According to al-Hagg Muhammad Sabri al-Sayyid, the secretary of the literary section of al-Ahram who read Mahfouz the newspapers in his home each morning, took his dictation, and delivered his manuscripts to Nisf al-Dunya for publication, whether the dreams were “real” or artistic inventions (he believes most were partly both, though some were likely entirely fictional), they all were born fully formed. Mahfouz created each dream in one draft, whether in writing or orally to al-Hagg Sabri (as he likes to be called), who insists that he never revised them at all.16
As in anyone’s nocturnal visions, real memory and experience permeate The Dreams. Close friends long deceased often appear, as in the case of Dr. Husayn Fawzi (1900–88) in Dream 86, former permanent undersecretary to the Minister of Culture, an ophthalmologist famed for his study and patronage of Western classical music, and for his travel writing17—the latter gaining him the sobriquet, “the Egyptian Sinbad.” And there are teachers from his youth, such as Shaykh Muharram (Dream 6), one of the young Naguib’s two Arabic instructors in his secondary school in then-suburban Abbasiya, and his math teacher in the same period, Hamza Effendi (Dream 27). The Dreams recall them less kindly than Fawzi. Some other figures from real life, who receive similarly sarcastic handling, are identified only by their initials, as in Dreams 72 and 73.
Inevitably, there are also references to Mahfouz’s past writings. In Dream 10, the “pharaonic queen” is Nitocris, the widow (and sister) of King Merenra II — characters in Mahfouz’s second published novel, Rhadopis of Nubia—and the “revenge” she takes on her husband’s murderers is from a legend recorded by both the ancient Greek writers Herodotus and Strabo. The woman who endowed the first major literary prize that Mahfouz would win (for Rhadopis of Nubia, in 1940) — Qut al-Qulub al-Damardashiya — is evidently the dangerous lady with a dainty gun in Dream 81. And Mahfouz’s writing for the screen flickers before us, as well. In Dream 13, his unconscious self meets a girl who identifies herself as “Rayya’s daughter.” To his horror, she then adds, “Maybe you remember Rayya and Sakina?” Very few Egyptians who lived through the time of their vicious career or who have seen the 1953 film about them — written by Naguib Mahfouz (who created many of the most praised scenarios in the history of Arab cinema) and directed by the legendary Salah Abu Seif — could ever forget them. Rayya and Sakina were women in their forties who lured gullible young members of their sex to their homes in Alexandria, where they were chloroformed and killed for their jewelry by a gang led by the malignant pair’s husbands. Before their apprehension in 1921, they had claimed up to thirty victims, whom they buried in the houses in which they had died.18
Equally inevitable is an apparition of his greatest personal hero, Sa’d Pasha Zaghlul (1859?–1927), leader of the 1919 movement for Egyptian independence from Britain (Dreams 73 and 158).19 And, in Dreams 30 and 48, Mahfouz rhapsodically resurrects the mightiest musician that movement produced, the Alexandrian minstrel-composer Sayyid Darwish (1892–1923).20 A line from one of Darwish’s most famous songs, that Mahfouz chose to end his novel Palace Walk, the first in the Trilogy, could well represent one of the central themes of his Dreams as welclass="underline" “Visit me once each year, for it’s wrong to abandon people forever.”21
Perhaps it was both Zaghlul and Darwish who inspired Dream 170, in which Mahfouz revisits the house where he was born in December 1911 in Bayt al-Qadi Square in the old Islamic quarter of Gamaliya. There, aged about seven, he saw demonstrators gunned down by British-led forces in front of the police station — bordered by fragrant Pasha’s Beard trees — during the uprising of 1919. His boyhood friends (none of whom are known to be living), their songs of rebellion, and the army as well all soon visit themselves upon him in turn.
Mahfouz’s fierce nationalism manifests itself further in the frequent spectral appearance of Zaghlul’s Wafdist colleagues — such as his deputy, Mustafa al-Nahhas (1879–1965), in Dream 158. Al-Nahhas’s own deputy, the Coptic (Egyptian Christian Orthodox) politician William Makram Ebeid (1889–1961), expelled from the Wafd for publishing its scandalous secrets in the Black Book Affair of 1942, expires in a crowd in Dream 154 (though he actually died at home). Another intense nationalist of a more stridently pan-Arab sort who stalks this work is Ustaz (roughly, “Professor”) Sa’d al-Din Wahba (1925–97), prominent playwright and head of the Egyptian Writers’ Union as well as the Cairo International Film Festival, and a hardliner against any sort of contact with Israelis. (Mahfouz himself often met with Israeli intellectuals, both in his regular nadwas [literary salons] and in his home — he believed that only such engagement could lead to a full and lasting peace.) And the tragically vain dictator who came to rule Egypt after the Free Officer’s coup of 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70, cited above for banning Children of the Alley) is undoubtedly the beyond-discreet Don Juan in what was once Alexandria’s busiest bus station in Dream 118.
Today’s politics naturally intrude in Mahfouz’s dreams. Among the most dramatic are the apparent allusions to his views of the Arab — Israeli conflict (Dream 90) and the war on terrorism (Dreams 74 and 103). But these are in the eyes of the reader, of course — and he has always encouraged others to reach their own conclusions about what he is saying. In this vein, the most jarring to me is Dream 151, which obviously recalls the mysterious case of Dr. Reda Helal, a former regular at Mahfouz’s weekly gatherings at a Garden City hotel. Helal, the dynamic forty-something deputy editor of Cairo’s famous daily, al-Ahram, and a noted pro-Western liberal, reportedly ordered food to be delivered to his flat one afternoon in August 2003. When the deliveryman arrived, he discovered all the doors locked, with no one home to take the meal. The debonair, pipe-smoking book author and columnist, one of America’s few (though not uncritical) defenders in the Arab press, had vanished without a trace. To this day, there has been no public explanation of his disappearance, though rumors abound.22
Among those who continually find new life in Mahfouz’s Dreams is one of his greatest intellectual influences, Shaykh Mustafa Abd al-Raziq (1885–1947), whom Mahfouz served as parliamentary secretary when the moderate Muslim cleric was Minister of Religious Endowments in the late 1930s and early ‘40s. Abd al-Raziq, a lucid, French-educated littérateur who later became head of al-Azhar, appears in Dream 155, asserting the superiority of science-based faith over superstition.
Eternal patriotism, with roots in Pharaonic Egypt that continue to flourish today, is the theme of Dream 146. The “golden statue of the nation’s reawakening” is undoubtedly Mahmoud Mukhtar’s renowned sculpture, “The Awakening of Egypt” (1920), which now sits by the Nile near the entrance to Cairo University. (Though not fashioned in gold, it shows a reclining sphinx next to a standing woman in traditional peasant dress.) The serpent, of course, is the uraeus cobra, the goddess Wadjet, symbol (and guardian) of pharaonic power. But the fear that the nation’s “historic treasures” might be stolen perhaps reflects the obsession of modern Egyptian intellectuals (and many others) that globalization has brought “cultural invasion”—a concept that Mahfouz himself rejected.23