The Eternal Alley:
Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz

July 23, 2007

Naguib Mahfouz begins his novel Midaq Alley (1947) with an arresting image of change. In the coffee house—a central meeting place for the men of the alley—we meet an old poet who presumes to ply his trade:

He played a few introductory notes just as the coffee-house had heard him play every evening for twenty years or more. His frail body swayed in time with the music. Then he cleared his throat, spat, and said: "In the name of God." [4-5]

The scene is familiar to readers of Lane's Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. We are witnessing a traditional mode of entertainment.. the vehicle through which stories such as those of the 1,001 Nights have come down to us. But Mahfouz will have none of it, and the poet is summarily kicked out of the coffee-shop. The owner speaks curtly to the poet:

"We know all the stories you tell by heart and we don't need to run through them again. People today don't want a poet. They keep asking me for a radio and there's one over there being installed now. So go away and leave us alone..." [5]

The poet never reappears in the novel. The scene stands out as an odd one, disconnected from the plot, but it allows Mahfouz to position himself with respect to traditional storytelling. Radio is in, and as the novel was by no means a traditional literary form in Arabic, we should align the novel with radio.. displacing traditional forms that nobody listened to anymore.

For all the confidence that the novel is an exciting form that people will want to read (Mahfouz writes a straightforward narrative that is hard to put down), there is an underlying stasis in the social world of the alley. A novel that begins by kicking out a traditional poet and turning on the radio is nevertheless fearful of moral change. I find that contrast difficult to reconcile: it is almost as if Mahfouz wants to lay claim to a modern method but then describe the same old alley and its social world.

The concept of the alley is hard for Americans to grasp. This last week I was reading The Great Arab Cities in the 16th-18th Centuries by André Raymond, and I was led to once again consider the importance of local structures such as the alley. Note the following map of some streets in Cairo around 1800:

That map is not going to be confused by anyone with New York City, and it is important to think about why that is. Grids allow for an openly accessible network of streets. The city is viewed as public and the streets are correspondingly useful to all. The above map shows a city which has major thoroughfares, but which then splinters into a number of small alleys that go nowhere. These alleys are not public space.. not meant to be useful to everyone.. but are the small fortresses of private life. Writing about the situation in Cairo, Raymond comments:

...these quarters formed unities that were often completely closed. They were placed under the authority of shaykhs who, given the limited dimensions of the quarters (generally a maximum of 4 or 5 hectares, often much less, with a population of 1,000 to 2,000 inhabitants, that is, 200 to 400 families), were able to exercise effective and efficient control over the entire population... [15]

This is the essential backdrop for Midaq Alley, and we go wrong if we imagine some American neighborhood (which generally includes a lot of people who barely know each other). The point about Midaq Alley is that it is a world unto itself.. providing the social bounds within which its inhabitants live and eventually die. We have seen that Mahfouz understands the changes being introduced by the modern world, but still the alley system holds. Having reached a climax, Mahfouz writes: "This crisis too, like all the others, finally subsided and the alley returned to its usual state of indifference and forgetfulness..." (244).

I would be curious to trace in Mahfouz his confidence, rising or falling, in the continuity of this Egyptian geography/way of life. From my contemporary vantage point it would seem he overestimated the timelessness of this way of life.. writing as he did at the beginning of the steep population curve that would utterly change his city.