Arabian Nights and Days Naguib Mahfouz Doubleday 227 pp. $22.95 Review by Thomas D'Evelyn Featured in BBR April 1995 No one knows who wanted Naguib Mahfouz killed on October 14, 1994. Both the government and the Islamic opposition have pointed the finger at each other. In any event, the assassination by knife did not succeed. Mahfouz has picked up where he left off that day, when as he had for 30 years he left his apartment for a cafe overlooking the Nile. Now this mild, even timid man, who spent his working life as a bureaucrat, is attended by government security guards, who, with a loyal group of fellow writers and intellectuals, have become regulars at the "Friday sitting" of Naguib Mahfouz. Mahfouz is a modern literary hero. He has been credited with inventing the modern Arab novel. The Dickensian realism and the Dickensian pathos of his literary recreation of Cairo have recommended him to non-Islamic readers in the West. But as the most recent work of his to be translated shows, the mosaic-like depiction of urban reality in his novels reflects, from time to time, a spiritual light that issues from his own profound religious discipline. Arabian Nights and Days is ostensibly a retelling of several of the myriad original tales of the medieval collection, The Thousand and One Nights. The lovely Shahrazad controls the bloodlust of her husband King Shahriyar by telling him stories; otherwise, she will join the thousands of virgins he has murdered. The stories mix folklore's genies with enduring occupations-the barber, the porter-and the unchanging political order of haves and have-nots. The differences are to be relished: Mahfouz makes the consciousness of the King-Sultan Shahriyar-the spiritual battleground of the work. The original used various points of view-first and third-whereas Mahfouz uses the omniscient narrator. In the original, death rounded out the lives of the story-tellers; here, it often interrupts them with all the brutal inconsequentiality of the modern police state. In place of the voluble, irresistible flow of the original, Mahfouz has created a sequence of "pieces" or "takes" by which he rotates the traditional stories through his multifaceted prism, where irony and ambiguity contend with literal piety and realism. Perhaps the most famous story of all the thousand tales-and perhaps the most well-known story of humanity-ends here with Aladdin being executed by a corrupt chief of police. But there is nothing cynical about Mahfouz. The lack of poetic justice that characterizes the original certainly admits an abyss between the tradition and Mahfouz. Mahfouz concentrates on hypocrisy, anxiety and the impact of dreams-whether induced by drugs, sex or false piety. His realism is psychological as well as historical. As in all his works, the alleyways are teeming with all orders of human existence. The irruption of the unseen is part of that life. The irrepressible repetition of "enlightening aphorisms" from the Koran and other traditional sources is a verbal, and often false, analog of the transcendence of truth. The activity of the other world in this one must always be questioned, just as it questions the sovereignty of the human world. A genie tells the chief of police, "You people are skilled at memorizing, quoting, and hypocrisy, and in proportion to your knowledge must be your reckoning, so woe to you." This "proportion" raises great, and open, questions about the realpolitik that prevails in the realm of the Sultan. And yet there are moments of sublime gravity when the whirling dervish of Mahfouz's fiction seems poised over the abyss. The sentences, clothed in traditional garb, grow luminous. Everyman Sinbad, looking forward to enjoying the fruits-spiritual and material-of his travels, is overtaken by restlessness. He seeks an answer for his anxiety from a holy man. He is told, "If your soul is safe from you, then you have discharged its right; and if people are safe from you, then you have discharged their rights." Thus Mahfouz speaks to his condition, to Egypt's-in the grip of murderous forces-and to our own. The apparent equanimity with which the frail old man has returned to his routine after the assassination attempt could be interpreted as a blind tempting of fate, as arrogance, as simplicity. But after reading Arabian Nights and Days, one can't but see it as an act of one who understands what he has written. Thomas D'Evelyn is a literary agent in Providence, RI. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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