“Amm Mutwalli” and “Hagg Shalabi”

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“Amm Mutwalli” and “Hagg Shalabi”

by Mahmud Taymur

THE LITRARY WORK

Two short stories set in Cairo, Egypt in the 1920s; first published in Arabic in 1925 (“Amm Mutwalli”) and 1930 (“Hagg Shalabi”), in English in 1947.

SYNOPSIS

In “Amm Mutwalli,” a poor hawker who moved to Cairo from the Sudan becomes convinced he is the promised Mahdi and goes insane. “Hagg Shalabi” features a brutal neighborhood thug who marries and impregnates women so that he can hire them out as wet nurses for wealthy families.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Stories

The Short Stories in Focus

For More Information

Mahmud Taymur (1894–1973) grew up in Cairo, in an aristocratic literary family of Kurdish origin. His father, Ahmad Taymur Pasha, was a philologist and a bibliophile whose personal library numbered among the largest and most important in Egypt. Mahmud’s paternal aunt, A’isha al-Taymuriyah (1840–1920), was a respected poetess and essayist. His older brother Muhammad (1892–1921) was a dramatist and short-story writer and a leading light in modern Arabic literature in his own right. As a youth, Mahmud was deeply influenced by his older brother’s literary activities as well as by the famous salons regularly held at the Taymur residence and attended by the intellectual luminaries of the day. Muhammad introduced his younger brother to the work of the French author Guy de Maupassant, who was to exercise an important influence on Mahmud Taymur’s writing (the source of Taymur’s sobriquet, “Egypt’s Maupassant”). While attending college, Taymur contracted typhus, and the illness left him a semi-invalid for most of his life. He dropped out of college, then worked briefly at various government ministries, but soon retired to devote himself fulltime to his literary career. Taymur traveled extensively in Europe over a 17-year period and lived there between 1925 and 1927, indulging his passion for modern French and Russian fiction during this period. An immensely prolific writer, he published more than 80 books, including novels, literary criticism, drama, travel literature, biography, and short-story collections. Taymur is considered a founding father of the modern Arabic short story, having written 29 collections over his lifetime; many would become available in English, French, and Russian translations. His best-known works are the two volumes of short stories entitled Hagg Shalabi (1930) and Abu Ali amil artist wa-qisas ukhra (1934, Abu Ali Pretends To Be an Artist) as well as his novella Rajab Afandi (1928) and his novel Nida al-majhul (1934, The Call of the Unknown). In his early fiction especially, Taymur built his plots around a single, somehow representative yet often quite unusual or shady Egyptian character. His most famous characters—of which Amm Mutwalli and Hagg Shalabi are just two examples—are individual studies in the mental and social eccentricities of a certain segment of Egyptian society. The stories are groundbreaking not only for their style, but also for their focus on Egypt’s lower classes.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Stories

The Nahdah and Arabic literature

The novel and the short story are relatively recent genres in Arabic literature. For centuries, poetry reigned supreme in the Arabic literary canon, and the highly formalized classical qasidah, or ode, remained the dominant and most respected cultural and literary form in Arab society (see, for example, Ode on the Conquest of Amorium , also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times). Prose writing, though not as prestigious as poetry, had its own rich tradition throughout the classical and medieval periods of Arab history and included a wide variety of genres such as the essay, the epistle, the biography, the chronicle, and the maqamah—a short, rhymed prose narrative that features the adventures of a picaresque hero (see Maqamat , also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times). These genres collectively constituted a body of belles-lettres that, strictly speaking, did not include quasi-oral fictional genres like the romance, the epic, and the famous collection of stories known in English as The Arabian Nights (also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times). While tremendously popular—especially among the illiterate urban lower classes—this type of oral narrative was, until quite recently, considered by Arab writers and scholars to be a vulgar and debased form of literature, unworthy of serious attention or study. Sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, this state of affairs began to change.

Back in the eighteenth century, the Arab world experienced significant social and economic ferment. Important shifts in international trade patterns and political institutions contributed to a gradual transformation in late medieval social structures—the urban guild system, the religious establishment, and the political and economic relationship between the city and the countryside. During this period, literary production and scholarship began to change as well, emphasizing a new utilitarian approach to language and the human sciences associated with it. For example, philology and lexicography began to focus on living linguistic usage rather than ideal word forms associated with the Quran or with classical poetry. This transformation was further accelerated by the introduction of the modern European sciences and humanities onto the Arab intellectual stage following the French conqueror Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798.

Some Arab writers and intellectuals were impressed by the scientific and technological superiority of Europe and attracted to its Enlightenment culture. More exactly, they were attracted to the “secular rationalism” of this culture—that is, its attempts to improve the human condition by focusing on knowledge and on the ability of people to reason. Though the French occupation of Egypt was short-lived, the cultural and intellectual ferment that it introduced became an important factor in the history of the nineteenth century, most notably in Egypt and Syria. Recognizing the importance of acquiring the secrets of European military technology, Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali (reigned 1804–49) sent numerous educational missions to study in France and established a School of Languages in Cairo, at which the concerted translation of European texts into Arabic was conducted. Christian missionary schools in Syria were also important centers of translation activity.

The process of literary and scientific translation into Arabic contributed to the simplification and revitalization of the medieval Arabic language and stimulated writers to experiment with older Arabic prose genres. Writers in Syria rediscovered the finest examples of classical prose and used them as a model for a modern revival of narrative genres like the maqamah. Other European genres like drama and the novel were introduced into the Arab world around the middle of the nineteenth century. Numerous literary magazines dedicated to fiction, both original and in translation, sprang up around the turn of the twentieth century. The novel and the short story became immensely popular among Arab audiences during this period, which is broadly referred to as the Nahdah, or the Awakening—a term that is used to denote a seminal era of cultural and political change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Egyptian intellectuals, colonialism, and social reform

French and then British financial, political, and cultural influence continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century. Between 1860 and 1867, the number of Europeans who settled in Egypt increased from a few thousand to over 100,000. By 1876 Egypt’s reigning monarch, the Khedive Ismail, had plunged the country into a major financial crisis through his extravagant expenditure of public monies. Both the British and the French, their eyes long

NAPOLEON IN EGYPT (1798–1801)

The rivalry over trade and Imperial possessions between Britain and France—the two great powers of the eighteenth century—came to a head in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte decided to lead an expeditionary force to Egypt Britain was anxious to safeguard its Red Sea trade routes to India—then a British colonial possession. France meanwhile wished to limit English supremacy in the East. Wise to the international competition Egypt’s eighteenth-century Mamluk rulers played the two powers against each other by granting trading privileges to one or the other, depending on Egyptian interests. When one such Franco-Egyptian treaty was abrogated by the Mamluks in favor of Britain, Napoleon decided to invade Egypt The short-lived French military occupation was accompanied by an extensive academic mission that included scientists, historians, and men of letters. This mission formed the nucleus of the Institute of Egypt, founded by Napoleon in the year of the invasion to “(1) work for the advancement of science and knowledge in and about Egypt; (2) to study the natural, industrial and historical sciences relevant to Egypt; and (3) to consult with, and advise, the government on specific matters relating to policy” (Vatikiotis, p. 41). Though scholars disagree as to the overall significance of the French expedition for modern Egyptian and Arab history and culture, there is no doubt that the institute provided the occasion for important encounters between French and Egyptian intellectuals as well as an impetus for the dissemination of European technologies and cultural texts in the Arab world.

fastened on the strategic and economic potentials of Egypt, had already established a presence in the area. They owned controlling stakes in the newly built Suez Canal and held consular authority over both the resident European populations and a substantial segment of Egypt’s religious minorities. Using Ismail’s incompetence as an excuse, the two powers took over the country’s crumbling finances and began to actively interfere in its domestic affairs. Not long afterwards, the British used a domestic Egyptian conflict—a nationalist army rebellion led by Colonel Ahmad Urabi Pasha—as an excuse to occupy Egypt. This occupation was to last nearly three-quarters of a century, during which the British insinuated themselves into Egyptian government. They ruled Egypt in a shifting, uneasy alliance with the king and the country’s landowning elite. British politicians and administrators introduced a particular kind of reformist colonial discourse into Egypt, one that emphasized the need to slowly “modernize” what they deemed to be the country’s culturally backward and racially inferior population. At the turn of the twentieth century, reformers appropriated this discourse and used it to push for limited changes in Egyptian society.

Many of the intellectual luminaries of the Nahdah came from the upper echelons of Egyptian society. They were members of the landowning urban elite, educated in Europe and engaged in Egyptian politics and in the law. Also they were prolific writers and dedicated reformers whose ideas were heavily influenced by nineteenthcentury European positivist social theory disseminated through Arabic translations of writers like Jeremy Bentham, Herbert Spencer, and Gustave Le Bon. Social Darwinism—the concept that the fittest rise to the top in society and therefore deserve their position—was extremely influential in Egyptian intellectual circles. Just as powerful individuals occupied their high-level positions for good reason, argued some of the social Darwinists, powerful nations held their political positions because they were inherently superior to less powerful ones. Le Bon’s description of a “collective mind” or “mental constitution” evolving over many generations of a nation’s history was intended to demonstrate the difference between advanced and backward nations. Many Egyptian intellectuals adopted this idea of a collective mind and applied it to Egypt, often in very negative ways. Egypt’s liberal reformers wholeheartedly admired and identified with Western liberal culture and saw themselves as the elite vanguard of Egypt’s social and political renaissance and the natural leaders of the degraded Egyptian masses. They believed that the key to this renaissance lay in the radical reform of Islam and the adoption of the secular, rationalist values espoused by Europeans. With these values in mind, they identified a variety of pressing issues in their society. Muhammad Al-Muwaylihi criticized the chaos and injustice of the legal system and the decadence of the religious establishment in Egypt. Qasim Amin championed the education of women, while Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid wrote extensively about the need to foster a liberal political culture amongst the emergent Egyptian middle classes. However, a deep sense of suspicion of and disdain for the masses lay at the root of their reformist project.

IMPERIALIST STEREOTYPES

British administrative manuals, ethnographies, and travel guides of the nineteenth century circulated racist views of “the Egyptian character,” reflecting a general cultural arrogance on the part of the British. An English schoolmistress who taught in Cairo for many years recollects Egyptians’ being regarded by her compatriots as “a cut above camels” (Rodenbeck, pp. 178–79). Colonial manuals described the Egyptian as intellectually limited, congenially lazy, and spitefully recalcitrant British writer Edward Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians devoted entire chapters to the “indolence,” “obstinancy,” “libidinous” sensuality, and invariable drug addiction of Egypt’s lower classes (Mitchell, pp. 105–106). Later, this type of racism would find its way into pseudo-scientific discourse about the relationship between the “character” and historical destiny of nations.

For the most part, turn-of-the-century liberal Egyptian intellectuals harbored an ambivalent attitude towards the peasants, the poor, the working classes, and their popular culture. While believing that Egypt as a whole needed to modernize in order to be admitted to the ranks of sovereign and independent nations, they blamed the masses for Egypt’s backwardness and dependence. The “common” Egyptian man was in fact often the target of their polemic. They described him in all sorts of negative ways—cunning, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, and addicted to vice—and blamed him for the ills of the Egyptian nation, its corruption, and, ultimately, its political weakness on the international stage. This disdain for the Egyptian masses and for Egyptian popular culture (as yet untouched by the cultural values of the invading West) manifested itself especially in the reformist attack on popular religious practice. In the words of one Muslim reformer writing in Egypt at this time: “Faith has deteriorated into a negation of reason. [Muslims] call indolence trust in God and the search for truth heresy. For them, this is religion, and anyone who holds different views is exposed to abuse…. Unquestioning acceptance of everything old is the heart of wisdom” (Ahmad, p. 45). The corrupted and archaic doctrine of the existing religious establishment, the hypocrisy and opportunism of popular preachers and mystics, and the superstition and gullibility of the pious masses were repeatedly criticized by secular liberals and Muslim reformers alike. In this context, a stock character begins to appear in the literature of the Nahdah—that of the dishonest and ignorant shaykh or preacher who at best is an incompetent fool and at worst, a hypocritical and treacherous knave. On the other hand, the simple folk who willingly participated in this type of religious hocus-pocus were deemed equally if not more to blame for the decadence of Egyptian society. In short, during this period, popular Islam was viewed by the educated upper and middle classes as a potentially dangerous social pathology that had to be reformed before Egypt could become a truly modern and independent nation.

Another important target for reform was the status of women in Egyptian society. This was a more controversial issue, though—one on which Muslim and secular reformers strongly differed. Between 1889 and 1891, Qasim Amin published two seminal books, Kitab tahrir al-mar’a (The Liberation of Women) and al-Mar’ah al-jadidah (The New Woman), in which he forcefully argued against the practice of female seclusion and for the reform of polygamy and divorce laws. In Egypt, both personal status laws and the customary interpretation of these laws were heavily weighted towards male authority and interests. Men had the exclusive right to divorce and to engage in a limited form of polygamy. Though the spirit of the law required extenuating circumstances for both divorce and multiple marriages, in practice abuses were widespread and legally sanctioned. Qasim Amin’s book argued too for increased educational opportunities for women, an issue hotly debated by contemporary Egyptian intellectuals around the turn of the century. For secular reformers, the attempt to educate women and integrate them more fully into public life was part and parcel of an urgent social and intellectual revolution. The more conservative Muslim and nationalist intellectuals, on the other hand, viewed this project as a dangerous capitulation to Western imperialism that would undermine the very basis of Egyptian culture and society. Acceptance of a woman’s right to an education, however, was one of the earliest social reforms to gain wide currency. By the end of the 1920s, even very conservative intellectuals believed women should be educated, if only because they were the mothers of the next generation and illiterate mothers meant uneducated and ignorant children.

Nonetheless, the cause of women’s rights in Egyptian society continued to gain momentum throughout the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s. Women themselves began to agitate on behalf of feminist issues. Many participated in the massive demonstrations for independence that took place in 1919. Some, like the celebrated Mayy Ziyadah and Fatma al-Yusuf, hosted important literary salons and founded political journals. In 1923, an upper-class political activist, Huda Sha‘rawi, founded the Egyptian Feminist Union, the first feminist union in Egypt. Its activities focused on reform of the legal and customary conditions of marriage and divorce and on women’s education. In response to feminist demands, the Egyptian parliament enacted legislation between 1921 and 1931 that restricted polygamy, divorce, and the widespread practice of child-marriage. These restrictions did not reach the bulk of the Egyptian population, however. Not until a quarter of a century after Taymur’s stories take place would women gain the right to vote. It was only in the 1950s that all women won this right and that universal free education further integrated middle- and lower-class women into public intellectual and political life in Egypt.

The Mahdist Revolt in the Sudan (1881–98)

In 1820, well before the arrival of the British, Egypt’s first independent ruler, Muhammad Ali (1769–1849), initiated the conquest of the Sudan and installed a centralized civil and military bureaucracy in Khartoum. Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, so the bureaucracy operated under the authority of Ottoman governors, who taxed the local population heavily and instituted a system of forced labor. Moreover, the government attempted to interfere with Sudanese religious beliefs and practices. Sufism or Islamic mysticism held sway in the region, an unacceptable state of affairs to Ottoman rule. Its agents set out to replace the powerful Sufi institutions of the region with a more orthodox version of Islam, which served only to further alienate the local population from the regime. Later on, the disaffection intensified because of Egyptian attempts to abolish the slave trade—from which certain Sudanese tribes had profited greatly over the nineteenth century. These heavy-handed and unwelcome policies, in addition to the general local unhappiness with Egyptian rule, contributed to the rise of the Mahdist revolt that would bring an end to Egyptian rule of the Sudan.

In 1881 a popular Sudanese religious leader named Muhammad Ahmad declared himself to be the Mahdi—a divinely guided leader and successor of the Prophet Muhammad. Not only did Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi found an Islamic revivalist movement; he also spearheaded a successful military revolt against Turco-Egyptian rule. The religious movement he founded was based on the eschatology or teaching in popular Islamic mysticism about the coming of the divinely guided Savior. A conviction about the coming of the Mahdi was widespread in nineteenthcentury Sudan, where Islam was characterized by the dominance of a series of powerful, tightly knit Sufi orders (such as that to which Muhammad Ahmad belonged—the Sammaniyah Order). For the most part, these orders practiced a popular, syncretic form of Islam, combining local beliefs and superstitions with elements of more orthodox Islamic doctrine. The arrival of the Mahdi was expected to “fill the world with justice, even as it has been filled with injustice” (Voll, p. 64). Stepping into this role, Muhammad Ahmad set out to cleanse the Muslim community of what he and his followers saw as the corruption and immorality of the authorities of the day, be they Turks, Egyptians, or Europeans. For inspiration, the Mahdists turned to the original example of the Prophet and his followers: “This [initial] period was regarded as the only one in Islamic history in which the umma [Islamic Community] was undivided and followed a path leading to the establishment of a just community of believers” (Warburg, p. 9). Mahdism had tremendous popular appeal among the Sudanese Sufi Orders precisely because it was viewed as a direct political and theological challenge to the rigid orthodoxy imported into the Sudan by the Egyptian government. It was even viewed sympathetically by the masses back in Egypt; many identified with its syncretic version of Islam and with its powerful messianic message of popular revival and resistance to a corrupt social and political establishment.

A British officer, Charles Gordon Pasha, was sent to quell the rebellion, but his men were defeated and he was killed in battle in 1885. Khartoum and most of northern Sudan were taken by the Mahdi’s armies. Soon after this major victory, Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi died. His successor, the Khalifah Abd-Allah, consolidated the movement against internal division and outside threats. Finally, in 1898, an Anglo-Egyptian army, led by Lord Kitchener, won a decisive battle outside Omdurman and defeated the Mahdist forces. In 1899 an agreement between Britain and Egypt redefined the structure of the post-Mahdist Sudanese government. Although, in theory, Egypt was supposed to share in the rule of the Sudan, in practice the condominium gave full control over the country to Britain, an arrangement that lasted until Sudanese independence in 1953. Meanwhile, the 1920s witnessed the rise of Sudanese nationalism and increasing anticolonial activity against the British. Some of the new nationalist organizations advocated independence for Sudan, while others, like the popular White Flag League, called for union with Egypt. Events came to a head in 1924, when a military uprising against the British was quashed, its leaders jailed, the nationalist parties outlawed, and most Egyptian officials expelled from the country.

The Wafd Party and the 1919 revolution

Meanwhile, in Egypt, anticolonial nationalism also came to a head in the 1920s. At the beginning of the First World War, the British declared Egypt a protectorate and imposed martial law on the country, sending in thousands of new British troops. Food shortages caused prices to skyrocket, and thousands of Egyptian peasants found themselves being conscripted into massive rural and military labor gangs by the British authorities. Over a quarter of these peasants-turned-laborers died from disease and malnutrition. Egyptians from all walks of life grew increasingly resentful of the occupation, and the movement for independence gained momentum. In 1918 a group of Egyptian politicians headed by Saad Zaghloul formed a national delegation (Wafd) to demand independence for Egypt at the Versailles Peace Conference. The British authorities in Cairo refused to let the delegation travel to the conference, however, and after almost a year of growing popular anger, on March 8, 1919, they arrested Zaghloul and exiled him and two colleagues to Malta. The massive nationwide demonstrations of 1919 immediately broke out, and popular agitation continued until Zaghloul was allowed to return. Three years later, on February 22, 1922, the British government finally granted Egypt limited independence, and a constitution was drawn up. In 1924, the Wafd—by now the most popular political party in the country—came to power in national elections. It would continue to dominate Egyptian political life through the time of the short stories until 1936, when a second treaty with the British, negotiated by the Wafd, met with popular condemnation.

The Short Stories in Focus

Plot summaries. “Amm Mutwalli.”

The title of this story is also the name of its main character, a poor Sudanese vendor of nuts and melon seeds who, we learn, moved to Cairo 15 years ago after having fought as a Divisional Commander in the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan. Amm Mutwalli lives in a small, dark room that contains nothing but his bedding and a box in which he keeps his old sword. During the day, he follows his usual route, making two regular stops—the first at a small mosque where he eats his lunch, prays, and takes a nap, and the second outside the mansion of Nur al-Din Bey, a wealthy Cairo notable. At night, he returns home exhausted, his sole entertainment being to take out and caress his old sword, losing himself in memories of the glorious old battles and the heroic Mahdi—“the Bearer of the Standard of Islam” (Taymur, “Amm Mutwalli,” p. 89). Amm Mutwalli dreams of the Mahdi’s return and the end of sin and worldly corruption. At dawn, before he shoulders his basket of wares and begins his long day, the vendor reads a few pages of pious or mystical religious tracts. He is furthermore in the habit of giving daily religious discourses and reminiscences about the great Mahdi to an assembled audience of gatekeepers and servants in the fancy neighborhood where Nur al-Din Bey lives: “They would talk about Islam during its days of glory, and how it had fallen a prey to misfortunes” (“Amm Mutwalli,” p. 90). The crowd listens to him in ecstasy, and Amm Mutwalli generally finishes by talking of the Mahdi’s promised return.

One day, Nur al-Din Bey’s irreverent young son—who buys a penny’s worth of nuts from Amm Mutwalli from time to time, but only after poking a little fun at him and his heroic claims—informs him that the father wishes to speak to him. Nur al-Din Bey tells Amm Mutwalli that his elderly mother has heard of his stories and would like to meet him in person. Amm Mutwalli is astonished. He feels honored. When taken into the august lady’s magnificent presence, he proceeds to narrate, with his usual eloquence, his stories and anecdotes of the past, “completely captivating the old lady’s heart” (“Amm Mutwalli,” p. 93). In parting, she gives him an unexpectedly handsome gift and makes many gestures of respect and gratitude, which confounds and embarrasses him. Moreover, as he leaves the mansion, a group of female servants crowd round him and try to touch his garment in order to acquire his blessing. Then they buy his entire stock. Amm Mutwalli hurries off to his little mosque and performs 40 prostrations in thanks for God’s bounty.

A major change of fortunes now commences in Amm Mutwalli’s life. He becomes a regular visitor at Nur al-Din Bey’s house and is able to give up his trade as a hawker while significantly improving his lifestyle. He can now afford to eat meat twice a week and wear the clothes of a well-off shaykh. He moves into larger and more comfortable lodgings and devotes his time to helping the poor, visiting mosques, and listening to religious discourses that he can then rework for his new patroness’s edification. Consequently his reputation as a great shaykh and a blessed man grows in the neighborhood until one day, a small group of his servant-followers engages in a fatal discussion while waiting for his arrival outside Nur al-Din Bey’s house. In furtive whispers, they decide that he is, first, one of God’s saints and, finally, that he is none other than the Mahdi himself, returned in secret to redeem Islam and vanquish its foes. As proof, one of them swears that Amm Mutwalli’s sword—“the sword of prophethood”—has cured his son of a fatal disease (“Amm Mutwalli,” p. 96). When the men confront Amm Mutwalli with his “true” identity, he is shocked and confused to the point of silence, unable to resist the onslaught of their certainty. The next day, a sick man arrives at his door and begs to touch “the sword of prophet-hood.” The man spends the night clutching the sword and wakes up cured. People now begin to come from far and wide to be cured by Amm Mutwalli—the Awaited Mahdi—or to be blessed by his touch. Amm Mutwalli begins to lock himself up in his room more and more frequently, taking out his sword and losing himself in feverish, distracted reveries. When one day his patroness, Nur al-Din’s mother herself, arrives at his door with her rich train of attendants and meekly begs for a blessing from the successor of the Prophet, Amm Mutwalli finally cracks. For several weeks he shuts himself up in his room and begins to have fits where he imagines he is fighting an invisible enemy with his sword. A man possessed, Amm Mutwalli jumps about and shouts until he drops unconscious to the floor. Then one day he rushes outside, “his eyes burning like hot embers,” and brandishes his sword at the customers of a nearby cafe, calling them “corrupt heathens”; as the police drag him off, he brokenly murmurs, “thanks be to God… I have performed my mission and brought my holy war to its conclusion” (“Amm Mutwalli,” p. 99).

“Hagg Shalabi.”

Once again, this story takes its title from the main character’s name. Hagg Shalabi is a powerful and menacing figure in the popular quarter of Cairo where he lives. When the story opens, he has just been released from jail and, dressed in his finest clothes, is preparing to pay a visit to his old friend, the matchmaker Umm al-Khayr (her name literally means “Mother of Goodness”), who regularly provides him with young brides. Umm al-Khayr receives Hagg Shalabi warmly, and from their conversation we learn that this man makes a living by exploiting the wives that the matchmaker finds for him. He marries a girl and waits for her to give birth. Once she has done so, and hence has ample quantities of breast-milk, he forces her to abandon her child and to work instead as a wet nurse for a wealthy family. When he tells Umm al-Khayr that he is looking for a new bride, she asks him about his other two wives. He replies that one is off at work and the other “has gone away—she was barren and gave me no children”—a roundabout way of saying that he has divorced her (Mahmud Taymur, “Hagg Shalabi,” p. 106). Umm al-Khayr then shows him a young girl called Farh who is not yet 17. They strike a bargain and cheerfully proceed to negotiate the terms of their agreement.

After the marriage, Farh gives birth to a baby girl, and Hagg Shalabi promptly gets her a job as a wet nurse in the family of a rich pasha, or Ottoman-era nobleman. Her own baby remains with Hagg Shalabi. Unhappy about abandoning her infant daughter, Farh seeks and is given permission to visit her husband and child once a month. On her first visit, she finds the child emaciated and pale. When her husband returns and finds her there playing with the baby, he scolds her and sends her off to the pasha’s house. On her next two visits home, Farh finds her daughter in worse and worse condition and finally on the verge of death. When she reproaches her husband and attempts to stay with her child, he strikes her, heaps threats and curses upon her, and throws her bodily out of the house. Farh returns to the house secretly the next day, but her child is no longer there. She searches frantically for Hagg Shalabi and finds him carousing with a group of his shiftless friends. When she confronts him, he defiantly tells her that the child is indeed dead and strikes her again, threatening to kill her if she does not return to her job. A week later, a haggard, broken Farh reappears and tells Hagg Shalabi that she has been fired because her milk has dried up. He promptly divorces her and throws her out for good. The story ends with Hagg Shalabi cheerfully preparing to make his next visit to Umm al-Khayr.

Millenarianism, madness, and the oppression of women

As previously noted, early-twentieth-century Egyptian reformers targeted popular culture as the source of the country’s backwardness and decay. The superstitious religious beliefs and practices of the uneducated masses as well as the prevailing popular attitudes towards women were two ways in which this backwardness seemed to manifest itself.

In “Amm Mutwalli,” the very recent history of Mahdism in the Sudan and its either real or perceived popularity among the Egyptian lower classes is intertwined with the liberal elite’s suspicion of Islamic mysticism and millenarianism. The liberals regarded these two phenomena as pathological social developments and as potentially destabilizing political movements. The story itself is clearly a kind of parody of Sudanese Mahdism, which was unfavorably viewed by Taymur’s nationalist contemporaries as a tool of British imperialism in the region. In their view, the Mahdists’ challenge to Egyptian rule in the Sudan directly threatened Egypt’s strategic geopolitical interests vis-à-vis Britain. “Amm Mutwalli” is a caricature of the historical Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi and his rise to fame and power. The tragicomic ending, in which a thoroughly mad Amm Mutwalli attempts to wage holy war on a bunch of peaceable cafe customers, declaring that he has “brought my holy war to its conclusion” as he is led off by the police, represents a damning indictment of Mahdism and its champions.

Taymur uses Amm Mutwalli’s strange story to illustrate and criticize the ignorance and superstition of the Egyptian masses, who are conceived of as a menace to progressive society. Their representatives in the story are the servants and hangers-on who first declare the hapless hawker to be the new manifestation of the Mahdi. This rabblelike crowd, which freely indulges in saint-worship, miracle cures, exorcism, and other popular religious rituals, is portrayed as a potentially destabilizing political force. It is the illiterate and credulous crowd that pushes Amm Mutwalli into megalomania and madness—much, the story implies, like the dangerous forces of demagoguery and insurrection attached to the followers of the real Mahdi. Amm Mutwalli himself has a history as a Mahdist officer. His piety and devotionalism have been rendered harmless enough by defeat, poverty, and middle age, but he is easily seduced by the popular delusion that grows up around him. Gradually he too becomes convinced that he is the awaited Mahdi, after his fortunes take a turn for the better and he is able to acquire the means and habit of an affluent and powerful religious authority. A supposedly spiritual and selfless sense of mission, the story shows us, has been infected by the acquisition of wealth and power, and the infection grows until the ailing party succumbs to self-delusion. Mutwalli’s newfound power is his downfall. The story’s message is that religion and politics—especially when leavened with a good dose of “ignorance”—are an explosive mix.

Similarly the liberal literati saw gender roles in popular culture as a symptom of national backwardness and decay. Hagg Shalabi, the brutal lower-class thug—a thoroughly disagreeable, even sinister, character—makes no bones about living off his wives’ sweat while maintaining the violent prerogatives of an oppressive patriarchal society. He is able to marry and divorce at will and with total disregard for the rights and responsibilities attached to the ideal Islamic laws governing polygamy and divorce. A man without honor or compassion, Hagg Shalabi regards women as chattel to be bought and sold. Even his own child is nothing but an unfortunate encumbrance on his wife’s ability to work for his own selfish profit. Women are portrayed as complicit in this corrupt social order. The matchmaker, Umm al-Khayr, is an unsavory merchant of flesh who, like Hagg Shalabi himself, makes a living by trading in women. Even Hagg Shalabi’s unfortunate young wife is shown as partly complicit in her own oppression. Ignorant and weak, she complacently allows her husband to separate her from her child and proves unable to stand up to his beating and bullying. Even after the child has died and Farh has lost her job as a wet nurse, she humbly returns to Hagg Shalabi’s doorstep, only to be thrown out for the last time.

Literary contexts

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, Egyptian writers and critics were struggling to define Egypt’s national identity. The idea of “national character”—in both a sociological sense and a literary one—was one of the focal points of this project. As far back as 1906, the critic Ahmad Dayf was already declaring that

We wish to have an Egyptian literature that will reflect our social state, our intellectual movements, and the region in which we live; reflect the cultivator in his field, the merchant in his stall, the ruler in his palace, the teacher among his students and his books, the Shaykh among his people, the worshipper in his mosque or his monk’s cell, and the youth in his amorous play. In sum, we want to have a personality in our literature.
(Gershoni & Jankowski, p. 192)

The birth of the short story in Egypt was closely linked to this urgent need to understand and realistically represent authentic Egyptian characters and settings.

PLAYING WITH NAMES

In “Hagg Shalabi,” Taymur plays on the names of his characters to make some Ironic jabs at the social hypocrisy of his age. The honorific title “Hagg,” which refers to a pious person who has performed his religious duty to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, is used here for a ruthless cad. Similarly the complicit matchmaker Umm al-Khayr has a name that means “the mother of goodness,” but she is clearly the opposite, though she does provide Hagg Shalabi with a steady stream of what he sees as “good things” in the form of unsuspecting wives.

The Revolution of 1919 represented an important moment in this project. It unleashed “a movement to express the new awareness of a national identity, to shape the dreams and aspirations of the nation, and to purge Egypt of the distortions which had resulted from the occupation” (Hafez, p. 158). “Egypt for the Egyptians” became the rallying cry of this movement, and writers and intellectuals set out to define and celebrate the Egyptian national genius in books and articles as well as through the arts. Artists like the composer Sayyid Darwish, the painter Ahmad Sabri, and the sculptor Mahmud Mukhtar created works inspired by Egyptian folklore, landscapes, and character types. This urgent focus on national identity manifested itself in letters as well. Writers called for a new Egyptian literature that would break with the conventions of the classical Arabic canon as well as blind imitation of fashionable European literature, since both of these were judged to be alien to the Egyptian spirit and character. This impetus, called the “National Literature” movement, gave birth, in turn, to the “New School” group of authors (1925–27), who began to write realistic short stories about everyday Egyptians. According to Taymur, who was loosely affiliated with the New School group,

The outline and specificity of the Egyptian character were obscure, lost amongst foreign currents, and so all intellectual effort turned towards the reform and foregrounding of this Egyptian character and to the exploration of its strengths and capabilities in life…. The new writers responded to the calls for modernization that demanded the creation of a properly Egyptian literature that would express Egyptian feelings and experiences in a narrative form modeled on western literature…. And when Egypt’s national revolution of 1919 ignited and the Egyptian character burst forth… the modem artistic story immediately responded, representing, describing and analyzing this authentic popular character.
(Taymur in Badr, p. 206–207; trans. S. Selim)

Rather than the heroic exploits of legendary Arab heroes or the aristocratic intrigues of foreign European characters, the new national literature sought to depict “real people in plausible situations” (Hafez, p. 182). The writer came to be seen as a kind of surgeon and the process of observation and writing as a surgical dissection of “the obscure human heart”—a metaphor that Isa Ubayd, another of the New School writers, used in 1921 in the preface to his first collection of short stories:

The purpose of fiction must be the investigation of life and its sincere portrayal as it appears to us…. The writer [must study]… the hidden recesses of the obscure human heart, as well as the moral and social development [of people] and the role of civilization, environment and heredity [in that development]…. For the function of the writer is to dissect the human soul and to record his discoveries [in writing].
(Ubayd, p. 9; trans. S. Selim)

This emphasis on environment and heredity in the formation of character was significant because it meant that personality was determined by factors beyond an individual’s control, such as class and family history. Taymur believed that an individual’s psychological makeup was largely predetermined in this way. His ideas about character were influenced by his readings in the new science of psychoanalysis and by the fiction of French naturalist writers such as Emile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. This is one of the reasons why Taymur was fascinated by the Egyptian lower classes. To him, these classes provided striking examples of a specifically Egyptian social pathology.

Reviews

In the 1930s and ’40s, Taymur was universally acclaimed by critics as the voice of a new literary generation. Reviewers praised him as “one of the few contemporary writers who have injected new blood into Arabic literature by writing fascinating Egyptian short stories that analyze the various aspects of the Egyptian psychology and describe Egyptian customs and traditions in a realistic and creative manner” (Shadah, p. 500; trans. S. Selim). A contemporary German Orientalist, or scholar of Arabic language and culture, claimed that would-be European tourists wishing to discover the real Egypt could just as well stay at home and read Taymur’s stories instead—so accurate and subtle were their portrayal of “the inner life of the Egyptian people” (Shadah, p. 501; trans. S. Selim). Another Egyptian critic praised Taymur’s “living portraits” of everyday people and his illumination of a national mentality still rooted in the Middle Ages (“Abu Ali amil artist,” p. 320; trans. S. Selim). A decade later, Taha Husayn, the twentieth-century doyen of Arabic letters, described Taymur’s 1942 collection of stories, Qala al-rawi (The Storyteller Said)—which included newly edited versions of both “Amm Mutwalli” and “Hagg Shalabi”—as “a wonderful and moving description of some aspect or condition of life, or of some particular Egyptian landscape, character or emotion” (Husayn in Taymur, Qala al-rawi, p. m; trans. S. Selim). However, Husayn suggested that there was a veiled element of “moralizing” or “preaching” in Taymur’s style, which certainly served a healthy didactic purpose, but which also constituted a certain kind of “deception” on the part of the writer. This insight was picked up again in the 1960s and ’70s. These later critics argued that rather than creating truly representative and realistic Egyptian characters, Taymur’s obsession with the violence and pathological psychology of extremely eccentric individuals and singular events actually distorted the realities of Egyptian society in all its vitality and complexity and produced unconvincing, one-dimensional characters. The late critic Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr suggested that this flaw in Taymur’s writing was rooted in the social prejudices belonging to his elite background—prejudices that produced a morbid fascination with the poor and their culture (Badr, p. 252). In spite of this increasingly critical reception, Taymur is still considered a great figure of modern Arabic literature whose works figured prominently in the invention and refinement of the modern Arabic short story.

—Samah Selim