After writing The Trilogy, which met with instant wide acclaim and served to focus renewed attention on his previous work, Mahfouz fell uncharacteristically silent for a number of years (1952–59), The Trilogy having been completed four years before its publication. Different theories exist as to why this happened. One, endorsed by the novelist himself, is that the social reforms introduced by Nasser’s revolution of 1952 made the type of social criticism he had hitherto voiced in his novels redundant. Another theory, held by Ghali Shukri,3 a well-known Mahfouz scholar, is that by writing The Trilogy Mahfouz had brought the realistic technique to a point of perfection which he could not possibly surpass. He thus needed a period of incubation in which to look for a new style. Whatever the reason, when Mahfouz serialized his next novel in the Cairo daily al-Ahram in 1959, his readers were in for a surprise. The People of Our Quarter, available in English as Children of Gebelawi, was a unique allegory of human history from Genesis to the present day. In it the masters of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are stripped of their holiness and represented, in thin disguise, as no more than social reformers who strove to the best of their ability to liberate their people from tyranny and exploitation. Another character in the allegory stands for science, which is shown to have supplanted religion and at whose hands the demise of God is eventually effected. Like most of Mahfouz’s novels, Children of Gebelawi ends on a note of gloom, though not without a flicker of hope. In this case the gloom is the corruption of ‘Arafa (science) and his alliance with the oppressive powers which finally destroy him, while the hope is in his last notebook, which contains the formulas for progress and happiness. The last scene is one of humanity frantically searching in a heap of rubbish for the promise of its salvation.