Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

The patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad in Palace Walk by the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz is the master of all he surveys. He terrorises his family of three boys and two girls, and his wife Amina, who wakes at midnight every evening to prepare for his home-coming from carousing. He's a respected and prominent merchant. He's adored by his circle of friends for his wit. And he has loose women falling at his feet.

But the truth, as we might expect, cannot be as appearances would suggest. And sure enough Ahmad's dominion is undermined at every turn, by his wife, by his daughters Khadija and Aisha, named after the two principal wives of the Prophet, by his sons Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal. Even by his daughters' suitors, who fail to respect his ideas on marriage order. And in the end by his country, which causes him to be humiliated as a man, and to lose one of the things most precious to him.

Let the part represent the whole: Palace Walk is set at the end of the First World War, and Cairo is swarming with Australian troops and with the occupying British, who have declared Egypt a protectorate in response to the country's nominal support for the Ottoman empire in the War. The feeling of national humiliation boiled over into riots against the exile of prominent nationalists who had been elected to the national assembly, leading in 1922 to Britain's declaration of Egyptian independence.

The novel, the first part of a trilogy that is Mahfouz's most celebrated work in the West, ends at the time of the rioting, when the feeling of humiliation is still raw. Ahmad is bullied (and effectively unmanned in his own eyes) by the British. His eldest son Yasin, his father's double in matters of ego and his taste for women, is likewise humiliated by the occupier. His youngest son Kamal is adopted by a garrison of British soldiers as a sort of performing mascot. Only his middle son Fahmy, bookish and idealistic, has the courage to stand up despite great personal risk. And he is made to pay a heavy price.

Manliness is everything to al-Sayyid Ahmad, and its requirements condition his every move. He is a prince among men in male company, because that is what is required. But he is a petty tyrant at home, beating his wife (we are told), swearing at his sons as he ridicules them. He exercises iron control over his wife and daughters, although they all individually escape in significant ways. He is hard-headed in business, drinks copiously in the wine-shops, eats his fill before anyone else is served, and juggles mistresses before the admiring eyes of his friends.

Egypt in 1918 seems to be a man's world. But as the book makes clear, the dominance of men like Ahmad is coming to an end, if it isn't already an illusion. As the two daughters marry and move away, we know that the ropes that bound them are slackening -- they marry brothers who are far too spoiled and lazy ever to be concerned about values or standards. And as it happens, the generation they belong to did in fact become more emancipated, which led directly to a backlash not so much in Egypt as elsewhere in the Muslim world. The Muslim Brotherhood, a radical fundamentalist sect, was founded in Egypt in 1928, ten years after the events of the novel, by Hassan al-Banna. The movement felt society had lost touch with Islam as a result of corrupting Western influences, among them the emancipation of women, such as it was. The wearing of the veil, some have argued, is a compromise to the increasing tendency of women to go outside the home. The word hijab, used to denote one form of such a veil, also means modesty or seclusion, similar to the idea of purdah. In Palace Walk, al-Sayyid Ahmad's wife and daughters simply do not leave the home, and can only look outside from behind the protective barrier of the lattice-work screens on the balcony, known as mashrabiya (see photo here).

Obviously, in such circumstances, to wear a veil would be superfluous. So the widespread use of the veil can only have come later, when women moved out of the home. This view sees the chador and all the many variants as a sort of portable hajib. But the move towards more Western ways of dressing was also a by-product of colonialism and occupation, which Arabists and Islamists countered by the adoption of more "authentic" forms of dress, some of which were about as authentic as a medieval ceremony invented by the Victorians. In the book, Ahmad wears a fez, a headgear that had originally been imposed by the Ottoman imperialists in an attempt to stamp out local group allegiance. The veil as we know it, on the other hand, was introduced as a rejection of colonialism by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s.

This may seem to be a long way from the story of al-Sayyid Ahmad and his family told in Palace Walk, but it wouldn't of course have been a digression for Mahfouz's audience reading at the time of the novel's first publication in 1956 (not long after al-Banna was killed by the government, and Muslim Brothers tried to assassinate Nasser). The background will have been familiar to his readers in the Arab world throughout his writing life, as he secured the place of the novel (not a native form) almost single-handed. He could never have imagined that issues such as the right of women to wear a veil over their face would become so gripping to Westerners that we would spend days debating the comments of one British minister on the matter.

It's impossible for a Westerner, I would say, to read a book like this in this day and age without contemplating these issues -- without mining Mahfouz's prose for indications of his own position on the various arguments. Is Amina a doormat? Is there nothing in it for her? Is Ahmad nothing but a macho bastard? Are we wrong obstinately to view this remote culture through our own Western eyes? Can it really be the case that they have got it all wrong, and we have it all right?

You read a book like this with such questions echoing in your mind. This would never have been a run-of-the-mill family saga -- the Carringtons in jellabas and yashmaks -- simply because of the depth of Mahfouz's psychological insight, the meticulous construction of his characters -- I finished this book weeks ago and the characters still feel fresh in my mind, and I still feel tragically affected by the ending -- and the beauty of his prose, which I have to assume has been faithfully rendered by William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny, his translators. If you'll allow me a florid image, his narrative is like the laying one on top of the other of many many onion-skin-thin layers of pastry, no single one of which seems to have any substance, until almost imperceptibly he creates a mille-feuilles that's at the same time so light you don't even realise you're eating it, and so rich that you could never manage two.

Palace Walk is published in Great Britain by Black Swan, and in the US by Anchor Books (who have a stunning selection of his works in English).

Naguib Mahfouz, who was stabbed in the neck in 1994 after his expressions of support for Salman Rushdie, died in August this year. He was 94. Read a short bio here. And an obituary from The Guardian here and from The Agonist here.