The outsider in the novels of Naguib Mahfouz

The novels of Najib Mahfūz, or — to use the more familiar Western spelling of his name, Naguib Mahfouz — offer a progressive study of the outsider in relation to Egyptian middle‐class society. In the early novels it was poverty which set the character outside the gale of a normally functioning community. The poverty of Mahjub in Modern Cairo (al‐Qahira al‐jadida) (1945) and of Hasanayn in A Beginning and an End (Bidaya wa‐nihaya) (1949) is the cause of their isolation in those novels.

The Trilogy (i: Bayn al‐Qasrayn; ii: Qasr al‐shawq: iii: al‐Sukkariyya) (1956–7) offers a large‐scale study of an alienated personality. It is Kamal, who, with the house in Bayn al‐Qasrayn, provides the link between the three generations depicted in the Trilogy. Alienation here is rooted in disappointment and frustration brought about by the mere process of growing up and disillusionment, religious, social and emotional.

The post‐realistic novels after the Trilogy offer bold sketches of a series of outsiders and exiles: the outlaw in The Thief and the Dogs (al‐Liss wa‐1‐kilab) (1961), the disgraced politician in Autumn Quail (al‐Summan wa‐1‐kharif) (1962) , and a group of social and political exiles in a small pension called ‘Miramar’ in Miramar (1967).

In the late seventies Mahfouz was still writing short novels on outsiders, but the wheel has come full circle. They are the young men who have obtained their degree, got the standard government or public sector jobs, been accepted by the sweetheart and her family and are formally engaged, but still cannot find themselves a place in a society highly inflated with petrol dollars and mushrooming wealth, where it is near impossible for a young couple to afford the huge sums necessary for any new accommodation.