Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel

Home , Bahaa Taher, Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Haqqi

Ziad Elmarsafy

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ELMARSAFY 9780748641406 PRINT.indd iv 23/10/2012 17:16 Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword vii Abbreviations x Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: Ouverture 1 1 Naguib Mahfouz: (En)chanting Justice 23 2 Tayeb Salih: The Returns of the Saint 52 3 Maªmūd Al-Masʿadī: Witnessing Immortality 66 4 The Survival of Gamal Al-Ghitany 78 5 Ibrahim Al-Koni: Writing and Sacrifice 107 6 Tahar Ouettar: The Saint and the Nightmare of History 139 Epilogue: Bahaa Taher, Solidarity and Idealism 162

Notes 168 Bibliography 235 Index 253

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new and unique series, ‘Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature’ A will, it is hoped, fill in a gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period, that is, from the nineteenth century onwards, is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/ Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature, or French literature, and so on. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature’ make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-Arabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century. The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of scholarly endeavour in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature to the Western reader, has never been stronger. The significant growth in the last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres, especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature interna- tionally since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western dias- pora and writing both in English and Arabic; the adoption of such authors and others by mainstream, high-circulation publishers, as opposed to the

vii

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academic publishers of the past; the establishment of prestigious prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker), run by the Man Booker Foundation, which bring huge publicity to the shortlist and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages – all this and more recently the events of the Arab Spring have heightened public interest, let alone academic, in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature. It is therefore part of the ambition of this series that it will be increasingly addressing a wider reading public beyond its natural ter- ritory of students and researchers in Arabic and world literature. Nor indeed is the academic readership of the series expected to be confined to special- ists in literature in light of the growing trend for interdisciplinarity, which increasingly sees scholars crossing field boundaries in their research tools and coming up with findings that equally cross discipline borders in their appeal.

Sufi thought and practice and their main historical exponents have exercised a not insubstantial influence on all main genres of modern Arabic literature: poetry, drama and fiction. In poetry the influence can be traced back to the revivalist or neo-classical period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries down to the contemporary Adūnīs (b. 1930) and later poets. In drama, and particularly verse drama, it was the Egyptian poet, Salah Abd al- Sabur (1930–81) who showed the relevance of Sufi thought and practice to contemporary political life in his memorable play of the 1960s, The Tragedy of Al-Hallaj. When we come to the novel, the art form most adept by its nature at the detailed representation of reality, it was no wonder that Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s novel, Zeinab (1912), broadly accepted as the first novel in Arabic of literary quality, reflected in some of its scenes popular Sufi practices and beliefs, as did the great Taha Husayn’s fictionalised autobiography,The Stream of Days (1929). It is as if the Arabic novel was born with a genetic propensity towards engagement with Sufism, a condition which continued unabated from those early days until the present, with the relationship growing ever more intense and complex, naturally more so with some authors than others, manifesting itself sometimes realistically, sometimes symboli- cally or allegorically, according to the styles of writing, the political agenda of authors, and their worldview in general. Most notably, Sufism plays a major role in the work of Egypt’s Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006),

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who has demonstrated time and again in his work that while Sufism may be viable as a means of personal salvation by withdrawal from society, it had no role to play in bringing about progressive social change. Other writers may have other views, but few could afford to ignore Sufism in their writing, considering its standing both in Arab/Muslim thought and popular belief and practice. Despite the above, the study of representations of Sufism in Arabic fiction, let alone other genres, has received little scholarly attention and remains a field wide open for researchers’ endeavour. The vast landscape needs to be surveyed, historical and socio-political connections established, develop- ments delineated, links with world trends identified, and the tools of relevant literary theory brought to bear on all that. Ziad Elmarsafy’s current volume, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, makes a much needed start on all these fronts through representative case studies of some of the most central exponents of Sufi thought in the contemporary Arabic novel. Rasheed El-Enany, Emeritus Professor of Modern Arabic Literature University of Exeter

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CW = Complete Works / Al-Aʿmāl Al-Kāmila (various authors) EI = Encyclopaedia of Islam. Refers to articles in both the second (P. Bearman et al.) and third (Kate Fleet et al.) editions EM = Louis Massignon, Ecrits mémorables EQ = Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān FM = Ibn ʿArabī, Al-Futūªāt Al-Makkiyya GA = Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe

Note on Transliteration and Translation

I follow the IJMES system for the transliteration of Arabic names. For the authors studied in this work, however, I have relied on the spelling used in the extant translations into Western languages (mainly English), in order to make them more accessible for the general reader. I have followed the same policy with titles and characters, adopting them as they exist in the extant translations. If there is no English translation, I use the transliterated Arabic for the author’s name and title. For the sake of clarity, authors’ names are transliterated according to the IJMES system at first mention in the text (mainly in the introduction) and in the bibliography where necessary. All nouns and the definite article ‘Al’ are capitalised in Arabic titles and names. Some widespread proper names are transliterated according to their better-known form, hence Gamal Abd El-Nasser rather than Jamāl ʿAbd Al-Nā‚ir. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. Once again, for the sake of accessibility, translations of individual works (mainly English, some French) are listed in the bibliography. All translations from the Qurʾān are taken from The Qur’an: A New Translation by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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irst and foremost, I wish to thank Professor Rasheed El-Enany, whose Finitiative and constant encouragement over the past three years made this book possible. The patient and professional support of the editorial and production teams at Edinburgh University Press was essential to keeping this project from derailing. The generous leave policy of the English Department at the University of York, coupled with a visiting appointment at the Université de Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle at the kind invitation of Professor Jean Bessière, gave me the time and resources necessary to get the project off the ground. The idea at the heart of this book began as a series of discussions with Gilles Ladkany, Daniel Rivet and Hamit Bozarslan at the Institut d’Etudes de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman (IISMM). Since then, numerous conversations with colleagues, friends and students – too many to list here – as well as discussions during talks and seminars at the universities of Cairo, Paris III and Warwick, forced me to rethink and sharpen key aspects of the text. Exchanges with my students at Paris III as well as Sayyid Bahrawi, Mustapha Bentaïbi, Renée Champion, Boutros Hallaq, Amal Helal, Robert Irwin, Ronald Judy, Marc Kober and Emmanuelle Ly, along with patient, intelligent readings of earlier drafts by Jane Elliott and Alain Messaoudi, helped me to add clarifications, engage with key references and write more coherently. Lewis Lewisohn and Alexander Knysh both responded with great courtesy and generosity to my queries. As in the past, Daniel and Françoise Rivet went beyond the call of duty with their hospitality and assistance. At the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the unflagging support of Philippe Chevrant kept me abreast of the latest publications in Arabic literature and criticism, while Michel Fani helped me not to take certain things too seri- ously. Lisa Eveson and the staff of the J. B. Morrell Library at the University

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of York were heroic in procuring material through purchases and the inter- lending service, often at very short notice. The editorial and production teams at Edinburgh University Press and Eliza Wright’s and Bryan Radley’s careful copyediting provided safe pairs of hands that saw the manuscript through its final stages. The friendly, collegial and occasionally culinary support of Derek Attridge, David Attwell, Anna Bernard, Judith Buchanan, Rose Coote, Hugh Haughton (whose great idea for a title – Ça sufi! – I was, alas, unable to use), Kit Fan and Claire Westall kept me going during some very tough times, as did the reappearance of many old friends. My deepest and warmest thanks to them all. Last but not least, I wish to thank my family for their patience, their kindness and their love that kept me mindful of what really matters in life. The Leavis Fund covered costs associated with indexing and proof- reading. Their support is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

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he following monograph aims at studying the deployment of Sufi Tthemes and ideas in the Arabic novel during the second half of the twentieth century. The frequency with which Sufi characters – dervishes, wander- ers, disciples, saints – and themes occur in the Arabic novel means that the authors studied here are illustrative rather than exhaustive. My argument will be that, during the second half of the twentieth century, a significant number of Arabic novelists used the language and thought of the Sufis as a way of tackling problems that were aesthetic first and foremost, as a way of interrogating the limits of the creating self and the creative act. Allusions and references to Sufism were not the only means to this end during the period under consideration, but the frequency with which such poets and mystics as Al-Óusayn b. Man‚ūr Al-Óallāj (c. 857–922) and Muªyi-l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), or theologians like Abū-l-Qāsim Al-Qushayrī (986–1072), are mentioned in Arabic novels written in the second half of the twentieth century calls for a sustained critical meditation. Although there is no lack of theories describing the ways in which art and literature are produced, one recent line of inquiry proves especially inspiring. Following Derrida, Derek Attridge proposes a lucid perspective on literature as the ‘creation of the other’, otherness being, ‘that which is, at a given moment, outside the horizon provided by the culture for thinking, understanding, imagining, feeling, perceiving’.1 Far from being a denial of authority or authorship, the idea that the literary work is the creation of the other

indicates that the relation of the created work to conscious acts of creation is not entirely one of effect to cause. The coming into being of the wholly new

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requires some relinquishment of intellectual control, and ‘the other’ is one possible name for that to which control is ceded, whether it is conceived of as ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ the subject.2

Attridge compares the response to the other through openness to change to what happens ‘when a writer refashions norms of thought to realise a new possibility in a poem or an argument’.3 For Derrida, the process of creating this new possibility is so unpredictable that, when it produces a new work or concept, it can only be compared to a stroke of luck rather than being merely the result of hard work.4 Although Attridge takes pains to explain that the phrase ‘creation of the other’ should not ‘be taken to imply a mystical belief in an exterior agent’, the term ‘other’ in the present study will cover both divine and human variants: the other could be another person, an abstract entity, or to use Rudolf Otto’s terminology, God as the Wholly Other.5 Literary creation involves an opening up to, and a making of space for, the other.6 The notion of opening up takes us back to one of the earliest Sufi manuals, namely the Kitāb Al-Lumaʿ (The Book of Flashes) by the Sufi writer Abū Na‚r Al-Sarrāj (d. 988), where Sufism is defined as ‘the science of openings [al-futūª: revelations, illuminations, spiritual “conquests”]; God opens up the hearts of His saints to the understanding of His speech and the connotations of His discourse as He wills’.7 This process of ‘opening up’ the human heart to divine inspiration recurs in Goethe’s ‘Pindar letter’ to Herder, in which the young writer reflects on his status and that of his creative activity, saying ‘I would like to pray like Moses in the Qurʾān: “Lord, open up my chest.” ’8 Goethe refers to the prayer of Moses before his encounter with Pharaoh, as narrated in Q20:25: like Moses, Goethe seeks an opening up that will result in eloquence and allow the words to flow. Let us note that this ‘opening up’ occurs with reference to both the human and divine Other. While instructive and important, Goethe is not a Sufi. The modernist Egyptian poet and playwright Íalāª ʿAbd Al-Íabūr (1931–81), on the other hand, constructs an entire theory of poetic creation based on the notion of such openings as they are described in one of the key Sufi manuals, the Risāla (Epistle) of Abū-l-Qāsim Al-Qushayrī.9 ʿAbd Al-Íabūr’s rare synthesis of a meditative poetic voice, a commitment to social justice and pioneering formal experimentation accommodates Sufi themes and ideas readily,

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including a tragedy about one of the most important figures in the history of Sufism, Al-Óallāj (Maʿsāt Al-Óallāj [The Tragedy of Al-Óallāj], 1965). Across a series of texts that constitute his own poetic autobiography, ʿAbd Al-Íabūr pursues the comparison between the activity of the poet and the life of the mystic: both poetic creation and mysticism involve spiritual and mental exertion (ijtihād ) unencumbered by the laws of cause and effect; if they are rewarded with anything it will be something sent by the infinite Other, God; both seek a way towards reaching the sort of truth that tran- scends the quotidian.10 A poem starts as an unknown thing, an idea that occurs to the writer as a flash of lightning that he or she tries to capture in written form and endow with a material existence. ʿAbd Al-Íabūr then traces the details of this process – the coming into being of the poem – via Al-Qushayrī’s photic imagery:

In his Epistle Al-Qushayrī tells us about other expressions from the Sufi lexicon – namely glimmers, dawnings and flashes – by way of defining these rapid thoughts that come from one knows not where. They live on in the course of the individual’s consciousness. They are produced less by the exertion of the mind than by the state of mental clarity. Al-Qushayrī therefore compares them to flashes of lightning that disappear as soon as they appear.11

ʿAbd Al-Íabūr’s account follows the poet’s itinerary, from these first sparks, to what he calls al-wārid (‘that which arrives’)12 – an immediate esoteric inspiration whose impact is longer lasting than the aforementioned lightning flashes – via the multiple spiritual and aesthetic stages involved in the creation of the work of art defined through Al-Qushayrī’s terminology of ‘colouring and consolidation’ (al-talwīn wa-l-tamkīn).13 Whole worlds open up before the poet during this itinerary: ‘A treasure-chest is opened, a new land discov- ered, mountains and valleys are revealed to the gaze, and a new life is born.’14 The poet-mystic’s journey of creation takes the poet in two directions, ini- tially away from him- or herself and towards the Other who ‘transmits’ the inspiration, and back in an attempt to find again that moment when the flash of lightning starts the act of literary production.15 The act of poetic creation involves a separation of the self from the self, both in response to the call of the Other and as a way of accommodating the Other. Writing poetry leaves

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the self transformed by this encounter. Indeed, since this encounter is what makes poetry happen, the poet qua creator of poetry would not exist without this relationship to and meeting with the Other. Both poet and poem are creations of the Other.16 None of the foregoing explains the importance of the novel in this context. In his La Pensée du roman Thomas Pavel describes the novel as the genre that simultaneously accomplishes two goals. First, the novel is the cultural product that accompanies the concept of the individual. Pavel relies on Louis Dumont’s account of the birth of the individual, a phenomenon that Dumont locates in early India, at the moment when early ascetics gave up the rights and duties that came with being part of a hierarchical society in order to devote themselves to the contemplation and adoration of a tutelary deity, who, in turn, provides them with everything that society might have. Dumont terms this individual the ‘extra-worldly’ individual (l’individu-hors- du-monde) and argues that the history of modern individualism is, in fact, the history of the gradual insertion of this extra-social bubble into the fabric of society, until it begins to resemble the collection of spheres that it is today.17 The genre that accompanies the trajectory of the extra-worldly individual is, Pavel argues, the novel, which finds its origins in a cultural space that has come to terms with the notion of individual freedom in relation to, rather than away from, divine presences and forces. Second, by proposing a gap between the protagonist and the surrounding environment as an object of investigation, the novel interrogates the genesis of the individual and the possibility of creating a common order. In doing so the novel raises the axiologi- cal question that underlies the human situation in the world: is the world habitable in moral terms? Does the moral order dictated by the tutelary deity that guides, protects and informs the individual have a place in the world? If so, why is life so difficult, and if not, why do that individual’s notions of right and wrong seem so obvious to him or her? Can the individual inhabit the world, ethically and morally speaking?18 The novel is thus concerned less withmimesis – though that is certainly a key part of its aesthetic – than with norms and values. Similarly, realism matters less to the proper operation of this genre than idealism. In Pavel’s terms, fiction defies, rather than merely reflects, actuality.19 The novel invites the reader to abandon the empirical perspective, with its focus on what is, in

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favour of the normative and value-oriented perspectives that focus on, and praise, what ought to be. To read a novel is to inhabit a fictional world, for a time, and allow oneself to be subject to its laws and values. We are not far from Virginia Woolf’s observation that ‘The novel is the only form of art which seeks to make us believe that it is giving a full and truthful record of the life of a real person.’20 This may explain why the novel has become the central global art form, a phenomenon aided and abetted by the novel’s ability to absorb various intellectual systems with relative ease. As Frank Kermode has it, the novel ‘lends itself to explanations borrowed from any intellectual system of the universe which seems at the time satisfactory’.21 It is a small step from Dumont’s earliest extra-worldly individuals to the Sufis of the medieval and modern period. Accordingly, one of the key tasks assumed by the novels under scrutiny in this work is thinking through individuality via the language and thought of Sufism.22 The turn to Sufism in the literature of the post-war period, especially after 1980, marks an attempt at reappropriating and redefining individuality along lines that evade the dogmas of institutional religious and political restriction. This is not to say, however, that individuality itself is somehow un-Islamic: as Louis Massignon reminds us, the dignity of the individual is very much intact at the moment of the shahāda, the instant where the Muslim bears witness that there is no God but God and Muªammad is his prophet.23 This dignity has, however, been under more or less continuous assault in the post-war period, caught between an increasingly oppressive state security apparatus, constant warfare and ever- increasing economic and civil inequality. The highest stakes attach, therefore, to the survival of that self in writing. Whereas for Massignon the idea of individuality (or personhood) is that which survives (rather than being born of) the transformative union with a tutelary deity, the sort of survival at stake most frequently in the novels under scrutiny in this study tends to be investi- gated in a more quotidian register, though this investigation is informed nevertheless by the contact with the Other.24 Coupled with the practice of using literature to get around the heavy demands of censorship – even as the state’s censors continue to tell writers what they can and cannot say – the novel becomes the locus of certain claims that would otherwise have been com- pletely excluded from the public sphere.25 The ideas and voices of Sufism that become increasingly frequent in fiction after 1980 attest to a selfhood under

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siege and a dismayed worldview. This is the period that effectively confirmed the bankruptcy of almost every ideology – nationalist, socialist, Arab unionist, communist, secular, liberal, neo-liberal – in favour of the forces of reaction. This is the period that saw peoples and causes abandoned to their fate and the consolidation of states and governments built on exploitation, injustice and the routine abuse of human rights. This is the period where the reforms that were slowly built and set into motion during the first half of the twentieth century came to an end, and where only those who were on the right side of the rapacious logic of global capitalism managed, for a time, to keep the worst at bay. Between the assassination of Sadat, the consolidation of dictatorship as a political norm from Morocco to Kuwait, the atrocities of civil war in Lebanon and Algeria, the ongoing travesty that is the Palestinian–Israeli peace process, the invasion of Kuwait and the two Gulf wars, and the fate of Iraq under Saddam and under American occupation, what is surprising is not the appearance of Sufism but the fact that it is not more prevalent, that there are not more saints cropping up every minute to propagate something like an idea of order – personal and public – amidst the chaos of history.26 According to Michel de Certeau, this is as it should be. In his study of mysticism in early modern Europe, de Certeau identifies a certain link between the ‘rise’ of mysticism (or at least an increase in certain mystical orientations of a literary and cultural order) and an increase in the surrounding misery: states of destitution and dismay accompany the appearance of saintly figures who ‘intercede’ on behalf of the world’s downtrodden.27 On this important point, de Certeau cites Massignon’s monumental study of Al-Óallāj, where the central hypothesis is precisely the eruption of the heroic mystical moment as a solution to social distress. For Massignon, there is a ‘trans-social’ axis to the heroic life of the saint or Sufi, one that might be fig- ured as a projection outside the world (note the parallel with Dumont) of the mystic’s life, on levels both imaginary and social.28 This conception of history, oriented as it is towards interiority and individuality, establishes a real and effective solidarity between collective social misery and the life of the saint, whose mission it is to see the sense in history and apply it to the suffering in the world.29 For suffering there is, and not only in the early modern or medieval periods but also (especially) in the modern period. De Certeau’s aetiology

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of mysticism traces one possible reason for its appearance to Wittgenstein, who explains the need for mysticism through the critique of modernity. For Wittgenstein, the need for mysticism arises when one feels that one has been left behind by all the promise of science and progress:

The urge towards the mystical comes of the non-satisfaction of our wishes by science. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered our problem is still not touched at all. Of course, in that case there are no questions any more; and that is the answer.30

The turn to Sufism is the net result of a sense of abandonment that pervades both the writer and the surrounding world; a world for which nothing – not science, not progress, not revolution – can do any good. Sufism then becomes an answer, of sorts. It is difficult to agree with Wittgenstein, however, on the fact that ‘there are no questions any more’ in such a situation. There are questions aplenty, not the least of which might be: what sort of language is adequate to this situation? What sort of linguistic and literary expression is allowed by such desperate times? One way of speaking of such upheaval is to claim that we are in an important transitory period, at the end of one epoch and the start of another. According to Frank Kermode, such thinking is as old as Christianity, if not older, and is especially apparent at the start of literary movements such as Modernism.31 The self-reflexive moments of literary history are marked by both an obsession with being situated at the dawn of a new age of history (which Kermode calls a useful fiction, a good way of thinking about upheaval) and with inventing a new sort of writing adequate to that moment.32 As Kermode rightly points out, however, every claim of novelty necessarily invokes a past that is not novel. The turn to Sufism in the contemporary Arabic novel does both: it constitutes a useful way of thinking about the present without losing touch with the past. The past in question is, of course, very carefully chosen: in the Sufis our writers find a set of cutting-edge literary experimenters, ironically – or perhaps usefully – situated centuries in the past. This appropriation and linking of past and present sustains the survival of the individual under siege in times of crisis. The foregoing matters thus constitute the themes with which this book is concerned. Between the vertices of the self, the Other, history and writing,

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Sufi themes and topoi enable key meditations on individuality, survival, hospitality, autobiography and, above all, the novel itself as a vector for ideas about the world and its habitability. In the writings of the medieval Sufis, modern Arabic novelists find a constant testing of the possibilities of language and thought; a practice that they themselves then try to follow assiduously. Nor are the writers under scrutiny the only ones interested in Sufism, which inspires writers well beyond the Arabophone literary space. One might mention Salman Rushdie (Grimus, Haroun and the Sea of Stories), Doris Lessing (The Four-Gated City, ‘Out of the Fountain’), Philip K. Dick (Eye in the Sky) among those whose fiction has touched on the subject.33 The Sufi tradition itself is literary through and through, insofar as the very first Sufis seem to have immediately thrown themselves into an exploration of the limits of language and the sayable, that which can and that which cannot be said, written, spoken of, in relation to desire, belief and the sacred. Gamal Al-Ghitany (Jamāl Al-Ghi†ānī, 1945–) describes the stakes thus:

The language of Sufism is the result of deep spiritual states. It is not the result of a semantic artifice or rhetorical construct. [The mystic] Al-Niffarī [d. 976–7] stated this concisely when he uttered his wonderful saying, ‘The more that vision expands, the narrower expression becomes’ . . . Thus, words appear like indications of the extraordinary distance [between experience and expression] on most occasions. The problem with which the Sufi wayfarer concerns himself resembles what the literary inno- vator faces. Both of them see the essence of the problem as being the meanings and spiritual experiences that they desire to express in words – in the customary framework of language – as a means of connection. How can these meanings be expressed? How can new words possibly be created? How can the distance between rapturous, ebullient feelings and visions blazing away in the spirit or mind and what emerges from the fingertips, written in ink, be narrowed?34

Despite Al-Niffarī’s aphorism regarding the inadequacy of language to the Sufi experience, and notwithstanding the long relationship between mysticism and apophasis, the writers at the core of this project seem to prove that Sufism actually enables thelogos and an expansion of expression, the strongest case being the sheer length of Al-Ghitany’s Kitāb Al-Tajalliyāt (The Book of

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Revelations, 1983–6). This is not to say that apophasis disappears entirely, but it is to say that fiction somehow undoes negative theology.35 From its beginnings, Sufism, like all mysticisms, has concerned itself with questions that would today be called literary. Put another way, most questions about literature have something to do with the interrogation of the sacred. This is not to say that the space of literature is the space of belief, but it is to say that the transcendent calls forth patterns of questioning and interrogation that are recognisably literary. I say ‘recognisably’ rather than essentially or ineffably because of the difficulties that attend dealing with and defining the literary. Although the definition of literature has tried the patience of numerous scholars, almost to no avail, quite a few important insights into the operation of the literary thing have been gleaned along the way, and we will be making use of many of these in what follows. One good summing up is offered by Derrida:

Literariness is not an intrinsic property of this or that discursive event. Even in those places where it seems to persist, literature remains an unstable function with precarious legal status. Its passion consists in the fact that it receives its determination from something other than itself.36

The process of writing literature constantly involves questioning limits: between the human and the divine, the self and the Other, the self and the world, and so on. The creation of literature has much to do with the creation of spaces within those limits that mark finalities and boundaries. One of the most important of these spaces is the space within the self, whose solid self- identity is called into question by the very act of writing. As noted above, the creative, inventive process that gives rise to literature entails ceding control to the Other, creating a space within the self that the Other might inhabit and through which the Other might speak. One way of understanding this process, and the quality of literariness that it confers on what is written, is through the two further idioms that are deeply concerned with limits, namely mysticism and deconstruction.37 Both of these will run through the course of this study, which, while being neither mystical nor deconstructive, is informed by them. Hence the textual selections that I have made. Readers might cavil with the fact that there are Sufi characters with which I do not deal, and authors

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that I do not discuss. In truth, researching this book has revealed that the Sufi presence in the Arabic novel is widespread; dealing with them all would have been impossible. The authors under scrutiny here were selected because they wrote the works that best fit the argument. The aesthetic of Yahya Haqqi (Yaªyā Óaqqī, 1905–92) serves as a point of departure, illustrat- ing the necessary concern of literature with Sufism and a dependence on the Other, and using this concern to investigate the idea of the modern, rational self located at the crossroads of the human and the divine on the one hand, and Eastern (Egyptian) and Western (English) culture on the other.38 Abdel-Hakim Kassem (ʿAbd Al-Óakīm Qāsim, 1935–90) provides an uncompromising view of the opposition between mysticism and political history: the exit from one marks the entrance into the other. Between them Haqqi and Kassem define the axes along which the curve of this monograph is plotted. The subsequent chapters each focus on a separate writer. Naguib Mahfouz (Najīb MaªfūÕ, 1911–2006) narrates the poetic, musical intru- sions of the Other into a violent socio-political universe where the question of justice is always being posed. Tayeb Salih (Al-˝ayyib Íāliª, 1929–2009) narrates the history of the modern Sudan via the village of Wad Hamid and the hospitality that its residents show to a steady stream of saints and visitors. Maªmūd Al-Masʿadī (1911–2004) narrates contact with eternity through the saintly, photic self produced by the discourse of science and rationality. Gamal Al-Ghitany uses the language and style of Ibn ʿArabī to narrate Egypt’s political history as seen through his father’s life and his own. Ibrahim Al-Koni (Ibrāhīm Al-Kūnī/Al-Kawnī, 1948–) serves up a cartography of the desert as a theophanic space wherein are revealed the materials and characters that populate his novels. Tahar Ouettar (Al-˝ahir Wa††ār, 1936–2010) uses the character of the perverse waliyy (saint; pl. awliyāʾ) to explore the possibility of historiography in light of the unspeakable horrors of civil war. The study ends with an epilogue rather than a conclusion reflecting on the persistence of idealistic modes of literary expression in the work of Bahaa Taher (Bahāʾ ˝āhir, 1935–). The chapters do not have to be read sequentially; rather they are arranged as a constellation around the key themes of this study. The chapter sequence follows the relationship of ideas between writers and texts rather than the more artificial order dictated by the chronology of the novelists’ lives. This

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also applies to the order in which literary works are examined within certain chapters. In Chapter One, for example, the reading of Mahfouz’s ‘A Story without Beginning or End’ (1971) precedes that of The Beggar (1965), all with a view to better delineating the logic of individuality, the limits of reason and openness to the Other as they operate in the Mahfouz canon. In Chapter Two, the analysis proceeds according to the order of events narrated in Salih’s works rather than the order of publication of his works. In Chapter Five, explicating the complexities of Ibrahim Al-Koni’s desert novels calls for a similar non-chronological approach. There is nonetheless a rough correspondence between the chapter sequence and the publication dates of the novels treated, though here again deviations are necessary for the sake of coherence and readability. Thus the chapter on Al-Masʿadī follows that on Salih as a better way of introducing the questions of mortality and survival, which are common to both Al-Masʿadī and Al-Ghitany. By the same token, Salih’s use of hospitality is more closely related to Mahfouz’s ideas about creativity and social justice. Similarly, the Ouettar chapter follows those on Al-Koni and Al-Ghitany even though he was born over a decade before them, both because the novels covered in the chapter on Ouettar were published after Al-Ghitany’s (though they are roughly contemporaneous with Al-Koni’s novels) and because the question of history constitutes a fitting end to this study. Although historical, social and political concerns frame and underlie the corpus under consideration in this study, they do not, and cannot, determine the content of the novels themselves. There is far more to the Sufi turn in contemporary Arabic fiction than a reaction to living in an age of injustice and corruption. It will be seen that questions of love, desire, mortality, hospitality and survival play a prominent role in shaping the appropriation of Sufi idioms in contemporary Arabic fiction. The reader should not, therefore, expect a set of correspondences between a given political event and its refrac- tion into an episode in a given novel, or between historical phases and an author’s seeking recourse to Sufism (though there are some clear instances of this process, especially in the works of Al-Ghitany and Ouettar). The limits of creativity and reason, the possibility of ethical action and the unforeseeable character of desire all feature frequently as aspects of the journey of the self into the space and language of Sufism.

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The recurrence of these themes should come as no surprise; they are common to the literary history of the novel as genre. Their frequency should also be related to the question of scale: as novels, the texts under scrutiny here do not constitute a large proportion of Arabic fictional production. By and large, the field of the Arabic novel is dominated by realist texts. Nor, as will be seen, do they constitute the prevailing mode of literary expression of the authors under scrutiny. The authors should thus be seen as engaging in a significant literary experiment by turning to Sufi ideas and language, but this experiment defines a part, rather than the whole, of their literary output. The reasons for undertaking that experiment, and in the last analysis the unpredictable character of literary creation, means that it will probably never be possible to isolate a certain incident that drives an author to Sufism, though that does not detract from the intrinsic interest of the phenomenon.

Yahya Haqqi: Human and Divine Love

Yahya Haqqi’s status as a pioneer in the art of Arabic fiction is paralleled by his work in several other fields of endeavour, including journalism, literary criticism, government and international diplomacy. Haqqi was born and raised in popular Cairo, specifically in the area around the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab (the Prophet’s granddaughter) which features prominently in his best-known work, discussed below. Apart from the broad range of activities that filled his life and inform his work, his writing is marked by a rare combi- nation of lucidity and allusion, dealing with themes such as the rural and the urban, wealth and poverty, development and education. In her account of his life and work, Miriam Cooke describes him as ‘one of the last udaba [men of letters]’ whose myriad accomplishments are connected by his ‘love for Egypt and his quest for the role befitting him as its literary custodian/harbinger’.39 Although it is a novella rather than a novel, Qindīl Umm Hāshim (The Lamp of Umm Hāshim; The Saint’s Lamp, 1944) tackles the same problems of the moral habitability of the world that constitute the novel’s focus. Published during the Second World War when Haqqi worked for the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and haunted by the place of religion and the other-worldly in the process of national development, Haqqi’s novella marks a key critique of the narrative of progress according to which science, triumphant, can cure the nation’s ills. The text is built around two axes, one running from East to

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West and the other linking the human to the divine, both spanning the plot of a short Bildungsroman that centred on the departure and return to Egypt of its protagonist, Ismail, armed with a degree in ophthalmology from England and a desire to do well. As Haqqi’s readers have pointed out, the text is heavy with allegory and symbolism: Ismail stands for Egypt in its encounter with the West, while his fiancée, Fatima Al-Nabawiyya, embodies Egypt in its isolation and ignorance.40 The names, too, are significant: Ismail is named after the son of Abraham who is believed to be the father of the Arabs, and Fatima’s name means ‘Fatima the Prophet’s daughter’.41 Ismail’s ambitions flounder on the fact that he is unable to cure the disease that affects, and eventually blinds, Fatima Al-Nabawiyya. Like most of Ismail’s community, Fatima anchors her hopes on the curative powers of the oil contained in the lamp that hangs in the shrine of Al-Sayyida Zaynab, the Prophet’s granddaughter. In a scene that neatly encapsulates the novella’s lines of tension between modern medicine and superstition, an exasperated Ismail breaks the lamp as he shouts ‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’ before an angry mob attacks him for his sacrilegious behaviour. Still, Ismail does not give up on treating Fatima. Eventually, Ismail recovers the customs of his youth and community, which leads him to add the saint’s oil to the other forms of treatment that he employs. The strategy succeeds, vindicating Haqqi’s lesson that there can be no science without faith. The novella closes with the narrator describing Ismail in old age: an overweight, badly-dressed asthmatic addicted to food and cigarettes, perpetually in a good humour, surrounded by the love of his community. Between his charm, his charitable efforts as a doctor and his love of humanity (which partly manifests itself in his love of women), the aged Ismail is diametrically opposed to the handsome, upwardly mobile, logic-driven young doctor who had returned from England decades earlier. In his seminal article on The Saint’s Lamp, M. M. Badawi asks,

[W]hat does he [Ismail] actually do with the oil? Does he treat Fatima’s eyes with it, concurrently with his use of proper medicine? If so, does he actually believe in the medicinal power of the oil? Do we take that then to be the mark of atavism, of his reversion to type? Or does he use the oil purely as a means of obtaining Fatima’s confidence and trust in him, as a means of suggesting to her that she is after all getting the right kind of treatment?42

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As Badawi proposes, Haqqi’s ambiguity is deliberate. It is as if he wanted to make the case that there are things that surpass language and narration: no one knows at what point healing occurs, nor what the actual agents of that healing might be.43 The best that a doctor can do is coax the patient along towards the point where the body heals itself. Put another way, Ismail uses the lamp to invoke, or beckon to, the Other, whose inscrutable powers cannot be explained rationally. The impotence of human agency and the power of love (of Fatima, of the community and perhaps above all of Al-Sayyida Zaynab herself) become the two faces of the sign of Al-Sayyida Zaynab’s power, both communicating to the believer the value of divine intercession and the order that the saints maintain. It is not for nothing that Shaykh Dardiri, who sells the oil in the mausoleum, takes the young Ismail aside one day and describes to him the events of the laylat al-ªa∂ra, when the legendary saints – mem- bers of the Prophet Muªammad’s family and later jurists who have acquired the status of awliyāʾ – gather and hold court to look into the injustices that afflict the community. (The motif of the court of saints [thedīwān ] will return in Gamal Al-Ghitany’s Kitāb Al-Tajalliyāt.) ‘If they wanted they could remove all the injustices, but the time has not yet come, for all those who are oppressed oppress others in turn, so how can proper punishment be meted out?’44 The order that is maintained by the saintly court is more real and more permanent than the promise held by the more rational order that Ismail imports from England. Ismail’s emotional life is circumscribed by three women: his fiancée, his English girlfriend, Mary, and Naima, a prostitute who prays at the saint’s shrine for deliverance from her lot.45 This triad of women pushes Ismail away from his sceptical, scientific outlook and towards his more faithful and loving (albeit dishevelled) elderly self. They do not do so in unison, of course: instead there is a dialectical process that goes from belief (Fatima, Naima) to disbelief (Mary) to informed belief (Fatima). Quite apart from Nabawiyya’s solid commitment to Al-Sayyida Zaynab as her tutelary saint, Naima’s experience at the shrine neatly prefigures the dynamic that effects Ismail’s spiritual reawakening. Before he leaves for England, Ismail sees Naima at the shrine. At first he is taken by her beauty, then by her oath: fifty candles to decorate the shrine if she finds a way out of her life as a sex worker. She then

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placed her lips on the wall of the shrine. This kiss was not of her trade; it came from her heart. And who can say for sure whether the saint did not approach the wall from the other side, with her lips ready to exchange one kiss for another?46

This charged erotic vision of a saint and supplicant kissing marks the first step on Ismail’s journey of understanding of the continuum joining human to divine love. The journey first takes a long detour in the realm of human erotic life and rationality before returning to the divine in the saint’s shrine. In England, Mary teaches Ismail the value of freedom and independence. His greatest fear, the narrator tells us, is freedom; hers is confinement.47 He seeks a programme for his life; she sees life as an ever-renewed polemic. He spends a great deal of time with his most vulnerable patients; she finds his spirit of generosity and self-sacrifice inappropriate because unproductive. Eventually he breaks down under the impact of Mary’s instruction, seeing in religion the opiate of the masses and in rational, solitary individuality the only possible route to happiness.48 Haqqi’s text vividly describes the destruction of Ismail’s psyche under the impact of Mary’s lessons, which are compared to the blows of an axe. Mary then helps him heal, rebuilding him in his modern guise, substituting for his religious belief an even stronger faith in science, to the point where he no longer approaches her as ‘an adept (murīd) before a saint (qu†b)’ but rather as an equal.49 When Ismail takes Mary’s lessons back to Egypt, the results are the aforementioned catastrophes: an individual self standing in pitched battle against the crowds of worshippers at the mosque of the Sayyida Zaynab. It is only once he lets go of his ambition and utilitarian outlook, opening his heart and mind to the people of the neighbourhood, their faith and their humour, finally allowing himself to be a mere one among many believers, that his efforts in treating Fatima Al-Nabawiyya finally bear fruit. In other words, the answer to Badawi’s question regarding what Ismail does with the oil is: nothing. Instead of regarding the oil from the saint’s lamp, and the saint’s lamp itself, as an instrument to be used or an ointment to be applied, Ismail sees them as markers of a spiritual path (the programme that he so desperately desired) linking the worldly to the other-worldly. Far from reverting to superstitious type, Ismail learns that progress along this

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path takes time, and that healing operates on both cultural and physical levels, and that this opening up to the Other requires, in Rasheed El-Enany’s words, ‘gradual change, persuasion, patience and persistence’.50 Instead of understanding freedom and independence as an attempt at dominating the masses, he perceives individualism as it should be: an ever-present link with the sacred that binds him to both his society and his God: ‘Before him is not a collection of individuals but a people held together by one common bond: a kind of faith, born of company over time and the slow ripening over its fire.’51 The final stage in this ‘ripening’ comes in the last line of the novella, where Ismail’s love of all women stands for his love of humanity. The narrator uses the term tafānī which could be translated as ‘self-sacrifice’ but also carries important connotations of the self-dissolution that obtains in mystical love, fanāʾ: ‘My uncle spent his entire life loving women, as if his love for them were but one aspect of his tafānī and love of humanity.’52 Thus Ismail’s reintegration into Egyptian society depends on the maintenance of a social bond that is itself driven by the link to the divine. The dialectic of human and divine love, the opposition between ambition and renunciation as two opposed aspects of individuality, and perhaps above all the relationship between the sacred and creativity (a term that encompasses unorthodox approaches to both medicine and art) returns in another short story by Haqqi, ‘The Priest Is Not Perplexed’. The title invokes the Sufi topos ofª ayra (perplexity, bewilderment),53 and the story is all the more interesting for its application of issues related to Sufism to a Christian context. The absence of perplexity indicates a failure or inability to embark on the path of the mystic. The plot is simple: a handsome young nobleman abandons his wealth and follows the retinue of an itinerant priest. When the latter happens upon the house of a rich man in town, he enters and preaches a sermon encouraging him to lead a better life. During the sermon the rich man’s daughter tries to seduce the young nobleman, to no avail.54 The sermon and the seduction operate in parallel: just as the rich man is at the point of abandoning his home and family to join the priest’s retinue, the latter advises him to stay and take care of his loved ones, as becoming a peripatetic will cause more harm than good. The rich man’s daughter accuses the nobleman of acting out of ambition rather than piety: he only joined the priest because he did not want to share his father’s inheritance, and only stands at

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the very end of the group of followers as a way of outdoing their humility. This radical ambition and refusal to compromise is reminiscent of the sort of individualism that Ismail picks up in England. The rich man’s daughter proposes another possibility: what if the young nobleman loved and danced with her? ‘I have always considered dancing a sort of worship. Every time I dance I feel that God is closer to me than during the times of emptiness and boredom.’55 When the young nobleman answers that there is something more important than dancing, and that he has ears for God alone and the sound of the cosmos singing His praises, she retorts that this only shows his incapacity for perceiving God’s beauty. Only by loving her and accepting her love can the nobleman be brought back to himself, and thereby start to love God properly.56 When the priest leaves, however, the young man joins him. In the young woman’s estimation, he has failed to heed the lesson of the priest that he claims to follow: the priest advised the rich man to stay at home based on the principle of God’s mercy, but the lesson is lost on this most ambitious of disciples, who leaves with the priest, this time at the head of the congregation. The woman muses, ‘What a poor half-wit! He did not understand the divine message [al-waªy]. When God’s mercy called to him to stay, he turned away and left!’ before clapping her hands and calling for dancing and music.57 Unlike Ismail, the young nobleman fails in the mystical quest, precisely because of his insistence and sense of purpose. The way to God is not path-independent: those who are not capable of human love can never reach the love of the divine. The woman’s final dance and call for music underlines the fact that she embodies this all-important nexus. Haqqi’s two novellas skilfully use sainthood and Sufism, devotion and discipleship to trope belonging, creativity and the idea of the individual. The ambiguities surrounding the saint’s lamp and the young nobleman’s motives convey the difficulty of placing Sufism and popular devotion on the chart of national development; a difficulty that is only resolved with the assumption of a love that builds societies while maintaining the relationship with the divine. In Abdel-Hakim Kassem’s case things turn out differently: while he remains alert to the operation of love within a family and a community of Sufis, the opposition between the mystical and the political renders the former obsolete under the weight of Egypt’s history of the 1960s and 1970s.

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The Saints Abandon Abdel-Aziz: The Seven Days of Man (Ayyām Al-Insān Al-Sabʿa) One of Haqqi’s many gifts to literature and posterity during his years as editor of the cultural periodical Al-Majalla (1962–70) was publishing the work of Abdel-Hakim Kassem. Kassem is usually grouped with a set of avant- garde writers known as the ‘Generation of the 1960s’; their distinguishing political feature being initial support for the policies of Gamal Abd El-Nasser followed by disillusion with and opposition to their increasingly oppressive character. Kassem was born in a village near ˝an†ā and moved to Cairo in the 1950s. Ever alert to the realities of injustice and inequality, his political activity eventually saw him detained and imprisoned in the 1960s, and then exiled in West Berlin from 1974 to 1985. Although his œuvre is not volumi- nous, his elegant prose and strident clarity regarding everyday struggles with the weight of history and the inequities of power, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, ensure his enduring interest. Kassem’s Seven Days of Man (1969), perhaps his best-known work, is an important development of the subgenre of the village novel in Arabic literature and a significant departure from the stereotyped social realism of his predecessors.58 It also marks another approach to the question of the Sufi self via the Bildungsroman, though the mood is far darker than that of The Saint’s Lamp and more consonant with the sorrow that followed Egypt’s catastrophic defeat in the 1967 war. The protagonist, named Abdel-Aziz in the novel and clearly modelled on Kassem himself, grows increasingly distant from the life of the village he inhabits, centred as it is on agriculture and devotion to Egypt’s most popular Sufi saint, Sayyid ªA mad Al-Badawī (c. 1200–76). The pilgrimage to Al-Badawī’s shrine and attendance at his mawlid (festival) in ˝an†ā mark the apex of village life. As his Sufi-centred existence collapses with the death of his father, the protagonist finds his voice. The novel ends with him sitting in a café in the village, smoking hashish and talking incessantly.59 Abdel-Aziz’s discovery of his voice contrasts sharply with his quiet, thoughtful presence throughout the novel, notwithstanding his brief outburst at the height of the mawlid when he accuses those around him of being mindless animals and idolators.60 Similarly, the angry, embit- tered voices that surround and inform him at the end of the novel contrast

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sharply with the gentle, loving modes of communication that are the fabric of village life. Abdel-Aziz’s Bildung is an education in modes of address, forget- ting the nostalgic modes that dominate the life of his father and his band of dervishes while learning the loud language of political opposition.61 In a 1980 article Kassem locates the birth of the writer precisely in the moment of political opposition to power.62 He starts that same article by pos- iting the dialectic of the real and ideal, or reality and dreams, as the dynamic that starts the process of writing.63 In Kassem’s case, the real is identified with an ugly present necessity, while the dream-ideal ‘has the features of the ancestral countryside’, though he finds that these are limited and exhausted.64 He writes at the intersection of worn-out ideals and implacable reality, which opposition he maps onto that between the country and the city. Having inhabited both locations, Kassem finds his loyalties divided between the loud city and the gentle village in the countryside in a destiny of perpetual estrangement: he is another individual outside the world. The only constant with which he identifies is the sound of the train on the tracks between these two worlds, the sound that speaks his estrangement. Nevertheless, this estrangement is not his alone: it is the fate of all Egyptians, caught in a ‘tor- tured journey between the inferno of a terrifying present and the uselessness of impossible dreams’.65 Much of Kassem’s bleak, alienated worldview is worked into the fabric of The Seven Days of Man.The world of dreams and ideals is that of the Sufi rituals and the lives of the dervishes in the evening, the gathering that gives them solace from what would otherwise be an unmanageable life and reframes the meaning of the cosmos.66 The many rituals and performances – theādāb – constitute the life of the dervish and give it meaning, grounding it in a reality of things far deeper than the one indicated by hard work and materiality.67 Theirs is the Sufism of purity, of‚ afāʾ, which is a term occasionally advanced in popular Sufi circles as being the etymological root of the term ‘Sufism’.68 In the opening chapter, the world of Hagg Karim and his dervishes is one that combines poverty with ‚afāʾ and satisfaction: ‘How happy is he who opens his heart to love and purity, his few feddāns multiply with God’s blessing.’69 The men whose lives are so full of these blessings in turn act as a conduit for these blessings to the villages they inhabit: wherever they go they are told that they ‘light up the place’ and that ‘the world without them has no flavour’.70

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Stories circulate about these ‘men unlike other men’, (saints, awliyāʾ, though the word is never used) with superhuman powers.71 What, the young Abdel- Aziz wonders, would the world be like without them and their lamps?72 The answer to this question comes at the end of the novel: it would be a world without purity and loving attachments, a world where the individual’s ‚afāʾ is routinely polluted by the material and political realities of economic deprivation, powerlessness and injustice. A world, in short, very much like that of the café scene that closes the novel. The last image that we have of Abdel-Aziz is that of a man who is ‘unlike men’, but only in the sense that he is as different from his father and his group of dervishes as the Sufi saints of legend were from ordinary human beings. The trajectory from Sufism to politics carries Abdel-Aziz from ‚afāʾ to anger, from fascination with his father’s world and the joyous ceremonies of the festival to lasting bitterness. Kassem uses a number of devices to narrate his protagonist’s increasing politicisation. Perhaps the most striking of these is the ironic chapter titles that structure the novel, all of which carry a double meaning – one is tempted to say an apparent (Õāhir) and a hidden (bā†in) meaning.73 The first chapter, Al-Óa∂ra, refers to both the ceremony of al-ªa∂ra and the presence (ªa∂ra) of Hagg Karim in the life of his son Abdel-Aziz. The second chapter title,Al-Khabīz , refers both to the baking of the bread in preparation for the mawlid and the sexual maturity of Abdel-Aziz and Samira. The third chapter,Al-Safar , refers to the metaphor of the spiritual journey, a staple of Sufi life, and to the voyage undertaken from the village to ˝an†ā, with a secondary signification referring to Abdel-Aziz’s – now a secondary school student – discovery of the world around him through travel. The fourth chapter,Al-Khidma , covers both the ritual service performed by the dervishes during their pilgrimage (feeding the poor, setting up dhikr ceremonies) and their treatment like slaves by the urban dwellers of ˝an†ā. The fifth chapter, Al-Layla Al-Kabīra, narrates the events of the ‘big night’, the climax of the mawlid, but at the same time it covers Abdel-Aziz’s outburst at his father and his fellow dervishes. The sixth, ‘Farewell’, refers both to the departure from ˝an†ā after the festival and to Hagg Karim’s advancing age and inevitable death. Finally, Al-˝arīq shows us the narrator as a grown man, his father dead and his father’s world der- elict. We understand that he has come a long way since he was a child, but ironically he has now abandoned ‘the way’ (al-†arīq) of the Sufis. The seven

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‘days’ of Abdel-Aziz’s life are therefore symbolic of the seven ages that are represented in these chapters: from a childhood immersed in village life and that of the Sufis, to puberty, independence, rebellion, separation (and the concomitant sorrow), to the forging of a new path in life. But each of these seven days is marked by a dark undercurrent: the intimacy and ‚afāʾ of Sufi life set off against harsh economic and political realities. Neither the abandonment of the values of the dervishes nor the entry into the political is wholly absolute, however. Indeed, much of the novel is devoted precisely to the prevalence and persistence of the way of Hagg Karim until his death, while the narration of the café scene takes up a few pages. In this respect the novel narrates a political socialisation of an individual only seemingly at odds with the values of his family, but in reality informed and determined by them as he adopts the political creed that makes him an artist.74 The reader is thus faced not with a facile opposition between Sufism and politics, but with their dialectical interdependence as an engine that drives Kassem’s idiolect.75 The novel’s narrative style depends on the novel’s interlocking perspectives and interpenetrating voices.76 A number of events are narrated that could not possibly have been witnessed by Abdel- Aziz, whose Sufi-informed consciousness persists in the narrative voice that overtakes them.77 The constant oscillation between the viewpoints of Abdel- Aziz and the omniscient narrator underlines the hesitations and uncertainties (Who am I? What am I? Do I believe? What do I believe?) that come with the protagonist’s Bildung, as he goes from being the beloved (and loving) son of a devoted Sufi, to the educated sceptic who grows distant from his origins, to the angry young man who realises that his entire existence has been a lie. If we bear in mind that the novel was composed during Kassem’s first period of political imprisonment, we could read it as a critique of Sufism insofar as the latter excludes – and excludes its adherents from – the political, which, as we have seen, is of paramount importance for Kassem. That, however, would be to ignore the persistence of the Sufi sensibility and the love of Hagg Karim, both of which infuse the narrative right down to its last page. It is the Sufi sensibility and the constantly amazed consciousness of the opening chapter that make Abdel-Aziz’s growing awareness of socio-political realities possible. Far from abandoning the life of the saints, it is they who have abandoned him. At the end of the novel, Abdel-Aziz is in a state not unlike the exhausted

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and angry one of the dervishes that he describes in the opening chapter, and, like them, he may well benefit from thedhikr and the ªa∂ra, were it not for the fact that it is far too late for him: the baraka of the saints is long gone. The lines of force that shape Kassem’s pioneering narrative return in the following decades under the pen of Naguib Mahfouz and, most signifi- cantly, Gamal Al-Ghitany. Although the tendency in both Mahfouz’s and Al-Ghitany’s work is towards a narrative that recounts an increasing saintli- ness in a character’s life, or even the process by which a character becomes a Sufi or a saint, as opposed to Kassem’s unmaking of a Sufi world, there is no gainsaying the significance ofThe Seven Days of Manas an intertext. The lesson of this novel is that no easy separation of the mystical and the political is possible: both elements of Egyptian life must be reckoned with in any work of art that makes a claim to aesthetic and political commitment.

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