Midaq Alley

Midaq Alley is one of the early books of Mahfouz, a real masterpiece of modern Egiptian and Arabic litrature.The book is fiction but is about real places and real people. I am Egiptian myself, born in Cairo and walked in this neighborhood because it is in the heart of Cairo where most of Prophet Muhammed's family have shrines such as Lord Husain and Lady of Ladies Zeinab (translated as People of The House. The characters sounds strange and unreal to the western reader, but I assure you that under the pressure of poverty, emotions and political turmoil such characters are very natural and inevitable. The main chacter is Hamida,a beatuful girl who turned to vice under the pressure of poverty. The residents of the alley are like a close family and to be neigbours means to be family.It is a big story where every character has a little story but all are weaved and connected with all others. This book sounds very real even the streats are real and for a Cairene like me, I can walk with the characters through it.Mahfouz doesn't conclude or teach us any one-sided morality, he just let us see things with his eyes and let each one of us decides the moral aspect of it. Close to the end one of his character give his opinion about good and evil and why God created evil, but some agreed and some not.At the last chapter (35), the drama unfolded with drastic consequences for all and the disappearance of Hamida that caused it, still Mahfouz didn't comment wether it is good or bad. One of the appartment became vacant in the alley and a poor family with many children moved in; one of the children is again very beatuiful girl. Mahfouz trying to tell us that this is the world and it is as it is and it goes in cycles that we can't change.This book is great, the translation is very good. It deserves five stars.

Following ten years after his more famous Cairo Trilogy, Midaq Mafouz brings us back to another neighborhood in Cairo and in the same time period as World War II is ending. (note, there seems to be more than one opinion about the sequence, Wiki has the trilogy out in mid-1950 and Midaq out in 1966) Much like his other neighborhood, its inhabitants believe themselves to be in a self-sustaining world, follow Islam or follow it as best they can. They appeal to the Lady of Ladies and to the line of The Prophet via local shrine to “Our master Hussain”. Also like the inhabitant of Cairo Walk, they are feeling the pressure of a modern more secular world. Here there is more poverty and less hope for material success.In fact, this is a population of character types at once subtle and extreme as to suggest satire. If so, satire is not always funny. Most of those in Midaq Alley are people of poverty and limited education. People are known to be skirting the law or violating it and being codependent neighborhood, they mostly ignore each other failings. A dentist practices dentistry mostly because he calls himself a dentist and is very cheap. We have a wife beater, who is revered for his intense, if ill-educated belief in his faith. A husband beater who can be tempted to stray. A king of thieves, who specialized in carving the physical handicaps that his customers pay him to provide so that they can increase their earnings as beggars. Young men consider the apparently irreversible decision to leave the neighborhood by joining the British, where there is high pay. The women seek to leave poverty by marrying away from the alley or by such activities by which women of many cultures have made better money and lost their ties to their families.More so than in his trilogy, Mahfouz achieve a conversation with an audience that need not be Egyptian. There are enough universal types in the alley that we are not so challenged to understand this world. Given the modern demand that all literature fit an ever-narrowing window of acceptability The paternity is empowered. But women are not as secluded as in the Trilogy. Major female characters, married and single get to walk about without first getting male permission. There are factory girls, openly working and wearing western dress. For all this the culture and the author have clearly separate standards for judging characters by sex. An unexpected character is the operator of a bar, semi illegal if not completely so. He is introduced to us as a hashish addict and it emerges that married man and father that he is, he routinely scandalizes his wife by his preference for young males. Even more interesting the response is not so much homophobia as a desire by the family that he not continuously embarrass them.Midaq Alley would fit nicely into the Cairo Trilogy. It is a different neighborhood than in the trilogy, . These people are also attempting to deal with a world between tradition and modernity, but they do so from the compromises that seem to associate with poverty. Satire and soap opera are terms other reviewers apply, but I never doubted the possibility of such people nor the writing skills of the author.

Thoreau said that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation." This wonderful novel, set in Cairo, Egypt, during WWII, beautifully illustrates that point. Midaq Alley is just what it sounds like, an out of the way alley in a big city where most of the inhabitants are just getting by, or worse. Some accept their fate, accepting it as God's will. Others are very unhappy with their lot in life and are determined to better themselves. Only one of them succeeds, but it is debatable whether the fate of that character, Hamida, whose way out is prostitution, a life style she is at first seduced into but chooses freely, is better than what she left.Midaq Alley has a vibrancy and a sense of community that has all but disappeared in modern urban settings, at least in the US, but probably less so in Egypt. All of its residents know each other and are generally there for each other. All of then live by their wits. One man sells sweets. One is a coffee shop owner and openly homosexual, something I found very surprising in an Islamic society of six and a half decades ago. One woman is a matchmaker. One woman is a landlady. One young man is a barber who goes to work for the British in order to be able to marry the girl he loves, a girl who ultimately proves to be unworthy of him, and is his undoing.One of the reasons fiction is valuable is that it gives us an insight into how societies that we may never otherwise come into contact with function. Midaq Alley is such a book. And, although it is tragic, its ultimate message is that life goes on. I highly recommend this book.

I'd been looking for more books by Naguib Mahfouz and ordered this copy. It came on time and with no markings. Good seller!

A masterpiece

Excelente, la historia es muy entretenida de inicio a fin. La calidad del libro es buena y el prólogo es muy informativo.

Unfortunately, I haven't read this book. I do know about the author though and I am fascinated with Egyptian folklore storytelling.

An incredibly interesting literary work from Mahfouz! His work never disappoints (in my opinion) and I only wish that his works be more widely distributed in the Western world. For anyone interested in Egyptian society or even Islamic society, this is for you!

Yet to read it; Physical condition of the book is excellent as described; Will submit a book-review after the completion of my read up.