Karnak Café is clearly one of Mahfouz’s angriest and most explicit works of fiction. The treatment to which the young people are subjected, the political discussions both before and after the 1967 defeat, and the stark choices facing the Egyptian people in its aftermath, are all portrayed with disarming accuracy. The setting is a café, and one might suggest that, of all the Egyptian authors of fiction whom one might wish to ask to depict the typical café scenario with complete accuracy, Mahfouz is the one who comes to mind first. Apart from his latter years, he loved nothing more than to spend time in cafés, talking with friends and discussing politics and literature. When I first encountered him in the 1960s, his favorite spot was the renowned Café Riche in central Cairo, but both before and after that there were others as well. Indeed another “story” that I have heard suggests that the advent to Karnak Café of Khalid Safwan is in fact a replication of an actual incident that occurred in a café near the old Opera House.
How ironic is it that Mahfouz puts into the mouth of the villain of this piece, Khalid Safwan, the presentation of the alternatives facing the Egyptian people in the wake of the June 1967 defeat, and indeed places particular stress on the goals of those people who would advocate religion as a basis for finding solutions. One might conclude by suggesting that, while this short novel clearly belongs in and describes a particular chronological context in twentieth-century Egyptian history and social life, the directions that it suggests and the dangers that it identifies make it disarmingly relevant to the situation in Egypt, and the Middle East in general, many years later.