Thirty years ago, on Oct. 14, 1994, the celebrated Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck as he was sitting in a friend’s car on the western bank of the Nile, on his way to his weekly meeting in a cafe in downtown Cairo. Mahfouz, then 82 years old, miraculously survived the assassination attempt but was rendered almost completely unable to write for the rest of his life. The perpetrator of the attack was a member of the militant Islamist movement al-Gamaa al-Islamiyah, which was heavily involved at the time in violence across Egypt aimed at upsetting the political order of the country. In targeting the prominent writer, the extremist attacker had acted upon the incitement of the radical cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who was then the spiritual leader of al-Gamaa.
A few years prior, in 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued his infamous fatwa calling for the murder of the British novelist Salman Rushdie. Abdel-Rahman took the opportunity to revive an old religious controversy around one of Mahfouz’s most famous novels, “Children of the Alley” (also published as “Children of Gebelawi”). Commenting on Khomeini’s fatwa, the Blind Sheikh said that Mahfouz was an apostate like Rushdie, adding that, had Mahfouz been killed 30 years earlier, Rushdie would not have dared to write his novel, “The Satanic Verses.” While not technically a fatwa, Abdel-Rahman’s words were interpreted by his acolytes as an order that Mahfouz should be killed.
“Children of the Alley” first appeared in serialized form in the influential Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 1959, decades before the assassination attempt on Mahfouz. Since its first appearance, it has been engulfed in religious disputes around its allegedly blasphemous content. It was only published in book form in Egypt after Mahfouz’s death in 2006.
Revisiting the troubled history of the book on the 30th anniversary of the attempt on Mahfouz’s life, however, it appears that the religious controversy at the time of “Children of the Alley’s” initial publication was in fact a convenient smokescreen for the military regime of Egypt’s then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Allowing the controversy to brew and the religious establishment to obstruct the novel’s publication was a way for the Nasser regime to avoid dealing with the political argument at the heart of the novel — a rather stark critique of the repressive drift of military rule since the 1952 coup — without openly attacking a writer who had already gained considerable fame and was much beloved by Nasser himself.
The novel is built around a series of allegorical novellas alluding to the three Abrahamic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All the events in the novel revolve around the estate of Gebelawi, an aloof and secluded patriarch with a godlike aura whose age transcends the limits of nature. In an act reminiscent of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Gebelawi casts his progeny away from his property, condemning his children to a life of suffering under the brutality of despotic rulers and thugs.
The plight of the alley is only temporarily assuaged by the emergence, across generations, of prophetic figures symbolically modeled on Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, all rendered by the poetic pen of Mahfouz with very human traits. All the prophets share a profound spiritual connection to Gebelawi, and their anointment by Gebelawi himself allows them to provide guidance to the children of the alley and temporarily restore justice in the administration of the estate. However, with the passing of time, the preachings of the prophets become hardened into repressive dogmas, exploited by new rulers and thugs, further condemning the citizens of the alley to a life of humiliation and dispossession. In the last part of the novel, science replaces the three religious canons as the orthodoxy of the modern age. The hero embodying modern rationality commits the sacrilegious act of murdering Gebelawi but, just like all of his predecessors, he is also doomed to fail in his quest to liberate the alley from its suffering.
There were various themes and elements in the novel that could have irked the Egyptian religious establishment of the late 1950s: the “murder of God,” the implication that Islam is just one of many religious doctrines that ultimately fail to liberate mankind from its suffering, and the scene in which the literary alter ego of the Prophet Muhammad, renamed Qasim in the novel, is seen smoking a hashish-laced pipe. As recounted in extensive detail by Mohamed Shoair in “The Story of the Banned Book: Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘Children of the Alley’” (2022), the novel did indeed provoke the outrage of various religious figures of the era, some affiliated with Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, one of the most prominent institutions for Islamic learning in the world.
Shoair, however, mentions two interviews in which Mahfouz claimed that the row around “Children of the Alley” had actually been started by other writers. In recounting the incident, Shoair seems to suggest the possibility that the poet Saleh Gawdat, for personal or political reasons, might have authored a letter under a pseudonym to accuse the novel of blasphemy, thus bringing it to the attention of Al-Azhar’s clerics. While we may never know who was the first to raise the allegation of blasphemy against Mahfouz, many critics have agreed throughout the complicated history of “Children of the Alley” that the religious controversy has overshadowed the political core of the novel, which, 65 years later, still stands as a powerful indictment of all oppressive regimes.
The novel was written by Mahfouz after a long hiatus. His earlier, realist phase culminated in the widely praised “Cairo Trilogy.” After rising to literary fame, he was left disoriented by the 1952 coup that toppled Egypt’s monarchy but also swept away the liberalism and intellectual fervor of the 1920s and ‘30s. Mahfouz’s disorientation took the form of a five-year break between the trilogy and “Children of the Alley,” during which he even contemplated quitting writing. He returned to his art with a distinctly different style, writing his most political work yet.
The political content of the novel did not go unnoticed by the editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal. A close associate of Nasser’s, Heikal “grasped the message of the novel and its enormous significance,” he told Shoair. After consulting with Nasser, Heikal went ahead with the work’s publication in serialized form, despite the mounting controversy in religious circles.
In my reading, as in that of many other critics mentioned in Shoair’s book, “Children of the Alley” stands more as a political testament to Mahfouz’s belief in egalitarian politics and human emancipation than as a literary representation of religious themes. In Mahfouz’s fascinating yet disillusioned account, neither religious doctrines nor technological developments can ultimately succeed at lifting the alley — a microcosm of Egypt, if not of all humanity — from its plight. Gebelawi’s luxurious and impregnable mansion, outside of which live masses of dispossessed and disenfranchised “children,” remains unscathed and dominant. The lessons from past generations and the teachings of past prophets seem to have been forgotten: “Forgetfulness indeed is the plague of our alley” is the refrain that punctuates each new part of the novel.
Both in Egypt and abroad, the novel is primarily known for the accusations of blasphemy and the religious controversy it sparked. Mahfouz is often associated with Rushdie as an example of a secular writer targeted by religious extremists. Yet this might be just the most sensational aspect of the story. In reality, the predicament of “Children of the Alley” exemplifies how a largely secular authoritarian regime was able to exploit a religious controversy to stifle the voice of a highly influential writer who was expressing his discontent with the political situation of Egypt under Nasser’s rule.
Mahfouz himself openly espoused this interpretation. In 2001, an Egyptian literary magazine quoted him as saying that “‘Children of the Alley’ is above all a political work, and the people I had in mind understood its meaning. They knew whom I meant by ‘the thugs,’ so I think they were probably behind the religious turn things took.” Mahfouz was well aware of the fact that the religious controversy had created a general misunderstanding about the deeper message of the novel, since he had, on several occasions, stated that while writing the novel he was moved by questions about political authority and how to challenge it. Speaking to a Kuwaiti newspaper in 1975, he lamented that “his message had not been understood,” explaining that the true motivation for writing the novel came from “experiencing a split between himself and society” after painfully observing post-1952 Egypt being plagued by “disquieting contradictions, mistakes … especially in the form of tortures and imprisonment” and seeing how “some people were benefiting enormously from the revolution, until they’d become better off than the feudalists” whose land had been expropriated by Nasser.
Through the novel, Mahfouz was asking the new military rulers: “Whose side are you on? The thugs or the prophets?” Such a blunt question was all the more problematic in Egypt in the late 1950s, when there was a lot of excitement around the military regime, especially after the successful nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. Amid all the fanfare, Mahfouz wrote a novel, full of evocative yet quite clear allusions to the political situation of the time, which suggested that, after all, it was “the same old alley, and the same old thugs.”
“Children of the Alley” also marks the first and most significant moment in a series of other episodes that put Mahfouz in the crosshairs of the regime because of his critical stance. The novel inaugurated a period of literary experimentation that lasted throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s, visible in novels such as “Autumn Quail,” “The Thief and the Dogs” and “Adrift on the Nile,” in which frustration and disaffection with the new authoritarian political order threads through various themes of disorientation, resentment and nihilist cynicism. It was during this period that Mahfouz’s novels were subjected to cuts by government censors and he was on the verge of being arrested himself, saved only by the personal intervention of Nasser.
The fallout from the religious controversy around “Children of the Alley,” compounded by tensions with the political and intellectual establishment of his era, continued to haunt Mahfouz even after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Accusations of apostasy were renewed in radical religious circles after the announcement of the prize, while Mahfouz was also targeted by various Arab countries for his support of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and for his favorable view of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In “The Story of the Banned Book,” Shoair mentions a curious episode in which a Palestine Liberation Organization officer allegedly offered Mahfouz nearly half a million dollars — three times as much as the value of the Nobel Prize — to renounce the prestigious award on the grounds of the supposedly pro-Israel sympathies of the awarding committee.
Despite his origins in a traditional religious family, Mahfouz’s political ethos was a product of his intellectual upbringing in a fairly liberal era — that of Egyptian nationalism and the struggle for independence from the British occupation — as well as of his mentorship by the secularist and progressive thinker Salama Moussa. While respecting the religious authorities in Egypt, Mahfouz held the strong belief that a modern state should not align with any religion or creed. Such a secular view of society and politics was bound to bring Mahfouz into a collision course with the most radical fringes of the religious establishment. This happened despite the fact, quite ironic in hindsight, that one of the first people to recognize the literary talents of Mahfouz was none other than Sayyid Qutb, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood ideologue and author of a seminal book on jihadism, who for a period had been a good friend of the writer.
The attempted assassination of Mahfouz in 1994 is a largely forgotten episode that was recently brought back to memory by the attempted murder of Rushdie in 2022. It encapsulates the problematic role of radical Islam in contemporary Egypt and its complex relationship with the country’s military rule, which over the decades has at times repressed Islamism and at others encouraged it. Yet, more importantly from a contemporary perspective, the episode also sheds light on Mahfouz’s democratic and egalitarian politics, which have been all but forsaken today under the autocratic government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Just as in the literary universe of “Children of the Alley,” the real Egypt of today also seems to have forgotten past lessons and teachings, most recently those of the 2011 revolution that toppled the decrepit regime of Hosni Mubarak. Once more, the alley seems to have been subjugated by the dogmas of an oppressive rule. The Gebelawi mansion, in all its forbidding might, indeed appears as the blueprint for the kind of society and architecture that is booming in el-Sisi’s Egypt, epitomized by the sprawling and secluded New Administrative Capital and by the plethora of upscale residential compounds and gated developments that are transforming the landscape of Cairo.
Despite being 65 years old, the novel is thus still an exceptionally clear prism through which one can understand Egypt’s structural political and social issues, as well as the current predicament of the country. The government has built its legitimacy by stamping out religious fundamentalism, only to create a system of oppression that has significantly worsened the precarious conditions that most Egyptians were already enduring under previous regimes.
Mahfouz wrote “Children of the Alley” in a moment of disillusionment in his trajectory as a writer and public intellectual, but he concludes the novel with an uplifting, empowering vision: “We shall see the end of tyranny and the dawn of miracles.” A little over a decade ago, the forgetfulness and oblivious attitude toward the plight of Egypt’s destitute masses made “the alley” erupt and topple a regime, which was nothing short of a miracle. While such a historic upheaval has since then been nearly expunged from the forgetful collective memory, its underlying causes are still very much present, as are also, potentially, the seeds for a future uprising. Perhaps, just as it took nearly 50 years for “Children of the Alley” to be published in Egypt, an even longer period of time will be needed for its message to finally appear in all of its liberating force and clarity.
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