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| | Trying to Interpret Awlad Haratina
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1988/mahfouz-bio.html
Naguib Mahfouz is no rising star like Shiina Ringo or (to some degree)
Murakami; he’s a well-established star who’s been both a cultural
symbol of Egypt (and poster-child for Egyptian Nationalism) and a
tireless, but cautious, chronicler of social injustice in the Middle
East through his more than a hundred short stories, thirty novels, and
two hundred articles from 1939 to the present day. His 1959 novel, Awlad Haratina, which translates into Children of the Alley,
depicts five generations of life in the alley of al-Gabalawi. The main
protagonists and antagonists, however, require no description for the
theologically-minded reader, since the lives of these alley-dwellers
are a giant re-enactment of the spiritual history described in the
Bible and Qu’ran. (For this reason, I think the more gendered Sons of the Alley
might be a more appropriate title). But, as I hope to show, while the
allegorical structure of the novel is unmistakable, this interpretation
is under constant threat of being undermined, or at least complicated,
by the connection the reader living in 1950s and 60s Egypt might draw
between the figure of the mighty leader whose rule is (ostensibly)
enforced by thugs whose job it is to silence dissent against power by
keeping the population in violent submission to authority. Whether the
religious allegory is meant as a benign cover for the more pointed
political commentary of the latter interpretation or if these two
interpretations merely coexist on a complementary level is a question I
will attempt to answer, or at least discuss. And again, my analysis
will be somewhat limited since I am using Peter Theroux’s translation in
place of a version in the original Arabic.
The history of the alley, like the history of the prophets, is
cyclical: a chosen one enters a world of debauchery, gathers followers
in order to save them from a life ruled by vicious gangsters, and
triumphs over unjust authority to create a race of chosen people. Time
passes, the village slips back into debauchery, the chosen people lose
touch with spiritual ideals, and a new chosen one emerges to redeem
another group of followers from the clutches of state authority.
Eventually, we end up with three groups of self-proclaimed chosen
people in constant conflict with one another, until the false magician
Arafa shows up to plunge the world into the spiritual void that is our
current condition.
In the first scene, the sons of Gabalawi: Abbas, Galil, Ridwan, Idris,
and Adham are gathered within a room in Gabalawi’s gated mansion. Adham
is the child of a black slave and the child of a different mother from
the other four children, but Gabalawi nevertheless entrusts to him the
task of overseeing the property after Gabalawi’s death. Idris (his
Biblical referent is “Lucifer,” the Qu’ranic is “Iblis”), who resents
Adham’s half-breed status and refuses to treat him as a member of the
family, is the only desenter. Idris is expelled from the mansion and
forced to make a living in the desert, with the condition that anyone
who helps him in any way will also receive Gabalawi’s damnation. Adham
goes to work on collecting rents from other tenants of the estate and
calculating various accounts which he then submits to Gabalawi. He
falls in love with and marries a slave woman, Umaima, and begins to
feel sorry for Idris, who lives in poverty and disgrace outside of the
mansion. Idris eventually persuades him to peek at the silver box in
Gabalawi’s room, which holds a book containing the inheritance records
of all of the people of Gabalawi’s mansion and the people living in the
surrounding village, or in other words, knowledge of the future. Adham
is caught by Gabalawi and expelled from the mansion forever, but after
a long life of despair and struggle (including the birth of a set of
twins: Qaidra and his murderous brother Humam), he has a vision of
Gabalawi in which Gabalawi tells Adham that he has forgiven him and
that “[t]he estate will belong to your children” (Mahfouz 88). From
this first section, the basic plot of the most of the other sections
should be fairly easy to imagine. The other main characters are Gabal
(Moses), Rifaa (Jesus), Qassem (Muhammad), and Arafa (who has no direct
allegorical connection, but to whom we can attribute the name of
modernity or technology; more on Arafa later).
The reading I have just offered is the preferred reading of most
Qu’ranic scholars and conservative state officials in Egypt and the
Middle East in general: Mahfouz is writing a modern day version of the
prophetic history of the Qu’ran (the 114 chapters of the book
correspond to the 114 chapters of the Qu’ran) in which the prophets
guide the village-dwellers towards spiritual truth and a life for
themselves and their children free from the sporadic violence of
gangsters who create empires upon hashish and opium and the protection
money extorted from peaceful families. But if the interpretation of
this novel is confined to a purely religious level, then what do we
make of its implicit commentary on contemporary Middle Eastern
governments and ruling authorities?
Hosam Aboul-Ela writes that the descendants of al-Gabalawi “find it
increasingly difficult to maintain a sense of virtue and community in
the neighborhood they inhabit, as the patriarch (arguably [Gamel] Abdel
Nasser) becomes ever more isolated in his mansion, and ‘gangsters’
(Egyptian State Security) perpetually rise up to run others’ lives for
them” (Aboul-ela 346). Removing ourselves from the straitjacket of the
Qu’ranic-based interpretive model, we allow the possibility of
connections like the one Aboul-Ela has described. From the novel: “The
people are even used to buying their own safety with bribes, and their
security with obedience and abasement, and were severely punished for
the smallest thing they said or did wrong—or even for thinking
something wrong” (Mahfouz 4). We can let Gabalawi stand in for any
number of derelict state authority figures worldwide who are content to
while away in luxury as an elite, Mafia-like crew dominates the lives
of citizens through threats and beatings. Or Gabalawi can stand for, as
Aboul-Ela hints at, patriarchal authority in general, the Law of the
Father, under which conflict is resolved through violence and endless
power struggles instead of through the more matriarchal ideal of
compromise. This is all up to the reader. However, Mahfouz can easily
sidestep such accusations of criticizing the government (which at the
same time holds him up proudly as the cultural symbol of Egypt) by
allowing the more benign religious interpretation to claim precedence
over the political one. While the religious interpretation is much more
strongly hinted at, the political, while it must remain subordinate to
allegory, nevertheless murmurs in the background.
Even so, the character of Arafa ensures that the allegorical model
becomes just as subversive and critical, if not moreso than, the
political model. Arafa is an example of a false prophet, who learns how
to impress the people by creating, testing, and demonstrating the power
of the bomb. Whether he stands in for technological advancement or
simply modernity itself is open to question, but the crucial importance
of this character is that he is responsible for the death of Gabalawi
when he sneaks into the overseer’s house to find Gabalawi’s book of
accounts (which Adham had searched for earlier) in which he believes he
can find the source of Gabalawi’s power, but ends up killing the old
man (unknowingly) when he gets caught. With the emergence of modern
science and its power to dominate nature and turn human subjects into
thralled spectators of forces beyond their control, the authority of
God and his prophets is reduced to nothingness. The opening of the
Arafa section:
No one
contemplating the state of our alley would ever believe what the poets
say in the coffeehouses. Who are Gabal and Rifaa and Qassem? What sign
is there, besides the coffeehouse stories, that any of them
accomplished anything? All the eye can see is an alley sunk in darkness
and poets that sing of dreams. How did this happen to us? (363).
And here are Arafa’s thoughts on the alley’s prophetic legacy:
God damn them all. . . . Each of them [Al Gabal, Al Rifaa, Al Qassem]
is so stupidly, so blindly proud of its man—all proud of men of whom
nothing is left but their names. And they never make any attempt to go
one step beyond that false pride! Bastards. Cowards. (367).
Once
the accomplishments of our stand-in prophets sink into oblivion as
their followers become the bickering neighborhoods of Al Gabal, Al
Rifaa, and Al Qassem, the stage is set for the false prophet Arafa, who
is ridiculed as a bastard wherever he goes, to gain power not through
physical strength (“Protection rackets are not the only way to riches,”
he says), but by fighting off the gangsters with the power of the bomb.
His ambitions extend further after he sneaks into Gabalawi’s mansion,
strangles a slave to death to keep him quiet, and learns the next
morning that the sight of his loyal slave’s dead body has literally
scared Gabalawi to death. Now Arafa’s self-imposed duty is to bring
Gabalawi back to life through magic. Following Mahfouz’s logic then,
the creation of the atom bomb (or perhaps the arrival of modern warfare
in general) has not only given science precedence over the authority of
God, but has put science in the position of God. (This move did not go
well with his Middle Eastern audience and this section of the novel is
often cited as one of the factors motivating an attacker to stab and
severely handicap Mahfouz in 1994.)
The aim of the earlier leaders was to unite the people under the banner
of spiritual truth and fight the injustice of the gangsters. Arafa’s
aim, however noble, sidesteps the basis of spiritual authority, which
is based not on the prophet’s performance of dazzling miracles but on
the willingness of followers to have faith in an unseen but
all-powerful entity. In Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov,
Jesus Christ, in Ivan Karamazov’s poem “The Grand Inquisitor” is
castigated during his Second Coming for this very reason: rejecting the
temptation to force his followers into obeisance through miracles. The
Cardinal Grand Inquisitor says:
And since man cannot bear to be left
without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself, his
own miracles this time, and will bow down to the miracles of quacks, or
women’s magic, though he be rebellious, heretical, and godless a
hundred times over. . . . You did not [come down from the cross]
because . . . you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted
for faith that is free, not miraculous. You thirsted for love that is
free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that
has left him permanently terrified (Dostoevsky 256).
This is less an indictment of Christ himself than it is an appraisal of the weakness of his followers. Now the titular word awlad can be read literally: children,
in the sense that the followers of Arafa are incapable of offering the
kind of free love and blind faith in God required of true believers and
true men; instead, they submit to the authority of the charlatan who
“terrifies” them with false miracles. Arafa, unlike Christ, treats his
followers like children and reduces the authority of an invisible and
all-powerful God to spectacle. The idea of the authentic vs.
inauthentic miracle has its precedent in the Qu’ran. In verses 103-129
of Sura 7, Al A’raf, or The Heights (as translated by Yusuf Ali), Moses battles Pharoah’s magicians as
a way of establishing the authority of God over that of Pharoah. While
the pharoah’s magicians perform “a great
feat of magic” (al-sehreen adheem) by “bewitching the eyes of the people” (saharu al-ayoun al-nas) (7:116), Moses’s
rod turns into a snake and “swallows up straightaway all the falsehoods
which they fake” (7:117). The Arabic word for “bewitch” is saharu and the word for “magic” is sehr, both of which share the common root of seen, ha, and ra, or simply S, H, R. In the passage, these words are contrasted with al haqq or “truth,” and Ayat Rabbuna or “the Signs of our Lord.” The inauthentic miracle or false magic of the sahara (sorcerer) is exposed when confronted by the authentic Ayat min al-Rabb. Qu'ranic verses themselves are referred to as Ayat, so this passage is as much a validation of Moses's miracles as it is of the Qu'ran itself.
Arafa, then, is not just your dime-a-dozen sahara, but the
sorcerer who destroys the authority of God only to appropriate this
authority to force the children of the alley to remain children, to
replace faith-based belief with the power of the spectacle, to replace
blind trust in God with service to whomever can detonate the bigger
bomb, to harness the powers formerly reserved to God in order to spread
fear among the alley-dwellers and to turn conflicts between
neighborhoods into armed struggles for worldwide hegemony. Now we can
see how the allegorical and political interpretations converge on a
single point. With modernity comes both the loss of proper and
meaningful authority and the emergence of conditions which turn
religious conflict contained within certain neighborhoods into
full-blown war. Rather than religious conflict escalating into war,
however, it is more often the case in contemporary times that severe
and violent conflicts are begun completely outside the realm of
religion (imperial or neo-imperial aggression and the often excessive
reaction against it is more responsible here) and then are re-framed as
religious conflicts in order to facilitate unproblematic identification
with a certain side. Biblical myth can be brought out to justify, for
example, the Israelis’ unquestioned right to the land of Palestine, and
Qu’ranic doctrines can be imposed upon the primarily political motives
of the people who attacked the World Trade Center towers on September
11, 2001. We see this in Awlad Haratina as the leaders of the
three neighborhoods do not use the truths of God revealed to their
specific groups as a way of guiding their actions, but as a way of
justifying their wars against the other neighborhoods. Modernity does
not replace a religious understanding of the world with a more
political one, but strips the religious understanding of its authority
or validity; but while most major conflicts are in fact
politically-motivated, religion can be called upon and God can be
resuscitated in order to provide one side with the moral authority over
the other: an “axis of evil” must be toppled, a “crusade” must be waged
in order to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, a settler class has a
God-given right to occupy the territory of another. While I am drawing
an explicit connection between the gangsterism in Awlad Haratina
and the policies of the current administration in the United States, I
should note that Mahfouz’s novel does end on a more optimistic note
than one would expect:
Overpowered by
fear, the overseer and
his men sent their spies everywhere to search homes
and shops and
impose the cruelest punishments for the slightest offenses. They beat
people with sticks for a look, a joke or a laugh, until the alley
endured a nightmarish atmosphere of fear,
hatred, and terrorism. Yet
the people bore the outrages steadfastly, taking
refuge in patience.
They held fast to hope, and whenever they were persecuted, they said,
“Injustice must have an end, as day must follow night. We will see the
death of tyranny, and the dawn of light and miracles” (448).
| | | Posted 11/27/2004 2:00 AM - 120 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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