1
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ AND HIS WOMEN: THE
Anshuman Mondal
In his book Neopatriarchy,
Hisham Sharabi suggests
that patriarchy in
modern Arab society assumes different forms to that within
‘traditional’
Arab societies, and that for all its appearance of
modernization the
‘neopatriarchal
state [...] is in many ways no more than a modernized
version of the traditional patriarchal sultanate’ (Sharabi, 1988: 7). Despite
the flaws in the book,1
Sharabi’s refusal to see patriarchy as merely the
oppression of women by men, and his insistence that it also
involves social
classes in their hierarchical relations to one another, as
well as individuals
in their relations to their family, the neighbourhood, the workplace, the
public sphere and the state, is very useful and suggestive
as it converges
issues which are quite often treated separately, such as
gender, politics,
class and religion. In this paper I shall take one of
these, i.e. gender, and
attempt to locate its representation by Mahfouz
within the wider totality of
his ideological vision. Mahfouz’s
representation of gender may be taken,
therefore, to be an index of his positions on class, the nature
of power, the
relationship of the individual to state and society, and the place
of religion
within modern
these must remain implicit within the argument concerning
gender which
is, nevertheless, the fundamental point of departure for
those who wish to
explore the substratum of Mahfouz’s
political vision.
Where critics of Mahfouz’s
work have tackled the issue of gender
in his work, they have done so on the basis that Mahfouz’s consideration
2
of the problem has been generally progressive, i.e. that
he has adopted an
anti-patriarchal stance.2 Much of this criticism has not been overly
sensitive to its own patriarchal assumptions and therefore its
engagement
has been rather superficial (Milson
1998: 114; El-Sheikh 1993: 94). The
most sustained engagement with gender issues in Mahfouz has been
conducted, unsurprisingly perhaps, by a woman, Miriam Cooke.
She
argues that Mahfouz, in his early
career, could be considered a feminist
writer because of his exploration of the shifting gender
relations within
Egyptian society during that period, and his incisive
critique of masculinity
within that shift, especially in the way he illuminates
gender relations to be
‘grounded in asymmetric
power’ (Cooke 1993: 107). Central to her
analysis is the figure of the prostitute — ‘Mahfouz’s most interesting and
creative women characters’ (ibid. 111) — which operates as a
mirror in
which masculinity’s true nature is revealed.3 Mahfouz’s prostitutes
thereby enable a space-clearing gesture from within the
patriarchal
discourse from which a critique of patriarchy can be launched.
Thus,
Mahfouz endows his prostitutes with a certain freedom: ‘they
have in
common not so much a commodification
of body for survival but an urge
for independence’ (ibid. 122). All this is echoed by Mahfouz himself, and,
at times, by some of his male characters. He has said,
‘The prostitute is
invaluable to a social critic because it is only in
contradistinction to her
that one can realize how immoral, inwardly and outwardly,
prominent
figures in society are’ (cited in Najjar
1998: 144), and Ahmad Akif, one of
his characters in the novel Khan al-Khalili , suggests that ‘the real
woman is the prostitute. She is the real one since she puts
of the mask of
3
hypocrisy from her face and does not feel the need to claim
love, loyalty
and purity [...]’ (ibid. 145).
If we examine Mahfouz’s
greatest work, the Cairo Trilogy, at first
glance the text seems to substantiate Cooke’s argument.
There is a
sustained critique of patriarchy in evidence, both explicitly
stated and in
certain situations such as the parodic
marriage between Al-Sayyid Ahmad
and Zubayda during one of his
soirées (PW: 104, 40–1, 116; SS: 23, 193,
245).4 If, however, we look closely both at Cooke’s argument
and at the
text, we begin to notice certain fundamental problems,
especially with
regard to her situation of the figure of the prostitute.
Cooke’s argument,
ultimately, rests upon the liberal humanist notion of an
individuated,
autonomous subjectivity, ‘Mahfouz’s
men cannot imagine that a woman’s
function masks an individual’ (Cooke 1993: 115). However,
modern
critical theory, especially feminist theory, has increasingly
rendered the
notion of the ‘individual’ as problematic (Moi 1985) pointing out that the
‘individual’ is a product of
wider social processes and is itself a product of
patriarchy. The ‘individual’, therefore, is a social construct.
It is rendered
doubly problematic in a society like
individuality, in contrast to modern Europe and
muted in favour of more
‘corporate’ identities. As Andrea Rugh points
out, this leads to ‘an inability in certain contexts for
people to develop an
individual sense of identity’ (Rugh
1984: 35); an Egyptian thus feels that
‘As an individual he is insignificant; as a social
being he has significance’
(ibid. 37). Therefore, one can suggest that we do need to
look at the ‘role’
and ‘function’ of the prostitute in Mahfouz’s
discourse, not in itself but
4
rather within the wider fictional representation of the
totality of social
relations.
Returning to Ahmad Akif’s
statement, then, we notice that there is
an implicit distinction between the prostitute and other
women who, it is
implied, are hypocrites. This begs several questions: are all
women other
than prostitutes hypocrites? Should they be blamed for
claiming ‘love,
loyalty and purity’ from men, and is it wrong for men to give
them these
things? Is it implied that prostitutes are, in fact, the
‘real’ women, and that
all other women are not? What then does Mahfouz understand by the
notion of ‘woman’? These questions render the whole issue of
‘woman’
as a sign in Mahfouz’s
signifying system unstable and open to
interrogation. Whilst feminist criticism advocates that the
destabilization of
the category of ‘woman’ as it is represented in the
patriarchal discourse is
a necessary aspect of feminist politics, in the course
of what follows I shall
argue that the reverse is true of Mahfouz
insofar as it is not his critique of
‘woman’ as represented by the
patriarchal order which renders that
category unstable; rather, the manner in which he deploys
‘woman’
actually destabilizes his critique. In other words, his
criticism of patriarchy
is confused by the manner in which his notion of ‘woman’
operates within
his discourse. Once we step through the fog of confusion
we find that
Mahfouz’s underlying representation of women conforms to
‘traditional’
patriarchal canons of femininity whilst disguising itself as an
espousal of
‘modern’ notions of
‘womanhood’. This is precisely symptomatic of what
Sharabi calls ‘neopatriarchy’.
5
So how does Mahfouz
represent women in the Trilogy? I want to
look first at what Peter Brooks has called the ‘aesthetics
of narrative
embodiment’ (Brooks 1993: 25). According to Brooks, ‘the body is
only
apparently lacking in meaning [...] it can be semiotically retrieved. Along
with the semioticization of the
body goes what we might call the
somatization of story’ (ibid.). This, he suggests, is a result of
‘narrative
desire’ which is itself the consequence of ‘epistemophilia’ — the desire to
know — which Brooks, following psychoanalytical theory,
sees as
emerging from the desire to know one’s own body as a means of
discovering, or knowing, oneself whilst being nurtured in close
proximity
to the body of another, that of the mother. The body,
then, insofar as it is
central to the process of identity-formation, is also a key
sign in the
formation of meaning, including narrative meaning. It is worth
quoting
Brooks at some length:
In modern narrative literature, a protagonist often
desires a
body (most often another’s, but sometimes his or her own)
and that body comes to represent for the protagonist an
apparent ultimate good, since it appears to hold within itself
— as itself — the key to
satisfaction, power and meaning. On
the plane of reading, desire for knowledge of that body
and
its secrets becomes the desire to master the text’s
symbolic
system, its key to knowledge, pleasure and the very creation
of significance [....] Thus, narrative desire, as the
subtending
dynamic of stories and their telling, becomes oriented toward
knowledge and possession of the body.
(ibid. 8)
Brooks then adds that, ‘the desiring subject may be in
the narrative, and
is always also the creator of the narrative , whose desire for the body is
6
part of a semiotic project to make it signify’ (ibid. 25,
emphasis added).
This need not be a conscious process, of course, and
therefore the
semioticization of the body in the text is implicated in those wider
processes that inscribe (social) bodies with meanings and
significances in
society at large. Narrative representations of the body are,
therefore,
overdetermined by ideological and social discourses in currency
within the
social field. Moreover, if, as Foucault maintains, knowledge
is power then
the ‘aesthetics of narrative embodiment’ may function as
the initial term
in a simple syllogism which unlocks the importance of
bodily
representations to our attempt to decode the political unconscious of
the
text. If knowledge is indeed power, then epistemophilia is a desire for
power. Bodily representation emerges from epistemophilia and therefore
representation of bodies is also a desire for power over them, to
control
them, to possess them. In a patriarchal society, this
desire for power is
gendered; representation therefore operates as a surrogate for
sexual
conquest.
This is paralleled in the narrative of the Trilogy
itself by the sheer
number of male sexual conquests. All the novels dwell
repeatedly and at
length on the female body as an object of sexual desire and
almost all male
sexual desires, in terms of possessing such sexualized
bodies, are satisfied.
Everywhere, it seems, women afford men sexual
opportunities. To pick
out just a few examples of this process of embodiment:
‘She draped the
black cloth around her skilfully
to reveal the details of her body’s features
and articulations. It especially highlighted her full
gleaming rump [....]
Under the pressure of her weight, her buttocks were
compressed’ (PW:
7
74); or again, ‘he caught himself, despite his good
intentions, gazing
stealthily at the precious treasure of her rump, which loomed up
like the
dome of a shrine’ (PD: 124). The narrative thus gazes long
and deliriously
over delectably sexualized female bodies in a process of
sexual reification
which enables the satisfaction of the voyeuristic gaze of
its (predominantly
male?) readers.
Two objections could be made here. First,
that this ‘gaze’ is
invariably filtered through the perceptions of male characters
in a
patriarchal society, buttressed by the use of free indirect
discourse, interior
monologue or description of the character’s inner thought
processes,
thereby decentring these bodily
descriptions from the authorial point of
view. Second, that Mahfouz
describes male bodies as much as female
ones, that is, his concern for physicality is not, in
fact, gendered but applies
equally to both sexes.
In response to the second objection, one may point out
that there is
in fact a qualitative difference in Mahfouz’s
representation of male bodies.
These descriptions evoke stature, strength, virility,
or allude to their
psychological character. Women, on the other hand, are described in
purely external terms in which their physical appearances
denote nothing
other than their beauty or otherwise, and hence their
desirability.
Moreover, whilst the males are rarely described in
terms of their sexual
attributes, on those occasions that they are — tallness and
broadness of
build, for example, denotes virility — we notice that they
are represented
as sexual subjects; Mahfouz’s
women, by contrast, are represented as
8
sexual objects, objects over which in the end men always
have control —
and to which they always have access.
This leads us back to the first objection, for Mahfouz’s textual
strategies here take refuge behind the ‘realism’ of his
portrayal of
patriarchal society. But the assumptions which are encoded into
Mahfouz’s description of that reality, of that society, become
a legitimate
concern for the critic because novels are never mere passive
reflectors of
life, mere ciphers of reality. Rather, all narrative is
mediated through the
subject-position of the author, and an interrogation of Mahfouz’s
‘reflection’ of Egyptian
patriarchy from his subject-position provides, in
fact, much more significant evidence for our analysis of
the Trilogy’s
gender ideology.
It is here that we can turn to the importance of situating
Mahfouz’s
representation of the role and function of his women characters
within the
frame of his wider representation of the totality of social
relations. We may
begin with the observation that men are represented as
having full sexual
access to the women in the novel. This has to be qualified
somewhat.
There are, of course, some women who are presented as
sexually
inaccessible except under certain circumstances which are
rigorously
policed. These are the ‘respectable’ women. It is in the difference
between
the text’s representation of these ‘respectable’ women
and the sexually
accessible or disreputable women, and in their relation to
each other (all
mediated, of course, through the male author’s subjectivity
within a
patriarchal social order) in the narrative that many of the
assumptions
about gender and society in the Trilogy may be unpicked and
examined.
9
Mahfouz correctly identifies what may be called the
‘discourse of
respectability’ as the linchpin of the system of gender and class regulation
which we call patriarchy. In Palace Walk, in a quite
masterful scene at
Aisha’s wedding, the performer Jalila
begins a drunken reverie about the
number of lovers she has had. The narrator contextualizes
her function:
‘At a party like this, women were able to entertain
the drunken jokes of
the performers and respond to their humour,
although the limits of
decency were occasionally surpassed. They seemed to enjoy a
break from
their normal primness’ (PW: 266). In the contrast between Jalila’s
drunkenness and the ‘primness’ of the ‘women’ Jalila’s
articulation of the
number of lovers she has had (most of them the husbands of
these
‘women’) reveals how a woman
like her is vital to the definition of the
‘women’ she addresses. Her sexualization is the corollary to their desexualization
and hence their respectability. She is thus a necessary
part of
the economy of desire in which desire is redistributed
away from
‘respectable’ women towards
concubines and prostitutes. She plays a vital
role in the male regulation of female sexuality for the
purposes of
maintaining a hierarchical social order based on respectability.
As Evelyne
Islamic religion, it persists because it serves that
function; moreover, in
addition to such illicit institutions, there are within Islam
licit ones like
multiple marriages and concubinage
which serve the same function
(Accad 1984: 74).5
Whilst Mahfouz correctly and
admirably exposes the doublestandards
and hypocrisy of the ‘asymmetric’ gender relations within
10
patriarchy, he nevertheless never actually challenges the
‘discourse of
respectability’ which divides women into ‘respectable’ and
‘disreputable’
functionaries in the male economy of sexual desire. In fact, he
consolidates
such a discourse. First, Mahfouz’s
women conform to the pattern of
representation in Arab fiction which portrays them in either
familial
(wives, mothers, sisters,
aunts, grandmothers) or sexual (mistress,
prostitute, concubine) relationships to men (Accad
1984: 66). In the
Trilogy, such women only operate either in the home or
in the brothel
(except Sawsan
Hammad, to whom we shall return shortly). The
inability
to imagine anything other than the brothel as an
alternative to the home
as a space for women seems to suggest a complicity on Mahfouz’s part
with the discourse of respectability even as he exposes
its doublestandards.
The ‘home’ of course is the locus par excellence of
respectability.
Nothing illustrates this better than Maryam’s reaction to Yasin
bringing
Zanuba back to their home one night, ‘Have you ever heard of
anything
like this before? A prostitute off the
street in a home?’ (PD: 278). This
discourse of respectability channels ‘respectable’ female
desire away from
the fulfilment of their
sexuality towards a desire for domesticity. This is
perfectly illustrated in the trajectory of the character of Zanuba. In Palace
of Desire her
strategies to acquire a greater degree of economic and
personal freedom by becoming al-Sayyid’s
‘concubine’ rather than a
mere prostitute (chapter 7, 88-90; chapter 9, 99-106) are
presented as
evidence of shifting gender relations by placing it the
context of a wider
redistribution of power away from the male patriarch. At first
glance, it
11
seems as if she is indeed arrogating some of the power, via
her sexuality,
hitherto reserved for men but on closer inspection we find
that, despite
acquiring greater economic and personal freedom, Zanuba does not in fact
alter the structure of gender relations at all. She
rises one notch in the
ladder of disreputable women but her role as a concubine is
essentially the
same as her former role as a prostitute. Zanuba thus usurps, in effect, her
aunt Zubayda’s position in the
court of al-Sayyid but does not challenge
al-Sayyid’s position itself. Indeed, she wants everything
to continue as
before. Eventually, however, this does not suffice and she
desires to
become fully ‘respectable’ by marrying Yasin
and by acquiring a home
(PD: 284). Eventually, her desire for respectability
is consummated and by
the final volume, having given birth to Yasin’s daughter, she is welcomed
into the family as a ‘respectable woman’ (SS: 19).
In the domestication of Zanuba’s
sexuality lies a moral fable
concealed deep within the heart of the Trilogy. Whilst it is
indeed one step
above considering all women or all prostitutes as morally
suspect by
nature, it does not represent anything like an
anti-patriarchal position. If
we are left in any doubt about Mahfouz’s
patriarchal conformism on this
score, Zanuba’s fable is
counterbalanced by Bahija’s. The boundary which
separates the respectable ladies from the rest is crossed
twice, actually,
once by Zanuba in the direction
of respectability, once by Bahija going the
other way. These inverse narratives seem to suggest the
possibility of
redemption for she who respects the discourse of respectability
but
damnation for she who does not. Bahija’s
fable seems to encapsulate all
the stereotypical fears about the dangers of women’s
sexuality. One notes
12
that Bahija’s sexuality is
‘released’ as it were only after the death of her
paralyzed husband thereby signifying that despite his infirmity
her
husband’s very presence guarantees her obedience to the rules
of
respectability. Bahija’s rather sudden
death (PD: 173) seems to echo
Yasin’s sentiments about women which reveals the
instrumentality of male
desire in such a society, ‘If my hopes turn out to be
groundless, I’ll cast
her away like a worn-out shoe’ (PD: 113). Bahija, her fable concluded, is
herself tossed off like a worn out shoe, her fate
representing a warning not
to transgress the norms of sexuality. The narrative thus
rather disturbingly
mimics its most misogynist character here.
In addition to her sexual voracity, one of Bahija’s main crimes
seems to be that she is not a good mother. Indeed, she is
shown to put her
own sexual satisfaction (with Yasin,
her daughter’s suitor!) ahead of her
daughter’s interest. The victory of the sexual instinct over the
maternal
one is cause for a great deal of anxiety as well as moral
censure. Critics
have noted Mahfouz’s
idealization of motherhood (El-Sheikh 1993;
Milson 1998) and ‘maternal’ characters like Amina and Khadija certainly
seem to come off best in the Trilogy. Even amongst
‘respectable’ women,
non-maternal characters are ‘punished’ as it were. Take Aisha, who has
been the subject of much critical scrutiny. The
extermination of her
branch of the family has been given various glosses, most
extensively by
Mattiyahu Peled who suggests that
because she has blue eyes and blond
hair she symbolizes the Turkish aristocracy which Mahfouz felt had no
place in modern
accordingly die (Peled 1983: 110ff.).
Although this is ingenious, there is no
13
support for it in the text and is not therefore particularly
convincing. I
agree that the blond hair and blue eyes are significant
markers as to the
interpretation of Aisha’s significance in
the Trilogy but by placing these
markers within the frame of gender, we can see that though
they do
signify foreignness they do not signify foreignness per se.
Rather, they
allude to a foreign paradigm of womanhood. It is within this
context that
the oft-noticed comparison between the ‘poster girl’
which Kamal
identifies with Aisha (PW: 47) makes
sense. If we look at the description of
the poster closely we notice that she is advertising
cigarettes (smoking is a
disreputable thing for a woman to do) made by ‘Matoussian”,
a foreign
owned tobacco company operative in
Amina this woman is not busy as a ‘bee’ doing the housework
but
reclining in leisure. She thus represents the ‘modern’ woman. Aisha is
therefore associated with this nexus of connotations: she
represents a
foreign ideal of womanhood which is specifically non-maternal.
This is
reinforced by her concern for her appearance, a concern that is
particularly resonant in the Islamic tradition in which there
operates a
concept of female ‘invisibility’, potently symbolized by the hijab. Aisha’s
concern for appearance characterizes her as a ‘visible’ woman
(and we
notice that she is physically visible — to the
policeman she initially falls in
love with) who is contrasted to the ‘traditional’ maternal
image of
womanhood which Mahfouz seems to
idealize.7 In her treatment we find
perhaps an unconscious anxiety over these changing gender
roles and the
imposition of a vicarious closure on such changes. Aisha herself echoes
14
this, saying of herself that ‘she became the cautionary
tale of her day’ (SS:
5). Absolutely. Mahfouz
quite literally grants her no future.
One consequence of Mahfouz’s
idealization of maternal women is
that the narration of female experience in the Trilogy is
confined to the
domestic space. Although Amina is
increasingly allowed out in practice
this boils down to her shuttling between her home, her
daughters’ home
and the mosque. Khadija also is
never represented outside the home, nor
is Aisha nor Naima. This is not just a question of representation which
could, perhaps, have been put right simply by ‘placing’
these characters in
different situations. It is also a question of narrative voice,
something
which Cooke believes Mahfouz
gives to his female characters and which
thus earns him the right to be called a feminist (Cooke
1993: 108). But
what kind of voice are they given? In chapter 38 of
given a long interior monologue from Amina
(SS: 209–13), but this is the
first sustained articulation of Amina’s
inner-self since the opening chapter,
and in Palace of Desire the only narrative voice
she is allowed is in the
first chapter again. We might compare this with Palace
Walk in which her
‘voice’ is articulated on
many occasions. It seems that not only is Amina’s
‘voice’ heard only within the
confines of the domestic space but that as
the focus of the narrative moves gradually from such a
space to a more
‘public’ space, the female
voice is increasingly muted and marginalized.
Correspondingly, the narrative register becomes
increasingly ‘masculine’.
One character we do see outside the home is Sawsan Hammad who
becomes Ahmad Shawkat’s wife. And
whilst one may disagree with El-
Sheikh’s disappointment with Mahfouz
for leaving us in the dark about
15
her ‘physical attributes, her way of dressing, or her
efficiency in household
affairs’ (El-Sheikh 1993: 96), insofar as this would merely
reinforce the
stereotyping of women as fundamentally domestic, one may agree
with
him that ‘Mahfuz did not
succeed in portraying a strong, convincing, upto-
date female character in his novel. The reader is suddenly
confronted
with a series of ideas and a chain of ideological
attitudes’ (ibid. 97). He
goes on, ‘There is hardly any spontaneous or gradual
development and
growth in the portrayal of Sawsan
as a character’ (ibid.). Actually, there is
but, politically speaking, it is not very progressive.
Despite her voluble
protests against the ‘bourgeois’ family, and about the need to
redefine it
(SS: 245), we notice that by the end of the novel she
too is fully
accommodated (in both senses of the word) into the bourgeois
family
home. At first we notice her gradual adoption of cosmetics
and then, after
her marriage, we do not see her outside the domestic
space again. Nor,
within this space, does she wish to antagonize her
mother-in-law which
seems a little odd for a woman who so vehemently espouses
class conflict
as a political ideal (SS: 260).
Which brings us to marriage. Diane Singerman, in her
outstanding
analysis of popular politics in
If marriage and reproducing the family is such a
critical issue
in
around it. It is not, therefore, surprising that Personal
Status
Law [...] has been one of the most deeply contested
and
sensitive issues for a wide range of political forces in
(Singerman,
1995: 15).
16
We should, therefore, expect discursive constellations
to form
around it too. Mahfouz does
consistently show that marriage is a
battleground upon which various forces converge — the foiled
suitor of
Aisha, Hasan Salim’s
marriage to Aida, Alawiyya Sabri’s
rejection of
Ahmad, Ahmad’s eventual marriage to Sawsan.
However, there seems to
be no critique of the fact that it is precisely because
of this that marriage is
the axis upholding the entire patriarchal order and that
in order to
challenge this order one must challenge marriage as an institution
in
which various political investments are made. Rather,
marriage is
presented as a fact of life rather like birth and death, and
this view is
perhaps best summed up by Ahmad Shawkat,
‘Life consists of work,
marriage and the duty incumbent upon each human being’ (SS:
306).
The only criticisms of marriage are accordingly made
by the male
characters who deploy a rhetoric of victimization which
represents
marriage as a cage — whether of their sexuality in the case of
Yasin or
their philosophical idealism in the case of Kamal. This, of course, occludes
the real nature of gender relations insofar as it
presents the male as victim.
One could again object that these are articulated only
by male characters
and that they would express their dissatisfaction this
way, but episodes like
that in which Al-Sayyid
confronts Zanuba’s strategy of ‘trapping’ him
into marriage seem to give objective narrative
corroboration to al-
Sayyid’s view. He considers her the spider and himself the fly and,
indeed,
she is shown in the episode to be doing exactly what he
thinks she’s
doing, namely ensnaring him and devouring his money. If,
ostensibly, the
rhetoric of victimization is shown to be a product of a
masculinity in crisis
17
due to shifting gender relations the increase in female
power that is
implied merely serves to confirm a long held stereotype of
feminine
cunning.
Thus, a recurrent theme is emerging in which women who
are not
contained by the institutions which police respectability and
who do not
conform to the familial role are consistently represented as
threatening and
dangerous. They must be re-contained. There is therefore, in
contrast to
feminism’s urge for destabilization of the patriarchal image of
‘woman’, a
move towards stabilization within certain prevailing norms
and images. In
contrast to this threatening womanhood we find a positive
valuation of
what David Radavich, in his
analysis of David Mamet’s plays, calls
‘homosociality’
(Radavich 1994: 123-136). In the Trilogy, whilst
relations
between men and women are confined to physical gratification
or to the
reproduction of the family, male friendships with other males is
consistently shown to be warm, fulfilling and satisfying. One need
only
quote al-Sayyid, ‘He chose
friendship over passion. He would say “The
affection of a friend endures. A girlfriend’s passion is
fleeting.”’ (PW: 223)
This concern with homosociality
— which Mahfouz seems to exhibit in his
own personal life — may be due as Fatima Mernissi suggests to the
pressure of Islamic tradition,
The Muslim system is not so much opposed to women as
to
the heterosexual unit. What is feared is the growth of
the
involvement between a man and a woman into an allencompassing
love, satisfying the sexual, emotional and
intellectual needs of both partners. Such an involvement
constitutes a direct threat to man’s allegiance to Allah (cited
in Sharabi 1988: 33-4).
18
Or it could be an escapist compensatory reaction
against a perceived
threat, a last, unconscious defence
of a ‘wounded patriarchy’ (Radavich
1994: 135). One notices, for example, a leitmotif of
male nostalgia by each
succeeding generation in the Trilogy which posits the previous
generation
as more ‘manly’ or more ‘virile’ than themselves (e.g.
SS: 132). Either
way, a fundamentally neopatriarchal
view of gender relations is reinscribed
deep into the political unconscious of the Trilogy.
19
Notes
1 Its most
fundamental problem is that Sharabi seems to suggest
that neopatriarchy is a structural
corollary of dependent modernization limited to ‘peripheral’,
semi-colonized and colonized societies in
the wake of colonial expansion and European supremacy. It
is, therefore, specifically non-Western.
Conversely, he seems to regard Western modernity as
‘authentic’ and presumably free from patriarchy,
as somehow ‘beyond’ patriarchy (see especially p.22 and
p.26). Feminists in Europe and
pick one group, would find this extremely hard to stomach.
2 An exception to
this is Sabry Hafez (1995).
3 ‘Mahfouz’s depiction of prostitutes make explicit what
remains implicit in his other women - that
men reify all women to avoid dealing with the reality of
their lives and experiences [....] Mahfouz uses
prostitutes to demonstrate his male characters’ inability to deal
with women except as masks and
symbols [...]’ (Cooke 1993: 112-114).
4 The
abbreviation PW refers to the first volume of the Trilogy, Bayn
al-Qasrayn, translated as Palace
Walk. All
subsequent citations refer to the translated editions. In the course of what
follows, the
abbreviations PD and SS refer to the second and third volumes
respectively, namely Qasr al-Shawq and
al-Sukariyya, translated as
editions.
5 ‘[Prostitution]
provides a way out for men who cannot pay for the legal forms of sexuality
[...] wives
and concubines are more expensive to support’ (Accad 1984: 75).
6 Beinin and Lockman (1988) note that tobacco manufacturers were
exclusively foreign and that they
constituted the largest capitalist industry in
7 It is
noticeable that the question of female visibility and invisibility is connected
to the process of
embodiment. Respectable women, who are supposed to be invisible,
are not sexually embodied in the
way the disreputable women are. Here again, the narrative
process itself can be seen to be conforming
to the discourse of respectability, averting its gaze
from the bodies of respectable women yet feasting
on the bodies of disreputable ones.
20
Bibliography
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Image of the
Prostitute in Modern Literature,
Beinin, Joel and Lockman, Zachary
(1988) Workers on the
Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian
Working Class 1882-
1954,
Brooks, Peter (1993) Body Work: Objects of Desire
in Modern Narrative,
Cooke, Miriam (1993) ‘Men Constructed in the Mirror of
Prostitution’ in
Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar (eds.) Naguib Mahfouz: From
Regional Fame to Global Recognition,
Press, pp.106-125.
El-Sheikh, Ibrahim (1993)
‘Egyptian Women as Portrayed in the Novels
of Najib Mahfuz’
in Trevor LeGassick (ed.) Critical Perspectives on
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— (1994)
M.Kenny (
—
(
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of
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Peled, Mattiyahu (1983) Religion,
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