The Pillars of Hercules

No one, not even she, suspected that someone would try to kill Mahfouz. In any case, Mahfouz made no concessions. He was fearless. He walked every day in the open air. Everyone who knew him, knew his movements. He was a familiar figure in Cairo, he walked all over the city, and he lived without a bodyguard. There was a feckless doorman at his apartment house but that man was half-asleep at the time of the attack.

The attacker approached Mahfouz the following day, just before five o’clock, as Mahfouz was getting into a car. Seeing him, Mahfouz in a reflex of courtesy turned to greet him. The man drew out a knife with a seven-inch blade and thrust down, stabbing Mahfouz at the base of his neck on the right side, cutting the carotid artery and slicing the radial nerve.

In his haste, the attacker forgot to cry out “Allah-u-akhbar!” and this omission (so he told police afterwards) explained why he had failed in his mission to murder Mahfouz. For this lapse, Allah delayed the death. He remembered to say it afterwards. “That is why I got away.” Other people said the man was simply unprofessional, since he had used a lowly kitchen knife for this important deed.

“I am being chased by a thief,” the man said to the taxi driver, who, unsuspecting, bore him away.

Meanwhile, Mahfouz had fallen and blood was pumping out of his severed artery and onto Sharia Nil. The man who had come to give Mahfouz a ride compressed the wound, stanching the flow, and the wounded man was hurried to the Military Hospital, just a few minutes away.

Bleeding profusely but still standing, Mahfouz said to the doctor, “There’s some blood here. I think you should look at it.”

He was immediately given two pints of blood, and during surgery another eight pints.

In another part of Cairo, the attacker was caught and held by some people whose suspicions were aroused by his strange behavior. The man did not deny what he had tried to do.

He said, “If I am released I will try again to kill him.”

In the newspaper Al-Ahram, Hasan Al-Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front, said, “The Egyptian fundamentalists’ use of force is a legal and honorable action, as were the attacks in Tel Aviv [the recent bus bomb] by Hamas.”

The most enlightened view—and it underlined the paradoxes of the issue—was that of Professor Edward Said, who wrote in Al-Ahram, “Mahfouz’s stabbing highlights the total bankruptcy of a movement that prefers killing to dialogue, intolerance to debate, and paranoia in favor of real politics.”

But the blame had to be shared: “It is hypocritical now to say to Mahfouz’s assailants only that they are crude fanatics who have no respect for intellectuals or artistic expression, without at the same time noting that some of Mahfouz’s work has already been officially banned in the Arab world. One cannot have it both ways. Either one is for real freedom of speech or against it. There is little basic distinction in the end between authorities who reserve the right for themselves to ban, imprison, or otherwise punish writers who speak their minds, and those fanatics who take to stabbing a famous author just because he seems to be an offense to their religion.”

Children of the Alley had the distinction of being banned in every Arab country, and many of those same countries included other Mahfouz novels in this ban. Small wonder, as Professor Said had suggested, that the fundamentalists seemed justified in their murderous intentions.

“He’s glad to see you,” Raymond said. “I told him you helped get him into the American Academy.”

“He got himself in,” I said.

The smiling man, supine in his bed, his neck bandaged, his hand in a splint, that greeted me in the intensive-care ward did not seem the dangerous man who had been vilified all over the Arab world. His expression was serene, his eyes clear. He was weary from what could have been a mortal wound, but he welcomed his visitors with animated conversation. He was modest, he teased, he even laughed and, soon after, this man who had been stabbed by a religious nut with a kitchen knife said, “It hurts when I laugh.”

Raymond introduced me. He said, “This is the man I told you about. He was one of the people who supported your application to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

Mahfouz began to laugh a little as Raymond repeated this in Arabic, as though a witticism had occurred to him that he was anxious to deliver.

“Raymond’s exaggerating,” I said.

Mahfouz said—his first words a joke—“I am the first person to be stabbed for being a member of the American Academy!”

He then uttered a dry chattering laugh that convulsed him and caused him pain. He was in a ward with about ten other men, all of them bandaged, with drip-feeds, and monitoring devices, and with plastic curtains around their beds. But Mahfouz’s intelligence, and his sweetness, shone in his face.

“How are you feeling?”

“I can’t write,” he said, and swung his splinted right hand on its sling. “That is bad.”