A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature by David Tresilian

Desmond Stewart’s gripping translation, the latter novel conveys what success under the new regime could involve, and it is told in a similar experimental style. 9
    Among Mahfouz’s later novels,
Respected Sir
,
Karnak Café
and
Wedding Song
might be picked out. 10 Each continues the preoccupations of the 1960s, with
Karnak Café
being a
tour de force
of protest against the excesses of the Nasser regime.
Mirrors
is a rewarding work, both in formal terms (it is written in short, named sections, sometimes almost entirely in dialogue), and in terms of its content (a series of sketches of the unnamed narrator’s friends and acquaintances, building up into a kind of portrait gallery of the Egyptian middle class). It contains some of the most telling, thoughtypically veiled, indications of Mahfouz’s own political and social attitudes. 11 However, in the 1970s Mahfouz’s writing also entered a new phase, as he began to experiment with new forms, bringing him close to the experiments carried out at the same date by the younger writers of the ‘generation of the 1960s’ in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. These are discussed in Chapter 5 . While Mahfouz’s writings from this time onwards will not strike every reader as being among his best, their consistent search for new forms and subject matter bears witness to a continually exploratory mind. They include works such as
The Harafish
,
Arabian Nights and Days
and
The Journey of Ibn Fattouma
. 12 The first of these, written in the shadow of the riots that broke out in Cairo in January 1977, is often considered Mahfouz’s last great work, the disturbances of the time causing him to revisit the theme of the formation of modern Egypt and the connections between the old, pre-modern system and the increasingly troubled modern state. With regard to what might be seen as consistently his best work, on the other hand, published between the 1940s and the 1960s, the foreign reader might well agree with the Iraqi critic who writes that Mahfouz was not only the writer who, more than any other, did the most to develop the Arabic novel, ‘rooting’ the form in Arab culture, but that he was also in his own way ‘the most critical, the most radical and the most subversive of all Arab writers’. 13
    Among Egyptian writers, Mahfouz’s greatest rival in the 1950s and 1960s was Yusuf Idris, a short-story writer, dramatist and journalist, whose work compares interestingly with his. Whereas Mahfouz always tended to disappear behind his books, fashioning a self-deprecating public personality, Idris had an arguably closer relationship with the regime and a rather different conception of literature.
    Born in 1927 in the Egyptian Delta to a relatively prosperous family, and a medical student in Cairo during the last years of the prerevolutionaryregime, in his work Idris, like Mahfouz, attempted to forge a national literature, though for him this meant a greater focus on the lives of the poor and a more direct approach to the exposure of injustice and hypocrisy. Whereas Mahfouz cultivated an unruffled public image, Idris typically presented himself as a passionate, even angry, man. 14 From his student days onwards, when he was arrested for left-wing political activities, Idris was a more obviously ‘committed’ writer than Mahfouz, arguing that literature should assist in the process of social change and in the struggle to bring in a more just social order. Like many writers at the time, he welcomed the 1952 Revolution and the collapse of the hated monarchical regime, identifying the agent of social change in the Nasser regime that replaced it. Perhaps inevitably he was disappointed in that regime’s actual record, becoming more and more disillusioned in later life and less and less productive in literary terms.
    Idris’s first collection of short stories,
The Cheapest Nights
, appeared in 1954, and, together with the volumes that swiftly followed it, contains some magnificent stories,