The Dreams

Translator’s Afterword

“Only the past is real.… ”

— Lord Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays¹

On Friday, October 14, 1994, an Islamist militant, allegedly acting on orders from blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, stabbed Naguib Mahfouz in the neck with a switchblade as he sat in a car outside his Nileside home in Greater Cairo. The young man who attacked the then — eighty-two-year-old author, the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize in literature, clearly intended to silence him forever. Though the assault,² which damaged the nerve that controlled his right arm and hand, did prevent him from writing for over four years, the fanatic’s mission failed. Not only did Mahfouz survive this nightmarish crime, he lived to tell us his dreams — which he persistently recorded in his own hand and by dictation, until his death at age 94 on August 30, 2006.

The path to the present innovative and provocative work was not an easy one, and near its end came a brief, but very revealing, musical interlude. On February 14, 1999, after prolonged and intensive physiotherapy, Mahfouz began to unveil his first new writing since the attempt on his life, with a short work called The Songs (al-Aghani),³ in a Cairene women’s magazine, Nisf al-Dunya (Half the World), where he had been publishing all his latest fiction since the periodical first appeared in 1990. More a tribute to memory than imagination, The Songs is a series of deftly chosen quotations from popular Egyptian airs ranging back through more than nine decades that capture the spirit and mood of the various stages of Mahfouz’s life, from childhood to old age. The only work he published in colloquial Egyptian, it was also the only one made up entirely of verse.

A few months later, a new stream of Mahfouz stories once again began to appear in the pages of Nisf al-Dunya. This was a succession of numbered, extremely brief narratives that one could easily term “nanonovellas,” bearing the title, Ahlam fatrat al-naqaha—literally, “dreams of the period of recovery.” (A volume containing Dreams 1–104 appeared in English translation in 2004 from the American University in Cairo Press entitled The Dreams. A second volume, Dreams of Departure, featured the next 108 dreams, comprising numbers 105–206, published in Nisf al-Dunya between January 2004 and September 2006, as well as six dreams numbered I–VI that were published in the Cairo daily al-Ahram shortly before his final birthday in December 2005. Dreams 204–06 had been sent to the magazine just prior to Mahfouz’s death, and the last one, 206, seems uncannily prophetic.)⁴ They were almost completely unlike anything Mahfouz — or anyone else, for that matter — had published before.

There was one precedent in Mahfouz’s work, however. In a 1982 collection of Mahfouz’s short fiction called I Saw as the Sleeper Sees (Ra’aytu fima yara al-na’im), the title piece is a series of seventeen short, numbered “dreams”—each no more than a few paragraphs in length.⁵ Meant to read like accounts of actual dreams, each begins with the phrase that gave the work its name. In a study of these “dreams,” Arabic literary scholar Fedwa Malti-Douglas notes that many are drawn from his reading of both the medieval adventures (maqamat) of Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, and the later allegorical ghost story by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi derived from them, The Tale of ‘Isa ibn Hisham (Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham, 1898 in newspaper serial, 1907 as a book). Malti-Douglas also points out that I Saw as the Sleeper Sees deliberately harks back to the ancient (and continuing) Arabic tradition of presenting and interpreting dreams. Even the title itself, she observes, is a variation on the sentence that typically begins a dream narrative in this genre, “Ra’aytu fi-al-manam” (“I saw in a dream”).⁶ The extraordinary interest that dreams have long aroused among the Arabs can be found, for example, in the often-oneiristic chronicles of Abu Ali ibn al-Banna, who lived in eleventh-century Baghdad. Frequently dreams bring back the dead, who (as in Mahfouz’s Dream 89) scold the living. Here al-Banna recounts that:

Abu’l-’Abbas b. ash-Shatti was accompanying me. He related to me two old dreams about Ibn al-Tustariya al-Hanbali — may God have mercy upon him! He said, ‘I saw him in my dream, and I greeted him. He returned my greeting, and took hold of a kerchief which was on my head, with both hands, tied it, and said, “O Abu-’l-’Abass! What is this rudeness which I have not experienced before?” ’ My informant continued, ‘I had stopped visiting his tomb; so I resumed my visits and continued doing so without interruption.’

⁷

Or such visions could be highly political (a point to which we shall return with regard to Mahfouz). Another medieval dream related by al-Banna warns of foreign invasion — which here could be an omen of ultimate good fortune:

… it appeared as though there were a great swarm of green locusts, each of them holding a pearl in his mouth. They represent armies coming; and it is possible that their coming might be beneficial. For green represents worldly prosperity, and pearls represent the Qur’an and religion. Hence, it is possible that there need be no fear as regards their coming — if God so wills!

⁸

I once asked Mahfouz what he thought was the greatest difference between I Saw as the Sleeper Sees and The Dreams. Without hesitation, he replied, “Composition.” The earlier work, he explained, was entirely a conscious authorial creation, while each episode of the present project is “a[n actual] dream, which I develop into a story.”⁹ In this, he may have achieved the major ambition of the iconoclast André Breton, who declared in the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), “I believe in the future resolution of these two states — outwardly so contradictory — which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak.”¹⁰

Mahfouz began his novelistic career with a series of three books set in the Pharaonic era: Khufu’s Wisdom (‘Abath al-aqdar, 1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (Radubis, 1943), and Kifah Tibah (Thebes at War, 1944), which indirectly critique contemporary society in symbolic terms.¹¹ He is best known for his “realistic” works such as Midaq Alley (1947), The Beginning and the End (1949), The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street (1956–57), and more. Yet Mahfouz has also been experimenting with virtually every style and type of fiction since serializing the book that later nearly got him killed—Awlad Haratina (available in English as Children of the Alley and Children of Gebelawi), itself a highy symbolic allegory of mankind’s corrupt ascent from the days of Adam and Eve to the era of modern science, set in a mythologized Gamaliya. As it ran in daily installments in Cairo’s flagship newspaper, al-Ahram, in the fall of 1959 a group of shaykhs from al-Azhar — Egypt’s great center of Islamic orthodoxy — denounced it for purportedly besmirching God and the prophets by representing them as earthly characters with human flaws. Demonstrations erupted at local mosques, and the government of then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser banned the novel’s appearance as a book in Egypt — though permitting its publication abroad. The ban still held at the time of Mahfouz’s death, at least so far as al-Azhar is concerned — and Mahfouz’s failure to “repent” for it led to his near-murder nearly twelve years before. In early 2006, Mahfouz came under enormous critical fire in Egypt for insisting that al-Azhar rescind condemnation of the novel before he would break this half-century-old “gentlemen’s agreement,” as he called the ban on the Arabic publication of his novel. And, as an additional precondition, he wanted an Islamist to write the book’s preface. As a result of these seeming concessions, fellow Egyptian author Ezzat al-Qamhawi accused him of having “betrayed his writing,” a remark typical of the views arrayed against him. But Mahfouz tried to calm his critics by saying that if he could get al-Azhar to change its mind about Children of the Alley, then that would have had great implications for other works proscribed.¹² In any case, after his death, Mahfouz’s Arabic publishers, Dar El Shorouk in Cairo, brought out the book, complete with the Islamist’s preface (by Ahmed Kamal Abu al-Majd) that Mahfouz had requested, though it is not clear if al-Azhar has yet approved.

Intriguingly, both Children of the Alley and the Dreams series marked new beginnings in his use of allegory, and each was connected to the attempt on his life: one as an indirect cause, the other as an indirect result. One of Mahfouz’s most starkly startling allegories is Dream 179—which yields an historic confession. The “big book” on “science, philosophy, and literature” from which the dreamer’s deceased friend has pledged to read a chapter to him each night, along with a chapter from the Qur’an until both books are finished, is undoubtedly Children of the Alley. Since the modern tome also interprets the Qur’an — which, like Children of the Alley, has 114 chapters — here Mahfouz finally admits that his novel really is meant to parallel the stories in the sacred scriptures, a fact he always denied.

The St. Valentine’s Day 1999 publication of Mahfouz’s The Songs, one should note, fell on the tenth anniversary of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the novel The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Shaykh Omar Abdel-Rahman, in issuing his own alleged fatwa against Mahfouz in April 1989, is said to have declared that if Mahfouz had been punished for his novel Children of the Alley when it first appeared in 1959, then Rushdie would not have dared to bring out his own “blasphemous” book in 1988. Abdel-Rahman, a close associate of Osama bin Laden, is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for having plotted to blow up a number of major targets, including the U.N. headquarters and the World Trade Center in New York in the early 1990s.

By the late 1960s, Mahfouz turned to ever-more radical forms, including absurdist plays of pure dialogue, and stories that have grown shorter and increasingly compact over time. And so the view among some literary critics in his country that Mahfouz is a plodding nineteenth-century novelist compared to those of younger generations — none of whom have yet matched his magisterial output in either quality or quantity — would seem to be based on an incomplete view of his remarkably varied oeuvre.

In the case of The Dreams, the effort to produce at all was especially difficult for Mahfouz. Apart from the damage done by the assailant’s knife, he endured diabetes starting in the early 1960s, which enormously weakened his eyesight and hearing. Long before the attack, he could only write “by the feel of the shape of the letters,” as he told me once in the early 1990s. Then in 2003 he was twice hospitalized (once for pneumonia, the second time for a cardiovascular crisis). During his first stay in hospital, he confided to Mohamed Salmawy, who, after his stabbing, interviewed him most Saturday evenings for a weekly column in al-Ahram called “Dialogues with Naguib Mahfouz,” that he no longer dreamt when he slept — though he could continue to publish the material he had already stored for some time to come. “My drawer is still full,” he reassured Salmawy.¹³

Adding to his travails that season, during a fall in his flat he evidently broke a bone in his right wrist. From that point on,¹⁴ if not before, Mahfouz began to dictate his new writing — something he had previously refused even to consider. Luckily, however, he soon had new dreams to relate. Though he complained of little sleep, the time he had to dream was fertile. The result was some of his most remarkable writing. Indeed, his Dreams are a unique and haunting mixture of the deceptively quotidian, the seductively lyrical, and the savagely nightmarish — the richly condensed sum of more than four score and ten years of artistic genius and everyday experience. Toward the end of his life, Mahfouz lamented to reporter Youssef Rakha of al-Ahram that “Now writing is restricted to the dreams.” He added ruefully, “It seems I gave myself the evil eye when I wrote Ra’aytu fima yara al-na’im [I Saw as the Sleeper Sees].”¹⁵

According to al-Hagg Muhammad Sabri al-Sayyid, the secretary of the literary section of al-Ahram who read Mahfouz the newspapers in his home each morning, took his dictation, and delivered his manuscripts to Nisf al-Dunya for publication, whether the dreams were “real” or artistic inventions (he believes most were partly both, though some were likely entirely fictional), they all were born fully formed. Mahfouz created each dream in one draft, whether in writing or orally to al-Hagg Sabri (as he likes to be called), who insists that he never revised them at all.¹⁶

As in anyone’s nocturnal visions, real memory and experience permeate The Dreams. Close friends long deceased often appear, as in the case of Dr. Husayn Fawzi (1900–88) in Dream 86, former permanent undersecretary to the Minister of Culture, an ophthalmologist famed for his study and patronage of Western classical music, and for his travel writing¹⁷—the latter gaining him the sobriquet, “the Egyptian Sinbad.” And there are teachers from his youth, such as Shaykh Muharram (Dream 6), one of the young Naguib’s two Arabic instructors in his secondary school in then-suburban Abbasiya, and his math teacher in the same period, Hamza Effendi (Dream 27). The Dreams recall them less kindly than Fawzi. Some other figures from real life, who receive similarly sarcastic handling, are identified only by their initials, as in Dreams 72 and 73.

Inevitably, there are also references to Mahfouz’s past writings. In Dream 10, the “pharaonic queen” is Nitocris, the widow (and sister) of King Merenra II — characters in Mahfouz’s second published novel, Rhadopis of Nubia—and the “revenge” she takes on her husband’s murderers is from a legend recorded by both the ancient Greek writers Herodotus and Strabo. The woman who endowed the first major literary prize that Mahfouz would win (for Rhadopis of Nubia, in 1940) — Qut al-Qulub al-Damardashiya — is evidently the dangerous lady with a dainty gun in Dream 81. And Mahfouz’s writing for the screen flickers before us, as well. In Dream 13, his unconscious self meets a girl who identifies herself as “Rayya’s daughter.” To his horror, she then adds, “Maybe you remember Rayya and Sakina?” Very few Egyptians who lived through the time of their vicious career or who have seen the 1953 film about them — written by Naguib Mahfouz (who created many of the most praised scenarios in the history of Arab cinema) and directed by the legendary Salah Abu Seif — could ever forget them. Rayya and Sakina were women in their forties who lured gullible young members of their sex to their homes in Alexandria, where they were chloroformed and killed for their jewelry by a gang led by the malignant pair’s husbands. Before their apprehension in 1921, they had claimed up to thirty victims, whom they buried in the houses in which they had died.¹⁸

Equally inevitable is an apparition of his greatest personal hero, Sa’d Pasha Zaghlul (1859?–1927), leader of the 1919 movement for Egyptian independence from Britain (Dreams 73 and 158).¹⁹ And, in Dreams 30 and 48, Mahfouz rhapsodically resurrects the mightiest musician that movement produced, the Alexandrian minstrel-composer Sayyid Darwish (1892–1923).²⁰ A line from one of Darwish’s most famous songs, that Mahfouz chose to end his novel Palace Walk, the first in the Trilogy, could well represent one of the central themes of his Dreams as well: “Visit me once each year, for it’s wrong to abandon people forever.”²¹

Perhaps it was both Zaghlul and Darwish who inspired Dream 170, in which Mahfouz revisits the house where he was born in December 1911 in Bayt al-Qadi Square in the old Islamic quarter of Gamaliya. There, aged about seven, he saw demonstrators gunned down by British-led forces in front of the police station — bordered by fragrant Pasha’s Beard trees — during the uprising of 1919. His boyhood friends (none of whom are known to be living), their songs of rebellion, and the army as well all soon visit themselves upon him in turn.

Mahfouz’s fierce nationalism manifests itself further in the frequent spectral appearance of Zaghlul’s Wafdist colleagues — such as his deputy, Mustafa al-Nahhas (1879–1965), in Dream 158. Al-Nahhas’s own deputy, the Coptic (Egyptian Christian Orthodox) politician William Makram Ebeid (1889–1961), expelled from the Wafd for publishing its scandalous secrets in the Black Book Affair of 1942, expires in a crowd in Dream 154 (though he actually died at home). Another intense nationalist of a more stridently pan-Arab sort who stalks this work is Ustaz (roughly, “Professor”) Sa’d al-Din Wahba (1925–97), prominent playwright and head of the Egyptian Writers’ Union as well as the Cairo International Film Festival, and a hardliner against any sort of contact with Israelis. (Mahfouz himself often met with Israeli intellectuals, both in his regular nadwas [literary salons] and in his home — he believed that only such engagement could lead to a full and lasting peace.) And the tragically vain dictator who came to rule Egypt after the Free Officer’s coup of 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70, cited above for banning Children of the Alley) is undoubtedly the beyond-discreet Don Juan in what was once Alexandria’s busiest bus station in Dream 118.

Today’s politics naturally intrude in Mahfouz’s dreams. Among the most dramatic are the apparent allusions to his views of the Arab — Israeli conflict (Dream 90) and the war on terrorism (Dreams 74 and 103). But these are in the eyes of the reader, of course — and he has always encouraged others to reach their own conclusions about what he is saying. In this vein, the most jarring to me is Dream 151, which obviously recalls the mysterious case of Dr. Reda Helal, a former regular at Mahfouz’s weekly gatherings at a Garden City hotel. Helal, the dynamic forty-something deputy editor of Cairo’s famous daily, al-Ahram, and a noted pro-Western liberal, reportedly ordered food to be delivered to his flat one afternoon in August 2003. When the deliveryman arrived, he discovered all the doors locked, with no one home to take the meal. The debonair, pipe-smoking book author and columnist, one of America’s few (though not uncritical) defenders in the Arab press, had vanished without a trace. To this day, there has been no public explanation of his disappearance, though rumors abound.²²

Among those who continually find new life in Mahfouz’s Dreams is one of his greatest intellectual influences, Shaykh Mustafa Abd al-Raziq (1885–1947), whom Mahfouz served as parliamentary secretary when the moderate Muslim cleric was Minister of Religious Endowments in the late 1930s and early ‘40s. Abd al-Raziq, a lucid, French-educated littérateur who later became head of al-Azhar, appears in Dream 155, asserting the superiority of science-based faith over superstition.

Eternal patriotism, with roots in Pharaonic Egypt that continue to flourish today, is the theme of Dream 146. The “golden statue of the nation’s reawakening” is undoubtedly Mahmoud Mukhtar’s renowned sculpture, “The Awakening of Egypt” (1920), which now sits by the Nile near the entrance to Cairo University. (Though not fashioned in gold, it shows a reclining sphinx next to a standing woman in traditional peasant dress.) The serpent, of course, is the uraeus cobra, the goddess Wadjet, symbol (and guardian) of pharaonic power. But the fear that the nation’s “historic treasures” might be stolen perhaps reflects the obsession of modern Egyptian intellectuals (and many others) that globalization has brought “cultural invasion”—a concept that Mahfouz himself rejected.²³

More than anything, however, The Dreams is a monument to the women that Mahfouz loved early in life, and whose images never left him. Though happily married from 1954²⁴ until his death, two of these now-distant bewitchings particularly possess him here, as in many other of his works. One is the “enchantress of Crimson Lane” (in Arabic, Darb Qirmiz, the narrow street in front of his first boyhood home in the old Islamic quarter of Gamaliya), in Dream 83. She has many incarnations throughout Mahfouz’s vast oeuvre, as in his 1987 story, “Umm Ahmad” (“Mother of Ahmad”):

Crimson Lane has high stone walls; its doors are locked upon its secrets; there is no revealing of its mysteries without seeing them from within. There one sees a quarter for the poor folk and beggars gathered in the spot for their

housework and to take care of their daily needs; and one sees a paradise singing with gardens, with a hall to receive visitors, and a harem for the ladies. And from the little high window just before the

qabw

[a vaulted passage connecting the lane to its continuation beyond], sometimes appears a face luminous like the moon; I see it from the window of my little house which looks out over the

hara

and I wander, despite my infancy, in the magic of its beauty. I hear its melodious voice while it banters greetings with my mother when she passes out of the alley, and perhaps this is what impressed in my soul the love of song; Fatima al-Umari, the unknown dream of childhood.…

²⁵

Just as unforgettable — to the reader as well as to Mahfouz himself — is the creature who stays ethereally out of reach to the writer, not only in Dreams 14, 84, and 85, but also elsewhere, particularly in his most celebrated work, The Cairo Trilogy. In the second volume, Palace of Desire, Mahfouz’s admittedly autobiographical character, Kamal Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, is fatefully smitten (and ultimately rejected) by an aristocratic neighbor in Abbasiya — the same district to which Mahfouz’s family moved from Gamaliya when he was about age ten. Mahfouz has said that the trauma of the actual lost teen romance upon which this was based afflicted him severely for about ten years — and remained vivid within him more than seventy years later. (That his feelings were probably never reciprocated — as in the Trilogy—means that Mahfouz, in reality, had been dreaming about a dream.)²⁶

In Dream 104 it seems that the dreamer invites this person’s apparition to a meeting with a mutual friend, now long dead, in a place where all were happy in days of yore. Her name, the “Lady Eye” as translated, is actually the spelling of the guttural Arabic letter ‘ayn—(also meaning “eye”), and at the same time is the first letter of the name of Kamal’s impossible love object in the Trilogy, Aïda Shaddad. The man she is brought to meet is identified only as “il-mi’allim,” a dialect word meaning anything from shop owner, to top thug in a neighborhood, to head of a small business. One person it most could have fit in the Fishawi Café in the midst of Cairo’s Khan al-Khalili bazaar, where the dream ends, is a man who used to sell Mahfouz books there — who also happened to be sightless. Perhaps the blindness of love is at work here — and yet the woman whose very name signifies vision is the one scolded for failing to see.

No doubt the most painful to the author of all the dreams presented here, and the one that finally exposes the identity of the woman who was “Lady Eye,” did not appear in Nisf al-dunya. Instead it was published in al-Ahram, the third in a group of six carried in the daily (whose parent company also owns the magazine) on December 9, 2005, shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday (which sadly would be his last). In this dream, Mahfouz recounts a conversation with his sister in which she tells him that the woman he loves — whose name is Ayn — has died in Cairo’s Maternity Hospital. Based on my own research, the woman — who is the same “Ayn” found in Dream 104²⁷—is actually Atiyah Shadid, one of Mahfouz’s neighbors in Abbasiyah — who died giving birth to her first child in Cairo’s Maternity Hospital in 1940. This is the real person whom he called Aïda Shaddad in the Trilogy—the great, unrequited love of his admittedly autobiographical character, Kamal Abd al-Jawad, and his own, as well — and who has many incarnations suffused throughout his fiction. (“Ayn” is also the name of the guttural first letter of both “Aïda” and “Atiya” in Arabic.)

Aïda’s father, Abdel Hamid Shaddad, guilelessly mirrors the actual Abdel Hamid Shadid, father of Atiya — both served as personal secretary to Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, ruler of Egypt from 1892–1914, even following him into exile in Europe after he was deposed by the British early in World War I. And in real life, Atiya had a sister named Aïda, and another called Budur, also the name of Aïda Shaddad’s younger sibling in the Trilogy. Aïda Shaddad dies 1943 in the Trilogy of pneumonia, in the Coptic Hospital in Cairo, loosely fictionalizing the death of her real-life counterpart.²⁸

The true identity of “Aïda Shaddad” remained strictly secret all of Mahfouz’s life. He confirmed that she was Atiyah Shadid when I came to discuss this dream with him, one of the most moving moments of all my experience working with this most discreet of human beings.²⁹ If I hadn’t met members of the Shadid family in 1995—who themselves seemed not to know which of the sisters really represented Aïda Shaddad, though they thought it was probably their own Aïda — I wouldn’t have known how to interpret this dream. The author was surprised finally to see his most-speculated-upon secret discovered, yet was very emotional, and — to my own subjective gaze — seemed somehow relieved, as well. Only the fact that, eleven years earlier, her relatives mentioned that one of the Shadid sisters, Atiya, had died in childbirth in 1940, provided the crucial clue, but even that would not have been enough without this encoded literary revelation. Faced with its detection, he said to me in apparent shock, “You got all that from a dream?”

In Dream 188, Mahfouz encounters many of the most important musical figures in Egypt (among them Darwish) stretching over the whole of the century just ended. Above them all is Umm Kulthoum, “the Star of the Orient” (1904?–75), who keeps chanting a haunting line from the Persian poet Omar Khayyam that she popularized in song. At the end, the dreamer recites the Fatiha—the opening chapter of the Qur’an — commonly compared to the Lord’s Prayer, and often read over those who have abandoned our world.

Though he has now departed, Mahfouz has not abandoned us — for, among many other treasures, he has left us his dreams. These on the whole express the longings — and embody the bittersweet recollections — that Naguib Mahfouz enlisted in The Songs, his heartbreakingly adept exercise in preserving the best of nearly a century of fleeting years and emotions through the remembrance of the lyrics that capture them. The seventh and final section of The Songs, “Old Age,” is the most powerful. There may be no better way to close an afterword to a book of prose that in so many ways is truly poetry, than to offer these verses in English:³⁰

When the evening comes …

How long ago were we here

?

Old closeness from the beautiful past, if only you could return

.

She said, how Time has mocked you since our parting

!

And I told her, I seek refuge in God, but it was you, not Time

.

What’s gone is gone, O my heart …

Say goodbye to your passion — forget it, and forget me

.

Time that has gone will not come back again …

I cannot forget you

.

We lived a lot and we saw a lot—

And he who lives sees wonders

.