Khan Al-Khalili

2

The taamiya was the best he had ever tasted; he praised it to the heavens. His father liked it too, and turned his praises into an encomium on the new quarter where they were now living.

“You know absolutely nothing about the al-Husayn quarter,” he said, warming to his subject. “It’s not only the tastiest taamiya and ful mudammis, but kebab, goat meat, trotters, and sheep’s head as well. You won’t find tea or coffee like it anywhere else. Here it’s always daytime, and life goes on day and night. Al-Husayn, the son of the Prophet’s own daughter, is here; he makes for a good neighbor and protector!”

After dinner, Ahmad went back to his room and threw himself down on the bed, hoping to get a bit of rest. By this time he had decided that the move to the new quarter had as many plusses to it as minuses. He looked round the room again, and his eyes fell on the piles of books beside the desk that still needed to be organized. He stared at them, his thoughts a mixture of pleasure and contempt. There they were, his beloved books, all of them in Arabic. He had had so much trouble learning English — and not very well — that he had been forced to neglect his Arabic books; by now he had almost forgotten about them. More than a third of them were school textbooks on geography, history, math, and science. Quite a few were reference books on law, and an equal number consisted of works by al-Manfaluti, al-Muwaylihi, Shawqi, Hafiz, and Mutran. There were also some yellowing tomes from al-Azhar on religion and logic, all of which still confounded him; he had come to regard them as symbols of that most difficult of subjects whose truths very few people manage to penetrate. There were also a few works by contemporary writers, the acquisition of which he regarded as an act of courtesy. So all these were his beloved books; truth to tell, they were his entire life. He was a voracious reader. For the past twenty years, from 1921, when he graduated from high school, until now in 1941, he had devoted himself to reading books. It consumed his life inside and out and served as the focus for all his feelings, whims, and aspirations. However, from the outset, his reading activities had had their own particular characteristics, and they had stayed with him for all twenty years. All his readings were general; there was no specialization or depth involved. While there may have been a certain inclination toward classical learning, it was both cursory and disorganized. The reason for this lack of focus may well have been that he had been compelled to abandon his studies after his high-school graduation, so he had never had any kind of planned opportunity to specialize.

This decision had had profound ramifications for Ahmad’s life, both socially and psychologically, and they had clung to him ever since. The major reason for the decision was that his father had been pensioned off before he had even reached the age of forty. As a result of sheer negligence he had failed to perform his administrative obligations adequately; what made it worse was that he had then adopted a supercilious attitude toward the civil service investigators who were examining his case. Because of his father’s behavior, Ahmad had been forced to terminate his studies and take a minor administrative post in order to provide for his shattered family and support his two younger brothers. One brother had died, and the other had taken a job as a minor employee in Bank Misr. Ahmad himself had been an excellent and ambitious student with broad aspirations. At first he had wanted to study law, by following his great idol, Saad Zaghlul, by completing a legal degree, but his father’s dismissal had swept all that away. The decision to abandon his studies had been a severe blow to his hopes. At first it sent him reeling, and he was overwhelmed by a violent, almost insane fury that completely destroyed his personality and filled him with a sense of bitter remorse. To him it was obvious that he was a martyr to injustice, a genius consigned early to the grave, a victim of malicious fate. Thereafter, he was forever ruing his martyred genius and invoking its memories, whether or not the occasion demanded it. He kept on complaining about what fate had wrought and enumerating its crimes against him to such an extent that the routine turned into a sickly obsession. His colleagues inured themselves to listening to him repeating the same things over and over again.

“If only I’d been able to complete my studies,” he’d say in his shaky voice, “needless to say, I would have done well. And then just think where I’d be now. I’d be a real somebody!”

“I’m in my forties now,” he’d complain in a resentful tone. “If things had gone the way they were supposed to and cruel fate had not stood in my way, just imagine what I’d be doing. I’d be a middle-aged lawyer, someone whose services to the legal profession would have been widely acknowledged for almost twenty years. What else could have been expected over a period of twenty years for someone as serious and dedicated as me?”

“We’ve been robbed of the most fruitful era in Egypt’s history,” he would go on regretfully, “one where considerations of age and inherited wealth have been thrust aside and the younger generation has leapt forward to occupy ministerial positions.”

He kept a relentlessly close watch on the careers of some of his more distinguished school contemporaries who had managed to continue their studies. Quite frequently he would look up from reading the newspaper and say something like, “Do you know this person they keep writing about?” he would ask incredulously. “He was at school with me, grade after grade. He was a very poor student; he never managed to beat me at anything.”

“Good heavens!” he would scoff. “The man’s an undersecretary of state! That scruffy boy who could never remember anything he was told? What’s happening to the world?”

He would then go on and talk about what an exceptional student he himself had been at school and what a promising career his teachers had predicted for him. All these sentiments only managed to have negative effects on his temperament; he became obstreperous, bad tempered, and arrogant, always ready to wax hyperbolic about his talents. His life was thus turned into a continuing succession of lies and sheer misery. This alleged genius thereafter found himself stuck in the eighth administrative level in the archives department at the Ministry of Works, but he adamantly refused to settle down and accept things. Never giving up, he kept searching for ways to rid himself of his chains and beat a path to freedom, glory, and authority. Many avenues were tried, and one attempt followed another. His first idea was to undertake home study for a law degree, that being the field he had aspired to from the start. He had to get a degree because practicing law was no longer the kind of endeavor it had been in the old days of Saad Zaghlul and al-Balbawi, so he started collecting books on law and borrowing reports, then spent an entire year studying before presenting himself for the examinations. He failed in two subjects. This was a savage blow to his pride, and he felt acutely embarrassed when dealing with all those people who had been assiduously following the tales of his exceptional talents. He started using his job in the ministry as an excuse for his failure and pretended he had an illness that made it impossible for him to continue his studies. In fact, he kept up this pretense of an illness even afterward as a precautionary measure against further embarrassment. He was scared to try the exam again and decided to avoid subjecting his talent to more obvious public experiments, where people could easily gauge the results.

He now decided to try free thinking instead and immediately made his colleagues aware of the contempt he felt for exams and degrees. He managed to convince himself that the reason for his failure in the exam had nothing to do with any failings or inadequacy on his part, but was simply due to the fact that he had not had enough time to prepare for it. With that in mind he abandoned his studies so he could discover the most natural outlet for his unquestioned (and martyred) genius. Thus he had managed to waste a year and acquire a sizeable quantity of law books for his library. Now he decided to concentrate on science, but could not make up his mind between more theoretical research areas and practical discoveries; which of the two should he choose? It was the latter area that he turned his back on, the pretext being that the country was completely devoid of factories and laboratories, which is where experiments were conducted and creative inspiration flourished. Instead he pinned his hopes on theoretical science. His dearest wish was one day to discover a theory that would transform the horizons of modern science; as a result he would find himself elevated to the eternal heights of fame and glory alongside Newton and Einstein. Once again ambition caught hold, and he started buying as many texts on physics and chemistry as he could lay his hands on. He read them all avidly, but after a solid year of study he found himself exactly where he had started, not having advanced a single step toward his ultimate goal. He now convinced himself that real involvement in scientific research demanded preparatory studies of the kind that he had never had.

At this point he panicked again, as was often the case. He gave up theoretical science as a field of study; such was his desperation, he managed to convince himself that theoretical research was no different from more applied investigations in its need for laboratories and research institutes. The intellectual atmosphere in Egypt in general was not yet ready for science. This time he felt no need to justify his failure to anyone. By now he had learned to keep his goals hidden from everyone, but even so that did not stop him telling his colleagues and friends that he was devoting all his spare time to knowledge and learning. The untrammelled domain of knowledge, something that far outclassed school-based learning and government-issued diplomas, and in-depth reading that would turn its practitioner into a scholar of enormous profundity.

Another year was squandered while his library acquired yet another category of scientific works. After a while he paused in his endeavors. “Precisely what is it,” he wondered in an exhausted quandary, “that my particular talents are cut out for?” It was obvious enough that he himself did not know the answer as yet; if he had, he could have saved himself some time — it would have been much better if he had — rather than wasting his energies to no effect.

What really interested him? By now he was finished with both law and science, but they were the be-all and end-all of everything. Even so, there was something else that was just as worthwhile and wonderful. How he adored the works of the poet Shawqi and the essayist al-Manfaluti; what bewitching eloquence in their writing! Could his real calling be literature? What a great mode of art it was, one that did not require a degree to practice it nor school learning either. Reading, that was all that was involved; reading poets like Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim, and Mutran, just as he had done before. His library soon welcomed some new additions in the form of poetry and prose anthologies that he devoured with such enthusiasm that it aggravated him. During his literary excursions he came across Ibn Khaldun’s quote: “We have heard from our revered shaykhs in literary salons that there are four major sourceworks when it comes to literature studies. They are: The Complete Work by al-Mubarrad, The Scribe’s Manual by Ibn Qutayba, The Book of Eloquence and Clear Expression by al-Jahiz, and The Book of Anecdotes by al-Qali from Baghdad. All other sources apart from these four are derivative.” He let out a sigh of satisfaction; it was as if he had stumbled on a treasure and had acquired the four pillars of literature. With that he read them all with his characteristic zeal and speed. When he had finished, he asked himself — with a good deal of relish — whether he had now become a literature scholar. Grabbing a pen he decided to test his resolve by writing something. The piece he wrote was called “On the Banks of the Nile,” and into it he poured his artistry and inspiration. When it was finished, he sent it by mail to a journal and started picturing the admiration and amazement with which readers would greet it once it had been published. This would be the first stage on the path of glory and fame. For him that would be enough, since the only reward he was looking for was literary recognition. The journal was duly published, and he thumbed through it looking for his article, but it was not there. He began to lose heart, and his high hopes took an awkward tumble. But he did not give up hope and told himself he had to wait another week. Weeks went by, and still the article did not appear. Here he was, someone who had read the four principal pillars of Arabic literature from which all other sources are considered to be derived. According to Ibn Khaldun that made him a literature scholar — Ibn Khaldun, no less! So how could it be that his article had not been published? Was it because the author was unknown, or he had not gone through an intermediary? Was it possible they couldn’t understand his argument? For a short while he thought he might go to the journal in person and find out what had happened, but he soon decided he could not; his innate diffidence was always there as a roadblock.

He now decided to put the shock of the first rejection behind him and wrote a second article about justice. He had no more luck with it than he did with the first one. He wrote a third piece entitled “Poverty’s Crime Against Talent,” but it fared no better than its two predecessors. When that happened, he set about writing with all the dogged stubbornness of someone who sees it as his final hope, all his previous efforts having been destroyed on the frozen rocks of cruel neglect. He rewrote most of them and sent them out to a number of different journals. However, none of them showed any mercy toward his tortured aspirations or seemed ready to rescue him from the pit of despondency. The last article he wrote was on “The Triviality of Literature,” and it too sank without a trace. Shattered in spirit and deeply hurt, he abandoned any further attempts. Bad luck — his enemy of old — had conspired against him yet again, and malicious intent had done the rest. Not for a second did he doubt the value of what he had written about literature. Indeed, he believed it was better than anything al-Manfaluti himself had written, not to mention the effusions of any number of contemporary writers. It was all a question of malice and evil intent. All his dreams had come to nothing. How utterly constricting and unfair life was! Discarding his pen, he now allowed his anger, sorrow, and recalcitrance free rein and finally gave up all aspirations for prestige and authority. His heart was full of anger and resentment, against the world in general and people, especially men with social renown and power. How could you define prestige, he asked himself, particularly its Egyptian form? He answered his own question with a single phrase: favorable circumstances. He was devoted to the memory of Saad Zaghlul, but even so he noted that it was Saad’s father-in-law who had paved the way for his successful career; but for that, he would never have become the figure we know.

“Behind every high-level position in Egypt,” he would often say, “there’s always a tale to be told. If you want to get ahead in this society of ours, then make sure you use deceit, hypocrisy, and impertinence; and don’t forget a fair dose of stupidity and ignorance to go with it!”

Either that sort of thing, or else, “Who are these literary types, the ones who write for newspapers and journals? How can it be real literature if the only way to succeed is to meddle in politics and party feuds? Is it only a person of honor who is incapable of achieving the phony prestige they have earned?”

“By God,” he would say angrily, “I couldn’t be a person of prestige in Egypt now, even if I wanted to … but may God Himself launch a campaign against the very idea of dignity!”

This anger kept burning away inside him until all that was left was an unholy flicker of flame and a pile of ashes. However, life cannot endure anger on a continuing basis; there have to be some intervals of calm, even if the calm involved is actually more akin to resignation. Thus, whenever his anger got the better of him, he would resort to despair.

“What’s the point of stubborn persistence in this world of ours?” he would tell himself. “If we’re all going to die like animals and rot in the grave, what’s the point of thinking like angels? Just suppose I’d filled the world with writings and inventions. Would the worms in the grave respect me? Would they instead devour me like some common murderer? No! The whole world consists of lies and vanities; in such a context the quest for glory is the acme of lies and vanities.”

Therefore, he surrendered himself to a bitter isolation of mind and heart. He despaired of life in general and fled from it. But, even as he was turning his back on it in impotent despair, he was still arrogant enough to imagine that he was in fact the one who was depriving life of the benefits of his own personality. For that reason he did not give up reading, the idea being that books were the things that provided man with the kind of life he wanted. He used the world of books as a way of looking down on the ordinary world and adopted them as a kind of salve to treat his wounded pride. From them he derived a kind of strength, one that he kidded himself was personal. It felt as though the ideas they contained were actually his own; their authority and eternal validity were his too.

After his succession of failures, he stopped reading things in an organized and goal-oriented way, and started reading whatever fell into his hands. He had a particular fondness for old volumes with yellowing paper because they were valuable and hard to find. He now began to read voraciously and quickly. He felt on edge and no longer enjoyed reading anything useful or serious; it gave him a kind of mental indigestion. He may have learned all sorts of different things but he was master of none of them. His brain was not used to indulging ideas in and of themselves, and he relied on books to do the thinking for him. Ideas and reflection on them did not interest him at all; his only real concern was that he be able to address the morrow on the basis of what he had read the day before and to harangue his friends and colleagues (all in a learned philosophical tone) with the inspired fruits of his memory. For that very reason the employees working in the archives section of the Ministry of Works nicknamed him “the philosopher.” That delighted him, even though the gesture was as much one of derision as of respect.

This “philosopher” had no fixed views on anything because, while he may have been reading things, he never reflected on them; he might well forget what he had said the day before and even totally contradict everything he had said earlier. He would always rush to adopt an opinion that served to boost his own arrogance, delusion, and total concern with superficialities. He relished confrontation and argument. If an interlocutor said “right,” he would say “left”; if the former said “white,” he would reply “black.” He would then plunge headlong into an argument, becoming more and more angry and worked up until he would almost be grabbing his opponent’s lapels. None of this implied that he was stupid; in fact, he was of average intelligence. His mind was one that never sank to the level of stupidity, but neither did it rise to any kind of excellence, let alone the notion of genius. The thing that totally deceived him about his own person was his crushing ambition to achieve prestige and his delusions of genius, all of which led him far from the path of reason. What made his sense of misery even more acute was that he was extremely sensitive and easily roused. Patience, perseverance, reflection, and contemplation — these traits were in short supply where he was concerned. As a result, his brain was full of an intellectual mixture of facts rather than being the focused mind of a penseur. There can be little doubt too that the insomnia that had afflicted him for fully six months of his life had had a negative effect on his mental make-up. It had brought him to the very brink of madness and death; he had spent countless nights wide-awake and raving. But then God’s mercy had descended on him, and despair had been replaced by cure. He attributed the reason for his illness directly to a risky venture that he had embarked on without considering the possible consequences.

He had long believed in magic and never doubted the veracity of the tales he had heard about it. One day he happened to meet an old civil servant who was a fervent believer in magic and demons, so he began to devote himself assiduously to getting to know him better. Once their friendship was firmly established, the old man lent him some ancient tomes dealing with magic and the invocation of demons, such as Solomon’s Ring, The Magic Bottle, and O Mighty Lords. He had been utterly thrilled and treated the entire subject as the loftiest kind of knowledge and truth that he had yet laid hands on. With the enthusiasm of conviction he embarked upon a process of solving its mysteries and penetrating its secrets; with all his heart he longed for the arrival of a time when he would gain control over the forces of the universe and acquire exclusive possession of the keys to knowledge, power, and authority. The idea almost drove him crazy, and the desire took complete hold of him: when would he be given infinite power to take and leave whatever he wanted, to toy with whomever he wished, to raise and lower, to make rich or poor, to give life and death? But his nerves could not stand the prolonged efforts involved, and he was incapable of spending long nights in seclusion with demon spirits. His confidence let him down and his nerves collapsed; he found himself hounded by fears and delusions. His health deteriorated rapidly and he felt the approach of insanity and death. At this point he realized that he had to stop these activities and give up his plans. He returned the books to their owner and for the last time gave up on the idea of achieving glorious heights now that he had tried every single avenue in an attempt to get there.

“What’s my problem?” he asked himself sorrowfully. “Is there any solution for a corrupted soul? Why is it that I am forever struggling when only an arm’s length separates me from my goals?”

He now collapsed beneath the rubble of his failed initiatives, dashed hopes, and lost illusions. As day followed day, he grew older without ever losing that profound sense of injustice; quite the contrary in fact, he even began to feel some obscure sense of pleasure in the pain it still gave him. He would now imagine injustice to be occurring, with or without due cause, and would proceed to counter it with this same peculiar blend of pain and cryptic pleasure.

“Isn’t it just great,” he would tell himself with a defiantly sarcastic tone, “that the entire world rises up in order to fight the individual?”

Didn’t his disillusioned self find great comfort in the thought that the abundance of bad luck he had suffered was an indication of other people’s envy and fear? Indeed he managed to surrender to the ancient notion that genuine misery is the lot of all rare geniuses in this world.

This decision of his to relish his own misery had an effect on his fluctuating political leanings. He always sided with the losing party, whatever its political principles may have been, and regularly placed himself in the role of the party leader who has to take all the inimical and malicious blows aimed in his direction and bear the brunt of all kinds of responsibilities and pressures. In all of it he discovered almost limitless pain and at the same time unparalleled pleasure.

Truth be told, this trait of his did not happen merely by chance or as a consequence of his failures; instead it traced its origins back to his early years when he was his parents’ firstborn child. He had become used to being cared for, loved, and even spoiled, but he was also the child whom fortune had kept in reserve so that he could take on all the responsibilities of his shattered family when he was not yet twenty years old. The world may have pandered to him just a bit, but not for a single hour had it treated him kindly!

He lay there stretched out on the bed, but didn’t close his eyes. He started looking round at the ceiling, walls, and floor of his room. Could he ever find contentment living in this strange quarter, he wondered. He felt a wave of nostalgia for Qamar Street, the Sakakini quarter, and the old house, but at the same time he still had that emerging sensation of hope alive with aspiration. Once again the apartment began to be filled with the sound of movement, and he listened to the noise as his mother and the servant started moving the furniture around and arranging the various rooms. From the street below came the sound of an annoying din. Listening more carefully with a disapproving ear, he made out that it was a group of children playing and singing. Shaken out of his slumber he went over to the window looking out on to the apartment buildings and opened it. Looking down on the street below, he could make out groups of boys and girls yelling and laughing. They had divided themselves up into teams, and each team was playing a particular sport. It was as if the entire street had been turned into a primitive sporting club; one group was playing with new stuff, and another amused itself with old rags. Some were skipping, others fighting. The young ones stayed on the sidewalk, dancing, singing, and clapping. Dust flew up in the air and noise was everywhere. He realized that from now on an afternoon snooze was out of the question. He heard some amazing tunes too: “Dear friend, what a beauty!” “Children of our alley, mulberries ahoy!” “That’s a high mountain, my friend!” and so on and so on. He did not know whether to feel amazed, angry, or happy. Just then he heard a nasty, gruff voice let out a yell like a clap of thunder: “God damn the world!” and then intoned the same phrase to a clapping rhythm. The voice was almost certainly coming from the store immediately below the window, but from inside. He could not see who this person was singing curses against the world in general, but he could not stop himself laughing, something that put a bloom on his pale face. He stretched as far as he could out of the window and was able to make out the sign over the store: “Nunu the Calligrapher,” it said in elegant script. So, he wondered, did this craftsman make signs that cursed the world and then sell them to grumblers and malcontents? He needed to buy some himself in order to slake his own thirst for such things!