AFRI2007

African Nobel Laureates in Literature

Week 7

Naguib Mahfouz and the Egyptian Revolution

INTRODUCTION

So, this week we turn to the work of our second author, Naguib Mahfouz. Karnak
Café is a deceptively dense novel that plays on the social tension that arose between
the festivities and promises of the July 1952 Revolution and the hammer-blow
suffered by Egyptians following their defeat to Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. As
such, in order for us to understand the kind of issues that Mahfouz raises in this
novel we must first turn to the pages of history…

A BRIEF HISTORY

Since the decline of the pharaohs, Egypt had been occupied and ruled by successive
waves of outsiders – the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians and Arabs.

In the 16th century all of North Africa, apart from Morocco, fell under Ottoman rule
and remained so until the 19th century. In 1811 Mohammed Ali, a high ranking
Albanian army officer serving in the Ottoman Empire ousted the Governor of Egypt
and appointed himself ruler. He remained nominally under Ottoman authority and
was carefully observed by the British, who were determined to strengthen their
position in North Africa. To begin with, Mohammed Ali pursued an independent
domestic and foreign policy.

In 1820, with the encouragement of Britain, Mohammed Ali invaded Sudan in search
of slaves. The Funj sultanate was deposed. Southern Sudan was devastated to such

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an extent that the Dinka – a pastoral tribe of south Sudan – still refer to the invasion
as ‘The time when the earth was spoiled’.

At home, Mohammed Ali launched an extensive modernisation programme. He

expanded the area under cultivation and planted crops specifically for export – such
as long-staple cotton, rice, indigo, and sugarcane. The surplus income from
agricultural production was used for public works, such as irrigation, canals, and
dams, and to finance industrial and military development. As such, Mohammed Ali’s
plans to development Egypt hinged on his ability to strike a monopoly over the
country’s agricultural resources. In practical terms, this meant that peasants were
told what crops to plant, in what quantity, and over what area. The government
bought directly from the peasants and sold directly to the buyer, cutting out the
intermediaries or merchants. With the increased revenue brought about from the
protected economic system that was also put in place, Ali set about developing
Egypt’s industrial sector. The government set up modern factories for weaving
cotton, jute, silk, and wool – workers being drafted into factories to weave on
government looms. Factories for sugar, indigo, glass, and tanning were set up with
the assistance of foreign advisers and imported machinery. The plan was so effective
that these industries employed about four percent of the population by the mid-
nineteenth century, or about 200,000 people.

However, after a series of brief wars against failing Ottoman governments in the
region, he was defeated in Syria by the armies of Britain, France, Austria, Russia, and
Prussia who were all wary of Egypt becoming too powerful in the region and
therefore jeopardising the delicate economic circuit that had developed in the
Middle East. In defeat, Muhammad Ali was obliged to accede to British demands.
According to the Treaty of 1841, Muhammad Ali was stripped of all the land he had
conquered except the Sudan, but was granted the hereditary governorship of Egypt
for life – with succession going to the eldest male in his family. Muhammad Ali was
also compelled to agree to the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1838, which
established ‘free trade’ in Egypt. This meant that Muhammad Ali was forced to
abandon the trade monopolies that had seen the Egyptian economy grow, and

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establish new tariffs that were favourable to imports. Thus, Egypt was unable to
control the flood of cheap manufactured imports from places such as Britain and
France, and so local industry collapsed.

So, British investment grew in Egypt, and North Africa became a focus for Anglo-
French rivalry. Mohammed Ali’s lasting successor was Abbas I. It was under his rule
that the 90 mile long Suez Canal was built with French engineering and Egyptian
labour.

The canal opened up a shipping route from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.
Of course, being a French project, the British government had opposed the project of
the canal from the outset to its completion. Clearly, the Suez Canal compromised the
valuable trade route that had developed around the horn of Africa, and therefore
negated, to some extent, the need for Cape Town in southern Africa. As one of the
diplomatic moves against the canal, Britain formally disapproved of the use of slave
labour on the canal – slaves had been banned throughout Europe and Russia by
1723. Unofficially, the British sent armed Bedouins to start a revolt among the
workers and slow the progress of the project. Through these tactics, involuntary
labour on the Suez Canal was banned, halting the project.

Angered by the British opportunism, Ferdinand de Lesseps – the Frenchman in

charge of the building project – sent a letter to the British government remarking on
the British lack of remorse a few years earlier when forced workers died in similar
conditions building the British railway in Egypt…

In spite of British actions to the contrary, the canal opened in 1869 and instantly
changed the circuit of global capitalism. But in the process of building the canal Egypt
was tipped into bankruptcy, with a debt that grew from £3 million in 1863 to £100
million in 1879. Under this condition of bankruptcy, the British and French had the
excuse they needed to move in and establish dual financial control of Egypt.

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Under the reign of Tewfik, a young and mild-mannered person, resentment of
foreign intervention in Egypt – particularly British intervention – grew among
members of the burgeoning nationalist movement. In June 1882 Alexandria broke
out in riots, leaving several Europeans dead. The British retaliated, the Egyptian army
mounted a rebellion, and by August, Tewfik’s government had collapsed. The British
army secured the Suez Canal and then assumed the role of an army of occupation.
This intervention marked the end of Anglo French co-operation over Egypt.

In 1919 there was a countrywide, non-violent revolution against the British

occupation which ultimately led to Britain's recognition of Egyptian independence in
1922, and the implementation of a new constitution in 1923.

ISRAEL AND EGYPT

Just beyond Egypt’s national border to the north and east, following victory in WWI
(1918), the British were given a mandate to govern Mesopotamia and Palestine.
From this moment on the British went about instigating Lord Balfour’s declaration of
1917 (dated 2 November 1917), that:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine

of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours
to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that
nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political
status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

And so was formalised the immigration of Jews into Palestine – although such
immigration had been going on from the 1880s. Of course, the last major wave of
Jewish immigration to Palestine came after the rise of Nazism in the Europe. This led
to an estimated influx of something like a quarter of a million Jews. The growing
Jewish population in Palestine sparked sporadic attacks by the local Arab-
Palestinians, who felt they were being removed from their hereditary land. So we

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have riots in Palestine in 1920, the Jaffa riots (or ‘Hurani Riots’) of 1921, and riots in
1929. By the time the British army intervened in the 1929 riots, 133 Jews and 116
Arabs had been killed. And so it is that we get the birth of grass-roots anti-British and
anti-Zionist activism in the 1920s and 1930s, populated by mainly young Muslim men
who were frustrated at the seeming ineffectiveness of the Arab elite to deal with the
perceived problem of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Of course, the attacks on the
Jewish population by Arabs led to the development of Jewish underground militias,
the best known of which was probably the Haganah (‘The Defence’). Following a
series of riots through 1936–1939, the British attempted to calm the situation by
trying to cap Jewish immigration to the region. It was a fair successful programme,
but with countries around the world turning away Jewish refugees who were fleeing
the Holocaust in Germany, a clandestine movement known as Aliyah Bet (‘Wave B’)
was organised to bring Jews to Palestine. By the end of World War II (1945), Jews
accounted for 33% of the population of Palestine – accounting for a dramatic
displacement of the Arab-Palestinian population.

On 29 November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly approved a plan – UN

General Assembly Resolution 181 – to resolve the continuing Arab-Jewish conflict by
partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The immediate
aftermath was major civil unrest. The scale of the unrest – some 1,000 recorded
deaths within the following six months – prompted the Americans to retract their
support for the partition. The British, on the other hand, decided that they would
continue to support the annexation of the Arab part of Palestine by Jordan. Because
of this support, David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the state of Israel on
14 May 1948, and became the first Prime Minister of Israel.

The very next day, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – five members of the Arab
League (something that the British had set-up in order to stabilise the region at the
end of WWII) – invaded Israel. In a war that they were expected to win, Egypt and
her allies sunk to a demoralising defeat. To this day, Egyptians refer to the Arab–
Israeli War of 1948 as al-Nakba, or ‘the Catastrophe’.

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In defeat, Egyptians looked for what had gone wrong. In the years following, the
country plummeted into a cauldron of conspiracy, assassination, rioting and press
agitation, where communists, nationalists, royalists, and Muslim extremists
competed for political ascendancy. In rural areas there were gusts of violence as
impoverished peasants rebelled against feudal landowners. Though the king of
Egypt, Farouk, was blissfully unaware of the rumblings in his country, the old order –
the one perceived to be to blame for the loss against Israel – was on the verge of
collapse.

THE 1952 REVOLUTION

In July of 1952 a group of young army officers – known as the Society of Free Officers
– took it upon themselves to restore order among the chaos that had been
unleashed in Egypt. They completed a coup d’état and exiled the playboy King to
Europe.

In any terms, the changes wrought by the army coup in 1952 were dramatic. It not
only brought an end to the 140-year-old Turkish dynasty founded by Farouk’s great-
great-grandfather, Mohammed Ali, it meant that for the first time since the Persian
conquest some 2,500 years ago, Egypt was ruled by native Egyptians.

After six months in power, the army officers – now calling themselves the
Revolutionary Command Council – began to consolidate their own control, laying the
foundations for an army dictatorship, excluding and eliminating all rivals along the
way. They abolished the old constitution and banned political parties, confiscating
their funds and other assets. Hundreds of people linked to the Farouk era were
removed from their positions – people within the military, education, trade unions,
student organisations, the media, professional syndicates, and religious
organisations. Rival groups such as communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and ultra-
nationalist factions were ruthlessly suppressed. In June 1953, the Revolutionary
Command Council formally abolished the monarchy and proclaimed a republic. In an
attempt to mobilise popular support, they launched their own political movement

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called the Liberation Rally. A certain Gamal Abdel Nasser, founder of the Society of
Free Officers, was nominated as the secretary-general. It was he that drew up the
following principles of the revolution:

 The liquidation of colonialism and the Egyptian traitors who supported it

 The liquidation of feudalism
 An end to the domination of power by capital
 The formation of a powerful popular army
 The need to establish social equality
 The need to establish a healthy domestic life

Ultimately, Nasser saw the task of the revolution as ‘winning the country’s
independence’.

So, under the first principle of the revolution, Nasser set about negotiating the
withdrawal of British forces from the Suez Canal. By 1954, both parties had reached
a compromise – the British military would withdraw from the region, but around
3,000 administrative and technical staff were to remain in order to keep things like
depots and workshops running.

This success in effectively kicking the British out of Egypt marks the beginning of
Nasser’s growing belief that Egypt can again become a regional power. When Britain
later asks Egypt to join in a defence pact to oppose the interests of the Soviet Union,
Nasser refuses and instead proposes an Arab defence pact, free from any outside
alliance. While for Nasser this is an assertion of Arab independence, for Britain and
America it seems that Nasser is merely masking anti-Western hostility. In retaliation,
both the Americans and British withhold arms sales to Egypt.

Now, this act of retaliation becomes really significant a few months later when Israeli
forces launch a sudden offensive against Egyptian interests in the Gaza Strip. Nasser
decides that rearming his ill-equipped military forces is his primary concern. Knowing
that he will not be entertained by either the British or the Americans, Nasser turns to

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the Soviet Union to buy his weaponry. This, in turn, infuriates the West, and turns
Nasser, in the perception of the West, into a ‘mastermind’ that wishes to drive out
all Western influence from the region. Needless to say, relations between the West
and Nasser’s Egypt rapidly deteriorate. When the Americans withdraw their
financing of Nasser’s Aswan Dam project – a project that promises to supply power
to Egypt for generations to come – Nasser reacts in a way that nobody predicts. He
effectively nationalises the Suez Canal, and in so doing neglects the fact that it is to
all intents and purposes owned by the British and the French. He declares:

Today, in the name of the people, I am taking over the company [the Suez
Canal Company]. Tonight, our Egyptian canal will be run by Egyptians,
Egyptians!

In line with the third principle of the revolution, Nasser is here seeking to end the
domination of power by capital. Clearly, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal was
designed precisely in order to lessen the influence of Western powers on Egyptian
politics by terminating their relationship with the economics of the canal.

Given that the economic implications of Nasser’s act were so huge, it is unsurprising
that both the British and the French respond by assuming the posture of a war
machine. Even though the Americans caution against military action, the British and
French are bent on destroying Nasser’s regime. On 29 October 1956, in association
with Israeli forces, the French and the British invade Egypt in the hope of securing
the Suez Canal. Nasser’s response was to sink a number of ships in the canal itself
and thereby block the flow of trade and oil to the West for a number of days.
Suffering from a steep rise in the cost and availability of oil in the West, the Israeli,
British, and French armies are pressurised by the American government to withdraw
from Egypt. They do so within a week of the initial invasion. So, although the
invasion had been a military success, politically it was a dramatic defeat.

For many historians, this political defeat at the hands of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser
marks the end of Britain’s imperial role on the African continent. For Nasser, the

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withdrawal of the Israeli, French, and British armies makes him a national hero.
Where King Farouk had failed to beat just the Israeli army with four other countries
by his side, Nasser had beaten Israel, France, and Britain on his own. Because of this,
his continued control over the Suez Canal was regarded as an affirmation of all the
social programmes he had put in place in order to better Egyptian society.

THE SIX-DAY WAR, 1967

Nasser’s popularity, although never fully eroded, waned after Egypt’s defeat to
Israeli forces in June 1967. Even after the ceasefire announced to end the hostilities
of the 1948 war between Israel and the Arab League, Israel initiated and suffered
low-level border skirmishes. However, one such skirmish escalated into what is now
known as the Six-Day War. Fearing an attack by Nasser’s military forces, which had
lined up an estimated 1,000 tanks and 100,000 men along Egypt’s border with Israel
in preparation for an invasion, Israel launched a pre-emptory attack that crippled the
Egyptian war machine. Nasser felt the defeat to be such a humiliation that he offered
his resignation shortly after the conclusion of the war. In his resignation speech – a
resignation that was not accepted – he announced that Israel had received military
help from both the US and Britain, and it was this support that took victory from the
hands of Egypt. He said:

What is now established is that American and British aircraft carriers were
off the shores of the enemy helping his war effort. Also, British aircraft
raided, in broad daylight, positions of the Syrian and Egyptian fronts, in
addition to operations by a number of American aircraft reconnoitering
some of our positions... Indeed, it can be said without exaggeration that the
enemy was operating with an air force three times stronger than his normal
force.

Unfortunately, Nasser was not aware that a telephone conversation he had with King
Hussein of Jordan – one of Egypt’s allies in the 1967 war – had been intercepted by

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the Israeli intelligence services. An article in The New York Times reports the
conversation:

Nasser: ...Shall we include also the United States? Do you know of this,
shall we announce that the U.S. is cooperating with Israel?
Hussein: Hello. I do not hear, the connection is the worst - the line
between you and the palace of the King from which the King is
speaking is bad.
Nasser: Hello, will we say the U.S. and England or just the U.S.?
Hussein: The U.S. and England.
Nasser: Does Britain have aircraft carriers?
Hussein: (Answer unintelligible).
Nasser: Good. King Hussein will make an announcement and I will make
an announcement. Thank you... Will his Majesty make an
announcement on the participation of Americans and the British?
Hussein: (Answer unintelligible).
Nasser: By God, I say that I will make an announcement and you will make
an announcement and we will see to it that the Syrians will make
an announcement that American and British airplanes are taking
part against us from aircraft carriers. We will issue an
announcement, we will stress the matter and we will drive the
point home. (New York Times, 1967: 17)

Not only had Nasser’s new Egypt been defeated in war but he and other Arab
leaders had been exposed as lying about the whole Six-Day War episode. Roger
Allen, the English translator of Mahfouz’s novels, articulates the atmosphere of
confusion that was brought about by this deception of the Egyptian people:

In the flash of an eye, triumphal forward marches and victories in the air
were turned into abject fiascos. What could be the response… to such
arrant and deliberate deception? Where now was that national pride
engendered by the forward progress of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952? …

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 What kind of government could and should now take over the reins of
power? What was to be the role and the place of the individual? And what
was the role of the intellectual… the novelist? (Allen, 2007: 94)

We’ll leave our history of Egypt here – in the era of profound dismay, reflection, and
recriminations that manifested the Egyptian people’s ‘utter despair and barely
suppressed anger’ (Allen, 2007: 94), to borrow a phrase from Roger Allen, at the
events of 1967.

ON MAHFOUZ

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Gamaliya, Cairo in 1911. The family lived in two popular
districts of the town, in al-Jamaliyyah, from where they moved in 1924 to al-
Abbasiya, then a new Cairo suburb. It would be these two neighbourhoods that
would become the scenery for many of his novels. His father, whom Mahfouz
described as having been ‘old-fashioned’, was a civil servant, something that
Mahfouz himself would also become. In his childhood Mahfouz read extensively. His
mother often took him to museums and, of course, Egyptian history later became a
major theme in many of his books.

Even though he was only eighty years old, the 1919 revolution in Egypt had a strong
affect on Mahfouz. From the window he often saw English soldiers firing at the
demonstrators, men and women. ‘You could say,’ he later noted, ‘that the one thing
which most shook the security of my childhood was the 1919 revolution.’ Some
years later, Mahfouz entered the University of Cairo, where he studied philosophy,
graduating in 1934. By 1936, having spent a year working on an M.A., he decided to
become a professional writer. Mahfouz then worked as a journalist at Ar-Risala, and
contributed to Al-Hilal and Al-Ahram, major Egyptian newspapers.

Even though Mahfouz continued to write articles and short stories, producing over
80 published pieces, he entered the civil service in 1939. From 1939 until 1954, he
was a civil servant at the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and then was appointed director

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of the Foundation for Support of the Cinema, the State Cinema Organization. In
1969-71 he was a consultant for cinema affairs to the Ministry of Culture.

Perhaps Mahfouz’s best-known work was the mammoth The Cairo Trilogy, which he
completed just before the July Revolution in 1952. The novels took their titles from
the street names – Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street – that Mahfouz
knew so well from his childhood. Set in the parts of Cairo where he grew up, the
novels depict the life of the patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family
over three generations in Cairo from World War One to the 1950s. The rich texture
of the novels allowed critics to connect his writing with that of the ‘Great’ European
writers – Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy. Obviously exhausted
by the effort of producing The Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz did not write anything else
until 1959.

But in 1959 he produced a novel that challenged the perceptions and beliefs of its
readership. The Children of Gebelaawi (1959) portrayed the patriarch Gebelaawi and
his children, average Egyptians living the lives of Cain and Abel, Moses, Jesus, and
Mohammed. The book was banned throughout the Arab world – except in Lebanon
– because of the suggestion that all of humanity was moving away from God even
though the rhetoric and practices of religion claimed to draw the spiritual closer to
the human. In addition, the invitation to compare Egypt’s leader, Nasser, with
Gebelaawi could not be missed.

For once, Mahfouz’s subtle political critique had not gone unnoticed. Indeed, that
Mahfouz is erroneously regarded as a non-political writer becomes the point of
Hosam Aboul-Ela’s critique of ‘de-contextualised’ readings of Mahfouz’s oeuvre.
Aboul-Ela writes:

… the easiest reading of his work for a novice is a radically decontextualized

one. The early Pharaonic Mahfouz is a romanticist, and not a Nationalist
author of political allegory. The social realist Mahfouz of the forties and
fifties is ‘an Egyptian Dickens or Balzac’ (in the fatuous formulation that

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 pervaded post-Nobel reviews) and not a cataloguer of an emerging corrupt
comprador class growing out of British colonialism. The ‘existential realist’
Mahfouz of the Nasser era… is an eastern mystic much more than a writer
whose political allegories become increasingly elusive as he feels the
pressure of Nasserist surveillance. And the postmodern Mahfouz of The Day
the Leader Died, The Journey of Ibn Fatouma, and The Nights of a Thousand
Nights is an aging writer of diminishing skills who has lapsed into political
rhetoric, cinematic episodism, and traditionalist obscurantism. (Aboul-Ela,
2004: 341-342).

For Aboul-Ela, Mahfouz is a pointedly political writer. He has, from his earliest work,
been drawn to critiquing the political situation of Egypt.

Nevertheless, because Mahfouz was quiet on the issue of politics beyond the pages
of his novels, and because those same novels seemed to champion the idea of Egypt
from Antiquity to the present day, the State managed to cast him as a supporter of
the nation state. He was undoubtedly a massive figure in the cultural life of not only
Egypt but of all Arab nations. Therefore, when he was seen at cultural events
organised by the State, when his image was used by the State to endorse its policies,
it was seen as Mahfouz giving his tacit support to the incumbent regime.

It was because he was perceived as a figurehead of the old order, and of the Hosni
Mubarak regime, that a group fervently opposed to Mubarak launched an
assassination attempt on Mahfouz on October 14, 1994. The 83-year-old Mahfouz
was stabbed in the neck. As Aboul-Ela shows, the first comment in the Egyptian press
about the attack appeared the previous day in Al Akhbar, Egypt’s second largest
newspaper. Again, the urgency was to link Mahfouz to the Egyptian order, and by
extension the Mubarak regime:

Whoever has tried to strike down Naguib Mahfouz, tried to smash one of
Egypt’s pyramids. For Naguib Mahfouz was not an individual, but rather one
of the symbols of Egypt. He was a sun that lit up this country, a flag elevated

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 over its flags, a great professor among its professors… He was not just an
individual, but rather a nation. He was a generation and a renaissance that
raised our heads collectively… For this wound in the neck of Naguib
Mahfouz is the blood of us all, and this wound will abide in our hearts for all
time… The blade that plunged into Naguib Mahfouz’s neck will not kill him,
for this type of great man does not die even if we bury him in the dirt.
Naguib will live as long as the Arabic language lives, as long as we have
something called Arabic literature. (Amin, 1994: 14)

Indeed, Mahfouz did not die from this wound. He lived into his ninety-sixth year,
receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. During his writing career, Mahfouz
produced some 40 novels and short story collections, 30 screenplays, and many
plays.

KARNAK CAFÉ

So, we finally get to our novel! As you will see, Karnak Café is set during the purges
of society brought about by Nasser’s 1952 revolution. But, importantly, it is written
after Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war. What we have, then, is a novel that is the
product of both events. As such, it is a novel that cautions against the damaging
excesses of revolutionary politics at a time when Egypt once again has the potential
to plunge into such revolutionary excesses. Such is the excess made clear in the final
chapter of the novel. Discussing how to recover from Egypt’s failure in the Six-Day
war with Israel, the members of Karnak Café – the café that obviously stands as a
metonym of wider Egyptian society – argue amongst themselves:

‘Start on the inside, that’s what we have to do.’

‘Fine! Religion then. Religion’s everything.’
‘No! Communism’s the answer.’
‘No! Democracy is what we need.’
‘Responsibility should be taken away from the Arabs altogether.’
‘Freedom…Freedom!’

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 ‘Socialism.’
‘Let’s call it democratic socialism.’
‘Let’s start off with war. We’ll have time for democratic reforms later.’
(Mahfouz, 1974: 83)

As the narrator observes, the sheer amount of positions from which one can respond
to Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war has the potential to go ‘on and … on, ad infinitum’
(Mahfouz, 1974: 83). In simple terms, Mahfouz saw the way in which (even recent)
history was repeating itself. Just as the Revolution of 1952 had brought about a
series of purges, so 1967 threatened to do the same – so Mahfouz’s reminds his
readers of the trauma of Nasser’s regime.

As early as page nine of the novel, the reader is exposed to the way in which the
1952 Revolution was received by most people of Cairo. After hearing the matriarch
of the café, Qurunfula exclaim, ‘Thank God who has brought us the revolution!’ (9),
the reader is told:

Both Arif Sulayman, the wine-steward, and Zayn al-Abidin, the public
relations director, were fervent admirers of the revolution as well, each of
them in their own particular way and for his own purposes. As far as the old
men were concerned, they too were equally enthusiastic for the
revolution… The young folk used to gather in a corner… As far as they were
concerned, history began with the 1952 Revolution.’ (9)

Apart from the nuanced note of caution offered by the older men that ‘not
everything in the past was bad’ (9), and the belief that extreme leftists and extremist
Muslims worked against Nasser’s regime, everyone seems to be in full agreement
that the Revolution was a glorious thing.

But it is only a few pages later that we realise that something is amiss in this society.

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All of the youngsters that usually gather in the café are simply absent. A couple of
the older patrons are able to make the logical link between Nasser’s purge of
oppositional voices and the missing youngsters. While Taha al-Gharib explains that
there have been widespread arrests, Muhammed Bahgat speculates that ‘“It’s quite
clear what’s happened… They decided to put all the guilty ones in prison, so they’ve
dragged all the friends in too. That way the investigation will be complete”’ (16).
What is being explained is the way in which Nasser’s Revolutionary State is casting a
dragnet over the whole of Egyptian society in order to find and capture ‘anti-
revolutionary’ reactionaries. Now, given that many innocent people are necessarily
caught in this dragnet thrown over the people of Egypt, clearly the idea of this
process cannot only be to capture ‘traitors to the cause’. If it were, it would be the
most gross and inefficient way of doing so. There must be a secondary significance.
And Isma’il’s conversation with the narrator gives us a good understanding of what
that secondary significance might be. He recounts the moment he is dragged away in
the middle of the night by the secret police. He says:

I felt a deathly terror. I started wondering what the charge might be. I
wasn’t a Communist, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, or a feudalist. I
had never uttered a single word to undermine the honour of that historical
period which I had come to consider my own ever since I had reached the
age of awareness. (46)

What we have here is a testament to the fear, to the terror that is struck into the
heart of the innocent people that the State’s dragnet ensnared. It is this fear and
terror that the State hopes will crystallise into a rigid sense of intimidation that will
see each citizen continue to recount the beliefs and ideology of the State.

The idea of such intimidation has clearly penetrated Egyptian consciousness and is
only propagated by the kind of conversation that we are privy to in Qurunfula’s café.
Considering what the youngsters must be going through after being caught in the
State’s dragnet, Qurunfula and those drinking in her café announce:

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 ‘Imprisonment is really scary.’
‘The things you hear about what’s being done to prisoners are even more
scary.’
‘Rumours like those are enough to make your stomach churn.’
‘There’s no judicial hearing and no defense.’
‘There’s no legal code in the first place!’ (16)

Clearly, the idea of being arrested is not a pleasant one; and so one could rightly
assume that it is not an experience that one would wish to repeat. Because of this,
the State assumes that its citizens would rather modify their behaviour than risk
further arrests. Under such conditions, Egyptians would simply ‘choose’ not to
engage in any kind of action that could be interpreted as ‘anti-revolutionary’ or even
become, or continue being, friends with someone who was known to have contrary
political views to the State. No doubt, this is the root to Zaynab’s question to Isma’il,
whether it would be a good idea ‘for us to keep ourselves for a while and avoid
meeting friends and other groups’ (69). This is precise the kind of question that the
State wishes its citizens to ask. In short, the State hopes that by operating this kind of
dragnet it can intimidate innocent people into modifying their own behaviour. Of
course, this in turn makes the general public more placid, more malleable, and in
short, more controllable. As such, Isma’il’s refusal to do so is an ominous signal of
things to come.

But, interestingly, what this brief conversation in Qurunfula’s café does expose is the
way in which Nasser’s regime is willing to operate beyond its own law in order to
‘defend’ its innocent citizens from the communist ideology of the extreme left and
the fascist doctrine of extremist Muslims. Indeed, Zaynab corroborates this idea
when she tells the narrator after her release from incarceration that ‘We had now
discovered the existence of a terrifying force operating completely outside the
dictates of law and human values’ (69). In acting ‘outside of the dictates of law and
human values’, the State can only lose any legitimacy it once claimed to govern
society justly. In fact, Zaynab’s and Isma’il’s conversations with the narrator show
how the State organises itself, and operates, in just the same way as a terrorist cell.

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First, the State positions itself as an antagonist to the people, as something that is
separate from the people it claims to govern; and, second, it creates a secret police
force that operates beyond the reach of law. It is this secret police force that
terrorises the people and ultimately stands as testament to the failure of Nasser to
create a democratic State – which, after all, was one of the stated aims of his coup.

Therefore, even though the narrator attempts to rationalise such underhand

movements of the State as the pains that must be suffered in order to give birth to a
model ‘scientific, socialist, and industrial nation’ (18), he realises that he is merely
telling himself a fiction. It is clear that such a nation cannot be born from the
unethical practices of Nasser’s regime since the narrator says to himself, ‘I had the
sense that, by applying such logic, I could even manage to convince myself that
death itself had its own particular requirements and benefits’ (18). The obvious
sentiment is that just as death has no benefit to the dead, the subterranean and
secret dealings of Nasser’s State have no benefit to the citizen.

It is just such a feeling of death that creeps across the minds of the young students
as they are deviously levered into a position where they must become agents of the
(secret) State – spying on their friends and families, and reporting all anti-
revolutionary activity. The reader is made privy to the thoughts of Isma’il as he
emerged as an informer after his second spell of incarceration:

However hard he struggled with himself to conceptualise his new job in

terms of his strong ties to the revolution, he always ended up feeling utterly
appalled at what he was doing. (56)

In the end, Mahfouz’s point could not have been sharper – Nasser’s revolutionary
State limited the freedom of the very people it was put in place to liberate, and in a
jerk of paranoia, turned in on itself in order to hunt down all those it believed to
have the potential to destabilise it. Why paranoia? Well, because any revolutionary
State is itself born from a revolutionary environment. Logically, this means that any
society that has actually produced a revolution is necessarily in a condition that

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could produce any number of revolutionary groups. Applied to Egypt, this means
that the Society of Free Officers is simply one revolutionary group amongst many
others. Clearly, if such a group aims to hold on to power then they must sterilise
society of the ability to produce other revolutionary groups. The result of this is that
the State tries literally to craft a distinct zone of difference between the ‘selfsame’
(the revolutionary State and its ideology) and all ‘others’ (those who hold other
political/ideological positions). Of course, the problem is that simple distinctions like
this rarely exist. Nevertheless, this is exactly the task that the sadistic secret police
interrogator Khalid Safwan is charged with. As a result of State paranoia, Safwan
must expose the anti-revolutionary agendas of all who come before him – whether
they are real or manufactured confessions.

LAST THOUGHTS

This idea of a State that turns in on itself is examined fully in the works of French
thinkers Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze. For example, Paul Virilio claims that a
paranoid State, such as the one we see described in Mahfouz’s novel, must unleash
an ‘assassin’ in order to counter destabilising forces (Virilio, 1975: 49). Khalid Safwan
would be just such an assassin. It is his job to instruct in the people a set of
limitations and inhibitions that have the effect of closing off all exchange.
Importantly, in this project of destroying all kinds of exchange between people (be
that informational, financial, and so on) the assassin is always unable to make a
distinction between faithful and rebelling subjects. Because of this inability the State
always undermines itself, which is to say, brings about its own destruction. The
question is whether this is the root of Khalid Safwan’s enigmatic statement at the
conclusion of the novel, or whether there is some other human claim to his story:

We’re all of us simultaneously criminals and victims. (85)

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WORKS CITED

Aboul-Ela, Hosam (2004). ‘The Writer Becomes Text: Naguib Mahfouz and State
Nationalism in Egypt’. Biography. 27.2 (Spring): 339-356.

Allen, Roger (2007). ‘Translator’s Afterword’ in Naguib Mahfouz Karnak Café. Trans.
Roger Allen. New York: Anchor Books.

Amin, Mustafa (1994). ‘Fikrah’. Al Akhbar. October, 16.

Clastres, Pierre (1977). Society against the State. trans. Robert Hurley. New York:
Urisen.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1999). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press.

Mahfouz Naguib (1974). Karnak Café. Trans. Roger Allen. New York: Anchor Books
[2007].

--- ‘Israelis Say Tape Shows Nasser Fabricated “Plot”’. The New York Times. June 9,
1967 (Friday).

Virilio, Paul (1986). Speed and Politics. trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York:
Semiotext[e].

Virilio, Paul (1975). L’insécuritié du territoire. Paris: Stock.

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