THE CAIRO TRILOGY
by Naguib Mahfouz
translated by William Maynard Hutchins et al
Black Swan, £9.99 each

The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who died last week aged 94, was the only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His Cairo Trilogy is set after the First World War, when Egypt was a British Protectorate. Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who runs a grocery store, rules absolutely at home. Little political life filters through the balcony where Amina waits for her husband, listening to the street that she has known since she married at 13.

Ahmad is committed in his faith, gallant to his friends and enthusiastic about life’s pleasures. “He was not accustomed to busying himself with introspection or self-analysis. In this way he was like most people who are rarely alone . . .”

An elderly religious guide, Shaykh Mutawalli Abd al-Samad, visits the shop to challenge Ahmad’s womanising and drinking. The sheikh prays for the “prosperity and piety” of his family — Amina, his sons Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal, and his daughters Khadija and Aisha. Ahmad is discomfited by the naming of his women “outside their chambers”.

But the modern world encroaches. The sheikh complains that two Australian soldiers have ripped his turban to shreds. Fahmy becomes involved with a group of freedom fighters. At the end of the first novel, Palace Walk, Fahmy is shot dead by British soldiers at a demonstration. In the second and third volumes (Palace of Desire and Sugar Street) another son falls in love with a Westernised girl, Ahmad’s daughters resist his plans and his grandsons embrace extremes, one as a Communist activist, the other as a Muslim fundamentalist. Ahmad learns, after all, to contemplate the inner life.

Shakyh Mutawalli — blind and decrepit — reappears at the end of the series. Once he was “a landmark of the neighbourhood”. But in mid-20th century Cairo, gangs of children taunt him.

BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a reading of The Cairo Trilogy, starting on October 15

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