22 pages • 44 minutes read
Naguib MahfouzZaabalawi
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Spiritual Quest
The Islamic story of the Mi’raj is the story of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim religion, ascending into heaven. In the Mi’raj, Muhammad starts at the lowest of seven heavens and embarks on a journey to meet God. Muhammad’s experience cleanses him of earthly idolatry and sin, and he meets prophets who prepare him for his ascension.
“Zaabalawi” also features a dream of divine inspiration, and the narrator’s broader spiritual journey mirrors Muhammad’s, although Mahfouz uses a fantastic realist lens to blend the prosaic and divine. By hewing closely to the Mi’raj’s structure and conceits, Mahfouz reframes the ancient story as a democratic spiritual journey in which the anonymous everyday peoples of modern Cairo can attain spiritual transcendence. In each section of the story, its narrator comes closer to meeting Zaabalawi, who represents his ascension. The people the narrator meets along the way are not the great prophets who serve as gatekeepers in the Mi’raj, but they do prepare the narrator’s spirit, ultimately leading him to relinquish his burdened sense of self. These modern revisions to Islamic lore are deeply political in their assertion that ascension is attainable to the common man.
The narrator’s enlightenment is imperfect, however; even after his dream of ultimate spiritual reality, he continues searching for healing in the physical world. This touches on the darker side of the spiritual quest trope. For Arab writers like Mahfouz, this narrative is historically charged, recalling the Crusades—European religious wars waged to lay claim to holy sites held by the Muslim Empire. Likewise, medieval romances often featured a courageous knight embarking on a labyrinthine journey to seize an important artifact. In Chrétien de Troyes’s 12th-century epic Perceval, the Story of the Grail, the knight Perceval locates the grail but fails to identify it as such and loses the treasure. Other works satirized the materialism inherent to this narrative, as well as the broader conventions of chivalric literature. “Zaabalawi” is part of this latter tradition. By depicting the narrator’s misguided search for spirituality, Mahfouz comments on the dangers of dogmatic belief in spiritual externalities and artifacts.
The Disease of Modernity
Like much of Mahfouz’s work, “Zaabalawi” owes a debt to Modernism—an artistic movement that developed in response to World War I’s technological expansion, redrawn borders, and shifted social spheres. Seeking to address the way these changes shaped our perception of reality, early 20th-century writers adopted new forms and literary techniques. For example, T. S. Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land depicts dreary utilitarian cities with crowds moving to and from work like a churning river. This alienation—from traditional religion, meaningful work, other people, etc.—is a hallmark of the Modernist Era.
The narrator of “Zaabalawi” suffers from a similar malaise: “The days passed and brought with them many illnesses, for each one of which I was able, without too much trouble and at a cost I could afford, to find a cure, until I became afflicted with that illness for which no one possesses a remedy” (1). This mysterious illness is never named but is characterized by anxiety, insomnia, and restlessness—classic symptoms afflicting the Modernist protagonist. These are the side effects of living in a world that has become incomprehensible, as Mahfouz alludes to in the story’s opening lines: “Oh what’s become of the world, Zaabalawi? They’ve turned it upside down and taken away its taste” (1). In this “upside down” existence, objective knowledge is impossible, so Expressionism—a subgenre of Modernism—focuses on representing the subjective experience of reality. In “Zaabalawi,” for example, the narrator’s point of view flattens Cairo’s crowds, smells, and sights into uniform dreariness. He perceives only the most utilitarian of details, implying that modern society has traded the full range of human experience for efficiency.
The workers, salesmen, vendors, and shopkeepers the narrator meets seem similarly affected; each is too busy to speak at any meaningful length on Zaabalawi. The implication is that modern life has even corrupted spiritual tradition. However, the story holds out hope that the cure for this condition lies within the human heart, in its impulses for kindness, music, and dreaming. This idea culminates in the narrator’s rapturous dream, where he at last feels connected to a world that has come fully into focus.
The Futility of Nostalgia
By recounting the narrative in the first person and past tense, Mahfouz uses the short story’s form to comment on storytelling and its relationship to nostalgia. Nostalgia is a propelling force driving the narrator’s search for Zaabalawi, who first appears in a popular song from the narrator’s childhood. The same lyrics mourn a Cairo long passed, even in the narrator’s youth. This telescoping recollection of a “simpler time” suggests that such a Cairo never existed at all; it’s always just out of reach no matter how far into the past the narrative ventures.
The narrative works to reconcile this hazy and dreamlike Cairo with the more utilitarian and industrious city that the narrator scours in search of Zaabalawi; the painstaking map the magistrate draws for the narrator reflects one such attempt to pin the city down in a definite form, and to locate Zaabalawi—himself a mythic figure—within it. At times, the narrator even seems on the verge of recovering a vanished past—most notably in Sheikh Gad’s home, which is “tastefully furnished in the old style, its walls redolent with history” (7). However, the past ultimately proves as elusive as Zaabalawi. What’s more, attempts to reconstruct it in narrative seem doomed by the nature of storytelling itself; just as the descriptions each character offers of Zaabalawi reflect that character’s concerns, each story overwrites the past even as it tries to depict it.
Tellingly, the narrator’s transcendent experience at Negma Bar involves the complete suspension of subjective time: “With the third glass, I lost my memory, and with the fourth the future vanished” (11). This suggests that nostalgia, though universal, is misguided; it’s only when the narrator relinquishes the past and future that he finds the lost paradise he’s been looking for in the present moment. The narrator doesn’t realize this, however, and the story ends where it began: with the narrator waiting for a bygone world to reappear. This circular structure further underscores nostalgia’s futility, implying that what the narrator perceives as change is really just more of the same, or (more optimistically) that the timelessness that characterizes the narrator’s dream always exists alongside human time.
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