Literature concepts and applications

¶ … Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz is a portrayal of several individuals living within a particular section of Cairo. Almost all of the characters are Muslim. Several are middle class but others, the most striking of the narrative, are quite poor and simply struggle to survive. Through creating such variety of characters from different social stratum, whom all meet in the context of the alley of the title, the author is able to construct a novel that both tells a tale and yet is also revelatory on a social and on a political level. The book has often been called 'important' not just in terms of its humor and striking literary value, but because of the unsentimental social reality it depicts.

The principle protagonist of the tale is a young woman named Hamida. Hamida is an orphan raised by a foster mother. She becomes, by choice and economic need, a prostitute. Hamida in many ways can be said to represent the author's vision Egypt before World War I. Hamida is not a bad person. However, all of her life she has known privation, both privation in terms of a lack of fulfillment of basic physical needs, and also basic emotional needs. She has never known the love of her true mother and true love. Mistaking valuable 'things' for truly valuable affection Hamida becomes a prostitute because she wants makeup, fancy clothes, and money to buy things. She bankrupts herself both religiously and morally for the trappings of success deemed important by the secular world. Like Midaq Alley itself, Egypt once shone forth as a gem of time gone by, a "shining star" whose "ancient glory" is no more (1)

The minor characters of the novel provide an equally telling foundation in the social and metaphorical reality of the author's impoverished as well as middle-class Cairo. Simply because an individual is somewhat economically successful, the author makes clear by the example of Kirsha, does not mean that the character is happy. Kirsha owns a cafe but is also a drug addict. The money he earns goes to satiate his habit. Kirsha, like Hamida, is thus also a slave of his body and sells his body for the pleasures of the moment. Kirsha is also a homosexual and cannot satiate his desires in a socially conformist fashion, either. The middle-class people who occasionally pass through the cafe's doors seem no happier than the lowest of the low.

The entire society seems enslaved to the need to satisfy basic economic needs as well as the need to sustain basic emotional needs that have become quantified in the form of luxury goods. People's needs have become deformed and perverted into drug addiction or sexual slavery. While addressing the deformed needs of others, more deformed needs are generated within themselves. Kirsha generates deformed needs in the form of his seedy cafe, but also creates new needs beyond basic necessities in the form of his drug addiction. Hamida's needs for clothes and makeup are similarly fueled by her economic desires and temporary success as a prostitute.

One minor character named Zaita even makes a living by disfiguring people so that they can become successful beggars. Uncle Kamil, the sweets seller, is a great "trunk" of a man, with "breasts" like a woman. "Some of the others commented that Uncle Kamil's profits from his sale of sweets would probably suffice to bury an entire nation." (10) Even the basic physical desires of the body, of food, have become distorted and distorting, have become excessive in the context of the alley and the cafe that forms the center of the alley's perverted social life.

References to religion exist only in an ironic fashion in relationship to the character's lives. Says Radwan Hussainy: "We are all sons of Adam. If poverty descends on you then seek help from your brother. Man's provider is God and it is to God any excess is due." (8) The excesses of the cafe and of prostitution become a parody of what is holy in Hussainy's homily. His faith may supposedly provide the character with solace in his disappointments, but excess is shown to be perverted in the context of the novel.