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The Happy Man

Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)

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Naguib Mahfouz By  Lee Smith

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2006/08/naguib_mahfouz.html

Remembering one of Egypt's first great novelists.

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, died today at the age of 94. I met him in December. He was at the back of a bar in a Cairo hotel on the Nile, and in the orange glow of the dark room he pressed his eyelids together like a cat dozing in the sun. He'd fallen at home earlier in the day, and he seemed fragile.

…

Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and raised in Gamaliya—a working-class district named after the "Camel road"—among the monuments of the ancient city's Fatimid period where he first learned to listen to the generations of Egypt and heard their warnings, their dreams and petitions, and the echoes of them. For instance, in the plot against the rebel pharaoh Akhenaton, Mahfouz heard the clamor of Anwar Sadat's Islamist assassins, who sent the president off to the next world shouting "death to the pharaoh."

Fate left all that material in Mahfouz's path, but it was the politics that men make that cursed his beloved Egypt with military dictatorships and yet more tyranny. Nasser's revolution found an easy external enemy in Israel while the country's perpetual internal foes went unchecked—poverty, illiteracy, disease, and dictatorship. That is probably not how Mahfouz would have imagined Egypt's future when he graduated from Cairo University in 1934, during a time of social ferment and hope, when the country was steered by liberal intellectuals, writers in whose work he had immersed himself since adolescence. Their themes were equal rights for women and minorities and an Egyptian identity based not on religion but on the country's long history and territorial integrity. They derived their ideas from classical liberal principles, the work of French and English political philosophers, and thus could hardly see themselves as anti-Western. Rather, it was a generation that struggled with the challenge of the West, a generation that, among its many other cultural achievements, made the novel into an Arab art form. After all, Mahfouz and the Arab novel are almost exact contemporaries; the first modern Egyptian novel, Zeinab, was published three years after Mahfouz was born.

His own first novel was published in 1939, and he went on to write 40 novels and short-story collections, dozens of screenplays and literary criticism. Among his best-known books are Thief and the Dog, Miramar, and The Cairo Trilogy, a multigenerational family epic that begins with the 1919 Egyptian revolution—arguably the only popular revolution in the modern Arab world—and extends through the 1952 coup that brought Nasser to power. Mahfouz was not merely a scribe; he also participated in modern Egyptian history, albeit unwillingly, for the Islamists came for him, too, more than a decade ago to repay him for a book.

Children of the Alley first appeared in serial form in 1959 and so outraged the religious authorities for its depiction of God and the prophets that Mahfouz agreed not to have the book published in Egypt, though it has been in circulation elsewhere in the Arab world and in dozens of other languages ever since. A year after Mahfouz's 1988 Nobel Prize, Omar Abdul-Rahman, the blind sheikh now held in a U.S. penitentiary for his involvement in the first World Trade Center attack, noted that had someone punished Mahfouz for his famous novel, Salman Rushdie would not have dared to publish Satanic Verses. In 1994, one of Sheikh Omar's acolytes acted on the hint and stabbed Mahfouz in the neck and nearly killed him. And thus Mahfouz joined the long line of Egyptian writers and intellectuals caught between the state on one side and the religion of the state closing in on the other flank.

…

"It is obvious why the men of religion don't like the book," Muhammad said to me. "The characters are named so that they refer to specific prophets, and the last prophet is named after science. This is very controversial since in Islam the final prophet, the seal of the prophets, is Muhammad, the messenger of God." …

Muhammad is an extremist of self-effacement, a writer who burns or destroys many of his own stories and articles and tells me later about the Western and Arab sources he has drawn on, the historical analogies and careful arguments he uses to make his case. For instance, Muhammad wonders if the real question is not what went wrong for the Arabs, but what the historical processes were that went right for the West. I figure that whatever the questions are, at least a few of the answers to the world's problems are somewhere in Muhammad's ashtray.

…Mahfouz is an example of a liberal intellectual who spoke his mind and paid for it over many years….

Although this Mahfouz’s quote does not appear in The Happy Man, it is relevant to understanding and appreciating the story. The following list contains several initial quotes taken from the short story. See how they move the theme. See how they frame the plot and character.

· If this was not happiness, what was it then?

· How did come? How long will it last?

· Tell me, Am Beshir, am I a happy man?

· Do you mean that I must be happy with my excellent position, beautiful apartment, and good health? Is this what you mean? Do you really think that I am a happy man?

· What about you? Don’t you have any worries?

· Do you mean that perfect happiness is impossible?

· How could Beshir, or anyone else, imagine his wonderful state of happiness?

· Then you believe that there should be some balance in my approach to events?

· How could he write about the trolley bus that sank in the Nile when he was intoxicated with all this terrifying happiness?

A good general check to control a story’s message is to closely attend to the first sentence and then the last. How do they balance each other? Is there change? If so, what kind? The Happy Man’s ending is indefinite; it is open to speculation. So is much of life.

The middle of this literary sandwich is a “grumpy” if not quarrelsome person who for no reason becomes happy. In spite of suffering the death of his wife, a son leaving for a foreign land, and encountering a business rival nothing changes his newly assumed mood. There is no ingested chemical or euphoric situation. He just is radically different.

Often abused people live in their abuse, they expect life to be so. This is their normal. The lead character’s normal has changed and it is uncomfortable. He laughs inappropriately, Then he sobs. He is a reasoned person and visits a psychiatrist – an action that is reasoned and courageous. Yes, he is ill. Yes, treatment is necessary….so he can be miserable like so many other people. Now that is normal. That is the quality of being human.