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From pharaohs to pashas, and from prime ministers to presidents, only those who serve that great national ka—according to Mahfouz’s own strict criteria — are worthy of his praise and a seat among the Immortals. The rest are sent to Purgatory (the counterintuitive destiny, in chapter 22, of the youthful king whose tomb’s discovery spurred the young Naguib’s love of ancient Egypt) — or even to Hell (like the hapless governor Nesubenedbed in chapter 32).

That he used an ancient Egyptian mode of judgment (albeit his own version of it) to hold these leaders to account, rather than a more conventional setting speaks loudly of his conviction that Egypt is different and must look to herself for wisdom — as well as offer it to the world. The Immortals even proclaim an Egyptian “ten commandments” in the final chapter.16

Despite the historical mission behind Before the Throne, some of the characters are seemingly the products of Mahfouz’s mind — and his need to invent voices for a cherished idea. An outstanding example is Abnum, who emerges as the leader of the “rebels of the Age of Darkness” (the First Intermediate Period) in chapter 5, and thereafter throughout the book as the bloody-minded champion of the oppressed. Mahfouz claimed that Abnum, who embodies the right of the common people to rise up against injustice, was a real figure he’d found in his research.17 Yet I have found no trace of him in the available sources that the author likely consulted, while the ‘revolution’ he allegedly led probably never occurred, at least not in the way that Mahfouz portrays it.

Mahfouz also uses terms, both religious and racial, that some readers might find strange. To him, historically, ‘Copt’ means ‘native Egyptian’ (derived from Aegiptos, the name the Greeks gave the country in antiquity), though today it refers to the indigenous Christian minority, who are thought to be the most direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians.

More confusingly, Mahfouz sometimes refers, not to God (in the monotheistic sense), or the gods (in the pantheistic one), but to a being called ‘the God.’ This partly reflects Mahfouz’s knowledge of the ancient Egyptian practice of adopting local divinities as objects of special devotion, and the worship of certain gods such as Amun, Horus, Khnum, Osiris, Ptah, and Ra as deities linked to kingship. For example, Ramesses II (chapter 26) invokes Amun — without naming him — as a patron, protective god when cut off by the Hittites at Kadesh. Moreover, Mahfouz, like many of his fellow Muslims, tended to view the ancient Egyptians as proto-Muslims, who would have regarded each minor god as but a manifestation of a grand single godhead. (In chapter 21, Imhotep even enunciates the kernel of this idea to Akhenaten — whose role as the first known monotheist made him the subject of Mahfouz’s 1985 novel, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth).18 Nonetheless, many characters speak of the various gods as actual beings. Above all, Mahfouz employs the conceit of the Osiris Court, with four of the ancient deities very much active in it (though shorn of their famous physical attributes), perhaps — but not necessarily — representing aspects of God. To finesse the theological conundrum this creates, the ancient gods do not render final judgment on defendants from the Christian and Islamic eras, but leave that task to a higher authority.

Just as curiously, the author’s view of international relations seems to be based on ancient Egyptian logic. Though he praises his hero Saad Zaghlul as well as several pharaohs, such as the doomed Seqenenra (chapter 10) and Psamtek III (chapter 39) and others for bravely fighting foreign occupation, Mahfouz paradoxically loves Egypt as an empire, lauding such conquerors as Amenhotep I (chapter 13), Thutmose III (chapter 17), and Muhammad Ali (chapter 56) — though the latter was not a native Egyptian. Whether aware of it or not, here Mahfouz demonstrates the divide between what the ancient Egyptians saw as Ma’at and its opposite, Isfet (chaos, hence injustice). In their conception, foreigners were always inferior to Egyptians (though an Egyptianized foreigner would be accepted among them). Thus Egypt’s control and even seizure of neighboring lands in the Near East and Nubia were considered a fulfillment of Ma’at, while an alien power invading Egypt was the triumph of evil over the proper cosmic order.20 Hence Mahfouz bars all but a few non-native rulers who either had become Egyptian or otherwise acted in Egypt’s best interest from the right to trial and thus the chance for immortality in Before the Throne. Indeed, the work as a whole seems but an expression of Mahfouz’s own personal version of Ma’at as embodied in his nation’s history.

Whatever its original source, this paradoxical attitude toward empire and occupation is remarkably similar to that of the “Pharaonists,” a group of intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s to which Mahfouz belonged. Led by such luminaries as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963), first rector of the Egyptian University, Taha Hussein (1889–1973), the great blind Egyptian belles-lettrist and novelist, and Mahfouz’s “spiritual father,” the Coptic thinker and publisher Salama Musa (1887–1958) — the Pharaonists believed that Egypt was both much older and much closer to Europe and the Mediterranean in culture than to her Arab and African neighbors.19

While his fellow Egyptians largely rejected this idea by the 1940s, Mahfouz did not — at least not completely. Though in his 1988 Nobel lecture,21 delivered for him in Stockholm by Mohamed Salmawy, he declared himself “the son of two civilizations” (the Pharaonic and the Islamic) to the Swedish Academy which awarded the prize, Mahfouz never quite roused himself to the same level of zeal for pan-Arabism or pan-Islam when they became the intellectual vogue in later years, despite enormous peer pressure, and numerous attempts of his own, to get there.”

A sensitive and problematic issue is the treatment of Jews (who are mentioned only three times as a group: twice in chapter 49 and once in chapter 54, in the trial of Ali Bey al-Kabir — Ali Bey the Great), as well as Egypt’s often rocky relations with both ancient and modern Israel. Mahfouz, who as an adolescent grew up in a largely Jewish area of suburban Abbasiya, once told me, “I really miss” the Jews of Egypt,22 all but a few of whom were dispersed from the country in the 1950s and 1960s.

Though the king most often theorized to be the pharaoh of the Exodus — a story found in similar form in both the Old Testament and the Qur’an — is given his own trial in Before the Throne (Merneptah, chapter 27), the tale itself is neither told nor even mentioned. Israel by name appears but twice (both in the trial of Pharaoh Apries, chapter 37) — briefly (and fatally) aligned with Egypt against the Babylonians — while Judah is captured by Egypt in the trial of Pharaoh Nekau II (chapter 35).

In Before the Throne, the current State of Israel does not exist at all except as the formidable but unnamed enemy whose presence dominates much of the proceedings in the final two trials (62 and 63). These are of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, champion of the Arab masses who led them into the catastrophic defeat of 1967, and Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), the “Hero of War and Peace” whose initially successful surprise attack on Israeli-held Sinai in October 1973 revived Egypt’s pride — and whose later bold gambit of peace with the Jewish State would finally cost him his life. Yet, with the successful pacts of peace signed between Seti I (chapter 25) and his son, Ramesses II, and the Hittites, Egypt’s aggressive military rivals based to her northeast, one of the main aims of Before the Throne clearly is to justify the 1979 Peace Treaty that Sadat signed with Menachem Begin.23