Cairo Modern, Khan Al-Khalili, and Midaq Alley

The American University in Cairo School of Humanities and Social Sciences A Morettian Literary Atlas of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo in Three Early Realist Novels: Cairo Modern, Khan al-Khalili, and Midaq Alley A Thesis Submitted to The Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts By Paul A. Sundberg Under the supervision of Dr. Hussein Hammouda December/2015 OUTLINE I. INTRODUCTION 1 a. Introduction to the Three Novels 2 b. Analytical Focus: Novelistic Place 4 c. The Three Realist Novels 6 d. Mahfouz and Places in his Life 1911-1947 7 e. Place and Time in the Three Realist Cairo Novels 11 i. Novelistic Place: Greater Cairo 12 ii. Novelistic Time: The Historical Background 18 1. Period Politics and Movements in Egypt 20 2. The Timeline of the Three Novels 22 3. Cultural and Political End Points 27 f. Views of Place and Space in Literature 28 II. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 36 a. Moretti’s Larger Project: “Distant” and not “Close Reading” 36 b. Moretti’s Map Methodology 39 i. Critiques of Moretti’s Mapping Method 45 ii. Other Studies Using the Methodology 48 iii. Rationale for Choosing Moretti’s Mapping Method 50 and Title Conventions III. FINDINGS 51 a. Data Gathering and Processing 51 i. Issues of “Realism” in the Three Novels 54 ii. Moving Space 58 iii. Plot Places and Mentioned Places 59 iv. Mapping the Usable Place Data 60 b. An Atlas of Each Novel Considered Separately 61 i. An Atlas of Cairo Modern 61 1. Introduction and statistics 61 2. Major Plot Locations 63 3. Mentioned Locations 66 ii. An Atlas of Khan Al-Khalili 68 1. Introduction and statistics 68 2. Major Plot Locations 70 3. Mentioned Locations 71 4. Other Map Experiments 73 iii. An Atlas of Midaq Alley 74 1. Introduction and statistics 74 2. Major Plot Locations 75 3. Mentioned Locations (beyond the alley) 77 4. Other Map Experiments 78 a. The Geography of the Alley and its Hara 78 b. Hamida’s Downtown and Cairo’s Real 82 Downtown During WWII c. The Geography of the Alley and its Residents 85 c. A Comparative Atlas of the Three Novels 87 1. “The World” According to Each Novel 87 2. Egypt Beyond Cairo 93 3. The World of Ministries 96 4. One Chronotope, Two Worlds and Two Genres 98 5. Further Literary Experiments 102 IV. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 103 V. BIBLIOGRAPHY 108 VI. APPENDICES 111 a. Appendix A. Major Plot Places in the Three Novels b. Appendix B. All Mentioned Places in the Three Novels (alphabetical order) c. Appendix C. All Mentioned Places in the Three Novels (frequency order) d. Appendix D. All Places in al-Ghitani’s Mahfouz Dialogues through 1947 (alphabetical order) 1 INTRODUCTION The study of literature has been approached from a wide number of angles and disciplines. In addition to standard literary criticism, literature has also been made an object of study by literary historians, social historians, philosophers, semioticians and linguists. More unusual, perhaps, has been Italian literary historian Franco Moretti’s recent approach to literature from a natural and social sciences perspective, borrowing methodologies from more technical “disciplines with which literary studies have had little or no interaction” (Graphs, Maps and Trees, 1) such as geography, statistics, and evolutionary theory. As a social scientist by background, the author of this thesis on Arabic literature was immediately drawn to an academic approach that combines these two interests, conducting “experiments” on literature by “plac[ing] the literary field literally in front of our eyes” ( Graphs, 2) by means of graphic representations of literary “data” – maps, in this case. As Moretti says, “abstraction is not an end in itself, but a way to widen the domain of the literary historian and enrich its internal problematic” – a way to bring to light insights into literature previously unavailable through conventional methods ( Graphs, 2). Moretti’s own early effort mapping 19 th -century European novels in his 1998 Atlas of the European Novel offered promising results that might well be derivable from mapping the literature of other geographic areas, such as the Arab novel. As a result, this thesis is perhaps not a humanities paper typically produced within departments of literature. With its four-part organization composed of introduction, method, findings, discussion/conclusions, this thesis is modeled more after a conventional paper in the sciences than a paper on literary criticism or a philosophical paper on the dimension of space in literature. It is a data-driven study of specific places occurring in three Cairo-based novels dating from Naguib Mahfouz’s early realist period in the 1940s, made visible (and hence, analyzable) by being plotted on real maps and from those maps compiling the beginnings of a 2 “literary atlas” of Mahfouz’s 1940s Cairo novels. A full Morettian literary atlas project would involve compiling place information from scores of novels; however, for this thesis at the master’s level, I have ana-lyzed three. Introduction to the Three Novels Abruptly in 1945, Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz left off publication of his very first series of novels – his moderately successful Ancient Egyptian literary project (“Pharaonic novels” 1 such as ‘Abath al-aqd ār (literally, Absurdity of the Fates in Arabic; English title: Khufu’s Wisdom ), 1939; Rādūbīs (Rhadopis of Nubia ), 1943; and Kif āh Tība (Thebes at War ), 1944) – and began to publish in rapid succession three Cairo-based realist novels: Al-Qāhira al-jadīda (Cairo Modern ) in 1945;2 Khan al-Khalili in 1946, 3 which won the Ministry of Education’s literary prize; and finally and perhaps the most famous of his early works, Zuq āq al-midaqq (Midaq Alley ) in 1947 – which, ironically, was turned down by the Ministry of Education for its prize that year. Thus began the period known as Mahfouz’s “1940s novels,” culminating in his chef d’oeuvre , the three-part Cairo Trilogy , begun in 1947 or 1948 (the author didn’t recall) and first submitted for publication as a single novel manuscript in 1952. 4 1 According to Egyptian literary convention, these are usually referred to as “historical novels” ( riw āyāt t ārīkhiyya ). 2 The title of the first edition. The book was later republished as Fa ḍīḥa f ī al-Qāhira , “Scandal in Cairo” (cf. ‘Abd al-‘A ẓīm An īs writing about it in 1955 (108)). 3 Contrary to Mafouz’s own official chronology of his publication (used here), Sasson Somekh (189-199) holds that Khan al-Khalili was Mahfouz’s first Cairo novel – published in 1945 – followed by Cairo Modern in 1946, a reordering approved of by Mahfouz biographer Rasheed El-Enany also, but for the purpose of this thesis, the true order of the first two Cairo novels is irrelevant. 4 The Trilogy, originally one immense novel, was written by Mahfouz over the years 1947/8-1952, then returned by the publisher due to its unwieldy size; as a result, the manu- 3 Regarding this sudden change in direction, literary critic Roger Allen, official, author- approved, English translator of Khan al-Khalili among other Mahfouzian novels, writes that “many commentators on Mahfouz’s career have suggested that it was precisely the dire impact of the war on contemporary Egyptian society during the early 1940s that led Mahfouz to abandon his plan” to finish his series of Ancient Egyptian novels (Allen 295). This literary change of direction is therefore significant and worthy of closer inspection. However, it would be untrue to say his early project was socially irrelevant. Mahfouz claimed that under the cover of ancient history, he was also writing indirectly “against the British occupier and the Turkish ruler lurking in the palace. I was on fire against the British and the Turks” (al- Ghitani, 89). Mahfouz himself related to Gamal al-Ghitani that after the third historical novel, Thebes at War , the desire to write a history of Egypt in novel form “died out.” He asked himself, “What was the cause of its death? I don’t know” (al-Ghitani 89). “How could I throw aside all that effort [in studying and writing about Ancient Egypt] after Thebes at War and write Cairo Modern ? Maybe because history had ceased to allow me to write what I wanted to. Maybe I wanted to enter directly into the treatment of social subjects. All of that may be true” (89). As for his early Cairo novels being written within the novelistic genre of realism , Mahfouz admitted that he was arriving on the scene quite late and that the genre had gone out of literary favor by the 1940s. In a series of interviews with Gamal al-Ghitani published in The Mahfouz Dialogs (2007), the author explained that, although he had been well aware of contemporary trends and had read modernist authors in 1930s, including Joyce and Proust, when it came to writing his own initial novels, he “went down the realist path” (87). Defen- script was not published in book form until 1956-57 after Mahfouz had divided it into a series of three novels: (in English) Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street. 4 ding this choice, he wrote: “I was without a guide, without a cicerone, and I was writing in a style that was being mocked and declared dead everywhere I looked, but now I believe that my thinking was sound. What made things more difficult is that we have no tradition of novel writing in Arabic literature” (al-Ghitani 87-88). Novelistic realism was a necessary phase through which European literature had passed and from which it had profited, whereas Arabic literature had not.

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