“And she must believe in science,” implored Imhotep, the vizier of King Djoser, “for that is the force behind her immortality.”
“And in wisdom and literature,” seconded the Sage Ptahhotep, “to savor the vitality of life and to imbibe its nectar.”
“And she must believe in the people and in revolution,” preached Abnum, “to propel her destiny toward completion.”
“And believe in might,” said Thutmose III, “that cannot be achieved before she has grappled with her neighbors in battle.”
“And that government be of the people and for the people,” exhorted Saad Zaghloul.
“And that relations between people be based on absolute social justice,” demanded Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
“And that her goal be civilization and peace, as well,” added Anwar Sadat.
“May the Divinity be implored,” Isis sighed hopefully, “to invest the folk of Egypt with the wisdom and the power to remain for all time a lighthouse of right guidance, and of beauty.”
All opened their palms in supplication, absorbed in prayer.
Translator’s Afterword
BEFORE THE THRONE IS NOT MERELY a book about olden times. This is a tableau of all Egypt’s history, from the remotest past to practically the present, and the rulers who led her through it — each judged by the Osiris Court, which in the ancient religion decided the fate of the soul after death. Moreover, its author insisted that this work (published as Amam al-’arsh in 1983), was not fiction. When pressed on the matter, Naguib Mahfouz, whose own life (1911–2006) spanned nearly a century, replied simply, “It is history.”1
But if so, it is history of a peculiar kind. Though based on many years of research and a lifetime of reflection on Egypt’s past, the setting is imaginary and the dialog invented. And far from being conventional historical fiction, or even romance, like his first three published novels (all of which were set in ancient Egypt), this is actually a kind of theatrical conversation between characters, with scant stage directions and the barest of scenery, though we are told that the décor is all of solid gold.
Why did Mahfouz choose this particular allegorical device? And why did he want to render an historical verdict upon so many of Egypt’s rulers? His exposure to classical literature, dating back to his studies of Greek thought published as a young man (obtaining a degree in philosophy from the Egyptian University, now Cairo University, in 1934), and his lifelong self-study of Egyptology may provide the answer.
Inspired by the explosion of Egyptian patriotism that sparked the 1919 movement for national independence led by Mahfouz’s lifelong hero, Saad Pasha Zaghlul 1859?–1927), and by the global frenzy at the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, Mahfouz’s first published book was a translation of a brief work on ancient Egypt aimed at young readers by the British scholar, the Rev. James Baikie, in 1932. Though Mahfouz wrote dozens of short stories set in contemporary Egypt, a small number are set in, or use motifs from, Pharaonic times (now collected in English translation in Voices from the Other World). The action of his first three novels — Khufu’s Wisdom (‘Abath al-aqdar, 1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (Radubis, 1943) and Thebes at War (Kifah Tiba, 1944), likewise occurs in ancient Egypt. Yet, each, in its own way, obliquely critiques contemporary Egyptian politics — especially the last of these, an allegorical attack on both the British and the Turkish aristocracy.2 But with his next two novels, al-Qahira al-jadida the latter published in English as Cairo Modern and Khan al-Khalili, both set in the twentieth century and both possibly published in 1945, he discovered that the risks of censorship were slight, and abandoned a plan to compose forty novels on ancient Egypt to focus instead on life in his own times. Thus he ultimately created such contemporary masterpieces as The Cairo Trilogy — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street — in Arabic, Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr al-Shawq, and al-Sukkariya) as well as scores of other works in a breathtaking array of styles and genres.3 He did not return to the pharaohs for nearly forty years — with Before the Throne.
Among his wide readings from ancient Egyptian literature as a young man, Mahfouz later confessed that a Middle Kingdom poem, The Dialogue of a Man and His Soul, had deeply impressed him.4 In it, an unnamed man contemplates death, debating its merits and demerits with his ba (a spiritual element released after death that connects the deceased in the burial chamber with the celestial deities).5 The man tells the story, recounting his arguments in favor of earthly life against his ba, which defends the advantages of death as though speaking in a court of law before an audience that may include the gods.6
Another possible source for the concept of presenting the afterlife trials of earthly movers and shakers is found in the writings of Lucian, a Hellenized Syrian in the Roman administration at Alexandria in the mid-to-late second century AD. Lucian cleverly adapted the judgment of the dead by the Greek underworld court headed by Zeus’ son Minos in order to mock the world of the quick. In his Dialogues of the Dead, the infamously irreverent Diogenes of Sinope (d. approximately 325 BC) invites one of the Cynic philosophers to join him in the House of Hades, lord of the shades:
“Diogenes bids you, Menippus, if you’ve laughed enough at the things on the earth above, come down here, if you want much more to laugh at; for on earth your laughter was fraught with uncertainty, and people often wondered whether anyone at all was quite sure about what follows death, but here you’ll be able to laugh endlessly without any doubts, as I do now — and particularly when you see rich men, satraps and tyrants so humble and insignificant, with nothing to distinguish them but their groans, and see them to be weak and contemptible when they recall their life above.”
As John Rodenbeck writes, the “satirical dialogues and fantastic tales” of the “long-lived Lucian of Samosata … have spawned many imitations.” Dialog as a means to convey abstract argument was itself key to the ancient Greek philosophy that Mahfouz had read.
Both Plato and his mentor Socrates asserted, Anthony Gottlieb notes in his book The Dream of Reason, that “truth emerged only through dialogue,” and Plato’s works were all “at least ostensibly” in that form. This could also explain why Mahfouz’s only published forays into writing for the theater — a series of short plays that he produced intermittently following the cataclysmic Arab defeat of 1967—were really just dialogs, with little or no stage directions or descriptions. Though he loved every aspect of drama, including the omnipresent singing and dancing of Egyptian productions (he apparently didn’t miss an opening night in Cairo’s theater district until at least the mid-1960s), Mahfouz the playwright nonetheless dispensed with everything but raw verbal confrontation between characters. He evidently felt that only ruthless dialog could unflinchingly expose the existential truths behind the naked humiliations and despair of the time.
A further potential model for Before the Throne is an allegory in prose on the fate of the soul by the blind Syrian poet Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri (d. 1058). In al-Ma‘arri’s Risalat al-ghufran (The Epistle of Forgiveness), a shaykh enters the afterlife — but in imagination only — to see how the drunkard poets of the Pre-Islamic “Age of Ignorance” have managed to find divine forgiveness.7
Or he may have read a work similar to that of al-Ma‘arri’s, Risalat al-tawabi’ wa-l-zawabi’ (Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons), by an Andalusian late contemporary, ibn Shuhayd (d. 1035), who “meets the spirits of a number of prominent littérateurs — poets such as Imru’ al-Qays, Abu Nuwas, Abu Tammam, and al-Mutanabbi, prose writers such as ‘Abd al-Hamid, al-Jahiz and Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani — and critics,” in the other world, as described by Roger Allen.8