Children of the Alley

Gebelawi, the wealthy patriarch who founded the alley and then withdrew into an inaccessible mansion at its edge, functions across the novel as an allegory for a certain idea of God, remote, invoked constantly, encountered by almost no one directly, whose original endowment of the alley to its residents has long since been seized by the gangster-overseers who actually run daily life there. Mahfouz structures the entire novel as a repeating cycle: a new figure rises promising to restore Gebelawi's original justice, wins some real victory for the alley's poor, and is eventually absorbed, corrupted, or forgotten by the same system he set out to reform.

Gabal, who leads the alley's snake charmers to a genuine, if partial, liberation from the overseers, and Rifaa, whose obsessive concern with the desperate and possessed rather than earthly power gets him killed by men who cannot use what he offers, map directly onto Moses and Jesus, while Qassem, who succeeds through a combination of persuasion, negotiated authority, and eventual organization, maps onto Muhammad, and Mahfouz keeps each figure recognizably human rather than reverent, ambitious, afraid, capable of real cruelty as well as real justice.

Arafa, the final section's protagonist, replaces prophecy and inherited authority with chemistry and invention, using the same rationalist tools that could liberate the alley from the overseers to instead build the era's most fearsome weapons, and Mahfouz's decision to end the allegory here, with a magician-scientist rather than a religious figure, was read on publication as an argument that science had inherited monotheism's promise of deliverance without yet earning any better a record of using power responsibly than the prophets before it.

Serialized in a Cairo newspaper in 1959, Awlad Haratina was denounced by al-Azhar, Egypt's foremost Islamic authority, as blasphemous for its unmistakable, if never explicitly named, retelling of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through gangster politics and human failure, and the novel was never published as a book in Egypt during Mahfouz's lifetime, circulating instead through a Beirut edition smuggled back across the border. The controversy followed Mahfouz for the rest of his career and is widely understood as part of what motivated the 1994 stabbing attack that nearly killed him, carried out by an assailant who had likely never read the book himself.