Khan Al-Khalili (3 page)

“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.