Abu’l-’Abbas b. ash-Shatti was accompanying me. He related to me two old dreams about Ibn al-Tustariya al-Hanbali — may God have mercy upon him! He said, ‘I saw him in my dream, and I greeted him. He returned my greeting, and took hold of a kerchief which was on my head, with both hands, tied it, and said, “O Abu-’l-’Abass! What is this rudeness which I have not experienced before?” ’ My informant continued, ‘I had stopped visiting his tomb; so I resumed my visits and continued doing so without interruption.’
7
Or such visions could be highly political (a point to which we shall return with regard to Mahfouz). Another medieval dream related by al-Banna warns of foreign invasion — which here could be an omen of ultimate good fortune:
… it appeared as though there were a great swarm of green locusts, each of them holding a pearl in his mouth. They represent armies coming; and it is possible that their coming might be beneficial. For green represents worldly prosperity, and pearls represent the Qur’an and religion. Hence, it is possible that there need be no fear as regards their coming — if God so wills!
8
I once asked Mahfouz what he thought was the greatest difference between I Saw as the Sleeper Sees and The Dreams. Without hesitation, he replied, “Composition.” The earlier work, he explained, was entirely a conscious authorial creation, while each episode of the present project is “a[n actual] dream, which I develop into a story.”9 In this, he may have achieved the major ambition of the iconoclast André Breton, who declared in the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), “I believe in the future resolution of these two states — outwardly so contradictory — which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak.”10
Mahfouz began his novelistic career with a series of three books set in the Pharaonic era: Khufu’s Wisdom (‘Abath al-aqdar, 1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (Radubis, 1943), and Kifah Tibah (Thebes at War, 1944), which indirectly critique contemporary society in symbolic terms.11 He is best known for his “realistic” works such as Midaq Alley (1947), The Beginning and the End (1949), The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street (1956–57), and more. Yet Mahfouz has also been experimenting with virtually every style and type of fiction since serializing the book that later nearly got him killed—Awlad Haratina (available in English as Children of the Alley and Children of Gebelawi), itself a highy symbolic allegory of mankind’s corrupt ascent from the days of Adam and Eve to the era of modern science, set in a mythologized Gamaliya. As it ran in daily installments in Cairo’s flagship newspaper, al-Ahram, in the fall of 1959 a group of shaykhs from al-Azhar — Egypt’s great center of Islamic orthodoxy — denounced it for purportedly besmirching God and the prophets by representing them as earthly characters with human flaws. Demonstrations erupted at local mosques, and the government of then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser banned the novel’s appearance as a book in Egypt — though permitting its publication abroad. The ban still held at the time of Mahfouz’s death, at least so far as al-Azhar is concerned — and Mahfouz’s failure to “repent” for it led to his near-murder nearly twelve years before. In early 2006, Mahfouz came under enormous critical fire in Egypt for insisting that al-Azhar rescind condemnation of the novel before he would break this half-century-old “gentlemen’s agreement,” as he called the ban on the Arabic publication of his novel. And, as an additional precondition, he wanted an Islamist to write the book’s preface. As a result of these seeming concessions, fellow Egyptian author Ezzat al-Qamhawi accused him of having “betrayed his writing,” a remark typical of the views arrayed against him. But Mahfouz tried to calm his critics by saying that if he could get al-Azhar to change its mind about Children of the Alley, then that would have had great implications for other works proscribed.12 In any case, after his death, Mahfouz’s Arabic publishers, Dar El Shorouk in Cairo, brought out the book, complete with the Islamist’s preface (by Ahmed Kamal Abu al-Majd) that Mahfouz had requested, though it is not clear if al-Azhar has yet approved.
Intriguingly, both Children of the Alley and the Dreams series marked new beginnings in his use of allegory, and each was connected to the attempt on his life: one as an indirect cause, the other as an indirect result. One of Mahfouz’s most starkly startling allegories is Dream 179—which yields an historic confession. The “big book” on “science, philosophy, and literature” from which the dreamer’s deceased friend has pledged to read a chapter to him each night, along with a chapter from the Qur’an until both books are finished, is undoubtedly Children of the Alley. Since the modern tome also interprets the Qur’an — which, like Children of the Alley, has 114 chapters — here Mahfouz finally admits that his novel really is meant to parallel the stories in the sacred scriptures, a fact he always denied.
The St. Valentine’s Day 1999 publication of Mahfouz’s The Songs, one should note, fell on the tenth anniversary of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the novel The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Shaykh Omar Abdel-Rahman, in issuing his own alleged fatwa against Mahfouz in April 1989, is said to have declared that if Mahfouz had been punished for his novel Children of the Alley when it first appeared in 1959, then Rushdie would not have dared to bring out his own “blasphemous” book in 1988. Abdel-Rahman, a close associate of Osama bin Laden, is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for having plotted to blow up a number of major targets, including the U.N. headquarters and the World Trade Center in New York in the early 1990s.
By the late 1960s, Mahfouz turned to ever-more radical forms, including absurdist plays of pure dialogue, and stories that have grown shorter and increasingly compact over time. And so the view among some literary critics in his country that Mahfouz is a plodding nineteenth-century novelist compared to those of younger generations — none of whom have yet matched his magisterial output in either quality or quantity — would seem to be based on an incomplete view of his remarkably varied oeuvre.
In the case of The Dreams, the effort to produce at all was especially difficult for Mahfouz. Apart from the damage done by the assailant’s knife, he endured diabetes starting in the early 1960s, which enormously weakened his eyesight and hearing. Long before the attack, he could only write “by the feel of the shape of the letters,” as he told me once in the early 1990s. Then in 2003 he was twice hospitalized (once for pneumonia, the second time for a cardiovascular crisis). During his first stay in hospital, he confided to Mohamed Salmawy, who, after his stabbing, interviewed him most Saturday evenings for a weekly column in al-Ahram called “Dialogues with Naguib Mahfouz,” that he no longer dreamt when he slept — though he could continue to publish the material he had already stored for some time to come. “My drawer is still full,” he reassured Salmawy.13
Adding to his travails that season, during a fall in his flat he evidently broke a bone in his right wrist. From that point on,14 if not before, Mahfouz began to dictate his new writing — something he had previously refused even to consider. Luckily, however, he soon had new dreams to relate. Though he complained of little sleep, the time he had to dream was fertile. The result was some of his most remarkable writing. Indeed, his Dreams are a unique and haunting mixture of the deceptively quotidian, the seductively lyrical, and the savagely nightmarish — the richly condensed sum of more than four score and ten years of artistic genius and everyday experience. Toward the end of his life, Mahfouz lamented to reporter Youssef Rakha of al-Ahram that “Now writing is restricted to the dreams.” He added ruefully, “It seems I gave myself the evil eye when I wrote Ra’aytu fima yara al-na’im [I Saw as the Sleeper Sees].”15