The late 1960s ushered in a new period of experimentation in the Arabic novel, which for a significant group of writers took shape in a return to heritage. Najib Mahfuz, as one of the form's most dedicated and prolific pioneers, was heavily involved in the exercise, though critics have tended to overlook this, distracted by his celebrated contribution to the more traditional realm of realism in the 1950s.(1) Between 1971 and 1995, Mahfuz published a series of novels centred on a dialogue with heritage, each taking as its point of reference, or interpretative context, a pre-modern text, genre or cultural phenomenon; Layali Alf Layla (1978) calls on Shahrazad's tales, Rihlat Ibn Fattuma (1983) evokes the well-known adventures of the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, and Hikayat Haratina (1975) and Asda' Sirat al-Dhatiyya (1995) are infused with Sufi codes and messages.(2) Thematically, these texts are all concerned to some degree with issues of truth and authority and tend to cast doubt over the appearance of things. Structurally and stylistically, they are all aimed at producing a more indigenous form; by grafting modern novelistic strategies onto past texts and genres Mahfuz gives the Arabic novel the appearance of having its roots in tradition, challenging the orthodox account that locates the origins of the Arabic novel in Western literature and calling into question the influence of the West on Arab culture and art.

It is never wise to draw too many parallels between a writer's fiction and events in his life. However, on this occasion it is safe to say that the shift in Mahfuz's prose style in the 1970s is directly linked with events in the political domain, in particular the June War of 1967 (al-naksa), when the old order collapsed and, with it, the structures and institutions that supported it, including realism in art; to move forward would require exploring new avenues and finding alternatives. This paper examines how Mahfuz sought to articulate the new reality in the first novel he published after the event, Al-Maraya (1972),(3) within the framework of an intertextual dialogue with classical Arabic biography.

Biography as History in Arab Culture
The identification of biography with history has a long tradition in Arab culture. The earliest attempts at historiography involved compiling short biographies of the Prophet's companions (al-Sahaba) and their successors (al-Tabi'un), principally to determine their trustworthiness as transmitters of hadith reports. By the ninth century there existed a flourishing tradition of gathering the biographies of men from a particular category of Islamic learning, especially poets, philologists, jurists and traditionists, into works known as tabaqat.(4) These in turn gave rise to the 'biographical dictionary' (mu'jam) - the great lexicographically arranged tome, and a hallmark of Arab heritage. Picking up on the biographers' notion of history as the sum total of people's lives,(5) Mahfuz attempts to tell the story of Egypt over the first two thirds of the twentieth century using the biographies of its citizens. On the back of the flyleaf of the disturbing short-story collection Taht al-Mazalla, published in 1969, Mahfuz writes: 'these stories were written in the period between October and December 1967', informing the reader they should be viewed as the author's initial response to the Arab defeat.(6) By the time Mahfuz came to write Maraya he had recovered his composure to a degree and was ready to begin the process of coming to terms with the crisis, to join Barakat and others in seeking to understand the recent past so as to remedy the present and restore hope in the future.(7) In this regard, the narrator of the text's deep respect for communist intellectual 'Azmi Shakir, who 'was among the first to regain equilibrium' after June 1967, is enlightening. Already by October of that year 'Azmi had published an article analysing the defeat in terms of the lessons it enshrined:

he warned of surrender to the tyranny of self-criticism and losing confidence... he asserted that the revolution was the real disputed land, not Sinai or Jerusalem, and that was what had to survive and continue, and followed it up with his magnificent book, From Defeat We begin, a charter for a new life forging its ways, dusting itself off.(8)

Yet retrieving a sense of balance did not involve a return to the writer's former method of constructing narrative. Nor did it mean he had succeeded in making sense of the stunning defeat and its causes, and reconciled himself to the event; every aspect of Maraya - structure, setting, character and story - is informed by the Arab defeat. Its narrative strategies are designed to represent the new reality, which was defined by disillusionment, uncertainty and fragmentation.

Fragmentation
Structure, time, story, even the city of Cairo, characters and narrator of Maraya are fragmented. Mahfuz explodes the narrative machinery that generated meaning in his fiction hitherto, just as the June War exploded the foundations upon which his generation based their values and beliefs. Edward Said describes a tendency towards episodism in Arab prose since 1948. The 'unit of composition', he writes, 'is the scene, and not the period (prologue, middle, end, in the Aristotlean sense)'(9), since, with question marks hanging over both the past and future, the moment was the only thing of which the Arab could be sure. The episodic tendency took on new proportions after 1967, Mahfuz's fiction being a good illustration. The short non-panoramic novels that followed Al-Thulathiyya (1956-7) may have taken the scene as their basic building block but they were 'organised scene successions'. Flashbacks and dream sequences (or drug-induced stupors) are used extensively in Al-Liss wa'l-Kilab (1962) and Tharthara Fawq al-Nil (1966) but linearity is never seriously questioned; the scenes are part of a clear progression and continuity in the making - a far cry from the narrative fragments, often consisting of no more than an image or solitary gesture, arranged in no apparent order and left for the reader to make sense of in Maraya.

Maraya is divided up into fifty-five short sections, never more than a few pages, each taking as its title the name of an individual who has crossed the narrator's path at some point. The sections do not follow one another according to a clear pattern, such as the sequence in which the narrator became acquainted with the title-character. Nor are they exclusive or comprehensive. Instead, details of the characters and events are scattered throughout the text, making a reading of the entire work necessary before a picture of either can be pieced together. Amani Muhammad's sketch, for instance, relates some details of her affair with the narrator - how it began at her instigation and ended with her husband's intervention - but it is not until the section under the name 'Jad Abu'l-'Ala' that the reader discovers there are other men in her life.(10) Likewise, a better picture of the character of Dr. Mahir 'Abd al-Karim is gleaned from incidental encounters with him throughout the narrative than from his own sketch, which is short and largely taken up by an encounter with the daughter of an ex-girlfriend and the rebuttal of a rumour. And the episode of Bilal 'Abduh al-Basyuni's emigration is only concluded two sketches later when the reader learns of his success. Appraisals of Rida Hamada, 'Id Mansur and other members of the narrator's immediate friendship group, who feature in several episodes, in particular benefit from a cross-textual perspective. (11)

Not only are these sections randomly arranged and incomplete, they are also in themselves fundamentally episodic, moving without explanation or mediation from one incidence or description to the next. The opening sketch of the book begins by referring to an article defaming its title-character, Ibrahim 'Aql, and providing a few cursory details about the clamour his doctorial thesis raised. It then shifts to a brief exchange between the narrator and Dr. 'Aql in a lecture and mentions how the two would often meet at Dr Mahir 'Abd al-Karim's salons. This is immediately followed by an account of a discussion at one of these meetings before the narrator jumps to the summer of that year to recall an encounter with the professor in Alexandria. Then come a few images of Ibrahim 'Aql as the target of ridicule and disdain as he continues to support the monarchy amidst the students' calls for its abolition, and a conversation charged with innuendo and hypocrisy on his part just before his students' graduation. This is followed by a portrait of a broken Ibrahim 'Aql at his sons' funeral thirteen years later, a chance meeting outside the Husayn mosque six years after that, by which point he has embraced Sufism, the appearance of his obituary in 1957, and a few retrospective comments from the narrator and some of 'Aql's friends to bring the sketch to a close. In fact, this is one of the fuller, and certainly the longest, sketch in the text. Portraits of the narrator's lifetime acquaintances move swiftly and spontaneously from childhood to adulthood, leaving the reader guessing about the interim period, and episodes and narrative descriptions that occur within a sketch often depart significantly from the character stated as their subject in the title. For example, an exchange between the narrator and 'Abduh al-Basyuni takes up at least half of Amani Muhammad's sketch, discussing her only at first before turning to the issue of sycophantry in the art scene, while the sketches of Sabri Jad and Salim Jabr consist in the main of political debate and 'Isam al-Hamalawi's wife usurps almost the entirety of the sketch bearing his name.

The pretext for this episodism, lack of focus within sketches and their apparent haphazard organisation across the text is the first-person narrator. The text is presented in the form of a memoir (mudhakkira), thus memory is the supreme narrative determinant. Chronology and causal relations, the conventional means of presenting story, are secondary considerations, subordinated to the chaotic machinery of memory, and the way is open for the narrator to organise his account according to his own specific criteria and design. But what are the narrator's criteria and design? Conventionally, association replaces chronology and causality in a memory-generated text; the mind moves from one memory to the next according to associative connections, such as contrast, logic and imagination, which are complex, multi-directional and ever-changing but which 'will always be thematic and to the point'.(12) The resulting text will then presumably display the narrator's thematic purpose. But in Maraya, while within individual sketches associative connections work up to a point, movement from one sketch to the next in the text at large is abrupt and arbitrary. The narrator is apparently without a clear design and purpose. His mind is not operating along conventional lines.

This comes back to the events of 1967. Just as the fragmented structure of Maraya reflects the shattering of ideals, values and institutions after the Arab defeat, so it reflects the narrator's loss of balance and confusion. James Roy King borrows Leo Bersani's 'deconstructed self' to account for Mahfuz's narrator. He never becomes 'a distinctly and coherently unified personality'.(13) Instead, as 'a product of all the strains and contradictions of modern Egyptian life',(14) he remains fragmentary and wispy. As a story in retrospect, the narrator involved in the act of recollection is distinct from the person he describes; the former (the narrator proper) is in a fixed situation (the narrating present), the situation of the latter (the hero in the past) is ever-changing. A journey into the past - a memoir - aspires to reconcile the two. But the narrator of Maraya never achieves an understanding of himself; the protagonist and narrator never realise an integration of past and present.

Polytemporality
Fragmentation has implications for the way in which time is represented and opens the way for a vision of temporality distinct from that found in Mahfuz's fiction hitherto. In his article on geohistorical location in the Arabic novel, Aboul-Ela addresses the incompatibility of the Hegelian historiography of the Bildungsroman and literature that springs from the Global South. The European novel conceives of narrative structure as 'organically linear, causal and teleological',(15) reflecting a vision of history as stable and progressive. History for societies that have suffered under Western imperialism, whose political and economic relations with their former masters remain today disproportionately balanced in favour of the latter, does not necessarily equate with progress, hence the voices that speak for these societies find limited uses for Hegel's historical thought.

Chronological and logical story-lines for a long time prevailed in modern Arabic fiction as writers sought to imitate the novel. In the 1960s, having mastered the form, conventional style ceased to bind Arab writers. Moreover the events of 1967 rendered Hegelian historiography unfeasible. Linearity, causality and teleology may provide a valuable service in rendering organic and homogenous the work of art but at that point in time they were so far removed from Arab reality as to have become irrelevant. Hence in Maraya Mahfuz explodes the temporal foundations upon which he had previously based his stories and opts for polytemporality.

Accordingly, the text operates multiple time schemes. There is the biographical (private) time (16) of narrator, the private times of each of the individuals profiled, and public (collective), historical or real time, the predominant scheme mapped out in terms of political events and regimes, and often actual dates. Apart from these people-based time-schemes, there are also a number of time currents - traditional and modern time, conservative and liberal time, foreign (European) and indigenous time - which exist in a constant state of friction, most obviously in sections of dialogue, and heighten the tension, density and complexity of the moment. Underpinning all this is retrospective time, i.e. the ever-changing temporal distance that separates the narrator-present from the narrator-past and which moves vertically, horizontally and metaphysically according to the speaker's thought processes.

Time in Maraya is thus a bundle of contradictions. The various schemes do not move forward in tandem but jump backwards and forwards, come together briefly then splinter. Like the experience of modern Arab nations, they are disparate and disorderly. The points at which they intersect are where the drama resides. Energetic debates between the narrator and his contemporaries illustrate the abyss that lies between modern and traditional time. In fact few sketches escape without events in the public arena interfering in the title-character's life, if not turning it upside down then at least having a profound effect on his emotional well-being. For instance, the economic crisis leaves Sayyid Sha'ir unemployed. He then turns to drug-dealing, opens a café with the proceeds, and with the Second World War finds himself rich as the British soldiers flood in and his profits double. History for the characters is characterised by swift changes in fortune over which the individual has only limited control. Time is a cycle of rise and fall, just as for the modern Arab nation state it is a cycle of hope and disappointment. To confirm this, the final sketch takes the reader back to 'Bayt al-Qadi and walnut trees with sparrows' nests'.(17) After conducting a tour of Egypt's history from the early decades of the twentieth century to two thirds of the way through, Mahfuz returns the narrative to the beginning, just as in 1967 the Arabs in many respects found themselves back at the beginning.

Disjointed Space
Local habitat has always played a central role in Mahfuz's fiction. Cairo provides the setting for his stories of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, where existing alleys of the old quarter are often portrayed in all their minutiae in order to comment on contemporary Egyptian society and expose the contradictions emerging in the wake of independence and modernisation, leaving characters like Kamal intellectually and spiritually in a quandary in Al-Thulathiyya. Realistic representation of space does not, of course, make it neutral and objective. Just as Bakhtin's 'words and forms are populated by intentions',(18) so space changes its semantics as it passes through the human imagination. A comparison of the Egyptian metropolis in Mahfuz's work with that of another of Cairo's literary chroniclers, Jamal al-Ghitani, demonstrates clearly the effect reflection, refraction and association has on location. Mahfuz typically foregrounds the 'collective signs of the city', such as the coffeeshop (qahwa), market place (suq) and trading centre (wikala), and emphasises the continuous, which for him equates with steady degradation. Ghitani accompanies these with landmarks of specifically private or individual significance, such as the Mamluk prison-house (maqshara), citadel (qal'a), and police check-points (niqat al-taftish), and focuses on 'the repetition of rupture within this collectivity'.(19) Mahfuz's city is set on a course of linear degeneration, Ghitani's is trapped in a cycle, or a 'repetition of rupture'. (20)

With this in mind it is hardly surprising to see Mahfuzian space undergo radical change in Maraya. No attempt is made to present a coherent topography of the city. The Cairo of Maraya is not the neat microcosm of Zuqaq al-Midaqq or Bayn al-Qasrayn with the alley as its clear nucleus and point of departure but a rather amorphous entity, fragmented both diachronically and synchronically with several axes or focal points. The streets of 'Abbasiyya, school yard, university lecture hall, government offices, cafes (in particular al-Fishawi's), and salons of Dr. Mahir 'Abd al-Karim, Jad Abu'l-'Ala and Salim Jabr constitute the narrative's main spaces but they are not connected, except by the protagonist and a few other characters that move between them, and are constantly adjusted according to the aesthetic distance of the first-person narrator. Thus the city never assumes concrete form for the reader; the Cairo of Maraya has no discernable topography. Each place within this disparate world is an ideological and social sign. The 'Abbasiyya quarter represents for both narrator and nation an age of innocence and simplicity, situated in the past and described with a lyricism uncharacteristic of the rest of the text. It is the only space that receives any real description. The government office, where the narrator spends his working life, is a place of backbiting, cynicism and underhand activities like bribery and embezzlement, and stands for the corruption and opportunism that pervaded every strata of political life at time of writing. The salons of Dr. Mahir 'Abd al-Karim, Jad Abu'l-'Ala and Salim Jabr, where ideas are discussed freely among the literati, and to an extent the cafes, where political discussion is set in the context of jocular banter, offer an insight into the intellectual and ideological currents of the day. The cafe, university lecture hall and government building, even the salon, for the most part are populated by men. At various points in the narrative, women enter them, which, like Su'ad al-Wahbi's arrival at the university lecture hall, usually causes a stir. Space is a male domain and, as such, can be used to trace attitudes to women over the period covered by the text, which will be explored presently. Change is another theme space lends itself to well. Urban decay becomes a symbol of the wider degeneration of social values and institutions. Walking through the old quarter in the 1960s, the narrator finds the Katib palace, once 'one of the noblest houses in old 'Abbasiyya', (21) 'torn down and its rubble removed, the open space was being dredged for four apartment blocks'.(22)

Biographical Dictionaries
Having dismantled the machinery of narrative - structure, time, space, character, having replaced linearity with apparent chaos and exploded the bourgeois epic's requisite centrality of character, how do the fragments of Maraya combine to tell a story? How is meaning created and channelled in this disparate text? The biographical dictionary is crucial in this respect, for not only does it vindicate the text's eccentric structure (Mahfuz's sketches, like the tarjamas of the mu'jam are arranged lexicographically)(23) but many aspects of Maraya benefit from a dual reading. Moreover, the issues raised by the marriage of history and literature cast grave doubts over historical knowledge and received wisdom, a major theme in the aftermath of 1967.

Lexicography and the fact that the text is made up of biographical notices establishes the connection between Maraya and the mu'jam so that the choice of subject-matter immediately assumes heightened significance. The mu'jam is the domain of the élite. Young identifies three main categories of biographical dictionary. One devoted to individuals distinguished within a particular field, such as rulers, hadith scholars, jurists or poets. Another devoted to the notables of a particular city or country, like al-Baghdadi's (d. 1071) Ta'rikh Baghdad (The History of Baghdad)(24). And a third devoted to eminent persons from all walks of life - the general dictionary like Ibn Khallikan's (d. 1282) famous Wafayat al-A'yan (Obituaries of Eminent Men and Notices of the Sons of the Epoch), al-Kutubi's (d. 1363) Fawat al-Wafayat (Beyond [Ibn Khallikan's] Obituaries)(25) and al-Safadi's (d. 1363) Al-Wafi bi'l-Wafayat (The Completion of [Ibn Khallikan's] Obituaries)(26). All three categories focus on notables (a'yan). The narrator of Maraya, on the other hand, fills his journal with sketches of children, students, academics and teachers, writers and journalists, civil service employees, housewives and female acquaintances. The modern dictionary is read as much for what it is, i.e. everyday, as for what it is not, i.e. exemplary, thus the transformation of subject-matter exposes the exclusive and discriminating nature of the mu'jam, and by extension the kind of historical writing it represents. It categorically announces that history is not a question of success stories but the sum of human experience from the highest to the lowest echelons of society.

The attempt to restore history to its proper remit is also effected on narrative mode. Arabic biography, as noted above, developed in close association with hadith scholarship, initially to record the lives of the founding members of the Islamic community and to assist in determining the credibility of hadith transmitters, thus traditionally served an important administrative function and, as a branch of Islamic science, is associated with the Islamic state. Maraya, on the other hand, is a work of fiction, with neither practical end nor patron to influence its creative process. Mahfuz dismantles the link between biography and authority to redefine the subject of history.

Approach is another point of contention between the medieval and twentieth-century chronicle. Early Muslim biographers viewed character as 'determined and fixed' and focussed on that which made their subjects exemplary as opposed to distinctive and unique. Characterisation was a matter of externals - appearance, speech, actions - while private thoughts were rare and a link between childhood experience and adult behaviour entirely absent. Hence the prevalence in Arab tradition of the mu'jam, which collects together individuals with certain things in common and views them in relation to the common characteristics of the group.(27) Robinson offers the biographies of Saladin (d. 1193) and Ahmad b. Hanbal (d. 855) as two standard illustrations. In his Sirat Salah al-Din,(28) Ibn Shaddad (d. 1235) finishes with his subject's early life in ten lines, dismissing the period before the latter received the patronage of Nur al-Din b. Zanji (rg. 1146-74) and beginning the account proper with the launch of his warrior career. Similarly, biographies of Ibn Hanbal, such as Hanbal b. Ishaq's (d. 886) Dhikr Mihnat al-Imam Ahmad b. Hanbal,(29) provide a skeleton sketch of the hero's life not to capture the individual person but as a frame for the famous event that catapulted Ibn Hanbal to the forefront of the traditionist debate ('aql vs. naql), namely his opposition to Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun's (d. 833) inquisition, which fills nine tenths of the narrative.(30)

The narrator of Maraya, by contrast, displays a clear interest in the private person. He subscribes to modern psychoanalytical theories that view personality and sexual orientation as the product of experience, in particular childhood experience, and on several occasions makes a concerted effort to account for how and why the subject came to be who he is. In so doing he finds a new use for tarjama conventions. The biographical notice typically includes details of the subject's date of death, lineage, teachers and education, travels and pilgrimage (hajj), appointments, an outline of his intellectual and moral qualities and physical appearance, philological notes on his name, illuminating anecdotes and, in the case of authors, a list of his works.(31) The length and detail of the notice depends on the perceived importance of the subject, thus some notices consist of a few lines while others fill several pages, but the consensus on what kind information was appropriate for the tarjama is clear.

While the setting of Maraya makes some of the items on this list redundant, there is a definite sense that the narrator, like the medieval biographers, has a mental picture of what to include in a profile and how to structure it, which he applies in particular in profiles dealing with government colleagues and acquaintances he makes in a professional capacity, where distance from the subject allows for more dispassionate recollection. For example, the opening lines of Sharara al-Nahhal, Sabri Jad and Saqr al-Munufi's sketches are almost formulaic. Sharara al-Nahhal:

I met him when I joined the civil service - a telephone operator in his twenties, fresh from primary school, attracting attention with his beautiful face, slender figure, and gentle nature... (32)
Sabri Jad:
He was appointed in the secretariat toward the end of the year of the defeat. He was twenty-two, with a degree in philosophy…He was of provincial stock, born raised, and educated in Cairo in a middle-class family, the only son among three daughters, all employed and married... (33)
Saqr al-Munufi:
'Amm Saqr al-Munufi was the secretarial department's messenger, but there came a time when our august department was almost called 'Amm Saqr's department. He was short and portly, but his energy surpassed the demands of his job. A self-serving spy by nature.(34)

When profiling individuals of questionable morality the narrator typically returns to their childhood. Khalil Zaki's sketch, after introducing the subject as a bully, turns to the issue of his drug-addicted father who 'treated him with proverbial cruelty' (35) and eventually threw him out onto the street. Similarly, 'Id Mansur has never known love, for his mother died after childbirth and his father 'was a miser, finicky, crude, emotionless, raising his son strictly, with no mercy of compromise'.(36) The behaviour of these individuals is thus set in context. Mahfuz is seeking to explore what makes men act the way they do. Just as he restores history to its proper setting by shifting focus away from the élite onto the proletariat, so he exposes and remedies what he sees as the biographers' flawed approach to human character by emphasising the unique and emotional.

The Narrative as a Kaleidoscope Yet on no account does Mahfuz seek to set his characters in stone. Maraya is characterised by uncertainty and ambiguity. In the aftermath of 1967 the possibility of logic and unity in narrative was no longer available; authentic art required the artist to find ways of capturing the difficulty, even folly, of trusting the appearance of things. Fragmentation was one technique Mahfuz adopted to this end. Another involves the transformation of a motif embedded in Arabic biography; the mirror.

Al-Kutubi writes that 'the science of history is a mirror of the times' through which one can become acquainted with the 'experiences of the nations'.(37) Similarly, al-Safadi states that, 'our understanding roams in the mirror of the inner meaning of the past',(38) referring to how the study of history provides a unique insight into the past, and Sibt b. al-Jawzi (d. 1256) gives his chronicle the title Mir'at al-Zaman fi Ta'rikh al-A'yan.(39) Indeed, the phrase 'mirror of the times' struck a cord with many biographers of the later period, who saw themselves as writers of history and the project they were involved in as key to understanding the past.(40) Mahfuz transforms the mirror motif to challenge the possibility of fixing static images to existence. He uses it to capture images of history and its actors without suggesting they are anything more than just that - images. Every fragment of the text is really an image, an episode, a mirror. In these mirrors we see reflections of the characters, the narrator and modern Arab history in the making, but the reflections change constantly, depending on the angle from which they are approached, and they disappear without warning, leaving the reader with only a very fragile, often contradictory, picture of the narrator and his world.

Ibrahim 'Aql in the opening pages is a good illustration. In his own sketch he appears as a much maligned tragi-comic professor-turned-dervish, a cluster of inconsistencies that do not allow for a satisfactory conclusion on the man. Nor do the many times his name crops up in conversation afterwards. His children, it is later revealed, were murdered, not killed in a cholera epidemic. Was he then involved in some intrigue? Tantawi Isma'il labels him 'a heretical bastard',(41) Mahmud Darwish notes 'He's a teacher with no students or disciples,(42) 'Abbas Fawzi finds his obsession with academic degrees shallow, (43) Mahir 'Abd al-Karim holds him in high esteem,(44) and 'Aql's students treat him with contempt and sympathy.(45) But none of these revelations are conclusive. Instead, characters' reactions to the professor are as much reflections on themselves and the ideological ferment of the time as they are insights into the man. They are all mirrors for one another.(46)

Another good example is Amani Muhammad's clique, a group of characters connected in narrative terms by Amani and to which belong her husband 'Abduh, her son Bilal, Jad Abu'l-'Ala and the narrator. In the section assigned to her, Amani presents herself to the narrator as a divorcee, describing her ex-husband as 'a selfish brutal monster'(47). They begin an affair, which the narrator stresses arose more out of a sense of duty than anything else. Later that year, 'Abduh al-Basyuni pays the narrator a visit and reveals Amani is in fact still married and gives his version of the alleged brutality - he hit her once in a moment of insane anger. For the children's sake al-Basyuni does not wish to divorce her so asks the narrator to end the affair and even enlists his help to convince her to return home, to which the narrator immediately agrees before their conversation turns to other matters. Thus, in this short sketch we have the narrator's image of Amani as pitiful victim juxtaposed with her husband's description of a rebellious wife and irresponsible mother. We also have al-Basyuni portrayed as a merciless husband by Amani but as an old friend deserving of respect by the narrator. And the narrator himself, in so far as he views his relationship with Amani as an act of altruism, appears conceited and, after al-Basyuni's visit, gullible. Moreover, in the exchange between al-Basyuni and the narrator, the speed with which they move from the Amani situation onto other matters and the latter's readiness to send the woman back to a miserable marriage casts them both as misogynists.

Three sketches later we meet Amani and al-Basyuni's son, Bilal, whose enthusiasm for science and decision to pursue his studies abroad become the topic of a conversation between al-Basyuni, Jad Abu'l-'Ala, the narrator and Bilal himself. The occasion brings out new aspects of the father and narrator. Reflected in the mirror of his cosmopolitan son, al-Basyuni is seen as patriotic and rather conservative while the narrator, who generally avoids confrontation, is for once visibly upset at Bilal's lack of patriotism. A little later 'Ajlan Thabit lets slip that Jad is another of Amani's lovers (48) so the phoney artist and superficial friend (for Jad's shallowness and the fact he does not write his books is well-known) becomes a less than complementary mirror for the narrator, now exposed as 'one of a long string of fools' (49) and brought down to Jad's level.

Events operate as mirrors too. The way in which characters respond to events in the public domain speaks volumes as their personal conviction is tested and they are forced to make difficult decisions. Rida Hamada, Badr al-Zayyadi's father, Muslim brother 'Abd al-Wahhab Isma'il and communists Kamil Ramzi and 'Azmi Shakir spend time in jail for their political activities while the integrity of other characters, like Ibrahim 'Aql, Mahir 'Abd al-Karim and even 'Azmi Shakir in later life when he appears to have mellowed (though the narrator interprets 'Azmi's shift as intellectual, not a matter of self-interest)(50) is called into question when they appear to acquiesce, or 'flee from confrontation' as Gordon would put it.(51) Characters, like Surur 'Abd al-Baqi, are entirely untouched by politics, earning the narrator's disapproval: 'No matter how brilliant or useful, he will not realise his human potential until he can see himself, not as an independent individual, but as a cell that had life only through cooperative existence in the human body.'(52) Others, like Sabriyya al-Hishma, are quick to turn the country's misfortune to their advantage, while 'Id Mansur's pleasure at the war with Israel in 1948 and the 'struggle of the Canal' in 1951, (53) the 'vindictiveness in [Surur 'Abd al-Baqi's] tone after the June 1967 defeat', (54)and Salim Jabr's 'secret delight' that year,(55) reveal a nasty side to the three men. The many discussions of developments in the political arena also function as mirrors of the times. On a private level, the deaths of Badr al-Zayyadi and Sha'rawi al-Fahham provide insights into certain characters. Yet none of this is conclusive. Just as the issue of Ibrahim 'Aql and Amani Muhammad remain unresolved, so it would be wrong to take event-response as anything more than one aspect of the relevant character seen from a limited point of view.

Of course the most enigmatic of all the characters is the narrator himself. Not only does the fragmented nature of the narrative, itself a mirror of a confused mind, suggest a man who has no clear picture of himself as seen above, but his many different guises, the shifting distance between narrator-present and narrator-past and the fact that for the most part he is only seen through a complex mirror operation (reflected in another reflection) - 'a product of our perception of his own projections'(56) - prevent the reader from formulating one either. From Ibrahim 'Aql's critic and sympathiser in the first sketch he moves to naïve child and Ahmad Qadri's moral interrogator in the second, to Amani Muhammad's conceited lover then gullible fool in the third, to confused onlooker at the event of neighbour Anwar al-Halawani's death at a demonstration in the fourth and so on. And apart from his various romantic liaisons, only twice does he recall a specifically personal experience; once when Sharara Nahhal attempts to recruit him in some election fraud, (57) and once when his promotion is rescinded at the last minute by 'Adli al-Mu'adhdhin.(58) He sometimes expresses opinions and is occasionally moved to philosophise but he never insists on a point or attempts to argue others round to a particular view, preferring the role of interrogator. He is the one individual who escapes judgement by other characters, because he is always in their presence when we meet them.

As with the rest of the characters, every image of the narrator is fleeting, here one minute, gone the next. The text is a mosaic of images, of rapid scene changes, which it makes no attempt to synthesise or weave into a cohesive and unitary narrative, but rather allows to rebound off one another and multiply, and sit side by side in apparent opposition. Each image embodies truth at a particular moment in time - the only form truth could assume in the aftermath of 1967 when discourse on the recent past and the nation's identity and confidence lay in tatters - so that the text as a whole presents truth as plural and highly subjective. As such the mirror-effect is an inspired way of telling a story without transcendence, without authority, causality, centre, closure and other concepts associated with realism. In this sense, Maraya aligns itself with postmodernist works like Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983).

Not only is knowledge/truth, plural and subjective; it maybe deceptive. Enshrined in the mirror motif is the idea of illusion, raising the possibility that the images presented are not real. Yet on the other hand, offered as a memoir written in the first-person and full of real events, places and public figures - Sa'd Zaghlul, Mustafa Nahhas, King Farouk etc. - the text is at pains to emphasise it historicity. In the same vein, the language of the text, predominantly reportage, evokes media genres, especially the newspaper, i.e. narrative forms associated with fact-reporting. The latter relationship is strengthened by features of presentation like the use of dashes and pictorial accompaniment.(59) The result is tension. The mirror, memoir, newspaper and mu'jam in dialogue in the text calls into question the boundaries that separate history and literature.

Manipulating Fragmentation to Accentuate Theme This line of questioning is continued on the level of narrative organisation for, in spite of the text's apparent instability and effort to present a story without transcendence, Maraya is not without design and intention. Rather, randomness is the desired effect, design the reality. The fragments are held together by the narrator and, to a degree, spaces and events common to the characters. But they are also manipulated to bring out certain themes and trace change in both Egyptian society and the narrator, as a product of it, over the fifty or so years that fall within the narrative timeframe.

At a glance, it is immediately obvious that the choice of Ibrahim 'Aql and Yusriyya Bashir as the subjects of the opening and closing sketches is not accidental. A university tutor, 'Aql is one of the narrator's most senior acquaintances in terms of the age and authority. The section assigned to him contains the main ingredients of the text - political debate, themes of change, responsibility and fate - and his character is an embodiment of the contradictions of Egyptian society. As such his sketch sets the narrative agenda. Moreover, 'Aql's suffering and inability to engage with the world thereafter taints the narrative from the outset. Conversely, the sketch of Yusriyya Bashir returns to the age of childhood innocence and presents a person entirely untouched by the horrors of human existence. Having dragged the reader through one of the most turbulent times in Egypt's history, bringing him face to face with several objectionable individuals and base human acts, the author reintroduces an element of hope. As seen above, Yusriyya's appearance at this late stage also challenges the thesis that history equals progress, thus the text ends on a positive and negative note at once, entirely in line with the contradictions it has sustained throughout.

Besides the obvious and deliberate choice of first and final characters, the way in which sketches are grouped, the juxtaposition or proximity of certain sections, is often significant. Four sketches near the beginning (nos. 2, 4, 5 and 6) contain episodes that leave an indelible mark on the narrator: his first sexual experience and the moral demise of Ahmad Qadri; his first proper encounter with the words 'kill', 'bullets', 'demonstration', 'the English', 'the people', 'Sa'd Zaghlul', and 'revolution'; the death of promising soccer star Badr al-Zayyadi; and the atypical desire to emigrate of Bilal. The effect is initiation; the reader is given a taste of the narrator's formative years and sensibility and he and the narrator together are simultaneously initiated into a chaotic world. The reader is, in a sense, made to share the narrator's experience.

A more significant clustering comes in the middle of the text where a series of sketches concentrating on government employees facilitates sustained consideration of the corruption, prejudice and hypocrisy that plagued the Egyptian civil service at times in the last century. The portrait of Sharara al-Nahhal, the embodiment of all the worst elements of that world, deliberately comes first and is followed by Sabri Jad, Saqr al-Munufi, Tantawi Isma'il, 'Abbas Fawzi, 'Adli Mu'adhdhin, 'Abd al-Rahman Sha'ban, 'Abda Sulayman, Fathi Anis and Kamiliyya Zahran, so that by the time the narrator's attention turns to more general sketches in the narrative's finishing stretch, the reader has a clear picture of the workings of government and further insight into the problem of responsibility, for how is a man meant to maintain high morals in such an environment? His wages are not enough to feed his family and the only hope of raising or supplementing them is to conform to the irregular practices that prevail: 'Put him in a post where he can earn bribes!'(60) 'Abd al-Rahman proposes as a solution to the Fathi Anis' poverty. Only Tantawi Isma'il tries to restore some dignity to the diseased environment. He sets about his job as inspector of accounts with more conscientiousness and integrity than his colleagues, whose incomes swiftly decline, can tolerate and soon finds himself dismissed, accused of corruption after his enemies forge his signature on an incriminating document.(61)

Juxtaposition and proximity encourage the reader to view the characters as foils for one another. The juxtaposition of Free Officer Qadri Rizq and communist Kamil Ramzi means that two extremes of basically the same ideal are considered one after the other. Likewise Europhile 'Abd al-Rahman Sha'ban's sketch juxtaposed with that of Islamist 'Abd al-Wahhab Isma'il, who has no knowledge of foreign culture but is nonetheless a skilled debater, guarantees reflection on the validity of the notion of Western superiority held by certain thinkers at the time. Placing the narrator's esteemed professor and mentor, Dr. Mahir 'Abd al-Karim (who remains above partisan politics), next to the despicable informer Mahmud Darwish is intended to emphasise the merits of one against the moral failings of the other.

Conclusions are not part of the narrator's repertoire in Maraya. But it is worth noting that he is not afraid to introduce a sense of poetic justice in so far as he often juxtaposes a character's final destiny with earlier actions, encouraging the reader to see them as linked in some way, as cause-and-effect. For instance, police spy and satanic torturer Ahmad Qadri suffers a heart attack and religious hypocrite Zahran Hassuna's son is killed in the Battle of the Canal and his company collapses in 1961 after nationalisation Sharara Nahhal's son is shot during the Yemen war and his son-in-law is injured in a demonstration after 1967 and another corrupt government employee, Saqr Munufi's, middle son is killed in a fight. The latter's daughter also disappears and his wife dies: 'It's just retribution', Saqr concedes. (62)

Manipulating Fragmentation to Trace Social and Personal Change
Change is another factor influencing Maraya's design and structure. Over the course of the decades that fall within the narrative time-frame, Egyptian society undergoes enormous change, in particular with respect to the role of women. The narrator too, as a product of this society and as a human being travelling the distance from childhood to adulthood, undergoes change. The narrative traces this in its female contingent.

Fourteen sketches take women as their title-characters. With the exception of two episodes referred to above (the election-fraud and rescinded promotion), they are the only sketches in which the narrator is directly involved in the action, thus they are the most useful in gaining what insight into his character is possible. They are ordered such that they reflect the transformation of the role of, and attitudes to, Arab women in society. The case of Amani Muhammad, the first woman encountered in the text, is a good illustration of the contradictions and problems that arise in the early stages of female emancipation. Neither she, nor her husband, nor the narrator, seem ready for female independence. 'Abduh al-Basyuni is a classic chauvinist, refusing to divorce his wife though he no longer loves her and views her as his property, 'She's a fool, not worth keeping if it weren't for the children', (63) while Amani, for her part, abuses what freedom she has by indulging in sexual liaisons with men like the narrator and Jad. The narrator too regards her as a charity case and is quick to surrender their relationship when a male friendship is at stake.

The following three female protagonists are also very much victims of a society that is still at heart deeply conservative. The narrator's courtship of Thurayya Ra'fat swiftly comes to an end when she confesses tearfully 'that someone had deceived her at a tender age'. (64) Their various rendezvouses provide an opportunity to discuss the important question of whether women should continue to study and work after marriage and expose the narrator as rather prejudiced where gender roles are at issue: 'For all your education you're still old-fashioned.'(65) Tradition also comes between the narrator and Hanan Mustafa three sketches later. Childhood sweethearts, she is confined to the house once she reaches the age of twelve and denied the benefits of education. Durriyya Salim suffers a similar fate as Amani Muhammad. She is the narrator's lover for a time, an affair that the narrator again considers beneath him - 'My attachment was courtesy then habit' (66) - and promptly terminates when he makes the acquaintance of her husband, Doctor Sadiq 'Abd al-Hamid. The sonorous parallelism in the names Duriyya and Thurayya encourages the reader to view the former's mistreatment as successor to the latter's, and to see a theme of injustice developing with regard to the text's females.

As the narrative continues some progress can be detected. Su'ad Wahbi and 'Abda Sulayman (sketches 19 and 34) represent a kind of middle stage where women are permitted into areas traditionally reserved for men, like the university lecture hall and government office, but not without repercussions. The establishments they infiltrate, though they welcome them on an official level, are not mentally prepared. The two are immediately subjected to rumour and speculation and allow themselves to be taken advantage of; Su'ad begins seeing an English teacher and the consequent whisperings prevent her return to the university the following year, and 'Abda finds herself a single mother having fallen for Muhammad al-'Adil's cruel trick. Between them comes Sabriyya al-Hishma, an exception to the rule in so far as she rises above a situation that has brought many others to their knees, namely the Second World War. Yet, not unlike Zahira in Malhamat al-Harafish (1977),(67) her power primarily finds expression through men; she grows rich on the back of the brothel and bar, that is by turning sex, the one service only women can provide, into a profitable business.

By 'Aziza 'Abduh, Fa'iza Nassar and Kamiliyya Zahran's sketches (38, 43 and 47) we have three women confident enough to assert themselves and pursue their goals, with a degree of success. And in sketches 50 and 54 the narrator is finally able to share a friendship based on genuine equality and mutual respect with fiercely independent Majida 'Abd al-Raziq and Widad Rushdi, both mistresses of their own affairs though not necessarily happy. Thus, over the course of the text, Egypt is seen to move from strict patriarchy, through a stage in which official policy and individual attitudes are in sharp conflict, to a situation where men and women can begin to interact on an equal-footing in certain spheres. The narrator himself is an embodiment of the Arab male's position towards women. He revises his attitudes to an extent but certain prejudices persist, for even in Widad's sketch his first instinct is to view her as a potential lover and Safa' al-Katib, a paragon of beauty but married off at a young age, remains his female idyll.

History as Narrative Discourse
That the text displays design and intention raises the question of Maraya's narrativity. The text up to this point is at pains to obfuscate the narrative process. Mahfuz presents Maraya as fragments of memory and mirror images in order to convey the confusion of the narrator, the collapse of cherished institutions and beliefs, and a sense of the illusory or transitory nature of knowledge. The fragmentation is further intended to create an impression of free, unmediated writing, as though scenes are presented independent of ideological context, the tacit idea being that in so doing the answers - explanations for the crisis of the present and lessons for the future - will emerge for themselves. The onus is apparently entirely on the reader; it is his task to assume the role of bricoleur and piece the fragments into a meaningful narrative. Yet the author's very clear manipulation of names betrays him to be involved in an attempt to influence meaning and produce a certain effect. Fragmentation has a role here too, for, as a challenge to narrative conventions, foregrounding it means it is itself exposed as a narrative strategy; as the reader goes through the motions of bricolage he is made more aware of the process of narrative construction and the text's initial arrangement - fragmentation - is understood as simply one of many possibilities available to the writer. The narrator's account thus becomes a personal take on events, history seen through the eyes of one individual with his own agenda.

The affinity between Maraya and the mu'jam automatically implicates the latter in all this. Cast as part of the same lineage, the narrator and medieval biographers take on each others' characteristics. Just as the narrator manipulates the names of his characters so the medieval Arab biographers selected and arranged their material to reflect a particular vision of history. True, the tarjama often contains quotations from different authorities, some of them contradictory, and in this sense does not represent a single, unitary voice, but the biographers nevertheless exercised choice in selecting and arranging the information, thus the arrangement is never objective and neutral. Mahfuz mimics the form and method of Arab biography in order to expose the mu'jam, and by extension historiography, as what Gottschalk calls 'imaginative reconstruction'(68), a form of discourse.

The revelation has far reaching consequences, for if history is a construct, a signifying system, what does this say about its truth claim? If the past is what Krieger defines as an 'unimpeded sequence of raw empirical realities' and only accessible to us today in textualised form,(69) like the mu'jam, what hope is there of knowing it? Maraya's fragmentation, mirror-effect, marriage of historical and literary genres, and covert design blur the lines between fact and fiction. Thus, not only was Mahfuz's first novel post-1967 an expression of the uncertainty that pervaded Arab society in the wake of defeat but a challenge to historical knowledge and unitary discourse in general. Accordingly, a key strategy Mahfuz introduced to articulate this - fragmentation - has become one of the defining characteristics of his later fiction. Another defining characteristic worth drawing attention to once more is the attempt to re-write the genealogy of the Arabic novel; by incorporating narrative strategies associated with the mu'jam into Maraya, Mahfuz gives the novel the appearance of having its roots in tradition and lends it a more indigenous texture. The move represents a clear attempt to break with the Western novel.

REFERENCES

Works cited by Najib Mahfuz
Zuqaq al-Midaqq. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1947. Trans. Trevor Le Gassick. Midaq
Alley. Cairo: AUP, 1966. Revised, London: Heinemann, 1975.
Bayn al-Qasrayn. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1956. Trans. William M. Hutchins and Olive Kenny. Palace Walk. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Qasr al-Shawq. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1957. Trans. William M. Hutchins, Lorne
Kenny and Olive Kenny. Palace of Desire. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Al-Sukkariyya. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1957. Trans. William M. Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan. Sugar Street. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Al-Liss wa'l-Kilab. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1962. Trans. Mohamed Mostafa Badawi  and Trevor Le Gassick. The Thief and the Dogs. Cairo: AUP, 1984.
Tharthara Fawq al-Nil. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1966. Francis Liardet. Adrift on the Nile. Cairo: AUP, 1993.
Taht al-Mazalla. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1969.
Al-Maraya. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1972. Trans. Roger Allen. Mirrors. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1977. This paper refers to the 1999 AUP translation.
Hikayat Haratina. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1975. Trans. Soad Sobhi, Essam Fattouh and James Kenneson. Fountain and Tomb. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988.
Malhamat al-Harafish. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1977. Trans. Catherine Cobham. The Harafish. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Layali Alf Layla. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1978. Trans. Denys Johnson?Davies. Arabian Nights and Days. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Rihlat Ibn Fattuma. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1983. Trans. Denys Johnson?Davies. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Asda' al-Sirat al-Dhatiyya. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1995. Trans. Denys Johnson?Davies. Echoes of An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1997.

Other Works Cited

Aboul-Ela, Hosam. 'Writer, Text and Context: The Geohistorical Location of the post-48 Arabic Novel.' Edibiyet 14/1&2 (2003), pp. 5-19.
Allen, Roger. 'Mirrors by Najib Mahfuz.' Muslim World 62 (1972), pp. 115-25 and 63 (1973), pp. 15-27.
Auchterlonie, Paul. Arabic Biographical Dictionaries: A Summary Guide and Bibliography. Durham: Middle East Libraries Committee, 1987.
al-Baghdadi, Ahmad b. 'Ali. Ta'rikh Baghdad. Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji, 1931, 14 vols. Barakat, Halim. 'Awdat al-Ta'ir ila al-Bahr. Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1969. Trans.Trevor Le Gassick. Days of Dust. Wilmette: Medina, 1974.
Bakhtin. Mikhail M. 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press: Austin, 1981.
Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969.
El-Enany. Rasheed. Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning. London: Routledge, 1993.
Gordon, Haim. Naguib Mahfouz's Egypt: Existential Themes in His Writings. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Gottschalk, Louis. Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method. Second edition. New York: Knopf, 1969.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988.
Ibn Khallikan, Ahmad b. Muhammad. Wafayat al-A'yan wa Anda' Abna' al-Zaman. Ed. Ihsan 'Abbas. Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafa, 1968-72, 8 vols. Trans. Baron McGuckin de Slane. Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary. Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1842-71, 4 vols.
Ibn Shaddad, Baha' al-Din. Sira Salah al-Din (Al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya wa'l-Mahasin al-Yusufiyya). Cairo: n.p., 1962. Trans. Donald Sydney Richards. The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981.
Khalidi, Tarif. Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Krieger, Murray. 'Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality.' Critical Inquiry 1/2 (1974), pp. 335-60.
al-Kutubi, Muhammad b. Shakir. Fawat al-Wafayat. Ed. Muhammad Muhyi al-Din
'Abd al-Hamid. Cairo: Maktabat al-Nah?a al-Misriyya, 1951.
King, James Roy. 'The Deconstruction of the Self in Nagib Mahfuz's Mirrors.' Journal of Arabic Literature 19 (1988), pp. 55-67.
Mehrez, Samia. 'Re-writing the city: The Case of Khitat al-Ghitani.' Mundus Arabicus 5 (1992), pp. 143-67.
Reynolds, Dwight F. Ed. Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Robinson, Chase F. Islamic Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Rosenthal, Franz. A History of Muslim Historiography. Leiden: Brill, 1968.
al-Safadi, Khalil b. Aybak. Kitab al-Wafi bi'l-Wafayat. Ed. Ahmad al-Arna'ut and Turki Mustafa. Beirut: Dar Ihya' al-Turath al-'Arabi, 2000, 29 vols.
Said, Edward. 'Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948', in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta, 2000.
Sibt b. al-Jawzi, Shams al-Din Yusuf. Mir'at al-Zaman fi Ta'rikh al-A'yan. Hyderbad: Da'irat al-Ma'rifa fi 'Uthmaniyya, 1952, vol. VIII.
Smith, G.R. 'Tabakat', Encyclopaedia of Islam II, vol. X, pp. 7-10.
Taha, Ibrahim. The Palestinian Novel: A Communication Study. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.
Young, M.J.L. 'Arabic Biographical Writing', in M.J.L. Young, J.D. Latham and R.B. Serjeant, eds., Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science in the 'Abbasid Period.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, vol. III, pp. 172-7.

1- See Colla's review of Rashid El-Enany's 1993 study, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning; Eliot Colla, 'Multiplying Mahfouz', Book review in SEHR 5/1 located at www.stanfordedu/group/SHR/5-1/text/colla.html.
2- All published by Maktabat Misr.
3- Maktabat Misr. Trans. Roger Allen, Mirrors (Mineapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1977). This article refers to the 1999 American University in Cairo Press edition, which contains the illustrations by Sayf Wanli that accompanied the text when it was first serialised in the television magazine al-Idha'a wa'l-Television in 1971. For a study of the book, see Roger Allen, 'Mirrors by Najib Mahfuz.' Muslim World 62 (1972), pp. 115-25 and 63 (1973), pp. 15-27.
4- Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 72-4. On the Arab biographical tradition see: Paul Auchterlonie, Arabic Biographical Dictionaries: A Summary Guide and Bibliography (Durham: Middle East Libraries Committee, 1987); M.J.L. Young, 'Arabic Biographical Writing', in M.J.L Young, J.D. Latham and R.B. Serjeant, eds., Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science in the Abbasid Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), vol. III, pp. 172-7; Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 46-8, 204-10; Robinson, Islamic Historiography; Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 1968); G.R. Smith, 'Tabakat', Encyclopaedia of Islam II, vol. X, pp. 7-10.
5- Ibn Khallikan in his Wafayat al-A'yan wa Anda' Abna' al-Zaman (Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafa, 1968-72) vol. I, pp. 19-20, writes: 'This is a concise treatise in the science of history. I was motivated to collect it by my own fondness to acquaint myself with reports relating to prominent figures of the past, their dates of death and birth, and what each age brought forth of their number'. Cited from Khalidi, Historical Thought, p. 207.
6- Rashid El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 200.
7- Halim Barakat's 'Awdat al-Ta'ir ila al-Bahr (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1969) represents one of the most considered and realistic responses to 1967.
8- Maraya, p. 30; Mirrors, p. 135.
9- Edward Said, 'Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948', in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2000), p. 49.
10- Maraya, p. 61; Mirrors, p. 42.
11- James Roy King counts 'over a dozen references to Ibrahim Aql; about as many to Mahir 'Abd al-Karim, Salim Jabr, and Zuhayr Kamil; even more to 'Abbas Fawzi; over twenty to Rida Hamada and to Ja'far Khalil…', not all of which are necessarily significant. J.R. King, 'The Deconstruction of the Self in Nagib Mahfuz's Mirrors', Journal of Arabic Literature 19 (1988), p. 56.
12- Ibrahim Taha, The Palestinian Novel: A Communication Study (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), p. 92.
13- Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), p. 313. Cited from King, 'Deconstruction', p. 57.
14- King, 'Deconstruction', p. 57.
15- Hosam Aboul-Ela, 'Writer, Text and Context: The Geohistorical Location of the post-48 Arabic Novel.' Edibiyet 14/1&2 (2003), p. 7.
16- On biographical time see Bakhtin's essay 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1981), in particular, pp. 130-46.
17- Maraya, p. 320; Mirrors, p. 185.
18- Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, p. 293.
19- Samia Mehrez, 'Re-Writing the City: The Case of Khitat al-Ghitani', Mundus Arabicus 5 (1992), p. 148.
20- ibid.
21- Maraya, p. 163; Mirrors, p. 98.
22- Maraya, pp. 165-6; Mirrors, p. 101.
23- Differences in the Arabic and Roman alphabet mean this is not reflected in translation.
24- Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji, 1931, 14 vols.
25- Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda al-Misriyya, 1951.
26- Beirut: Dar Ihya' al-Turath al-'Arabi, 2000, 29 vols.
27- M.J.L. Young, 'Arabic Biographical Writing', p. 170. This approach to character has parallels in Ancient Greece. See Bakhtin, 'Chronotope in the Novel', pp. 130-2.
28- Cairo: n.p., 1962.
29- Cairo: n.p., 1977.
30- Robinson, Islamic Historiography, pp. 62-3.
31- Dwight F. Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 42; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, pp. 67-72; M.J.L Young, 'Arabic Biographical Writing', p. 171.
32- Maraya, p. 138; Mirrors, p. 85.
33- Maraya, p. 156; Mirrors, pp. 94-5.
34- Maraya, p. 167; Mirrors, p. 101.
35- Maraya, p. 75; Mirrors, p. 49.
36- Maraya, p. 245; Mirrors, p. 143.
37- al-Kutubi, Fawat al-Wafayat, vol. I, p. 1. Cited from Khalidi, Historical Thought, p. 207.
38- At the beginning of al-Wafi bi'l-Wafayat. Cited from ibid., p. 208.
39- Vol. VIII (Hyderbad: Da'ira al-Ma'rifa fi 'Uthmaniyya, 1952). Cited from ibid.
40- Khalidi, Historical Thought, pp. 207-8. The mirror has also captured the imagination of Western authors. See Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 87. Cited from King, 'Deconstruction', p. 55.
41- Maraya, p. 174; Mirrors, p. 103.
42- Maraya, p. 293; Mirrors, p. 169.
43- Maraya, p. 183; Mirrors, p. 108.
44- Maraya, p. 287; Mirrors, p. 166.
45- Maraya, p. 14; Mirrors, p. 18.
45- King, 'Deconstruction', pp. 57-9.
47- Maraya, p. 26; Mirrors, p. 23.
48- Maraya, p. 61; Mirrors, p. 42.
49- King, 'Deconstruction', p. 62.
50- Maraya, p. 228; Mirrors, p. 133,
51- Haim Gordon, Naguib Mahfouz's Egypt: Existential Themes in His Writings (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990). Gordon argues that responsibility and the need to strive for 'things that are worthy in themselves' are central themes in Mahfuz's fiction.
52- Maraya, p. 124; Mirrors, p. 77.
53- Maraya, p. 248; Mirrors, p. 144.
54- Maraya, p. 124; Mirrors, p. 77.
55- Maraya, p. 118; Mirrors, p. 73.
56- King, 'Deconstruction', 66.
57- Maraya, pp. 143-4; Mirrors, pp. 97-8.
58- Maraya, p. 193; pp. 114-5.
59- See note 7.
60- Maraya, p. 261; Mirrors, p. 152.
61- Maraya, pp. 174-8; Mirrors, pp. 103-5.
62- Maraya, p. 169; Mirrors, p. 102.
63- Maraya, p. 31; Mirrors, p. 26.
64- Maraya, p. 52; Mirrors, p. 38. The narrator later finds out the culprit was 'Id Mansur.
65- Maraya, p. 51; Mirrors, p. 36.
66- Maraya, p. 84; Mirrors, p. 55.
67- Published by Maktabat Misr.
68- Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method, 2nd edn. (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 48. Cited from Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 92.
69- Murray Krieger, 'Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality', Critical Inquiry 1/2 (1974), p. 339. Cited from Hutcheon, Postmodernism, p. 92.