INTELLECTUALS ARE NOT professionals denatured by their fawning service to an extremely flawed power — but, to repeat — are intellectuals with an alternative and more principled stand that enables them in effect to speak the truth to power,” wrote the late literary and cultural critic Edward Said in his Representations of the Intellectual.

As Egypt and the world mourn the death of the iconic novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the nation’s literary élite is still celebrating the precious legacy the Nobel laureate left behind. Literary prowess aside, the genius storyteller had long been criticized for his non-confrontational attitude on the burning political questions of his age, so much so that some have even branded him a defeatist.

Was Mahfouz, as Said puts it, an intellectual who was able top speak the truth to power?

“Naguib Mahfouz spoke the truth in his works,” says the author Gamal El-Ghitani, one of Mahfouz’s closest friends. “While writing his novels, he did not care about anyone or anything — whether that was during the king’s rule or during Nasser’s, Sadat’s or Mubarak’s eras As such, you can say that Mahfouz fulfilled his role as an intellectual,” asserts El-Ghitani, who is also editor-in-chief of the weekly literary newspaper Akhbar Al-Adab.

Rasheed El-Enany, a professor of modern Arabic literature and director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in Britain, is an expert on Mahfouz’s fiction. He feels the same way, noting that, “No other Egyptian intellectual better fits Edward Said’s definition. Naguib Mahfouz maintained his intellectual independence for almost a century in the face of great odds: not only in the face of a succession of political regimes that were markedly intolerant of criticism and dissent, but also against a backdrop of social ignorance, intellectual illiteracy and obscurantism.”

According to Mostapha Abdel Ghani, the literature editor of Al-Ahram, the nation’s leading daily newspaper, and the author of Naguib Mahfouz: The Revolution and Sufism, the Nobel laureate adopted a dual political discourse, especially Nasser’s rule. “He never talked clearly and directly about politics. Both Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfik El-Hakim were very prudent and had ambiguous political stances. They could not confront the regime; otherwise, they would have been sent to prison.”

Courtesy Shawki Mostafa Naguib Mahfouz with a blind bookseller at El-Fishawy coffeeshop, Khan El-Khalili, in 1960.

Nonetheless, Abdel Ghani insists that when it came to his novels, Mahfouz was ruthless in his political criticism.

“He was an ‘escaper of politics’ and he did not want to express his political views bluntly, but he would express them in his political novels That is why when anybody asked him what he thought about a certain [political] issue, he would reply by asking his interlocutor to check a certain novel for an answer,” says Abdel Ghani. “We love Naguib Mahfouz, but he was very cautious not to do anything that would get him sent to prison. Even in his later interviews and writings, he expressed his views in a very intelligent way — but he never expressed a clear stance.”

This duality, Abdel Ghani argues, means Mahfouz cannot be labeled a genuine intellectual according to Said’s definition. Despite his acknowledgment of Mahfouz’s literary genius, Abdel Ghani dismisses him as a “functionary-intellectual,” who was loyal to the state in his official statements. “[Sadly], the intellectual in our country is a civil servant who can be kicked out of his office if he attacks the state,” contends Abdel Ghani.

Indeed, Mahfouz served as a civil servant for almost 35 years. In 1934, he took up his first job as an administrator at the University of Fouad I, renamed Cairo University after the revolution. Four years later, he was hired as parliamentary secretary to then-Minister of Endowments Sheikh Mostapha Abdel Razeq, his mentor at college. In 1959, Mahfouz became chairman of the Censorship Authority for Artistic Works. Later, he served as director of the Foundation for Support of the Cinema, the state’s cinema organization. A decade later, he was hired as an advisor to then-Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha until his retirement in 1971.

Throughout his literary career, Mahfouz also served as a contributing editor at Al-Ahram daily, which serialized his novels and carried his weekly column titled “Point of View.”

Al-Ahram Photo November 1988: President Hosni Mubarak greets Naguib Mahfouz after investing him in the Order of the Nile — the highest state award for civilians.

Samia Mehrez, an associate professor of modern Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, believes that Mahfouz is an example of a liberal intellectual who succeeded in speaking the truth to power, but she also acknowledges a duality in his political writing, which was clearly manifested in his newspaper column, she says.

“There is schizophrenia between his literary and journalistic texts,” explains Mehrez. “I would say that basically [he led a] double life: one as a public civil servant who respects and understands hierarchy and authority and the importance of complying with hierarchy and authority — and this comes in his journalistic columns, where he never rocks the boat. He toes the dominant line. Then we have the other part of Naguib Mahfouz, which is Mahfouz the writer, who rebels against the public figure and his rebellion happens within the literary text. So whatever does not come out in the public discourse of his columns does come out in the underworld of the literary text.”

Critics spotted this dichotomy during Mahfouz’s lifetime and constantly wondered whether to believe his novels or his public discourse. Mahfouz himself handed them the answer: “Believe my literary works,” he stated.

“Mahfouz’s columns were general and were not taken seriously,” adds Mehrez. “Nobody read them; people did not sit waiting for Naguib Mahfouz’s columns in Al-Ahram, expecting him to say something important [Writing columns] was a means to maintain a source of income; that was the strategy of the state — pulling the most important writers into the biggest institution in the country in order to co-opt them,” Mehrez explains. “He was not alone in that. Other writers also joined [the state-owned press], including Tawfik El-Hakim and Youssef Idris. When you read their journalistic pieces, you will find a kind of discourse that is not necessarily compatible with the discourse in their literary works.”

El-Ghitani, on the other hand, refuses to accept the suggestion that his mentor suffered from any kind of intellectual schizophrenia.

Omar Mohsen Author Gamal El-Ghitani says his friend Naguib Mahfouz spoke the truth in his works.

“As far as his positions are concerned, Naguib never contradicted himself, but his [public] statements used to be diplomatic, to some extent. However, this [diplomacy] does not exist in his creative works at all,” says El-Ghitani. “He used a lighter language in the press and whenever he could not speak out, he would stay silent, but he was not a hypocrite.

“The most ruthless criticism of the flaws of the July revolution and Nasser’s project came from Mahfouz during the time of Nasser himself,” he continues. “I always said that if the works of Mahfouz were read, we could have avoided the defeat in 1967. Also, the most violent criticism of the Sadat era came from Naguib Mahfouz in his novel The Devil Preaches [1979] and the short story ‘Love on the Pyramids Plateau’ [1979].”

El-Ghitani also shrugs off the use of the expression “functionary-intellectual” to describe the author. “He [Mahfouz] was not a functionary-intellectual, he was both a functionary and an intellectual,” contends El-Ghitani.

To prove his point, El-Ghitani refers to an incident when Mahfouz threw himself into a head-on confrontation with President Anwar Sadat. In early 1973, Mahfouz was among almost 100 writers who signed a statement blaming Sadat for what they saw as inaction and the perpetuation of the state of “no-war/no-peace” that preceded the October war between Egypt and Israel that same year. Angered by the statement, Sadat fired the signatories, most of whom were employed by the state-owned press. According to El-Ghitani, Mahfouz, who was then writing for Al-Ahram, was not fired — he was too exalted for that, even that long before the Nobel — but was unofficially suspended.

It wasn’t the only time Mahfouz publicly took a political stand. The star novelist broke ranks with writers at home and in the region when he came out in support of peace with Israel in the late 1970s. His position won him the condemnation — and the boycott of many Arab writers.

Al-Ahram Photo 1994: Naguib Mahfouz in hospital after being stabbed in the neck

To many critics, including Abdel Ghani, this position was a manifestation of the author’s “opportunism.” As Abdel Ghani sees it, “He was keen to remain under the umbrella of the regime.”

El-Ghitani counters that Mahfouz’s position was based on genuine beliefs: “He was not simply supporting a ruler, but he saw that this ruler came up with what he [Mahfouz] believed in,” says El-Ghitani, adding that Mahfouz first talked about the need to solve the conflict diplomatically in 1967, almost a decade before Sadat took the Arab world by surprise when he expressed his willingness to hold direct peace talks with the Jewish State.

According to Youssef El-Qoeid, an author and friend of Mahfouz’s, the author supported peace, but was not in favor of normalization.

“He was a supporter of Camp David, but did not normalize with Israel [personally] — that is, he did not have any relationship with Israelis, he did not have a constant link with Israelis I acquit him of the crime of normalization.”

But El-Ghitani provides a different account, claiming, “When he supported negotiations with Israel, he met with Israelis, especially during the first few years that followed [the 1979 peace treaty]. He used to correspond and have and friendships with Israeli academics and intellectuals; he was not against normalization.”

Amr Nabil Naguib Abdel Aziz Mahfouz (December 11, 1911 – August 30, 2006)

El-Ghitani does add that in his final months, Mahfouz had many reservations about Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

“It is beyond doubt that Al-Wafd was the party of the nation. We used to dismiss whoever did not support Al-Wafd as an infidel,” Mahfouz was quoted as saying in El-Ghitani’s book entitled Mahfouz’s Gatherings, where the author recorded some of his conversations with the Nobel laureate.

On many occasions, Mahfouz expressed his loyalty to the liberal ideology of the old-line Wafd party, which was the symbol of the national struggle for independence and stood for the establishment of constitutional rule in the first half of the 20th century.

Strangely, though, Mahfouz never did join the Wafd Party, nor any other political party for that matter, a position which, according to El-Ghitani, the author adopted deliberately to preserve his independence as a writer. “As far as his relationship with politics is concerned, Naguib supported Al-Wafd party emotionally, but he never joined it officially throughout his life,” says El-Ghitani.

Mehrez adds that the following excerpt, spoken by a character in Mahfouz’s 1947 novel Midaq Alley best summarizes Mahfouz’s view on engagement with politics: “In fact, politics destroy our homes and devour our business You will find yourself forced to spend more money on the party [you join] than what you spend on yourself, your family and your business. And if you run for Parliament, you will spend thousands in vain to get a non-guaranteed seat. And is our country’s Parliament anything more than a man with a heart disease risking a stroke at any moment?”

“[To him], basically, politics is a headache,” Mehrez says. “Talking about politics, though, is a different story,” she adds, contending that throughout his literary career, Mahfouz walked a fine line between “sincere political commitment” and “a disengagement from politics.”

“All his novels are indicative of this kind of commitment,” she continues. “It is obvious from everything that he has written that he was committed politically to justice, social equality, social justice and constructive criticism of things that are not happening according to promises given by the authorities.”

Still, the professor of literature says, it is also obvious that outside of his works of fiction, Mahfouz refrained from head-on oppositional political positions.

Indeed, El-Ghitani hails Mahfouz’s avoidance of politics as a correct course of action that allowed the Nobel laureate to devote all his effort and attention to his literary career.

“He had his own style that differed from that of my generation; we engaged in organizations and were sent to prison. He trod a different path, and he proved to me with time that he was correct in not getting involved in any official party, to preserve his independence and to avoid getting into battles that would make him drift away from his literature,” says El-Ghitani, who was detained for six months in the mid-1960s on charges he belonged to an underground Marxist organization.

“Politics is at the center of Mahfouz’s writing,” says El-Enany. “He once said that of the famous trio of sex, religion and politics, some of his works may be lacking in the first two, but that none would be without political content. And he is probably right: Politics has always played a principal role in his fiction, whether we go back to his very early historical-romantic novels of the late 1930s and early 1940s set in Ancient Egypt, or to his very last novel, Qushtumur, published in 1989.”

Mahfouz established himself as an outstanding novelist during the 1950s and 1960s after he published his most controversial and sophisticated works, including his Cairo Trilogy (which included Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street), Children of the Alley, The Thief and the Dogs, Miramar, Autumn Quail, The Beggar and Adrift on the Nile. Despite the incendiary political undertones of many of those works, Mahfouz was never subject to direct attack from any of the regimes he criticized — or that he himself later openly called dictatorial. To the contrary, most of these works first appeared serialized in Al-Ahram, known to be Nasser’s mouthpiece.

“There was special tolerance of artists and novelists. However, nobody else enjoyed the same level of tolerance,” Mahfouz once said when asked about his opinion on the way Nasser’s regime dealt with political criticism.

In the meantime, Mahfouz refused in several interviews, which came out years after Nasser’s era, to be labeled as an opponent of the revolution and the political system to which it gave birth. He was once quoted as saying: “I used to criticize the regime as someone who belonged to it. I was not against the July Revolution at all, and none of my works was against it It is not logical to be one of the opponents of the revolution and then write in Al-Ahram and have all the chances I had.”

Instead, Mahfouz contended that his works highlighted only the flaws that marred Nasser’s era.

But to many such as Mehrez, it was not simply the regime’s “tolerance” that allowed Mahfouz’s controversial novels to see the light of day in the 1960s. To her, the key to his books slipping under the government’s radar was the “patronage” she says the author earned from prominent statesmen who were close to Nasser, including the prominent journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, a former Al-Ahram editor-in-chief and one of Nasser’s closest advisors, and Tharwat Okasha, Nasser’s famous minister of culture and one of the Free Officers who led the 1952 coup.

Okasha has since gone down in history as one of the most effective people ever to hold the post of cultural supremo. Under his tenure, Mahfouz assumed several top jobs at the ministry. In the late 1960s, Mahfouz became Okasha’s advisor for cinema affairs. In some interviews, Mahfouz referred to Okasha as a friend.

Mahfouz himself paid homage to Okasha and Heikal in an interview published in the local press in 1993, where he narrated how he escaped state retaliation after Adrift on the Nile came out in the mid-1960s.

“I never faced any criticism because of my opinions under the rule of Nasser — except once. It was because of the novel Adrift on the Nile Tharwat Okasha stood by me back then. I remember that after the novel came out, Abdel Hakim Amer [then Nasser’s chief of staff and vice-president] read it and s ‘Naguib Mahfouz had crossed all the lines and should be punished.’ I do not remember now who conveyed that to me, but of course it was not Heikal, because he was keen not to scare me,” Mahfouz said.

“Tharwat Okasha was preparing for a trip to Europe when Nasser asked him: ‘Did you read Adrift on the Nile?’ Okasha replied that he did not. Nasser asked him to read it and let him know — frankly — what he thought. When Okasha came back from Europe, and after he had read the story, he met Abdel Nasser and told him, ‘If art is not allowed this kind of freedom, it will not be art,’ So Nasser replied calmly — as I was told by Okasha — ‘Very well.’ Nasser considered the matter closed at that point and Adrift on the Nile did not cause me any further trouble.”

Adrift on the Nile depicts the sweeping sense of defeatism that drifted across the nation on the eve of Egypt’s disastrous war with Israel in 1967. It featured a houseboat where a group of men and women from different social backgrounds gathered regularly to indulge in sex and drugs — and talk politics.

According to Mehrez, Mahfouz developed several literary strategies that allowed him to voice “ruthless” political criticism without entering into direct confrontation with authorities.

“One of the strategies is the use of multiple points of view. You have several characters who speak at the same time,” explains Mehrez. “By adopting multiple perspectives in his work, we can say it is one way of distancing himself more from responsibility for the text You actually have a multiplicity of positions and you can never ground him with one.”

El-Qoeid recounts an anecdote that synchs with her theory: “I wrote once, while [Mahfouz] was still alive, a sentence uttered by Elwan Fawaz Mohtashemi, [a character in Mahfouz’s The Day the Leader was Killed] as saying, ‘No salvation until we get rid of Camp David,’ and another sentence where [the same character] described Sadat, saying ‘He wears the cloth of Hitler and acts like Charlie Chaplin.’ I quoted him [Mahfouz] on these sentences. He told me that these were not his words, but the words of Elwan Fawaz Mohtashemi. ‘But he is one of your characters,’ I contended. He replied saying that he does not necessarily hold the opinion expressed by a character.”

Despite Mahfouz’s attempts to distance himself from his texts, El-Enany believes his political leanings can be inferred from his works without the least bit of difficulty.

“Mahfouz was a secularist who believed religion was a matter of personal belief and not a means of organizing and governing human society,” El-Enany begins. “He was a democrat who believed in the dignity of the individual and his right to choose his rulers. He was a liberal who believed in freedom of thought and expression. He was a socialist who believed in social justice, but he was not a Marxist; he did not believe in state control, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or any other form of autocratic rule for that matter. He was also a humanist who believed in science and the centrality of mankind in the world, and a historical optimist who believed in the inevitability of human progress (read Awlad Hartena, or Children of Gebelawi, 1959). Mahfouz was also a pragmatist rather than an idealist — consider his support for peace with Israel. And he was a gradualist rather than an advocate of sudden and violent change — consider his lifetime support for the Wafd Party and his resentment of the radicalism of the 1952 Revolution.”

Three years after the death of Nasser, Mahfouz shocked readers with El-Karnak, which depicted torture of political opponents in detention centers under the late president’s rule. Some critics alleged that Mahfouz wrote the story simply to support a smear campaign Sadat had launched. (Shortly after he came to power, Sadat promised a complete revision of all flaws of his predecessors and pledged to establish a genuine democracy. But while he liberalized in many areas, Sadat often relaxed control over one previously oppressed group, such as Islamists, to counter the influence of others, such as the socialists. Several times, he ordered mass roundups of agitators of all political flavors.)

Mahfouz’s fiction did not give Sadat a free ride, but his most trenchant criticism came after the president’s assassination in 1981. In the short story “Love on the Pyramid Plateau” (1979), for example, Mahfouz decried the social and economic implications of Sadat’s Open Door policy. Far more stinging was his 1985 hit The Day the Leader Was Killed, which featured a young couple that failed to get married because of economic difficulties resulting from Sadat’s economic policies. The characters dismissed those policies as having spawned corruption and social frustration. In the story, none of the leading characters mince their words: In several passages, they mock Sadat outright.

Mubarak’s era is unique in that it has not witnessed the appearance of a politically incendiary, critical fictional work by Mahfouz. According to El-Ghitani, Mahfouz focused in his last decades on his own life. In the mid-1990s, Mahfouz published his autobiography Echoes of an Autobiography. Last year, he released Dreams of Recovery, in which he narrated 146 dreams he had while recovering from an attempt on his life by Islamist extremists in 1994, which left his arm impaired.

After the attack, Mahfouz dictated his columns and books.

Mehrez does not see the timing of the release of such audacious works as an indication of the author’s evasion, but again as one of the late authors strategies to express his criticism gradually.

“I do not think that Mahfouz at any point throughout his life was silenced,” she says. “Look at his works and the dates when they appeared, and you will see that the criticism came when it was due. Perhaps some texts are stronger than others, or are more vocal or audacious than others. And those levels were determined by how much he could say at a given moment.” et