Khan Al-Khalili Read online

  When Ahmad saw that he could see open sky from his window, he relaxed; the thing he had feared most was that he’d only be able to see blank walls. He now made his way over to the other window opposite the door to his room and opened it too. This time the view was completely different. Down below was a narrow street leading to the old part of Khan al-Khalili; its shops were closed, and it looked deserted. On the other side of the street was the side of another apartment building whose windows and balconies were very close to those of the building he was in. He now realized that the roofs of the two buildings were actually connected at several points and that their different floors were also linked by balconies, all of which made him think that it was in fact a single apartment building with two wings to it. On the left side of the street you could see the old Khan al-Khalili; from where he was standing it looked like a series of dilapidated roofs, collapsing windows, and wood and cloth canopies to give shade to the network of streets below. The space beyond that was filled with minarets, domes, and the tops and walls of many mosques, all of which gave the viewer an impression of the Cairo of al-Mu’izz’s time. This was the first time he had ever seen that view, and it only served to intensify his dislike for this new quarter. He started gazing at the strange, sprawling scene, a truly amazing sight for eyes accustomed only to paper and unversed in the real wonders of nature and historical monuments. But he had no time to indulge in such sensations, because he heard a knock on the door.

  “The taamiya’s ready, esteemed sir!” his mother called.

  He shut the two windows, changed out of his business clothes, and put on a gallabiya and skullcap. “God bless this house!” he intoned to himself. At that very same moment and before he had had a chance to leave his room, he heard a gruff voice coming up from the street below.

  “God destroy your house and damn your eyes, you son of a …!”

  Another voice retorted with an even viler curse, all of which proved that the two men were merely following the custom of the quarter in swearing at each other in such a disgusting fashion.

  Ahmad felt furious and cursed them under his breath. “I seek refuge with God from bad luck and pessimism!” he said, and then left the room.

  2

  The taamiya was the best he had ever tasted; he praised it to the heavens. His father liked it too, and turned his praises into an encomium on the new quarter where they were now living.

  “You know absolutely nothing about the al-Husayn quarter,” he said, warming to his subject. “It’s not only the tastiest taamiya and ful mudammis, but kebab, goat meat, trotters, and sheep’s head as well. You won’t find tea or coffee like it anywhere else. Here it’s always daytime, and life goes on day and night. Al-Husayn, the son of the Prophet’s own daughter, is here; he makes for a good neighbor and protector!”

  After dinner, Ahmad went back to his room and threw himself down on the bed, hoping to get a bit of rest. By this time he had decided that the move to the new quarter had as many plusses to it as minuses. He looked round the room again, and his eyes fell on the piles of books beside the desk that still needed to be organized. He stared at them, his thoughts a mixture of pleasure and contempt. There they were, his beloved books, all of them in Arabic. He had had so much trouble learning English—and not very well—that he had been forced to neglect his Arabic books; by now he had almost forgotten about them. More than a third of them were school textbooks on geography, history, math, and science. Quite a few were reference books on law, and an equal number consisted of works by al-Manfaluti, al-Muwaylihi, Shawqi, Hafiz, and Mutran. There were also some yellowing tomes from al-Azhar on religion and logic, all of which still confounded him; he had come to regard them as symbols of that most difficult of subjects whose truths very few people manage to penetrate. There were also a few works by contemporary writers, the acquisition of which he regarded as an act of courtesy. So all these were his beloved books; truth to tell, they were his entire life. He was a voracious reader. For the past twenty years, from 1921, when he graduated from high school, until now in 1941, he had devoted himself to reading books. It consumed his life inside and out and served as the focus for all his feelings, whims, and aspirations. However, from the outset, his reading activities had had their own particular characteristics, and they had stayed with him for all twenty years. All his readings were general; there was no specialization or depth involved. While there may have been a certain inclination toward classical learning, it was both cursory and disorganized. The reason for this lack of focus may well have been that he had been compelled to abandon his studies after his high-school graduation, so he had never had any kind of planned opportunity to specialize.

  This decision had had profound ramifications for Ahmad’s life, both socially and psychologically, and they had clung to him ever since. The major reason for the decision was that his father had been pensioned off before he had even reached the age of forty. As a result of sheer negligence he had failed to perform his administrative obligations adequately; what made it worse was that he had then adopted a supercilious attitude toward the civil service investigators who were examining his case. Because of his father’s behavior, Ahmad had been forced to terminate his studies and take a minor administrative post in order to provide for his shattered family and support his two younger brothers. One brother had died, and the other had taken a job as a minor employee in Bank Misr. Ahmad himself had been an excellent and ambitious student with broad aspirations. At first he had wanted to study law, by following his great idol, Saad Zaghlul, by completing a legal degree, but his father’s dismissal had swept all that away. The decision to abandon his studies had been a severe blow to his hopes. At first it sent him reeling, and he was overwhelmed by a violent, almost insane fury that completely destroyed his personality and filled him with a sense of bitter remorse. To him it was obvious that he was a martyr to injustice, a genius consigned early to the grave, a victim of malicious fate. Thereafter, he was forever ruing his martyred genius and invoking its memories, whether or not the occasion demanded it. He kept on complaining about what fate had wrought and enumerating its crimes against him to such an extent that the routine turned into a sickly obsession. His colleagues inured themselves to listening to him repeating the same things over and over again.

  “If only I’d been able to complete my studies,” he’d say in his shaky voice, “needless to say, I would have done well. And then just think where I’d be now. I’d be a real somebody!”

  “I’m in my forties now,” he’d complain in a resentful tone. “If things had gone the way they were supposed to and cruel fate had not stood in my way, just imagine what I’d be doing. I’d be a middle-aged lawyer, someone whose services to the legal profession would have been widely acknowledged for almost twenty years. What else could have been expected over a period of twenty years for someone as serious and dedicated as me?”

  “We’ve been robbed of the most fruitful era in Egypt’s history,” he would go on regretfully, “one where considerations of age and inherited wealth have been thrust aside and the younger generation has leapt forward to occupy ministerial positions.”

  He kept a relentlessly close watch on the careers of some of his more distinguished school contemporaries who had managed to continue their studies. Quite frequently he would look up from reading the newspaper and say something like, “Do you know this person they keep writing about?” he would ask incredulously. “He was at school with me, grade after grade. He was a very poor student; he never managed to beat me at anything.”

  “Good heavens!” he would scoff. “The man’s an undersecretary of state! That scruffy boy who could never remember anything he was told? What’s happening to the world?”

  He would then go on and talk about what an exceptional student he himself had been at school and what a promising career his teachers had predicted for him. All these sentiments only managed to have negative effects on his temperament; he became obstreperous, bad tempered, and arrogant, always ready to wax h
yperbolic about his talents. His life was thus turned into a continuing succession of lies and sheer misery. This alleged genius thereafter found himself stuck in the eighth administrative level in the archives department at the Ministry of Works, but he adamantly refused to settle down and accept things. Never giving up, he kept searching for ways to rid himself of his chains and beat a path to freedom, glory, and authority. Many avenues were tried, and one attempt followed another. His first idea was to undertake home study for a law degree, that being the field he had aspired to from the start. He had to get a degree because practicing law was no longer the kind of endeavor it had been in the old days of Saad Zaghlul and al-Balbawi, so he started collecting books on law and borrowing reports, then spent an entire year studying before presenting himself for the examinations. He failed in two subjects. This was a savage blow to his pride, and he felt acutely embarrassed when dealing with all those people who had been assiduously following the tales of his exceptional talents. He started using his job in the ministry as an excuse for his failure and pretended he had an illness that made it impossible for him to continue his studies. In fact, he kept up this pretense of an illness even afterward as a precautionary measure against further embarrassment. He was scared to try the exam again and decided to avoid subjecting his talent to more obvious public experiments, where people could easily gauge the results.

  He now decided to try free thinking instead and immediately made his colleagues aware of the contempt he felt for exams and degrees. He managed to convince himself that the reason for his failure in the exam had nothing to do with any failings or inadequacy on his part, but was simply due to the fact that he had not had enough time to prepare for it. With that in mind he abandoned his studies so he could discover the most natural outlet for his unquestioned (and martyred) genius. Thus he had managed to waste a year and acquire a sizeable quantity of law books for his library. Now he decided to concentrate on science, but could not make up his mind between more theoretical research areas and practical discoveries; which of the two should he choose? It was the latter area that he turned his back on, the pretext being that the country was completely devoid of factories and laboratories, which is where experiments were conducted and creative inspiration flourished. Instead he pinned his hopes on theoretical science. His dearest wish was one day to discover a theory that would transform the horizons of modern science; as a result he would find himself elevated to the eternal heights of fame and glory alongside Newton and Einstein. Once again ambition caught hold, and he started buying as many texts on physics and chemistry as he could lay his hands on. He read them all avidly, but after a solid year of study he found himself exactly where he had started, not having advanced a single step toward his ultimate goal. He now convinced himself that real involvement in scientific research demanded preparatory studies of the kind that he had never had.

  At this point he panicked again, as was often the case. He gave up theoretical science as a field of study; such was his desperation, he managed to convince himself that theoretical research was no different from more applied investigations in its need for laboratories and research institutes. The intellectual atmosphere in Egypt in general was not yet ready for science. This time he felt no need to justify his failure to anyone. By now he had learned to keep his goals hidden from everyone, but even so that did not stop him telling his colleagues and friends that he was devoting all his spare time to knowledge and learning. The untrammelled domain of knowledge, something that far outclassed school-based learning and government-issued diplomas, and in-depth reading that would turn its practitioner into a scholar of enormous profundity.

  Another year was squandered while his library acquired yet another category of scientific works. After a while he paused in his endeavors. “Precisely what is it,” he wondered in an exhausted quandary, “that my particular talents are cut out for?” It was obvious enough that he himself did not know the answer as yet; if he had, he could have saved himself some time—it would have been much better if he had—rather than wasting his energies to no effect.

  What really interested him? By now he was finished with both law and science, but they were the be-all and end-all of everything. Even so, there was something else that was just as worthwhile and wonderful. How he adored the works of the poet Shawqi and the essayist al-Manfaluti; what bewitching eloquence in their writing! Could his real calling be literature? What a great mode of art it was, one that did not require a degree to practice it nor school learning either. Reading, that was all that was involved; reading poets like Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim, and Mutran, just as he had done before. His library soon welcomed some new additions in the form of poetry and prose anthologies that he devoured with such enthusiasm that it aggravated him. During his literary excursions he came across Ibn Khaldun’s quote: “We have heard from our revered shaykhs in literary salons that there are four major sourceworks when it comes to literature studies. They are: The Complete Work by al-Mubarrad, The Scribe’s Manual by Ibn Qutayba, The Book of Eloquence and Clear Expression by al-Jahiz, and The Book of Anecdotes by al-Qali from Baghdad. All other sources apart from these four are derivative.” He let out a sigh of satisfaction; it was as if he had stumbled on a treasure and had acquired the four pillars of literature. With that he read them all with his characteristic zeal and speed. When he had finished, he asked himself—with a good deal of relish—whether he had now become a literature scholar. Grabbing a pen he decided to test his resolve by writing something. The piece he wrote was called “On the Banks of the Nile,” and into it he poured his artistry and inspiration. When it was finished, he sent it by mail to a journal and started picturing the admiration and amazement with which readers would greet it once it had been published. This would be the first stage on the path of glory and fame. For him that would be enough, since the only reward he was looking for was literary recognition. The journal was duly published, and he thumbed through it looking for his article, but it was not there. He began to lose heart, and his high hopes took an awkward tumble. But he did not give up hope and told himself he had to wait another week. Weeks went by, and still the article did not appear. Here he was, someone who had read the four principal pillars of Arabic literature from which all other sources are considered to be derived. According to Ibn Khaldun that made him a literature scholar—Ibn Khaldun, no less! So how could it be that his article had not been published? Was it because the author was unknown, or he had not gone through an intermediary? Was it possible they couldn’t understand his argument? For a short while he thought he might go to the journal in person and find out what had happened, but he soon decided he could not; his innate diffidence was always there as a roadblock.

  He now decided to put the shock of the first rejection behind him and wrote a second article about justice. He had no more luck with it than he did with the first one. He wrote a third piece entitled “Poverty’s Crime Against Talent,” but it fared no better than its two predecessors. When that happened, he set about writing with all the dogged stubbornness of someone who sees it as his final hope, all his previous efforts having been destroyed on the frozen rocks of cruel neglect. He rewrote most of them and sent them out to a number of different journals. However, none of them showed any mercy toward his tortured aspirations or seemed ready to rescue him from the pit of despondency. The last article he wrote was on “The Triviality of Literature,” and it too sank without a trace. Shattered in spirit and deeply hurt, he abandoned any further attempts. Bad luck—his enemy of old—had conspired against him yet again, and malicious intent had done the rest. Not for a second did he doubt the value of what he had written about literature. Indeed, he believed it was better than anything al-Manfaluti himself had written, not to mention the effusions of any number of contemporary writers. It was all a question of malice and evil intent. All his dreams had come to nothing. How utterly constricting and unfair life was! Discarding his pen, he now allowed his anger, sorrow, and recalcitrance free rein and finally gave up all aspirations f
or prestige and authority. His heart was full of anger and resentment, against the world in general and people, especially men with social renown and power. How could you define prestige, he asked himself, particularly its Egyptian form? He answered his own question with a single phrase: favorable circumstances. He was devoted to the memory of Saad Zaghlul, but even so he noted that it was Saad’s father-in-law who had paved the way for his successful career; but for that, he would never have become the figure we know.

  “Behind every high-level position in Egypt,” he would often say, “there’s always a tale to be told. If you want to get ahead in this society of ours, then make sure you use deceit, hypocrisy, and impertinence; and don’t forget a fair dose of stupidity and ignorance to go with it!”

  Either that sort of thing, or else, “Who are these literary types, the ones who write for newspapers and journals? How can it be real literature if the only way to succeed is to meddle in politics and party feuds? Is it only a person of honor who is incapable of achieving the phony prestige they have earned?”