The Contest between Secular and Islamist Movements in Egypt 1936–1945 Study in Naguib Mahfouz's Sugar Street

Abstract

35 *Farid Al_Salim earned his PhD in History in 2007 from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville,AR. In 2008,he joined the History Department at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas and he he became member of the Security Studies faculty. Dr Al Salim research interest centered on social and economic history of the Middle East with main focus on Greater Syria and Egypt. Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIV, No.4, Summer 2011 The Contest between Secular and Islamist Movements in Egypt 1936-1945 Study in Naguib Mahfouz’s Sugar Street Farid Al-Salim* Sugar Street is set in Cairo; and the action takes place from the 1930’s to after the end of World War II. It is one of the most famous novels concerning that period in the Middle East, and is considered to be a major work of Egyptian literature. Sugar Street is the third and final book in the Cairo Trilogy, which traces the life of a middle-class Egyptian family from 1919 to just after the end of the Second World War. The preceding books are Palace Walk and Palace of Desire. All of these books are named after streets in the old section of Cairo: in Sugar Street, the home of the head of the family is located on Sugar Street, which is the closest street to a bridge over the Nile River linking the old and new parts of Cairo In Sugar Street, Naguib Mahfouz has three objectives. He is telling a story, voicing a call to revolution and showing a situation. The first level of the novel is that it is the story of an Egyptian family. The life of the Abd alJawad family is full of intermarriages, disputes, tragedies and hopes. This is, however, only the most superficial aspect of the novel. 36 1 Matti Moosa. The Early Novels of Naguib Mahfouz: Image of Modern Egypt. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 255-256 2 Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 47 Naguib Mahfouz presents his views on everything from religion and politics to marriage, life and death in such a manner that the state censors at the time of publication, 1952, would not be able to accuse of being antigovernment . He says things that are not necessarily easy for people to hear, regardless of whether these things are right or wrong. This was a political risk for Mr. Mahfouz. He almost lost his life at the hand of a Muslim fanatic in 1994. In Sugar Street, the author described the rapid social changes in Egypt during the late 1930 and the World War II period-- tremendous upheavals in family structure, in women’s roles, in politics, and in the lives of the characters. Mahfouz shows us Egyptian colonial society in all its complexity. The characters get out more – the center of gravity shifts to new homes, new neighborhoods, universities, newspaper offices, and the public space in general. All of this brilliantly shows the significant social changes that occurred in Egypt over this period. Sugar Street is a call to the Egyptian people to unite, resolve their internal differences and fight against the foreign and domestic enemies of Egypt. These enemies include foreign powers which controlled or attempted to control Egypt such as the British, the Germans, the French and the Italians. By domestic enemies, Mahfouz means Muslim Brotherhood who wanted to turn Egypt again into an Islamic state, some of the nationalist groups which wanted power in order to oppress the Egyptian people, and the monarchy and aristocracy which wanted to maintain power.1 ( I ) Historical Background Throughout the period extending between 1516 and 1798, the Ottoman empire adopted a policy of total impenetrability to European influence in its heartland territories like Egypt and Syria, which resulted not only in the isolation of these regions but also in their cultural, scientific and intellectual deterioration.2 The emergence of secularism in the Middle East dates back to the first major post-Renaissance European military intervention in the region known as Napoleon’s campaign on Egypt and which took place in 1798. The Egyptians in particular came...