In the end, the tribunal apparently feels that Sadat has won the debate. Osiris invites Sadat to sit with the Immortals — though he had only permitted Nasser to do so. The presiding deity had sent Nasser (who had infuriated the court by declaring that “Egyptian history really began on July 23, 1952,” the day of his Free Officers coup) on to the final judgment with but what he termed ‘an appropriate (“munasiba”) recommendation.’ Sadat’s testimonial, however, was qualified as “musharrifa,” or “conferring honor.”
Mahfouz’s defense of Arab — Israeli peace would cost him a great deal, including boycotts of his books and films for many years in the Arab world. And it may have contributed to the attempt on his life by Islamist militants on October 14, 1994, roughly the sixth anniversary of the announcement of his Nobel. Though it is believed the attack was in punishment for his allegedly blasphemous novel, Children of the Alley (Awlad haratina, 1959),24 it fell on the day that Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were revealed to have won the Nobel peace prize in Oslo.25 Then, and even now, accused by some of selling out to Israel (which has no demonstrable influence over the Swedish Academy) for the sake of his prize — despite devoting most of his Nobel lecture, cited above, to a defense of Palestinian rights, and even for a time endorsing Palestinian suicide bombings — he nonetheless never renounced his support for the treaty that followed the Camp David Accords and the dream of a true, lasting, and comprehensive peace between Arabs and Jews someday.26
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 chapel29—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.