Najib Mahfuz: Allegory and symbolism as a means of social, political and cultural criticism, 1936-1985

This thesis attempts to place Najib Mahfuz and his works within the historical, sociopolitical and cultural perspective of Twentieth Century Egypt. During his remarkably prolific career, starting in 1930 and culminating with the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, Mahfuz has gone through many different phases or stylistic periods in his attempt to capture the voice and experience of the Egyptian people.;After a brief introduction, Chapter one covers Mahfuz's "realistic" or "social" period of works written between 1936 and 1952.;Chapter two is the most lengthy chapter of this thesis and is devoted exclusively to the currently banned Awlad Haritna, published in serial form in Egypt in 1959. Allegorical in nature, Awlad Haritna contains the central theme of Mahfuz's philosophical history. It is a hybrid of Marx and Freud with the economic motivation of characters seen in the ten conditions for the distribution of wealth, yet all the inhabitants are also descendants of a whore and a fratricidal killer who pass on these innate characteristics of sex and aggression. Time passes with the eras of three prophets in succession: Moses, Jesus and the prophet Muhammed. While each of these men preaches liberation, each movement inevitably is doomed to failure because of stagnation. However, with the introduction of 'Arafa, the character who is the embodiment of science, Mahfuz is plainly stating that science is the next successor in the line of prophets which, according to Moslem tradition, began with Adam and ended with the prophet Muhammed.;While chapters two and three deal with the chronological progression of Mahfuz's oeuvre after Awlad Haritna and Egypt after the revolution, chapter five provides the crystallization of Mahfuz's intellect and the final destination of his philosophical journey. Ibn Fattuma's Journey is the application of Mahfuz's views on culture and civilization and his calling for a New Islam, one that will change with the times and therefore improve everyone's life with the application of science, the latest in the line of prophets dating back to Adam. In so doing, he describes a practice of the New Islam in the land of the Arena (allegorically America) that is outside the existing laws of Moslem tradition, i.e., drinking wine, eating pork, etc.;As discussed in the final chapter of this thesis, Mahfuz's New Islam is fundamentally Islamic because it is built upon the existing infrastructure of Islamic law, yet it is new because it ends up outside the establishing parameters of the Moslem way of life.