Naguib Mahfouz wrote about Cairo in the twentieth century, and of the lives of the lower classes that inhabited the ancient alleys and neighborhoods.  He wrote about extended families and arranged marriages and illicit lovers, he wrote about personal and public rebellions against religious and economic strictures, and he wrote about connections between people, and the ease with which such connections can be severed by deceit or death or simply, the passage of time. In 1988 he won the Nobel Prize for literature.  My favorite books by Mahfouz are Midaq Alley and Cairo Trilogy but now there is another one that I love, and it is very different from the others that I have read.

In Respected Sir (published in 1975) Mahfouz writes about a single man, alone and without family, who does not rebel, does not connect, does not want anything out of life other than to rise within the civil service.  Othman Bayyumi has a good brain, recognized early on by his teachers who set him on a path away from laborer and into civil service.  But his agile brain is used only to pursue his ambition of rising within the bureaucracy.  He believes it is his duty, under God and country, to work hard and rise, to not question the system or even consider the political or economic situations, but just to work and perform.  He never uses his knowledge to understand himself; anytime he comes close to a self-revelation or a gaze inward, he grabs onto slogans of duty and God and country. I will quote just a few:

“Man was sanctified by suffering…. Work and worship were inseparable…”

Or:

“There was no meaning to our life on earth save by sweat and blood”

Or (and this is a doozy):

“[M]an had only one path, along which he had to trek without flinching and all alone, taking no part in politics and demonstrations, that only a solitary man would be aware of God and what He wished him to do in this life, and that man’s glory was fulfilled in his muddled but conscious effort to distinguish good and evil and in resisting death until the last moment.”

Bayyumi never does anything without a motive of self-advancement; his friends and his lovers are analyzed for the service they can provide.  Although sometimes overcome by lust or love or admiration, he always lapses back into self-preservation and promotion justified as religious devotion:

“[The others] talked endlessly about children, diseases, food, the system of government, class conflict, political parties; they repeated proverbs [NB: this is the pot calling the kettle black!] and clever sayings and they cracked jokes.  They did not live a true life: they ran away from their sacred duty.  They recoiled from taking part in the fearful race against time and glory and death, and in the fulfillment of God’s word, which was withheld from the unworthy.”Despite the constant effort and struggle, Bayyumi is terrified of happiness and never finds it for long; every promotion is savored briefly and then set aside for the next struggle upwards.  Every love found is disdained, put off, and then regretted:

“The love he had known would not be easily erased.  It would teach him to hate himself and his ambition but he was determined to cling to it with all the power of loathing and despair.  Mad he was, but his was a hallowed madness that slammed the door on happiness with disdain and pride and drove him irresistibly along the path of glory, rough and strewn with thorns.  Happiness might lure him into thoughts of suicide, but misery would spur him to purse life and worship it.”

Poor Bayyumi is caught between wanting to live and hoping to get it all over with, so that he can die.  There is never a mention of an afterlife; I got the sense that Bayyumi craved nothing so much after life than the unending sleep of death.  He will finally get some rest after years of just working, working, working, his way up the ladder.  He finds solace finally in knowing that he has a nice tomb to rest in, and it is the only solace he has at all.

Respected Sir is more than just a cautionary tale against narrow-minded and blinkered and naked ambition (although it is that), and it is more than just a satire of slogans and proverbs (it is most certainly that, and so cleverly done, right up there with Dickens’ best jabs at hypocrisy).  Very slyly and with his unique mix of humor (really funny, at times) humor and pathos (you want to slap Bayyumi on the head and tell him to get a clue but he is never going to listen), Mahfouz raises the question of what is the meaning of life.  It has to be more than Bayyumi’s meditation that life is nothing more than”[a] passing game that a man played with reluctance until he found himself face to face with his ultimate fate.  Then he would survey his life in its entirety, weight his deeds and assess their fruits, suffer however resentfully the breath of the unknown, brace himself for further struggle, and then accept defeat.“  Mahfouz leaves the meaning undefined but clear: it is the absolute opposite of the life lived by Bayyumi.