the latter

is a dreamer. Hashish is introduced simply to symbolize the

fact that he is a companionable man, at ease in the society of

ordinary people, unlike the introverted Rifaa. There is of

course no implication that the Prophet Muhammad i ndulged

in any such way; Qaasim is a Nineteenth Century Cairene, not

a Seventh Cen tury Meccan. As for the swift undoing of Qaasim 's

work, it has always been the view ofMuslims that Islamic society

has repeatedly failed to live up to the Prophet's standards.

Calls for a return to the purity of early Islam are i ndeed at the

heart of movements of renewal. The failures of his successors

do not diminish the towering status of Qaasim.

As regards the 'death of God', this meaning can be extracted from the novel only if Gebelaawi is equated with God.

Marxist readers in 1959 were quick to make this equation,

claiming that Mahfouz was depicting scientific socialism as the

religion of the future. The Nobel Prize committee i tself made

this mistake in its press release, referring to 'the primeval

father Gebelaawi's (God's) death'. Mahfouz however consistently refused this in terpretation. For him Gebelaawi represented not the eternal and transcendent One but, as he told me in 1962, 'a certain idea of God that men have made': the

man-like god of infantile religion, made in the image of man,

the 'old guy in the sky' who has friends and enemies, is pleased

or angry, makes decisions and changes his mind ...

There is a long and honorable tradition in Islam of opposition to anthropomorphic ideas of God, going back to the Mu'tazila and beyond. This school of theology, which predominated through most of the second and third Muslim centuries, has influenced many of the greatest Muslim thinkers, including the Egyptian architect of the Islamic renais-xii

Introduction

sance, Muhammad Abduh ( 1849-1905). Mahfouz may be seen

as an inheritor of Mu' tazilite philosophy, the essen ce ofwhich

is 'al-tawhid - affirmation of Divine Unity', rejecting any

comparison between God and created things. It finds confirmation i n the Holy Koran, which clearly warns against belief i n a man-like god, and i ndeed makes it absolutely clear that n o

human figure could ever stand for God. Sura 112, said by the

Prophet Muhammad to be equal in value to a third of the

Koran, spells it out with wonderful economy:

In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful,

Say: ' He is God, One,

God the Eternal;

He begets not, nor is begotten,

And no one and nothing is like Him.'

The great adversary of the Mu ' tazila in the Third Century

of Islam was Ahmad ibn 1-lanbal, who said that God must in

some mysterious sense have hands and eyes and sit on a

throne, since the Holy Koran says so. The argument was

eventually resolved by orthodoxy with the formula that God

has such attributes but 'without our knowing how (hila kayj) ' .

I n the e n d Ibn Han bal's legacy turned o u t to be n o t so

different from that of the Mu' tazila; the movement that looks

back to him as its inspiration, the Wah habis of Saudi Arabia,

call themselves 'al-Muwahhidin

the affirmers of Divine

-

Uni ty', and they are the fiercest of all opponents of anything

that could be called idolatry.

The anthropomorphic god is seen as endangering religion, for like an idol he takes the place of the true God. His removal is necessary if we are to discover the Eternal. By

revealing a self-organising universe of myriads of galaxies,

billions of years old, in which there is no place for a man-like

god, modern science may be said to have cleared the way for

true religion. However, many people have taken the meta-

xiii