Authors: Naguib Mahfouz
“You tried to murder me, and, if not for Divine Providence, you would have succeeded,” said Mustafa al-Nahhas. “Yet you lost your own life as the result of assassination. Do you still believe in that method?”
“We need to live twice to acquire true wisdom,” pleaded Sadat.
“I have heard of your call for democracy, and I was astonished,” al-Nahhas continued. “Then it became clear to me that you wanted democratic rule in which the leader has dictatorial authority.”
“I wanted a democracy that would return the village to its traditional manners, and bring back respect for the father,” said Sadat.
“This is tribal democracy,” al-Nahhas replied.
“That is true,” said Saad Zaghloul. “Yet, though true democracy is taken, not given, there is no call to blame him unreasonably.”
“The travails of the people grew worse and worse,” resumed Mustafa al-Nahhas. “What happened is what usually transpires in such conditions, when one avoids dealing with strife and extremism. You let things get out of control as if you didn’t care. Then suddenly you exploded and threw everyone in prison, enraging both Muslims and Christians, moderates and extremists alike. Finally things culminated in the tragedy at the reviewing stand.”
“I found that there was no other option but a decisive blow to control the chaos,” Sadat said defiantly, “for it seemed the country was about to erupt into full-blown civil war.”
“When the ruler usurps the rights of his people, he makes an enemy out of them,” adjudged Saad Zaghloul. “When that happens, the political strength of the country is squandered in internal conflict, rather than in doing what should be done.”
Isis then uttered her summation.
“Thanks to this son,” she said, “the spirit returned to the homeland. Egypt regained her complete independence, as it had been before the Persian incursion. He erred as others too have erred, while accomplishing more good than others have done.”
Osiris then turned toward Anwar Sadat.
“I welcome you as one of the Immortals among the sons of Egypt,” he told him. “You shall proceed to your other tribunal with a testimonial bestowing honor from ours.”
64
O
SIRIS DIRECTED HIS GAZE
toward the Immortals.
“Thus has the life of Egypt passed before you in all its joys and sorrows,” he intoned, “from the time that Menes brought forth her unity, until she regained her independence at the hand of Sadat. Perhaps, then, some of you have reflections that you would wish to mention now?”
King Akhenaten sought leave to speak.
“I appeal to you to hold to the worship of the One God,” he called out, “for the sake of truth, immortality, and liberation from the idolatry of earthly things.”
“Be zealous for the unity of the land and the people,” admonished Menes, “for disaster only comes when this unity is ruptured.”
“Egypt must believe in labor,” declared Khufu, “for with it I erected the Great Pyramid, and by it all things are built.”
“And she must believe in science,” implored Imhotep, the vizier of King Djoser, “for that is the force behind her immortality.”
“And in wisdom and literature,” seconded the Sage Ptahhotep, “to savor the vitality of life and to imbibe its nectar.”
“And she must believe in the people and in revolution,” preached Abnum, “to propel her destiny toward completion.”
“And believe in might,” said Thutmose III, “that cannot be achieved before she has grappled with her neighbors in battle.”
“And that government be of the people and for the people,” exhorted Saad Zaghloul.
“And that relations between people be based on absolute social justice,” demanded Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
“And that her goal be civilization and peace, as well,” added Anwar Sadat.
“May the Divinity be implored,” Isis sighed hopefully, “to invest the folk of Egypt with the wisdom and the power to remain for all time a lighthouse of right guidance, and of beauty.”
All opened their palms in supplication, absorbed in prayer.
Translator’s Afterword
B
EFORE THE
T
HRONE
IS NOT MERELY
a book about olden times. This is a tableau of all Egypt’s history, from the remotest past to practically the present, and the rulers who led her through it—each judged by the Osiris Court, which in the ancient religion decided the fate of the soul after death. Moreover, its author insisted that this work (published as
Amam al-’arsh
in 1983), was not fiction. When pressed on the matter, Naguib Mahfouz, whose own life (1911–2006) spanned nearly a century, replied simply, “It is history.”
1
But if so, it is history of a peculiar kind. Though based on many years of research and a lifetime of reflection on Egypt’s past, the setting is imaginary and the dialog invented. And far from being conventional historical fiction, or even romance, like his first three published novels (all of which were set in ancient Egypt), this is actually a kind of theatrical conversation between characters, with scant stage directions and the barest of scenery, though we are told that the décor is all of solid gold.
Why did Mahfouz choose this particular allegorical device? And why did he want to render an historical verdict upon so many of Egypt’s rulers? His exposure to classical literature, dating back to his studies of Greek thought published as a young man (obtaining a degree in philosophy from the Egyptian University, now Cairo University, in 1934), and his lifelong self-study of Egyptology may provide the answer.
Inspired by the explosion of Egyptian patriotism that sparked the 1919 movement for national independence led by Mahfouz’s lifelong hero, Saad Pasha Zaghlul 1859?–1927), and by the global frenzy at the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, Mahfouz’s first published book was a translation of a brief work on ancient Egypt aimed at young readers by the British scholar, the Rev. James Baikie, in 1932. Though Mahfouz wrote dozens of short stories set in contemporary Egypt, a small number are set in, or use motifs from, Pharaonic times (now collected in English translation in
Voices from the Other World
)
. The action of his first three novels—Khufu’s Wisdom (‘Abath al-aqdar, 1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (Radubis, 1943) and Thebes at War (Kifah Tiba, 1944), likewise occurs in ancient Egypt. Yet, each, in its own way, obliquely critiques contemporary Egyptian politics—especially the last of these, an allegorical attack on both the British and the Turkish aristocracy.
2
But with his next two novels, al-Qahira al-jadida the latter published in English as Cairo Modern and Khan al-Khalili, both set in the twentieth century and both possibly published in 1945, he discovered that the risks of censorship were slight, and abandoned a plan to compose forty novels on ancient Egypt to focus instead on life in his own times. Thus he ultimately created such contemporary masterpieces as The Cairo Trilogy—Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street—in Arabic, Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr al-Shawq, and al-Sukkariya) as well as scores of other works in a breathtaking array of styles and genres.
3
He did not return to the pharaohs for nearly forty years—with Before the Throne
.
Among his wide readings from ancient Egyptian literature as a young man, Mahfouz later confessed that a Middle Kingdom poem,
The Dialogue of a Man and His Soul
, had deeply impressed him.
4
In it, an unnamed man contemplates death, debating its merits and demerits with his
ba
(a spiritual element released after death that connects the deceased in the burial chamber with the celestial deities).
5
The man tells the story, recounting his arguments in favor of earthly life against his
ba
, which defends the advantages of death as though speaking in a court of law before an audience that may include the gods.
6
Another possible source for the concept of presenting the afterlife trials of earthly movers and shakers is found in the writings of Lucian, a Hellenized Syrian in the Roman administration at Alexandria in the mid-to-late second century
AD
. Lucian cleverly adapted the judgment of the dead by the Greek underworld court headed by Zeus’ son Minos in order to mock the world of the quick. In his
Dialogues of the Dead
, the infamously irreverent Diogenes of Sinope (d. approximately 325
BC
) invites one of the Cynic philosophers to join him in the House of Hades, lord of the shades:
“Diogenes bids you, Menippus, if you’ve laughed enough at the things on the earth above, come down here, if you want much more to laugh at; for on earth your laughter was fraught with uncertainty, and people often wondered whether anyone at all was quite sure about what follows death, but here you’ll be able to laugh endlessly without any doubts, as I do now—and particularly when you see rich men, satraps and tyrants so humble and insignificant, with nothing to distinguish them but their groans, and see them to be weak and contemptible when they recall their life above.”
As John Rodenbeck writes, the “satirical dialogues and fantastic tales” of the “long-lived Lucian of Samosata … have spawned many imitations.” Dialog as a means to convey abstract argument was itself key to the ancient Greek philosophy that Mahfouz had read.
Both Plato and his mentor Socrates asserted, Anthony Gottlieb notes in his book
The Dream of Reason
, that “truth emerged only through dialogue,” and Plato’s works were all “at least ostensibly” in that form. This could also explain why Mahfouz’s only published forays into writing for the theater—a series of short plays that he produced intermittently following the cataclysmic Arab defeat of 1967—were really just dialogs, with little or no stage directions or descriptions. Though he loved every aspect of drama, including the omnipresent singing and dancing of Egyptian productions (he apparently didn’t miss an opening night in Cairo’s theater district until at least the mid-1960s), Mahfouz the playwright nonetheless dispensed with everything but raw verbal confrontation between characters. He evidently felt that only ruthless dialog could unflinchingly expose the existential truths behind the naked humiliations and despair of the time.
A further potential model for
Before the Throne
is an allegory in prose on the fate of the soul by the blind Syrian poet Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri (d. 1058). In al-Ma‘arri’s
Risalat al-ghufran
(The Epistle of Forgiveness), a shaykh enters the afterlife—but in imagination only—to see how the drunkard poets of the Pre-Islamic “Age of Ignorance” have managed to find divine forgiveness.
7
Or he may have read a work similar to that of al-Ma‘arri’s,
Risalat al-tawabi’ wa-l-zawabi’
(Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons), by an Andalusian late contemporary, ibn Shuhayd (d. 1035), who “meets the spirits of a number of prominent littérateurs—poets such as Imru’ al-Qays, Abu Nuwas, Abu Tammam, and al-Mutanabbi, prose writers such as ‘Abd al-Hamid, al-Jahiz and Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani—and critics,” in the other world, as described by Roger Allen.
8
Perhaps a more immediate literary example of a trial involving Egypt’s former rulers is Sir H. Rider Haggard’s “Smith and the Pharaohs.” In this story, an English archaeologist, accidentally locked in the Egyptian Museum overnight, finds himself witness to a ghostly assembly of the kings and queens whose bodies and belongings are housed in the building. After overhearing them gossip about the performance and relative qualities of their respective predecessors and successors, he finds himself brought before them for formal judgment as a despoiler of the royal dead.
And yet another contemporaneous precedent—which Mahfouz may well have read—is George Sylvester Viereck’s eccentric 1937 biography of Wilhelm II,
The Kaiser on Trial
, apparently ghost-written by “Essad Bey,” a Jewish-cum-Muslim writer (later “Kurban Said,” born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku). Essad Bey was a popular novelist and nonfiction author based in both Weimar and Nazi Germany who was also widely read in the rest of Europe, the U.S., Central Asia, and the Middle East. He died in Italy in service to the Axis in 1942. Tom Reiss, Essad Bey’s own biographer, sketches the essential details of this oddly path-breaking book:
The Kaiser on Trial
is a bizarre historical pastiche written in the form of courtroom testimony. It is ostensibly the trial of the Kaiser for war crimes in front of a tribune of historical figures, both dead and living. It is also a reflection on the first years of the twentieth century and the events that ended the [sic] Europe’s old empires in a vast spectacle of mass killing and destruction. George Bernard Shaw praised it as an effective “new method in the writing of history,” providing “a mine of information … both dramatic and judicious.”
10
Mahfouz also had more occult sources of inspiration—and even wrote a kind of prototype of
Before the Throne
in the form of a long (49 pp.) short story, “The Seventh Heaven” (“
al-Sama’ al-sabi’a
”) in 1979. In “The Seventh Heaven,” a series of famous figures, ranging from Pharaoh Akhenaten (1353–1336
BC
), Saad Zaghlul, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1918–1970), and others, face brief afterlife trials conducted by a former Egyptian high priest from ancient Thebes, in their quest to reach the highest (seventh) level of Paradise. Strikingly, in this work influenced by the writings of the Egyptian spiritualist, Ra’uf Sadiq ’Ubayd,
9
no one—not even Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin—suffers eternal damnation, only brief spells of penance back on earth. Hitler himself returns as a petty crime
capo
in a Cairene alley. (For this and other tales of the uncanny by Mahfouz, see his collection,
The Seventh Heaven: Stories of the Supernatural
, translated by Raymond Stock, American University in Cairo Press, 2005; Anchor Books paperback, 2006.) Many of the Egyptian characters make their afterlife encores in
Before the Throne
.