In this present echo of the values of Mahfouz’s lifetime, woman is the symbol not only of beauty and joy in being alive but also of spiritual release. This is personified as, in celebration, not male patronage, ‘a naked woman with the bloom of the nectar of life’ who has ‘the heart of music as her site’. The Proustian conception (let us grant it, even if only in coincidence with Mahfouz’s own) of love as pain/joy, inseparably so, also has a Mahfouzian wider reference as a part of the betrayal by time itself, let alone any lover. Entitled ‘Mercy’, the apergu reflects on an old couple: ‘They were brought together by love thirty years ago, then it had abandoned them with the rest of expectations.’
Love of the world, ‘this wicked but fascinating life’, is the dynamism shown to justify itself as essential to religious precepts sometimes in its very opposition to them. The greed for life is admissible to Mahfouz in all his work; against which, of course, there is juxtaposed excess as unfulfilment. Yet how unashamedly joyous is the parable of’The Bridegroom’: ‘I asked Sheik Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih about his ideal among those people with whom he had been associated, and he said: “A good man whose miracles were manifested by his perseverance in the service of people and the remembrance of God; on his hundredth birthday he drank, danced, sang, and married a virgin of twenty. And on the wedding night there came a troop of angels who perfumed him with incense from the mountains of Qaf at the end of the earth.” ’
It is detachment that sins against life. When the narrator tells the Sheikh, ‘I heard some people holding against you your intense love for the world’, the Sheikh answers, ‘Love of the world is one of the signs of gratitude, and evidence of a craving for everything beautiful.’ Yet this is no rosy denial that life is sad: ‘It has been decreed that man shall walk staggeringly between pleasure and pain.’ Decreed by whom? The responsibility for this is perhaps aleatory, cosmic rather than religious, if one may make such a distinction? And there is the question of mortality, since nowhere in these stoic but not materialist writings is there expressed any belief in after-life, or any desire for it; paradise is not an end for which earthly existence is the means. This life, when explored and embraced completely and fearlessly by tender sceptic and obdurate pursuer of salvation Naguib Mahfouz, is enough. Mortality becomes the Sheikh’s serene and exquisite image: ‘There is nothing between the lifting of the veil from the face of the bride and the lowering of it over her corpse but a moment that is like a heartbeat.’ And after a premonition of death one night, all the Sheikh asks of God, instead of eternal life, is ‘well-being, out of pity for people who were awaiting my help the following day.’
If sexual love and sensuality in the wider sense of all its forms is not an element opposed to, apart from, spirituality, there is at the same time division within that acceptance, for life itself is conceived by Mahfouz as a creative tension between desires and moral precepts. On the one hand, sensuality is the spirit of life, life-force; on the other, abstinence is the required condition to attain spirituality.
It is said that Mahfouz has been influenced by Sufism. My own acquaintance with Sufism is extremely superficial, confined to an understanding that its central belief is that the awakening to the inner life of man is a necessary condition of fulfilment as a human being, while both the outer and inner realities are inseparable. Readers like myself may receive Sufism through the transmission of Mahfouz as, for precedent, anyone who is not a Christian may receive Christian beliefs in the Pensées: through Pascal. (And by the way, there is a direct connection there, between the paths of the Sufi and the Christian. Pascaclass="underline" ‘To obtain anything from God, the external must be joined to the internal.’) Faith, no matter what its doctrine, takes on the contours of individual circumstance, experience, and the meditation upon these of the adherent. We therefore may take manifestations of Sufi religious philosophy that are to be discerned in Mahfouz’s thinking as more likely to be his own gnosis, original rather than doctrinal. There is surely no heresy in this; only celebration of the doubled creativity: a resplendent intelligence applied to the tenets of what has to be taken on faith.
If we are to take a definitive reading of where Mahfouz stands in relation to faith, I think we must remember what his most brilliantly conceived character, Kamal, has declared in The Cairo Trilogy. ‘The choice of a faith still has not been decided. The great consolation I have is that it is not over yet.’ For Mahfouz, life is a search in which one must find one’s own signposts. The text for this is his story ‘Zaabalawi’. When a sick man goes on a pilgrimage through ancient Cairo to seek healing from the saintly Sheikh Zaabalawi, everybody he asks for directions sends him somewhere different. Told at last he will find the saint (who is also dissolute: see unity-in-dichotomy, again) in a bar, the weary man falls asleep waiting for him to appear. When he wakes, he finds his head wet. The drinkers tell him Zaabalawi came while he was asleep and sprinkled water on him to refresh him. Having had this sign of Zaabalawi’s existence, the man will go on searching for him all his life—‘Yes, I have to findZaabalawi.’
The second half of the prose in the present collection is devoted to the utterances and experiences of another Sheikh, one Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih, who as his spokesman is perhaps Naguib Mahfouz’s imagined companion of some of the saintly sages in Sufi history, such as Rabi’a al-Adawiya (a woman) of Basra, Imam Junayd al-Baghdadi of Persia, Khwaja Mu’in’ud-Din Chisti of India, Sheikh Muzaffer of Istanbul. He is also, surely, Zaabalawi, and brother of all the other wanderers who appear and disappear to tantalize the yearning for meaning and salvation in the streets of Mahfouz’s works, offering and withdrawing fragments of answer to the mystery of existence, and guidance of how to live it well. This one, when first he makes his appearance in the quarter of Cairo invented for Mahfouz’s notebooks, is heard to call out: ‘A stray one has been born, good fellows.’ The essence of this stray one’s teaching is in his response to the narrator, Everyman rather than Mahfouz, who gives as his claim to join the Sheikh’s Platonic cave of followers, ‘I have all but wearied of the world and wish to flee from it.’ The Sheikh says, ‘Love of the world is the core of our brotherhood and our enemy is flight.’
One of the Sheikh’s adages is: ‘The nearest man comes to his Lord is when he is exercising his freedom correctly.’ Many of Mahfouz’s parables are of the intransigence of authority and the hopelessness of merely petitioning the powers of oppression. With the devastating ‘After You Come Out of Prison’ one can’t avoid comparison with Kafka, although I have tried to do so since Kafka is invoked to inflate the false profundity of any piece of whining against trivial frustrations. In answer to a journalist’s question, ‘What is the subject closest to your heart?’
Mahfouz gave one of the rare responses in his own person: ‘Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of kings, basic human freedom in the context of society and family. These types of freedom follow one from the other.’ This love of freedom breathes from every line in this book. It is imbued with what his character Kamal has called ‘a struggle towards truth aiming at the good of mankind as a whole. . life would be meaningless without that’ and with the tolerance Kamal’s friend Husayn has defined: ‘The Believer derives his love for these values from religion, while the free man loves them for themselves.’