Excess, Rebellion, and Revolution: Egyptian Modernity in the Trilogy

Abstract

The Trilogy of Nagib Mahfuz, which stands at the end of his series of realist novels set in Cairo that began to appear in 1945, morally configures everyday Egyptian life in a manner that encompasses the political development of Egypt from 1917 to 1944.¹ In doing so, it projects a revolutionary politics of hegemonic struggle whose horizon is a humanist, rather than a nationalist, realization of national unity and agency. The Egyptian nation is not the goal of humanity but the form in which Egyptians may attain humanity, which lies in the moral maturity of modernity. The Trilogy distances modernity from the West by making it the necessary outcome of the internal moral development of Egyptian society. This development begins with a static and traditional psychic and social order whose collapse results in dissolution and tyranny. From its standpoint within this comprehensive crisis, the novel generates an authentic moral disposition that promises to be the basis of a dynamic, unceasing social transformation. This manner of representing Egyptian society is distinctive in that it creates a trajectory of national development with great internal coherence that plays out on the level of everyday individual experience. On a deeper level, the novel’s oppositional vision of modernity, in which humanity is liberated through the progressive elimination of social inequality, stands in stark contrast to the socially affirmative aesthetic nationalism put forth in Return of the Spirit.