Before the Throne

by Naguib Mahfouz

  20 For the Pharaonist movement’s views of Egypt as an empire, see Charles Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image: From its Origins to Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1972), 236–37, and for the movement as a whole and Mahfouz’s connection to it, see R. Stock, A Mummy Awakens, 40–61.

  21 Naguib Mahfouz’s Nobel lecture, translated into English from the Arabic and delivered in both languages by Mohamed Salmawy in Stockholm, December 8, 1988, reprinted in The Georgia Review (Spring 1995): 220–21.

  22 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz and Yoram Meital, Maadi, Cairo, March 1998.

  23 For an analysis of Before the Throne, see Menahem Milson, Najib Mahfuz: The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo (New York and Jerusalem: St. Martin’s and Magnes Press, 1998, 144–53.)

  24 Children of the Alley, translated by Peter Theroux (New York: Doubleday, 1996) and the American University in Cairo Press in paperback (Cairo, 2001), first translated by Philip Stewart as Children of Gebelawi (London: Heinemann, 1981).

  25 Raymond Stock, “How Islamist Militants Put Egypt on Trial, The Financial Times, Weekend FT, March 4/5, 1995, III.

  26 R. Stock, A Mummy Awakens, 20–21, and Ayman al-Hakim, “Najib Mahfuz mata wa huwa yuhibbu Isra’il!,” al-Idha‘a wa-l-tilifizyun, December 30, 2006, 84–85.

  Rasheed El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1993), 210.

  27 For quotation, see Thomas L. Friedman, “I Am a Man,” The New York Times, May 15, 2011. For more on the connection between this novel and the recent dramatic changes in Egypt, see David Remnick, “Judgement Days,” in “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2011, and Raymond Stock, “Egypt’s Revolution Foreseen in Fiction: Before the Throne by Naguib Mahfouz,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 2011. These articles refer to the 2009 American University in Cairo Press hardcover edition of the novel.

  28 The Day the Leader was Killed by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Malak Hashem (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 1997).

  Interview with Naguib Mahfouz by Egyptian critic Ghali Shukri in the magazine al-Watan al-’arabi (London: January 1988), 46.

  29 Qur’an, Surat al-fajr (89: 27–30): “O soul at peace/Return unto thy Lord, well-pleased, well-pleasing/Enter thou among My servants/Enter thou My paradise” (Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964, 1982]).

  30 Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. II, The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 165–78.