From FPRI:
FORESEEN IN FICTION:
"BEFORE THE THRONE" BY NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
by Raymond Stock
May 10, 2011
Raymond Stock, Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic and
Middle East Studies at Drew University (2010/2011), is
writing a biography of Naguib Mahfouz for Farrar, Straus &
Giroux; for many years, Mahfouz cooperated in his research.
He has translated numerous stories and seven books by
Mahfouz, including Before the Throne (2009) and most
recently, The Coffeehouse (2010), all for The American
University in Cairo Press, many also published by Random
House. A twenty-year resident of Egypt, Stock was detained
and deported at Cairo Airport on a return visit last
December, apparently due to a 2009 article critical of then-
Culture Minister Farouk Hosni's bid to head UNESCO for
Foreign Policy Magazine. He has also published in The
Financial Times, Harper's Magazine, The International Herald
Tribune and many other venues. This E-Note is partly based
on and updates a lecture he delivered for FPRI at the Union
League in Philadelphia on June 5, 2007, entitled, "From
before King Tut to Hosni Mubarak: Egypt's Past, Present and
Future in a Novel by Naguib Mahfouz." It also draws from
Stock's Translator's Afterword to Before the Throne
(publisher's link:
http://www.aucpress.com/pc-3593-26-before-the-throne.aspx),
and from his doctoral dissertation, A Mummy Awakens: The
Pharaonic Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages
and Civilizations, 2008). This note is dedicated to the late
Harvey Sicherman.
Available on the web and in pdf format at:
http://www.fpri.org/enotes/201105.stock.egypt.html
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FORESEEN IN FICTION:
"BEFORE THE THRONE" BY NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
by Raymond Stock
A rebel firebrand defends the revolution that he led against
the ruler and his system-in Egypt's ancient past. Many of
his words, however, could almost be heard today:
"History remembers the elite, and we were from the poor-
-the peasants, the artisans, and the fishermen. Part of
the justice of this sacred hall is that it neglects no
one. We have endured agonies beyond what any human can
bear. When our ferocious anger was raised against the
rottenness of oppression and darkness, our revolt was
called chaos, and we were called mere thieves. Yet it
was nothing but a revolution against despotism, blessed
by the gods."
Change "thieves" to "foreign agents," make the revolt not
one of just the poor, but of people from all classes and
walks of life, replace "gods" with God, and we are in
Cairo's Tahrir Square of the last few months. But the speech
is delivered by a probably apocryphal persona called Abnum,
the purported leader of an uprising of that may never have
happened at the end of Egypt's Old Kingdom (about 2125
B.C.). And it comes not from some dry-as-dust historical
annals, but from a brief but riveting novel in dialogue by
Egypt's greatest modern writer, 1988 Nobel laureate in
literature Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006).
There has never been a revolt in Egypt quite like the
current one, which has not ended with the stunningly rapid
downfall of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011
after more than twenty-nine years atop the nation's power
pyramid. Yet Mahfouz, who did not live to see it-and who
backed Mubarak in his last election, in 2005--in a way,
actually foresaw it. Five years before his Swedish prize, he
published a peculiar novel, Before the Throne-largely
forgotten but for a recent translation into English--that
both justifies and gives the historical background to what
is happening now (though some of his other works also point
toward it). In it, Mahfouz provides not only the precedents
for the revolt itself, but also the arguments for
maintaining one of the greatest achievements of the order
just overthrown, which itself is now threatened: that is,
the peace between Egypt and Israel. The only thing he
didn't leave us is the ending.
JUDGING PASHAS, PHARAOHS, PRIME MINISTERS AND PRESIDENTS
In Before the Throne: Dialogs with Egypt's Great From Menes
to Anwar Sadat (published as Amam al-'arsh: hiwar ma`a rijal
Misr min Mina hatta Anwar al-Sadat in 1983), Mahfouz takes
three score of Egypt's rulers, from Menes, who unified Upper
and Lower Egypt in one kingdom at the start of the First
Dynasty (roughly 2950 B.C.), up to Mubarak's immediate
predecessor before the Osiris Court, the ancient Egyptian
tribunal of the soul. There, in the gilded Hall of Justice,
he has them defend their rule before a panel of the gods and
of those kings and queens, viziers and wise men, rabble-
rousers and statesmen, who had been acquitted before them,
and thus made Immortals. Crucially, Mahfouz uses the careers
of several key figures-especially the 19th Dynasty kings
Seti I and his son, Ramesses II-to justify the 1979 Camp
David Treaty signed by Sadat.
With more than thirty novels to his credit, Mahfouz hadn't
produced a piece of fiction set in ancient Egypt since 1944,
and had never written one that sought to cover all of
Egypt's recorded history. Two years earlier, in 1981,
Sadat-Egypt's bold, flamboyant, and ultimately tragic
president-was gunned down in Cairo during the parade marking
the eighth anniversary of his victory over the Israelis at
the Suez Canal, by Islamist extremists in the army who
reviled him as "Pharaoh."
Sadat was beloved outside of Egypt for his initially-
popular, visionary peace treaty with Israel and avuncular
love of pipes. But mainly due to economic policies that left
the poor feeling vulnerable, he was not much mourned at
home-though there has been real nostalgia for him in recent
years. Soon after his death, Muslim militants in the Upper
Egyptian district of Assiut rose up in a rebellion that took
many days of violence to put down. Revolution was in the
air.
Like all other attempted revolutions in Egypt's history, the
Islamist uprising failed, as did the Islamist terror war
against the regime of President Mubarak, Sadat's vice-
president and successor, which targeted government officials
and tourists in the 1990s. So too did the nationalist
uprising led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi in 1882 (which backfired
to invite seventy-four years of subsequent British
occupation). Also unsuccessful, arguably, was the 1919
Revolution headed by Sa`d Pasha Zaghlul against that British
presence, though it did lead to partial independence in 1922
and paved the way for much of the resistance that followed
until Britain's final departure after the Suez Crisis in
1956. But even then the British, along with their French and
Israeli allies, were ordered out by a foreign leader, U.S.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who later regretted it)-not
really by the Egyptian people.
Perhaps the closest, and now nearly forgotten, precedent was
actually Muhammad Ali Pasha's cleverly-packaged coup against
Khurshid, the Ottoman wali (governor) in Cairo in 1805, in
order to seize personal power (which Before the Throne
covers in the trials of Shaykh Umar Makram, who opposed
Napoleon's occupation of Egypt, and of Muhammad Ali). The
Albanian adventurer "appealed to the right of the common
people, the ahl al-balad, to depose an unjust ruler," writes
J.C.B. Richmond of the affair. Richmond also noted that it
was the common people who provided Muhammad Ali with the
force necessary for the move.[1] Just as the people in
Tahrir Square arguably provided the Egyptian armed forces
the cover needed to remove Mubarak, whose apparent plan to
install his non-military son after him had dismayed them.
Neither was Egypt's last, and only successful, "revolution"
actually born of a mass movement. Rather it was a movement
of tanks around Abdin Palace on the night of July 23, 1952,
the work of a small number of officer-conspirators, whose
ideological (and, in some cases, genetic) descendants still
control the all-powerful Egyptian military elite. True, most
Egyptians were glad to see the king and his corrupt circle
go. In euphoric gratitude, one of Egypt's then most-
respected authors and Mahfouz's mentor, Tawfiq al-Hakim
(1898?-1987) naively hailed their clique as "the Blessed
Movement." Al-Hakim and many others later cursed the regime
it founded for its own corruption, lack of democracy and
destruction of the economy after its charismatic great
dictator, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, died a literally heartbroken
has-been, though still on the throne, in 1970.
Mahfouz, who at age seven watched Egyptian nationalist
demonstrators shot down in front of his comfortable middle-
class home in Islamic Cairo during the 1919 revolt, grew up
fiercely loyal to Sa`d Zaghlul, who died in 1927 after a
brief sojourn as Prime Minister (in 1924), and his party,
the Wafd. Devoted to the cause of Egyptian independence, the
olive-and-honey skinned Mahfouz also detested what he
regarded as the arrogant Egyptian monarchy, seen as of the
same blood as the pallid Turkic aristocracy that had ruled
Egypt in various guises since the fall of Salah al-Din's
(Saladin's) dynasty in 1250.
Though he cheered the abolition of royal rule and the
privileged titles of "pasha" and "bey," Mahfouz was appalled
by the Free Officers' cavalier killing of the limited
liberal democracy that survived under the king and the
British, the suppression of free expression, the expulsion
of the nation's vital foreign communities and the reckless
seizure and plunder of private business and property,
despite his own socialist leanings. Most of all, he resented
Nasser's attempt to bury the memory of 1919, a true popular
uprising, and especially of its patriotic leader, Sa`d
Zaghlul. And, though it cost him enormously for years
through the Arab world boycott of his books and the many
films made from them, he also came to reject Nasser's legacy
of permanent war with Israel.
Ironically, two of the principles that Mahfouz trumpets so
clearly in Before the Throne-the people's right to rise up
against tyranny and the need to make mutually beneficial
peace with one's neighbors-are most likely set to clash in
the aftermath of today's Egyptian revolution, whomever it
finally brings to power. This is true because all of the
likely future leaders of the country, both secular and
religious, want to annul or emasculate the Camp David
Treaty: a recent Pew poll shows that 54% of Egyptians want
to scrap it altogether-and not a single major voice speaks
out for keeping it.
WHAT IS GOOD FOR EGYPT?
The most important question asked in Before the Throne is
clearly the one most crucial to Mahfouz's own worldview.
That is, what is good for Egypt? How Mahfouz defines what is
good for his country, and even who is really Egyptian,
provides a fascinating glimpse not only into the author's
psyche, but into the historical consciousness of Egypt
herself-one that is clearly relevant today.
The Osiris Court, carved and painted in tombs, and depicted
on papyrus in the Book of the Dead, is the most vivid and
enduring image from old Egyptian beliefs regarding the fate
of the individual after death. God of the netherworld and
chief of the tribunal that judges the souls of the deceased,
Osiris is one of ancient Egypt's oldest known deities, with
roots deep in the clay of the northeastern Delta.[2] An
ancient folk belief held that he was an actual-and
prodigious-king in Predynastic times (a view still debated
by Egyptologists). Yet the first known image of him dates to
the Fifth Dynasty, one of many minor deities grouped around
the king, "with a curled beard and divine wig in the manner
of the traditional ancestral figures."[3] In the Old
Kingdom, he was associated with the royal dead only, mainly
in the great necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt, though
gradually his popularity, and his dominion over the
afterlives of more and more Egyptians, including commoners,
grew. His nemesis was Seth, who eventually became an
Egyptian prototype of Satan, the Evil One. In one of
pharaonic Egypt's most famous myths, Seth twice attacks
Osiris, the second time cutting him into sixteen pieces and
throwing them into the Nile, all but one of which recovered
by his sister-wife, Isis, for burial-and resurrection.[4]
One should note that, to the ancient Egyptians, "the dying
of Osiris does not seem to be a wrong thing," as Herman Te
Velde says, "for death is 'the night of going forth to
life.'"[5]
Crucial to Before the Throne is the role Osiris plays in the
passage of the dead into the next world-or into
nonexistence. In the ancient myth, Osiris, in the shape of a
man wrapped in mummy bandages, bearing the symbols of royal
power (the elaborately plumed atef crown on his head, the
false beard on his chin, the crook and flail in his hands
crossed over his chest), presided. Meanwhile, the jackal-
headed god of embalming, Anubis, weighed the heart of the
deceased on a great double-scale against a feather
representing Ma`at, the principle of divine order and
justice. If the defendant had committed no grave sins on
earth, the heart would balance with the feather-and the
deceased would be pronounced "true of voice" (a concept that
resonates strongly through all of Mahfouz's work) and given
the magic spells necessary to enter the underworld, Duat.
But if there was no balance with the feather, the heart was
fed to "the devourer," Ammit, a terrifying female beast with
the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hind
legs of a hippo. As all of this transpired, the ibis-headed
Thoth, god of writing and magic, supervised and recorded the
judgments and reported them to Osiris. (Another
representation of Thoth, a baboon, sat atop the scale.)
Meanwhile, Isis (a radiantly beautiful woman with either a
throne-which was her emblem-or a solar disk and horns upon
her head), her son, the falcon-headed Horus (who introduced
and pleaded for each defendant), and other deities looked
on.[6]
Mahfouz seized upon this timeless and quintessentially
Egyptian device as the framework for one his strangest and
most explicitly ideological books. In it he dramatically
presents his views on scores of Egypt's political bosses
from the First Dynasty to the current military regime-the
deep structure of which has survived not only Mubarak, but
will probably outlive his successors as well. He does by
putting words in their mouths as they defend their own days
in power to the sacred court. Those whom Mahfouz sees as the
greatest leaders of ancient Egyptian civilization, under the
aegis of the old Egyptian lord of the dead, judge those who
follow them, from the unification of the Two Lands through
late antiquity and the Middle Ages, right down to his own
times. This continuum of Egyptian history showcases his
essentialist vision of a sort of eternal Egyptian ka-the
living person's undying double who, in the afterlife,
receives mortuary offerings for the deceased, thus ensuring
their immortality.[7]
From pharaohs to pashas, and from prime ministers to
presidents, only those who serve that great national
ka-according to Mahfouz's own strict criteria are worthy of
his praise-and a seat among the Immortals. The rest are sent
to Purgatory or even to Hell-not the ancient Egyptian
conception of the afterlife, but a concession to Mahfouz's
modern, mainly monotheistic, readership-and perhaps his own
personal beliefs as a Muslim.
Yet that he used an ancient Egyptian mode of judgment
(albeit his own version of it) to hold these leaders to
account, rather than a more conventional setting speaks
loudly of his conviction that Egypt is different and must
look to herself for wisdom-as well as offer it to the world.
The final chapter even presents a sort of "Ten
Commandments"[8] which Egypt must follow in order to fulfill
her sacred mission as "a lighthouse of right guidance, and
of beauty," in the parting words of Isis. In that sixty-
fourth (and final) chapter, ten of the key figures who had
faced and survived trial offer their own advice to their
homeland. The rebel leader Abnum, whose rousing speech in
defense of the ancient revolt is quoted above, admonishes
Egypt "to believe in the people and in revolution, to propel
her destiny toward completion."
Abnum initially emerges as the leader of the "rebels of the
Age of Darkness that fell between the collapse of the Old
Kingdom and the creation of the Middle Kingdom" (the First
Intermediate Period) in the book's fifth chapter. Introduced
as "a group of people of varying shapes and sizes," Mahfouz
makes them seem disreputable as well as uncouth:
"These are the leaders of the revolution: they directed
the angry people in a bloody, destructive revolt. They
then ruled the country for the long period that lasted
from the fall of the Old Kingdom to the start of the
Middle Kingdom. Afterward, they left behind them nothing
to mark their former presence but ruined temples,
plundered tombs and monstrous memories."
When asked by Osiris to choose someone from among themselves
to speak for them, "they all pointed to a tall, gaunt man
with a stony face." This is Abnum, a character whom Mahfouz
insisted was real, but of which I have found no trace in any
of the available sources that one can be sure he
consulted-or any others.
Abnum tells the court that in the chaos and lawlessness of
Egypt under the aged, long-reigning King Pepi II, he urged
the people to rise up, and "quickly they answered the call."
This recalls Mubarak's own seemingly interminable rule, and
the general sense of things falling apart in the final few
years, as well as the underlying tension that long promised
an eventual explosion. The last film by famous Egyptian
filmmaker Youssef Chahine, released in what no one knew were
the waning years of the Mubarak era, was "Heya Fawda" (It's
Chaos, 2008). Despite a booming economy that could not keep
pace with the burgeoning population, there was a general
sense of dysfunctionality, corruption and stagnation. That
is always a dangerous combination, and not entirely
dissimilar to the slow, anarchic decline at the end of the
Sixth Dynasty as nonagenerian Pepi II resolutely refused to
"fly to his horizon," in the ritual obituary phrase for the
departed king.
Yet the book does not preach revolution alone. Many of its
heroes are pharaohs who believe in their divine right to
rule, and who view popular movements against authority as an
obscene threat to justice (i.e., order) as well as peace.
For example, in the trial of six nearly forgotten kings who
each ruled briefly and ineffectually in the period before
the great Hyksos invasion at the end of the Middle Kingdom,
Abnum laments the lack of a popular uprising against their
incompetence. But a fellow member of the tribunal, the
Twelfth Dynasty monarch Amenemhat I, himself murdered in a
harem intrigue, rebukes him:
"All you think about is revolution," Amenemhat I
upbraided him. "When I was governor of a nome
[province], I found the country drowning in chaos. I did
not therefore call for greater disorder, but trained my
own men and took over the throne, saving the land and
the people, without violating our sacred custom, and
without giving up either lives or honor."
Yet again and again, Abnum the revolutionary raises his
voice in praise of the people's right to rebel, and puts a
premium on making heads roll, to boot. Addressing Gamal
Abdel-Nasser in the book's penultimate trial, Abnum opens
with admiration but closes with a chilling admonition:
"Permit me to hail you in my capacity as the first
revolutionary among Egypt's poor," began Abnum. "I want
to testify that the wretched did not enjoy such security
in any age-after my own-as they did in yours. I can
only fault you for one thing: for insisting that your
revolution be stainless, when in fact the blood should
have run in rivers!"
This arouses the ire of King Khufu (Cheops), for whom the
Great Pyramid was built. "What is that butcher raving about
now?" Khufu exclaims. This outburst gets him only a tongue-
lashing from an indignant Osiris, who demands that he
apologize for being so rude to a fellow member of the panel.
EGYPTIAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Of course, the Lotus Revolution (the flower itself a symbol
of Egypt from ancient times), despite pitched battles
(mainly with stones, though many died of gunfire) at Tahrir
Square, seemed to follow in the (initially) bloodless
footsteps of the 1952 coup-especially in those euphoric days
around Mubarak's fall. Yet there were soon calls that the
deposed president, members of his family and his corrupt
insider entourage should be put on trial, some-including
Mubarak--for their lives. In the case of Mubarak himself,
that reportedly will soon happen, an event which, whatever
the now-helpless old man's transgressions, will only sully
the nobility to which the movement at first aspired, and the
glory that it could, for a brief moment, claim so credibly.
Meanwhile, on Facebook and elsewhere, those who express
doubts about the direction in which the country is now
headed are often insulted, sometimes even called
"scaremongers" or even traitors or enemies of the
revolution, as well. This, despite the once easily-dismissed
rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies, the
Salafis, and the army's own alarming brutality toward both
demonstrators and Christians on occasion becomes harder and
harder to deny.
Nonetheless, that Egypt's current revolution has set a
unique example to all nations is already part of its rapidly
evolving mythology. Its roots lie in the same deeply
ingrained view of Egypt as "Umm al-Dunya"-"Mother of the
World"--common among the Egyptians, and fiercely held by
Mahfouz. As a nation, Egypt long ago may have invented the
very idea of "exceptionalism."
Wherever Egypt's 2011 revolution-or was it really an army
coup assisted by an exceptionally enlightened
mob?-ultimately leads, be it to a democratic, harmonious
civil society or a bloody civil conflict, it might well lead
to war. Yet Before the Throne, while trumpeting Egypt's
imperial past (both ancient and modern, as in Mohamed Ali's
adventures in Arabia, Greece, the Levant and the Sudan) most
of all preaches against going to war.
Mahfouz is justly lauded in the West for his early backing
of Arab-Israeli peace-a position he began to edge toward as
early as winter 1973, when he asked Mu`ammar al-Qaddafi--
then meeting with the writers at al-Ahram--if the Arabs
could beat Israel? When the otherwise irrational Libyan
dictator answered, "No," Mahfouz declared that the Arabs
must therefore negotiate with Israel for peace. This opinion
led to much abuse at the time, and later to boycotts of his
books and films. It was largely in response to the huge
split that the 1979 treaty with Israel caused among Egypt's
intellectuals (most of them opposing it, Mahfouz and a few
others endorsing it) that he wrote two key chapters about
ancient Egypt, as well as the two final trials-those of
Nasser and Sadat-in Before the Throne.
Curiously, Mahfouz's view of international relations seems
to be based on ancient Egyptian logic. Though he praises his
hero Sa`d Zaghlul as well as several pharaohs, such as the
doomed Seqenenra (who fell resisting the invading Hyksos)
and Psamtek III (executed by the vanquishing Persians), and
others for bravely fighting foreign occupation, Mahfouz
paradoxically loves Egypt as an empire, lauding such
conquerors as Amenhotep I and Thutmose III, even the 18th
century rogue Mamluk ruler Ali Bey al-Kabir (the Great).
Here Mahfouz demonstrates the divide between what the
ancient Egyptians saw as ma`at and its opposite, isfet
(chaos, hence injustice). In their conception, foreigners
were always inferior to Egyptians (though an Egyptianized
foreigner would be accepted among them). Thus Egypt's
control and even seizure of neighboring lands in the Near
East and Nubia were considered a fulfillment of ma`at, while
an alien power invading Egypt was the triumph of evil over
the proper cosmic order.[9] Hence Mahfouz bars all but a few
non-native rulers who had either become Egyptian or
otherwise acted in Egypt's best interest from the right to
trial and thus the chance for immortality in Before the
Throne. Indeed, the work as a whole seems but an expression
of Mahfouz's own personal version of ma`at as embodied in
his nation's history.
This paradoxical attitude toward empire and occupation is
remarkably similar to that of "the Pharaonists," a group of
intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s whose ideas Mahfouz
admired. Led by such luminaries as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid
(1872-1963), first rector of the Egyptian university, Taha
Husayn (1889-1973), the great blind Egyptian belles-
lettriste and novelist, and Mahfouz's "spiritual father,"
the Coptic thinker and publisher Salama Musa (1887-1958)-the
Pharaonists held that Egypt was both much older and much
closer to Europe and the Mediterranean in culture than her
Arab and African neighbors.[10]
A sensitive and problematic issue is the treatment of Jews
(who are mentioned only three times as a group, none in the
trials of figures from later than the 18th century), as well
as Egypt's often rocky relations with both ancient and
modern Israel. Mahfouz, who as an adolescent grew up in a
largely Jewish area of suburban Abbasiya, once told me (and
visiting Israeli expert on Egyptian Jewry, Yoram Meital), "I
really miss" the Jews of Egypt, all but a very few of whom
were dispersed from the country in the 1950s and 60s.
Though the king (Merneptah, son of Ramesses II) most often
theorized to be the pharaoh of the Exodus-a story found in
similar form in both the Testament and the Qu'ran-is given
his own trial in Before the Throne, the tale itself is
neither told nor even mentioned. Israel by name appears only
twice (both in the trial of Pharaoh Apries), briefly (and
fatally) aligned with Egypt against the Babylonians-while
Judah is captured by Egypt in the trial of Pharaoh Nekau II.
In the novel, the current state of Israel does not exist at
all except as the formidable but unnamed enemy whose
presence dominates much of the proceedings in the final two
trials (62 and 63). These are of Gamal Abdel-Nasser,
champion of the Arab masses who led them into the
catastrophic defeat of 1967. But these chapters would lose
their force if not for the arguments advanced in the trials
of two seemingly totally dissimilar monarchs, the iconic
19th Dynasty father and son duo, Seti I and his son,
Ramesses II.
These back-to-back approving portraits of pharaonic
potency-and peace-making sagacity-begin with the following
classic lines:
Next Horus called out, "King Seti the First!"
In came a man tall of stature and powerfully built. He
walked, wrapped in his winding sheet, until he stood
before the throne.
Then Thoth, Scribe of the Gods, read aloud, "He assumed
the throne upon the death of his father. He subdued
Nubia, returned Palestine to Egypt, then focused his
energies on building and construction."
During his opening speech in self-defense, Seti I explains
that he took "Palestine" (a term, like Nubia and even Egypt,
not used in his time) back from the Hittites who had seized
it, a victory "sealed with a pact of peace."
But when asked by his mighty predecessor, Thutmose III, why
he had not continued the war anyway, Seti I replies, "I felt
my army was exhausted," adding, "while at the same time the
Hittites as a nation are extremely tough in battle."
Challenged that there is no glory in not pressing on the
fight, Seti I answers, "A treaty of peace is preferable to a
war without glory."
His son, Ramesses II, after his overblown triumph of
Qadesh-in which he barely beat off a massively superior
Hittite force that had tricked him into crossing the Orontes
ahead of most of his troops-also got down to making peace
with the same enemy nation to the northeast. Some years
after withdrawing back to Egypt, leaving the enemy in his
original objective, Qadesh, but with no further
encroachments on Egyptian buffer states or territory, he
signed a peace pact with the Hittite king-whose daughter he
also married in an imperial celebration.
Again, Thutmose II takes up a prosecutorial tone. When
Ramesses vainly asks him, "What do say about my routing the
enemy's army," his much more martially talented remote
predecessor skewers him:
"I say that you won a battle but lost a war, while your
enemy lost a battle but won the war. He enticed you to
make peace in order to reorganize his ranks. He welcomed
your relationship by marriage in order to fix your
friendly attitude before making good his losses. He was
content to keep Qadesh as a place from which to threaten
any point in your empire in future."
"During all of my long reign, the security of my
homeland was not disturbed for even one hour," Ramesses
II responded. "Nor was there a single violent rebellion
anywhere in our vast empire, while no enemy dared cast
an aggressive glance at our borders."
NASSER, SADAT, AND ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE
An entirely different pair of rulers-though again, one
succeeds the other in power-faces the tribunal in trials of
Nasser and Sadat, the last two in the book. Nasser is
attacked not only for wasting Egypt's limited resources on
efforts to win every war of liberation around (while
spectacularly failing to defend his own territory in 1967),
but also for destroying any traces of democracy left by the
ancient regime. Mustafa al-Nahhas, Zaghlul's successor as
head of the Wafd Party, thus the chief initial target of
Nasserist repression, berates Nasser for what he has done to
Egyptian democracy:
"You were heedless of liberty and human rights," al-
Nahhas resumed his attack. "While I don't deny that you
kept faith with the poor, you were a curse upon
political writers and intellectuals, who are the
vanguard of the nation's children. You cracked down on
them with arrest and imprisonment, with hanging and
killing, until you had eradicated their optimism and
smashed the formation of their personalities-and only
God knows when their proper formation shall return.
Those who launched the 1919 Revolution were people of
initiative and innovation in the various fields of
politics, economics and culture. How your high-
handedness spoiled your most pristine depths! See how
education was vitiated, how the public sector grew
depraved? How your defiance of the world's powers led
you to horrendous losses and shameful defeats! You never
sought the benefit of another person's opinion, nor
learned from the lessons of Muhammad Ali's experience.
And what was the result? Clamor and cacophony, and an
empty mythology-all heaped on a pile of rubble."
During his trial, Sadat has a prolonged verbal duel with
Nasser, much of which is worth quoting here:
Then Gamal Abdel-Nasser asked Sadat, "How could it have
been so easy for you to distort my memory so
treacherously?"
"I was forced take the position that I did, for the
essence of my policy was to correct the mistakes I
inherited from your rule," rebutted Sadat.
"Yet didn't I delegate power to you in order to satisfy
you, encourage you, and treat you as a friend?"
"How tyrannical to judge a human being for a stand taken
in a time of black terror, when fathers fear their sons
and brothers fear each other?" shot back Sadat.
"And what was the victory that you won but the fruit of
my long preparations for it!" bellowed Abdel-Nasser.
"A defeated man like you did not score such a triumph,"
retorted Sadat. "Rather, I returned to the people their
freedom and their dignity, then led them to an
undeniable victory."
"And you gave away everything for the sake of an
ignominious peace," bristled Abdel-Nasser, "dealing Arab
unity a fatal thrust, condemning Egypt to exclusion and
isolation."
"From you I inherited a nation tottering on the abyss of
annihilation," countered Sadat. "The Arabs would neither
offer a friendly hand in aid, nor did they wish us to
die, nor to be strong. Rather, they wanted us to remain
on our knees at their mercy. And so I did not hesitate
to take my decision."
"You exchanged a giant that always stood by us for one
who had always opposed us!" Abdel-Nasser upbraided him.
"I went to the giant who held the solution in his hand,"
pointed out Sadat. "Since, then, events have confirmed
that my thoughts were correct."
One may wonder if, given the way the Barack Obama
administration so quickly encouraged Mubarak's fall, and
then spoke warmly of cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood
(which, in Arabic if not in English, has always said-and
recently reaffirmed--that it would terminate the treaty with
Israel), that Mahfouz would still write such dialogue now.
At any rate, in the end, the tribunal apparently feels that
Sadat has won the debate. Osiris invites Sadat to sit with
Immortals--though he had only permitted Nasser to do so. The
presiding deity had sent Nasser (who had incensed the court
by declaring, "Egyptian history really began on July 23,
1952") 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,
at least symbolically, 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), it fell on the same day that Yasser Arafat, Shimon
Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were revealed to have won the Nobel
Peace Prize in Oslo.[11] Then, and even now, accused by some
of selling out to Israel (which has no discernible influence
over the Swedish Academy) for the sake of his prize-devoting
most of his Nobel lecture, cited above, to a defense of
Palestinian rights, and even endorsing Palestinian suicide
bombings during the (much-misreported) 2002 Jenin
incursion-he nonetheless never renounced his support for
Camp David. Nor did he give up the dream of a comprehensive
Arab-Israeli peace accord someday.
Yet the question remains, how will this history really end?
How would Mahfouz try Mubarak, who will probably be facing
judgment both on earth and in the hereafter soon? After five
millennia of mainly authoritarian rule, will the new
Egyptian democracy be a real one-or at least the sort of
secular liberal version that was the heady, widely touted
goal of the January 25th Revolution? Will it go back to war
with that other, more established democracy watching
nervously from across the oft-bloodied sands of Sinai? Of
course, we cannot answer for Mahfouz (or anyone) with
certainty now how all this will turn out. Yet, to be sure,
more than just Egypt's fate alone shall turn on it.
----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] J.C.B. Richmond, Egypt 1798-1952: Her Advance toward a
Modern Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977),
39. Though dated, this remarkable work is a still-valuable
and beautifully written reference that has sadly been
forgotten.
[2] Herman Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion (Leiden, E.J.
Brill, 1967), 85; and David P. Silverman in his article,
"Divinity and Deities in Ancient Egypt," in Religion in
Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths and Personal Practice, ed. Byron
E. Shafer, authors John Baines, Leonard H. Lesko and David
P. Silverman (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University
Press, 1991), 44. However, The Oxford Encyclopedia of
Ancient Egypt, ed. Donald B. Redford (Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, 2001), Vol. 2, 615-19, places
Osiris' origins in Upper Egypt, as most early images of the
god depict him wearing the White Crown of the southern
kingdom, though this seems a minority view.
[3] Bojana Mojsov, Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 33.
[4] For Seth's prominence in the development of this concept
in monotheistic religion, see Peter Stanford, The Devil: A
Biography (New York, Henry Holt, 1996), 20-23. More on the
sinister aspect of Seth in Marc �tienne, Heka: magie et
envoutement dans l'�gypte ancienne (Paris: Reunions des
Mus�es Nationaux, 2000), 22-39.
[5] Te Velde, Seth, 6.
[6] R.H. Wilkinson, Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient
Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005),
148, describes Isis' iconography. For a harrowing account of
the ordeal before the scales of ma`at, see Dimitri Meeks and
Christine Favard-Meeks, Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods,
translated from the French by G.M. Gosharian (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 142-50.
[7] The description of the ka is largely in the words of
David P. Silverman, Eckley Brinton Coxe. Jr., Professor and
Curator of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
[8] This comparison belongs to the late Akef Ramzy Abadir,
Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Near Eastern Languages and
Literatures, New York University (1989), Najib Mahfuz:
Allegory and Symbolism as a means of social, political and
cultural criticism, 1936-1985 (Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms International), 166-7. For a brilliant overall
analysis of Before the Throne, see Menahem Milson, Najib
Mahfuz:The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo (New York and
Jerusalem: St. Martin's Press and The Magnes Press,1998),
Chapter 9, "In the Courtroom of History."
[9] David O'Connor, "Egypt's View of Others," in 'Never Had
the Like Occurred:' Egypt's View of its Past, ed. John Tait
(London: UCL Press, Institute of Archaeology, University of
London, 2003), 155-85.
[10] For the Pharaonists' views of Egypt as an empire, see
Charles Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National
Image, from its Origins to Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press,
1972), 236-7. For the movement as a whole and Mahfouz's
connection to it, see Stock, A Mummy Awakens (cited in the
introductory note, above), 40-61.
[11] Raymond Stock, "How Islamist Militants Put Egypt on
Trial," The Financial Times, Weekend FT, March 4/5, 1995,
III, on the military trial of sixteen defendants charged in
the stabbing of Naguib Mahfouz.
----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/)
FORESEEN IN FICTION:
"BEFORE THE THRONE" BY NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
by Raymond Stock
May 10, 2011
Raymond Stock, Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic and
Middle East Studies at Drew University (2010/2011), is
writing a biography of Naguib Mahfouz for Farrar, Straus &
Giroux; for many years, Mahfouz cooperated in his research.
He has translated numerous stories and seven books by
Mahfouz, including Before the Throne (2009) and most
recently, The Coffeehouse (2010), all for The American
University in Cairo Press, many also published by Random
House. A twenty-year resident of Egypt, Stock was detained
and deported at Cairo Airport on a return visit last
December, apparently due to a 2009 article critical of then-
Culture Minister Farouk Hosni's bid to head UNESCO for
Foreign Policy Magazine. He has also published in The
Financial Times, Harper's Magazine, The International Herald
Tribune and many other venues. This E-Note is partly based
on and updates a lecture he delivered for FPRI at the Union
League in Philadelphia on June 5, 2007, entitled, "From
before King Tut to Hosni Mubarak: Egypt's Past, Present and
Future in a Novel by Naguib Mahfouz." It also draws from
Stock's Translator's Afterword to Before the Throne
(publisher's link:
http://www.aucpress.com/pc-3593-26-before-the-throne.aspx),
and from his doctoral dissertation, A Mummy Awakens: The
Pharaonic Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages
and Civilizations, 2008). This note is dedicated to the late
Harvey Sicherman.
Available on the web and in pdf format at:
http://www.fpri.org/enotes/201105.stock.egypt.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Upcoming Events at FPRI
May 19: Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs
Lorenzo Vidino on The Muslim Brotherhood in the USA:
Social Service or Taqiyya?
May 24 Symposium
Eric Trager, Samuel Helfont, and Aaron Rock on
Egypt, Regime Change and the Muslim Brotherhood
For event details, visit:
http://www.fpri.org/events/
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For assistance, contact: lux@fpri.org or call
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----------------------------------------------------------
FORESEEN IN FICTION:
"BEFORE THE THRONE" BY NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
by Raymond Stock
A rebel firebrand defends the revolution that he led against
the ruler and his system-in Egypt's ancient past. Many of
his words, however, could almost be heard today:
"History remembers the elite, and we were from the poor-
-the peasants, the artisans, and the fishermen. Part of
the justice of this sacred hall is that it neglects no
one. We have endured agonies beyond what any human can
bear. When our ferocious anger was raised against the
rottenness of oppression and darkness, our revolt was
called chaos, and we were called mere thieves. Yet it
was nothing but a revolution against despotism, blessed
by the gods."
Change "thieves" to "foreign agents," make the revolt not
one of just the poor, but of people from all classes and
walks of life, replace "gods" with God, and we are in
Cairo's Tahrir Square of the last few months. But the speech
is delivered by a probably apocryphal persona called Abnum,
the purported leader of an uprising of that may never have
happened at the end of Egypt's Old Kingdom (about 2125
B.C.). And it comes not from some dry-as-dust historical
annals, but from a brief but riveting novel in dialogue by
Egypt's greatest modern writer, 1988 Nobel laureate in
literature Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006).
There has never been a revolt in Egypt quite like the
current one, which has not ended with the stunningly rapid
downfall of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011
after more than twenty-nine years atop the nation's power
pyramid. Yet Mahfouz, who did not live to see it-and who
backed Mubarak in his last election, in 2005--in a way,
actually foresaw it. Five years before his Swedish prize, he
published a peculiar novel, Before the Throne-largely
forgotten but for a recent translation into English--that
both justifies and gives the historical background to what
is happening now (though some of his other works also point
toward it). In it, Mahfouz provides not only the precedents
for the revolt itself, but also the arguments for
maintaining one of the greatest achievements of the order
just overthrown, which itself is now threatened: that is,
the peace between Egypt and Israel. The only thing he
didn't leave us is the ending.
JUDGING PASHAS, PHARAOHS, PRIME MINISTERS AND PRESIDENTS
In Before the Throne: Dialogs with Egypt's Great From Menes
to Anwar Sadat (published as Amam al-'arsh: hiwar ma`a rijal
Misr min Mina hatta Anwar al-Sadat in 1983), Mahfouz takes
three score of Egypt's rulers, from Menes, who unified Upper
and Lower Egypt in one kingdom at the start of the First
Dynasty (roughly 2950 B.C.), up to Mubarak's immediate
predecessor before the Osiris Court, the ancient Egyptian
tribunal of the soul. There, in the gilded Hall of Justice,
he has them defend their rule before a panel of the gods and
of those kings and queens, viziers and wise men, rabble-
rousers and statesmen, who had been acquitted before them,
and thus made Immortals. Crucially, Mahfouz uses the careers
of several key figures-especially the 19th Dynasty kings
Seti I and his son, Ramesses II-to justify the 1979 Camp
David Treaty signed by Sadat.
With more than thirty novels to his credit, Mahfouz hadn't
produced a piece of fiction set in ancient Egypt since 1944,
and had never written one that sought to cover all of
Egypt's recorded history. Two years earlier, in 1981,
Sadat-Egypt's bold, flamboyant, and ultimately tragic
president-was gunned down in Cairo during the parade marking
the eighth anniversary of his victory over the Israelis at
the Suez Canal, by Islamist extremists in the army who
reviled him as "Pharaoh."
Sadat was beloved outside of Egypt for his initially-
popular, visionary peace treaty with Israel and avuncular
love of pipes. But mainly due to economic policies that left
the poor feeling vulnerable, he was not much mourned at
home-though there has been real nostalgia for him in recent
years. Soon after his death, Muslim militants in the Upper
Egyptian district of Assiut rose up in a rebellion that took
many days of violence to put down. Revolution was in the
air.
Like all other attempted revolutions in Egypt's history, the
Islamist uprising failed, as did the Islamist terror war
against the regime of President Mubarak, Sadat's vice-
president and successor, which targeted government officials
and tourists in the 1990s. So too did the nationalist
uprising led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi in 1882 (which backfired
to invite seventy-four years of subsequent British
occupation). Also unsuccessful, arguably, was the 1919
Revolution headed by Sa`d Pasha Zaghlul against that British
presence, though it did lead to partial independence in 1922
and paved the way for much of the resistance that followed
until Britain's final departure after the Suez Crisis in
1956. But even then the British, along with their French and
Israeli allies, were ordered out by a foreign leader, U.S.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who later regretted it)-not
really by the Egyptian people.
Perhaps the closest, and now nearly forgotten, precedent was
actually Muhammad Ali Pasha's cleverly-packaged coup against
Khurshid, the Ottoman wali (governor) in Cairo in 1805, in
order to seize personal power (which Before the Throne
covers in the trials of Shaykh Umar Makram, who opposed
Napoleon's occupation of Egypt, and of Muhammad Ali). The
Albanian adventurer "appealed to the right of the common
people, the ahl al-balad, to depose an unjust ruler," writes
J.C.B. Richmond of the affair. Richmond also noted that it
was the common people who provided Muhammad Ali with the
force necessary for the move.[1] Just as the people in
Tahrir Square arguably provided the Egyptian armed forces
the cover needed to remove Mubarak, whose apparent plan to
install his non-military son after him had dismayed them.
Neither was Egypt's last, and only successful, "revolution"
actually born of a mass movement. Rather it was a movement
of tanks around Abdin Palace on the night of July 23, 1952,
the work of a small number of officer-conspirators, whose
ideological (and, in some cases, genetic) descendants still
control the all-powerful Egyptian military elite. True, most
Egyptians were glad to see the king and his corrupt circle
go. In euphoric gratitude, one of Egypt's then most-
respected authors and Mahfouz's mentor, Tawfiq al-Hakim
(1898?-1987) naively hailed their clique as "the Blessed
Movement." Al-Hakim and many others later cursed the regime
it founded for its own corruption, lack of democracy and
destruction of the economy after its charismatic great
dictator, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, died a literally heartbroken
has-been, though still on the throne, in 1970.
Mahfouz, who at age seven watched Egyptian nationalist
demonstrators shot down in front of his comfortable middle-
class home in Islamic Cairo during the 1919 revolt, grew up
fiercely loyal to Sa`d Zaghlul, who died in 1927 after a
brief sojourn as Prime Minister (in 1924), and his party,
the Wafd. Devoted to the cause of Egyptian independence, the
olive-and-honey skinned Mahfouz also detested what he
regarded as the arrogant Egyptian monarchy, seen as of the
same blood as the pallid Turkic aristocracy that had ruled
Egypt in various guises since the fall of Salah al-Din's
(Saladin's) dynasty in 1250.
Though he cheered the abolition of royal rule and the
privileged titles of "pasha" and "bey," Mahfouz was appalled
by the Free Officers' cavalier killing of the limited
liberal democracy that survived under the king and the
British, the suppression of free expression, the expulsion
of the nation's vital foreign communities and the reckless
seizure and plunder of private business and property,
despite his own socialist leanings. Most of all, he resented
Nasser's attempt to bury the memory of 1919, a true popular
uprising, and especially of its patriotic leader, Sa`d
Zaghlul. And, though it cost him enormously for years
through the Arab world boycott of his books and the many
films made from them, he also came to reject Nasser's legacy
of permanent war with Israel.
Ironically, two of the principles that Mahfouz trumpets so
clearly in Before the Throne-the people's right to rise up
against tyranny and the need to make mutually beneficial
peace with one's neighbors-are most likely set to clash in
the aftermath of today's Egyptian revolution, whomever it
finally brings to power. This is true because all of the
likely future leaders of the country, both secular and
religious, want to annul or emasculate the Camp David
Treaty: a recent Pew poll shows that 54% of Egyptians want
to scrap it altogether-and not a single major voice speaks
out for keeping it.
WHAT IS GOOD FOR EGYPT?
The most important question asked in Before the Throne is
clearly the one most crucial to Mahfouz's own worldview.
That is, what is good for Egypt? How Mahfouz defines what is
good for his country, and even who is really Egyptian,
provides a fascinating glimpse not only into the author's
psyche, but into the historical consciousness of Egypt
herself-one that is clearly relevant today.
The Osiris Court, carved and painted in tombs, and depicted
on papyrus in the Book of the Dead, is the most vivid and
enduring image from old Egyptian beliefs regarding the fate
of the individual after death. God of the netherworld and
chief of the tribunal that judges the souls of the deceased,
Osiris is one of ancient Egypt's oldest known deities, with
roots deep in the clay of the northeastern Delta.[2] An
ancient folk belief held that he was an actual-and
prodigious-king in Predynastic times (a view still debated
by Egyptologists). Yet the first known image of him dates to
the Fifth Dynasty, one of many minor deities grouped around
the king, "with a curled beard and divine wig in the manner
of the traditional ancestral figures."[3] In the Old
Kingdom, he was associated with the royal dead only, mainly
in the great necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt, though
gradually his popularity, and his dominion over the
afterlives of more and more Egyptians, including commoners,
grew. His nemesis was Seth, who eventually became an
Egyptian prototype of Satan, the Evil One. In one of
pharaonic Egypt's most famous myths, Seth twice attacks
Osiris, the second time cutting him into sixteen pieces and
throwing them into the Nile, all but one of which recovered
by his sister-wife, Isis, for burial-and resurrection.[4]
One should note that, to the ancient Egyptians, "the dying
of Osiris does not seem to be a wrong thing," as Herman Te
Velde says, "for death is 'the night of going forth to
life.'"[5]
Crucial to Before the Throne is the role Osiris plays in the
passage of the dead into the next world-or into
nonexistence. In the ancient myth, Osiris, in the shape of a
man wrapped in mummy bandages, bearing the symbols of royal
power (the elaborately plumed atef crown on his head, the
false beard on his chin, the crook and flail in his hands
crossed over his chest), presided. Meanwhile, the jackal-
headed god of embalming, Anubis, weighed the heart of the
deceased on a great double-scale against a feather
representing Ma`at, the principle of divine order and
justice. If the defendant had committed no grave sins on
earth, the heart would balance with the feather-and the
deceased would be pronounced "true of voice" (a concept that
resonates strongly through all of Mahfouz's work) and given
the magic spells necessary to enter the underworld, Duat.
But if there was no balance with the feather, the heart was
fed to "the devourer," Ammit, a terrifying female beast with
the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hind
legs of a hippo. As all of this transpired, the ibis-headed
Thoth, god of writing and magic, supervised and recorded the
judgments and reported them to Osiris. (Another
representation of Thoth, a baboon, sat atop the scale.)
Meanwhile, Isis (a radiantly beautiful woman with either a
throne-which was her emblem-or a solar disk and horns upon
her head), her son, the falcon-headed Horus (who introduced
and pleaded for each defendant), and other deities looked
on.[6]
Mahfouz seized upon this timeless and quintessentially
Egyptian device as the framework for one his strangest and
most explicitly ideological books. In it he dramatically
presents his views on scores of Egypt's political bosses
from the First Dynasty to the current military regime-the
deep structure of which has survived not only Mubarak, but
will probably outlive his successors as well. He does by
putting words in their mouths as they defend their own days
in power to the sacred court. Those whom Mahfouz sees as the
greatest leaders of ancient Egyptian civilization, under the
aegis of the old Egyptian lord of the dead, judge those who
follow them, from the unification of the Two Lands through
late antiquity and the Middle Ages, right down to his own
times. This continuum of Egyptian history showcases his
essentialist vision of a sort of eternal Egyptian ka-the
living person's undying double who, in the afterlife,
receives mortuary offerings for the deceased, thus ensuring
their immortality.[7]
From pharaohs to pashas, and from prime ministers to
presidents, only those who serve that great national
ka-according to Mahfouz's own strict criteria are worthy of
his praise-and a seat among the Immortals. The rest are sent
to Purgatory or even to Hell-not the ancient Egyptian
conception of the afterlife, but a concession to Mahfouz's
modern, mainly monotheistic, readership-and perhaps his own
personal beliefs as a Muslim.
Yet that he used an ancient Egyptian mode of judgment
(albeit his own version of it) to hold these leaders to
account, rather than a more conventional setting speaks
loudly of his conviction that Egypt is different and must
look to herself for wisdom-as well as offer it to the world.
The final chapter even presents a sort of "Ten
Commandments"[8] which Egypt must follow in order to fulfill
her sacred mission as "a lighthouse of right guidance, and
of beauty," in the parting words of Isis. In that sixty-
fourth (and final) chapter, ten of the key figures who had
faced and survived trial offer their own advice to their
homeland. The rebel leader Abnum, whose rousing speech in
defense of the ancient revolt is quoted above, admonishes
Egypt "to believe in the people and in revolution, to propel
her destiny toward completion."
Abnum initially emerges as the leader of the "rebels of the
Age of Darkness that fell between the collapse of the Old
Kingdom and the creation of the Middle Kingdom" (the First
Intermediate Period) in the book's fifth chapter. Introduced
as "a group of people of varying shapes and sizes," Mahfouz
makes them seem disreputable as well as uncouth:
"These are the leaders of the revolution: they directed
the angry people in a bloody, destructive revolt. They
then ruled the country for the long period that lasted
from the fall of the Old Kingdom to the start of the
Middle Kingdom. Afterward, they left behind them nothing
to mark their former presence but ruined temples,
plundered tombs and monstrous memories."
When asked by Osiris to choose someone from among themselves
to speak for them, "they all pointed to a tall, gaunt man
with a stony face." This is Abnum, a character whom Mahfouz
insisted was real, but of which I have found no trace in any
of the available sources that one can be sure he
consulted-or any others.
Abnum tells the court that in the chaos and lawlessness of
Egypt under the aged, long-reigning King Pepi II, he urged
the people to rise up, and "quickly they answered the call."
This recalls Mubarak's own seemingly interminable rule, and
the general sense of things falling apart in the final few
years, as well as the underlying tension that long promised
an eventual explosion. The last film by famous Egyptian
filmmaker Youssef Chahine, released in what no one knew were
the waning years of the Mubarak era, was "Heya Fawda" (It's
Chaos, 2008). Despite a booming economy that could not keep
pace with the burgeoning population, there was a general
sense of dysfunctionality, corruption and stagnation. That
is always a dangerous combination, and not entirely
dissimilar to the slow, anarchic decline at the end of the
Sixth Dynasty as nonagenerian Pepi II resolutely refused to
"fly to his horizon," in the ritual obituary phrase for the
departed king.
Yet the book does not preach revolution alone. Many of its
heroes are pharaohs who believe in their divine right to
rule, and who view popular movements against authority as an
obscene threat to justice (i.e., order) as well as peace.
For example, in the trial of six nearly forgotten kings who
each ruled briefly and ineffectually in the period before
the great Hyksos invasion at the end of the Middle Kingdom,
Abnum laments the lack of a popular uprising against their
incompetence. But a fellow member of the tribunal, the
Twelfth Dynasty monarch Amenemhat I, himself murdered in a
harem intrigue, rebukes him:
"All you think about is revolution," Amenemhat I
upbraided him. "When I was governor of a nome
[province], I found the country drowning in chaos. I did
not therefore call for greater disorder, but trained my
own men and took over the throne, saving the land and
the people, without violating our sacred custom, and
without giving up either lives or honor."
Yet again and again, Abnum the revolutionary raises his
voice in praise of the people's right to rebel, and puts a
premium on making heads roll, to boot. Addressing Gamal
Abdel-Nasser in the book's penultimate trial, Abnum opens
with admiration but closes with a chilling admonition:
"Permit me to hail you in my capacity as the first
revolutionary among Egypt's poor," began Abnum. "I want
to testify that the wretched did not enjoy such security
in any age-after my own-as they did in yours. I can
only fault you for one thing: for insisting that your
revolution be stainless, when in fact the blood should
have run in rivers!"
This arouses the ire of King Khufu (Cheops), for whom the
Great Pyramid was built. "What is that butcher raving about
now?" Khufu exclaims. This outburst gets him only a tongue-
lashing from an indignant Osiris, who demands that he
apologize for being so rude to a fellow member of the panel.
EGYPTIAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Of course, the Lotus Revolution (the flower itself a symbol
of Egypt from ancient times), despite pitched battles
(mainly with stones, though many died of gunfire) at Tahrir
Square, seemed to follow in the (initially) bloodless
footsteps of the 1952 coup-especially in those euphoric days
around Mubarak's fall. Yet there were soon calls that the
deposed president, members of his family and his corrupt
insider entourage should be put on trial, some-including
Mubarak--for their lives. In the case of Mubarak himself,
that reportedly will soon happen, an event which, whatever
the now-helpless old man's transgressions, will only sully
the nobility to which the movement at first aspired, and the
glory that it could, for a brief moment, claim so credibly.
Meanwhile, on Facebook and elsewhere, those who express
doubts about the direction in which the country is now
headed are often insulted, sometimes even called
"scaremongers" or even traitors or enemies of the
revolution, as well. This, despite the once easily-dismissed
rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies, the
Salafis, and the army's own alarming brutality toward both
demonstrators and Christians on occasion becomes harder and
harder to deny.
Nonetheless, that Egypt's current revolution has set a
unique example to all nations is already part of its rapidly
evolving mythology. Its roots lie in the same deeply
ingrained view of Egypt as "Umm al-Dunya"-"Mother of the
World"--common among the Egyptians, and fiercely held by
Mahfouz. As a nation, Egypt long ago may have invented the
very idea of "exceptionalism."
Wherever Egypt's 2011 revolution-or was it really an army
coup assisted by an exceptionally enlightened
mob?-ultimately leads, be it to a democratic, harmonious
civil society or a bloody civil conflict, it might well lead
to war. Yet Before the Throne, while trumpeting Egypt's
imperial past (both ancient and modern, as in Mohamed Ali's
adventures in Arabia, Greece, the Levant and the Sudan) most
of all preaches against going to war.
Mahfouz is justly lauded in the West for his early backing
of Arab-Israeli peace-a position he began to edge toward as
early as winter 1973, when he asked Mu`ammar al-Qaddafi--
then meeting with the writers at al-Ahram--if the Arabs
could beat Israel? When the otherwise irrational Libyan
dictator answered, "No," Mahfouz declared that the Arabs
must therefore negotiate with Israel for peace. This opinion
led to much abuse at the time, and later to boycotts of his
books and films. It was largely in response to the huge
split that the 1979 treaty with Israel caused among Egypt's
intellectuals (most of them opposing it, Mahfouz and a few
others endorsing it) that he wrote two key chapters about
ancient Egypt, as well as the two final trials-those of
Nasser and Sadat-in Before the Throne.
Curiously, Mahfouz's view of international relations seems
to be based on ancient Egyptian logic. Though he praises his
hero Sa`d Zaghlul as well as several pharaohs, such as the
doomed Seqenenra (who fell resisting the invading Hyksos)
and Psamtek III (executed by the vanquishing Persians), and
others for bravely fighting foreign occupation, Mahfouz
paradoxically loves Egypt as an empire, lauding such
conquerors as Amenhotep I and Thutmose III, even the 18th
century rogue Mamluk ruler Ali Bey al-Kabir (the Great).
Here Mahfouz demonstrates the divide between what the
ancient Egyptians saw as ma`at and its opposite, isfet
(chaos, hence injustice). In their conception, foreigners
were always inferior to Egyptians (though an Egyptianized
foreigner would be accepted among them). Thus Egypt's
control and even seizure of neighboring lands in the Near
East and Nubia were considered a fulfillment of ma`at, while
an alien power invading Egypt was the triumph of evil over
the proper cosmic order.[9] Hence Mahfouz bars all but a few
non-native rulers who had either become Egyptian or
otherwise acted in Egypt's best interest from the right to
trial and thus the chance for immortality in Before the
Throne. Indeed, the work as a whole seems but an expression
of Mahfouz's own personal version of ma`at as embodied in
his nation's history.
This paradoxical attitude toward empire and occupation is
remarkably similar to that of "the Pharaonists," a group of
intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s whose ideas Mahfouz
admired. Led by such luminaries as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid
(1872-1963), first rector of the Egyptian university, Taha
Husayn (1889-1973), the great blind Egyptian belles-
lettriste and novelist, and Mahfouz's "spiritual father,"
the Coptic thinker and publisher Salama Musa (1887-1958)-the
Pharaonists held that Egypt was both much older and much
closer to Europe and the Mediterranean in culture than her
Arab and African neighbors.[10]
A sensitive and problematic issue is the treatment of Jews
(who are mentioned only three times as a group, none in the
trials of figures from later than the 18th century), as well
as Egypt's often rocky relations with both ancient and
modern Israel. Mahfouz, who as an adolescent grew up in a
largely Jewish area of suburban Abbasiya, once told me (and
visiting Israeli expert on Egyptian Jewry, Yoram Meital), "I
really miss" the Jews of Egypt, all but a very few of whom
were dispersed from the country in the 1950s and 60s.
Though the king (Merneptah, son of Ramesses II) most often
theorized to be the pharaoh of the Exodus-a story found in
similar form in both the Testament and the Qu'ran-is given
his own trial in Before the Throne, the tale itself is
neither told nor even mentioned. Israel by name appears only
twice (both in the trial of Pharaoh Apries), briefly (and
fatally) aligned with Egypt against the Babylonians-while
Judah is captured by Egypt in the trial of Pharaoh Nekau II.
In the novel, the current state of Israel does not exist at
all except as the formidable but unnamed enemy whose
presence dominates much of the proceedings in the final two
trials (62 and 63). These are of Gamal Abdel-Nasser,
champion of the Arab masses who led them into the
catastrophic defeat of 1967. But these chapters would lose
their force if not for the arguments advanced in the trials
of two seemingly totally dissimilar monarchs, the iconic
19th Dynasty father and son duo, Seti I and his son,
Ramesses II.
These back-to-back approving portraits of pharaonic
potency-and peace-making sagacity-begin with the following
classic lines:
Next Horus called out, "King Seti the First!"
In came a man tall of stature and powerfully built. He
walked, wrapped in his winding sheet, until he stood
before the throne.
Then Thoth, Scribe of the Gods, read aloud, "He assumed
the throne upon the death of his father. He subdued
Nubia, returned Palestine to Egypt, then focused his
energies on building and construction."
During his opening speech in self-defense, Seti I explains
that he took "Palestine" (a term, like Nubia and even Egypt,
not used in his time) back from the Hittites who had seized
it, a victory "sealed with a pact of peace."
But when asked by his mighty predecessor, Thutmose III, why
he had not continued the war anyway, Seti I replies, "I felt
my army was exhausted," adding, "while at the same time the
Hittites as a nation are extremely tough in battle."
Challenged that there is no glory in not pressing on the
fight, Seti I answers, "A treaty of peace is preferable to a
war without glory."
His son, Ramesses II, after his overblown triumph of
Qadesh-in which he barely beat off a massively superior
Hittite force that had tricked him into crossing the Orontes
ahead of most of his troops-also got down to making peace
with the same enemy nation to the northeast. Some years
after withdrawing back to Egypt, leaving the enemy in his
original objective, Qadesh, but with no further
encroachments on Egyptian buffer states or territory, he
signed a peace pact with the Hittite king-whose daughter he
also married in an imperial celebration.
Again, Thutmose II takes up a prosecutorial tone. When
Ramesses vainly asks him, "What do say about my routing the
enemy's army," his much more martially talented remote
predecessor skewers him:
"I say that you won a battle but lost a war, while your
enemy lost a battle but won the war. He enticed you to
make peace in order to reorganize his ranks. He welcomed
your relationship by marriage in order to fix your
friendly attitude before making good his losses. He was
content to keep Qadesh as a place from which to threaten
any point in your empire in future."
"During all of my long reign, the security of my
homeland was not disturbed for even one hour," Ramesses
II responded. "Nor was there a single violent rebellion
anywhere in our vast empire, while no enemy dared cast
an aggressive glance at our borders."
NASSER, SADAT, AND ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE
An entirely different pair of rulers-though again, one
succeeds the other in power-faces the tribunal in trials of
Nasser and Sadat, the last two in the book. Nasser is
attacked not only for wasting Egypt's limited resources on
efforts to win every war of liberation around (while
spectacularly failing to defend his own territory in 1967),
but also for destroying any traces of democracy left by the
ancient regime. Mustafa al-Nahhas, Zaghlul's successor as
head of the Wafd Party, thus the chief initial target of
Nasserist repression, berates Nasser for what he has done to
Egyptian democracy:
"You were heedless of liberty and human rights," al-
Nahhas resumed his attack. "While I don't deny that you
kept faith with the poor, you were a curse upon
political writers and intellectuals, who are the
vanguard of the nation's children. You cracked down on
them with arrest and imprisonment, with hanging and
killing, until you had eradicated their optimism and
smashed the formation of their personalities-and only
God knows when their proper formation shall return.
Those who launched the 1919 Revolution were people of
initiative and innovation in the various fields of
politics, economics and culture. How your high-
handedness spoiled your most pristine depths! See how
education was vitiated, how the public sector grew
depraved? How your defiance of the world's powers led
you to horrendous losses and shameful defeats! You never
sought the benefit of another person's opinion, nor
learned from the lessons of Muhammad Ali's experience.
And what was the result? Clamor and cacophony, and an
empty mythology-all heaped on a pile of rubble."
During his trial, Sadat has a prolonged verbal duel with
Nasser, much of which is worth quoting here:
Then Gamal Abdel-Nasser asked Sadat, "How could it have
been so easy for you to distort my memory so
treacherously?"
"I was forced take the position that I did, for the
essence of my policy was to correct the mistakes I
inherited from your rule," rebutted Sadat.
"Yet didn't I delegate power to you in order to satisfy
you, encourage you, and treat you as a friend?"
"How tyrannical to judge a human being for a stand taken
in a time of black terror, when fathers fear their sons
and brothers fear each other?" shot back Sadat.
"And what was the victory that you won but the fruit of
my long preparations for it!" bellowed Abdel-Nasser.
"A defeated man like you did not score such a triumph,"
retorted Sadat. "Rather, I returned to the people their
freedom and their dignity, then led them to an
undeniable victory."
"And you gave away everything for the sake of an
ignominious peace," bristled Abdel-Nasser, "dealing Arab
unity a fatal thrust, condemning Egypt to exclusion and
isolation."
"From you I inherited a nation tottering on the abyss of
annihilation," countered Sadat. "The Arabs would neither
offer a friendly hand in aid, nor did they wish us to
die, nor to be strong. Rather, they wanted us to remain
on our knees at their mercy. And so I did not hesitate
to take my decision."
"You exchanged a giant that always stood by us for one
who had always opposed us!" Abdel-Nasser upbraided him.
"I went to the giant who held the solution in his hand,"
pointed out Sadat. "Since, then, events have confirmed
that my thoughts were correct."
One may wonder if, given the way the Barack Obama
administration so quickly encouraged Mubarak's fall, and
then spoke warmly of cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood
(which, in Arabic if not in English, has always said-and
recently reaffirmed--that it would terminate the treaty with
Israel), that Mahfouz would still write such dialogue now.
At any rate, in the end, the tribunal apparently feels that
Sadat has won the debate. Osiris invites Sadat to sit with
Immortals--though he had only permitted Nasser to do so. The
presiding deity had sent Nasser (who had incensed the court
by declaring, "Egyptian history really began on July 23,
1952") 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,
at least symbolically, 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), it fell on the same day that Yasser Arafat, Shimon
Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were revealed to have won the Nobel
Peace Prize in Oslo.[11] Then, and even now, accused by some
of selling out to Israel (which has no discernible influence
over the Swedish Academy) for the sake of his prize-devoting
most of his Nobel lecture, cited above, to a defense of
Palestinian rights, and even endorsing Palestinian suicide
bombings during the (much-misreported) 2002 Jenin
incursion-he nonetheless never renounced his support for
Camp David. Nor did he give up the dream of a comprehensive
Arab-Israeli peace accord someday.
Yet the question remains, how will this history really end?
How would Mahfouz try Mubarak, who will probably be facing
judgment both on earth and in the hereafter soon? After five
millennia of mainly authoritarian rule, will the new
Egyptian democracy be a real one-or at least the sort of
secular liberal version that was the heady, widely touted
goal of the January 25th Revolution? Will it go back to war
with that other, more established democracy watching
nervously from across the oft-bloodied sands of Sinai? Of
course, we cannot answer for Mahfouz (or anyone) with
certainty now how all this will turn out. Yet, to be sure,
more than just Egypt's fate alone shall turn on it.
----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] J.C.B. Richmond, Egypt 1798-1952: Her Advance toward a
Modern Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977),
39. Though dated, this remarkable work is a still-valuable
and beautifully written reference that has sadly been
forgotten.
[2] Herman Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion (Leiden, E.J.
Brill, 1967), 85; and David P. Silverman in his article,
"Divinity and Deities in Ancient Egypt," in Religion in
Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths and Personal Practice, ed. Byron
E. Shafer, authors John Baines, Leonard H. Lesko and David
P. Silverman (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University
Press, 1991), 44. However, The Oxford Encyclopedia of
Ancient Egypt, ed. Donald B. Redford (Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, 2001), Vol. 2, 615-19, places
Osiris' origins in Upper Egypt, as most early images of the
god depict him wearing the White Crown of the southern
kingdom, though this seems a minority view.
[3] Bojana Mojsov, Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 33.
[4] For Seth's prominence in the development of this concept
in monotheistic religion, see Peter Stanford, The Devil: A
Biography (New York, Henry Holt, 1996), 20-23. More on the
sinister aspect of Seth in Marc �tienne, Heka: magie et
envoutement dans l'�gypte ancienne (Paris: Reunions des
Mus�es Nationaux, 2000), 22-39.
[5] Te Velde, Seth, 6.
[6] R.H. Wilkinson, Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient
Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005),
148, describes Isis' iconography. For a harrowing account of
the ordeal before the scales of ma`at, see Dimitri Meeks and
Christine Favard-Meeks, Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods,
translated from the French by G.M. Gosharian (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 142-50.
[7] The description of the ka is largely in the words of
David P. Silverman, Eckley Brinton Coxe. Jr., Professor and
Curator of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
[8] This comparison belongs to the late Akef Ramzy Abadir,
Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Near Eastern Languages and
Literatures, New York University (1989), Najib Mahfuz:
Allegory and Symbolism as a means of social, political and
cultural criticism, 1936-1985 (Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms International), 166-7. For a brilliant overall
analysis of Before the Throne, see Menahem Milson, Najib
Mahfuz:The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo (New York and
Jerusalem: St. Martin's Press and The Magnes Press,1998),
Chapter 9, "In the Courtroom of History."
[9] David O'Connor, "Egypt's View of Others," in 'Never Had
the Like Occurred:' Egypt's View of its Past, ed. John Tait
(London: UCL Press, Institute of Archaeology, University of
London, 2003), 155-85.
[10] For the Pharaonists' views of Egypt as an empire, see
Charles Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National
Image, from its Origins to Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press,
1972), 236-7. For the movement as a whole and Mahfouz's
connection to it, see Stock, A Mummy Awakens (cited in the
introductory note, above), 40-61.
[11] Raymond Stock, "How Islamist Militants Put Egypt on
Trial," The Financial Times, Weekend FT, March 4/5, 1995,
III, on the military trial of sixteen defendants charged in
the stabbing of Naguib Mahfouz.
----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/)
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