Book Review on "Midaq Alley the Central Character"

Book Review 6 pages (2005 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Midaq Alley

The central character in the novel Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz is not a person but the alley of the title, a section in Cairo that features a number of small businesses and an array of interesting characters peopling the stories told by the author. The book is a great deal like a number of short stories melded together into novel form, and it has a particular power based on the way the author handles the many narrative elements and keeps the stories focused on the life of the alley and of Cairo. The stories are set in the 1940s, but what Mahfouz has to say about the people, the country, the society, the religion and the political background speaks volumes to us today.

The neighborhood that is the center of this novel is a poor one, a place where the residents have to work hard just to get by. The story takes place as the world faces the Nazi threat and the World War against that threat. In many ways, that conflict is far from the lives of the people of this neighborhood, and the greater concern for the people of Cairo is the control exerted by the British Army in the Middle East..

A key location in the alley is the cafe operated by Kirsha, a middle-aged man who prefers spending time with the young men of the neighborhood rather than with his wife, men like Abbas, who owns the local barbershop. Both the cafe and the barbershop are the types of establishment that are likely to survive in troubled times, both being necessities to a great degree. Still, hard times mean problems for these business owners. In spite of the troubles facing many of the denizens of Midaq Alley, Mahfouz takes an optimistic view of the neighborhood and the people in it, though the novel has a bleak ending and seems to show a people cowed by foreign influences. Another important businessman in the neighborhood is Uncle Kamil, owner of the sweets shop.

The nature of Midaq Alley is established early as Mahfouz writes that it "lives in almost complete isolation from all surrounding activity" yet "clamors with a distinctive and personallife of its own" (1). At the same time, Mahfouz sees this area as linked to a lost past, and he calls the alley "an ancient relic and a precious one" (1). The cafe is singled out for its crumbling decorated walls. In some ways, the alley is like a closed off space that is not as affected by the outside world as it would be if it were not "enclosed like a trap between three walls" (1). This is not a dead street by any means but rather a street teeming with life, however straitened the circumstances facing the people of this neighborhood.

The people are clinging to their traditions and their way of life even as that way of life becomes more and more enclosed in this small alley, while the outside world is more and more changed by commerce with the Western world, as represented primarily by the British. The beggar Zaita may represent a degree of the self-reliance of the past. He is said not to interact with the alley in which he lives and "works," but he does interact with other beggars as he trains them to be beggars. He fits with the rest of the neighborhood, which is described by Mahfouz as if it were a slice of time past. Kirsha tells the street singer that history has passed him by and that he is only telling old stories over and over again. this attitude is very Western in the way it suggests that there is something fresh and new that should replace old traditions and old stories.

This idea is examined with reference to the position of women in this society, largely through the story of the matchmaker, Umm Hamida. Her step-daughter, Hamida, is a beautiful girl who wants to escape from the old traditions that would have her marry in order to escape the poverty of the neighborhood. Marriage is one route to that escape, but Hamida does not want to take that path and envies the Jewish girls who work in factories and do not have to stay home and fulfill the expectations of their parents in the same way. However, such an escape is virtually impossible in the society in which she lives, and eventually she does agree to marry Abbas, though she does not respect him and sees him as uneducated and uninteresting. Also, she rightly sees him as a humble young man who can never match her own ambitions, but she does know that he has plans to escape Midaq Alley, which is the one ambition they share. His way out is to work for the British Army, which Hamida's brother has also done. The two are destined to fail in their effort to improve and instead become victims of the globalization of their time, the movement of foreign troops into the region as part of World War II. Abbas works as a barber in the British area, while Hamida becomes a prostitute serving the British and American troops who are far from home. Clearly, this is not what she had in mind and does not allow her to escape from the inferior status of her life or of her people, as far as the colonizers are concerned. Indeed, in taking on this job, she allows herself to be changed by her pimp so she has a new name, a new way of dressing, a new way of behaving, and even a new language she has to speak.

AS bad as this era is, worse is to come as the war ends and leaves people like Abbas and Hamida with no livelihood. Abbas eventually rebels against what his wife has become because of the Western presence in the region, and when he throws beer glasses in her face, the British troops beat him to death, in effect demonstrating both the stranglehold they have on the people of this part of the world and their own arrogance that they are helping by harming.

Mahfouz details the life of this neighborhood and does so in a way that celebrates that life even as it shows how hard circumstances may be and how many may fail when tested. Thee are real human beings who have a culture that supports them but who may find their ideas challenged by events over which they have no control. The war was such an event, but even more troublesome was the imposition of a foreign social system over the traditional system, creating deep-seated conflicts that have long-term consequences. We can see the result of many of those consequences today, as Mahfouz was certainly aware when he write the book in 1966, two decades after the war. At that time, Egypt was torn by conflicts between Western powers and Middle Eastern forces, and that is certainly the case today as well.

We see the Middle East today as reacting badly to any American influence, but at one time the threat was perceived to be more from the British. Much of the Middle East was under British control at one time, and the borders that now exist owe a good deal to the British era of oversight and control, with British wars helping determine those orders and the rulers or ruling groups that emerged to shape the nations that eventually developed. PRIVATE the Middle East can be divided into four sections, the Arabian Peninsula, the Fertile Crescent, the Non-Arab North, and North Africa. The British have had an influence in all of these regions. There are eight nations along the Persian Gulf, and these are the oil-rich nations where more than half the world's known reserves and one-fifth the world's natural gas reserves are found. These nations also have low population and little industry, and they exist by selling oil to the rest of the world. The first oil well in the region was found in 1908 and developed by the British. The oil reserves in Kuwait were found in 1930 when the country was a British protectorate. Qatar became a British protectorate in 1916, a situation that did not end until 1971. To the east of Qatar is a loose federation of small city-states, seven of them, once called the Trucial States. The leaders signed an agreement with the British in the 1800s and sought British protection, which also lasted until 1971. Oman, originally known as Muscat, was ruled by several different countries. It held a strategic location in the region and established treaties with the British beginning in 1798, again gaining full independence in 1971, though it ceased to be a British protectorate in 1951. Britain has had a major influence in this region since the end of the eighteenth century, and the nature of the borders and of the economic interests of the countries of the Middle East… READ MORE

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