Cover

Title Page

Copyright

AN ANCHOR BOOK

PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

A division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103

ANCHOR BOOKS, DOUBLEDAY, and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This English translation was first published by The American University in Cairo Press in 1986. First published in Arabic as al-Shahhādh in 1965. Protected under the Berne Convention.

The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with The American University in Cairo Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maḥfūẓ, Najīb, 1911 –

[Shaḥḥādh. English]

The beggar / Naguib Mahfouz; translated by Kristin Walker Henry and Nariman Khales Naili al-Warraki.

— 1st Doubleday ed.

p.    cm.

Translation of: al-Shahhādh.

I. Title.

PJ7846.A46S413      1990      89-48672

892′.736—dc20

ISBN 0-385-26455-0

ISBN 0-385-26456-9 (pbk.)

eBook ISBN 9780525431688

Copyright © 1986 by The American University in Cairo Press

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION: AUGUST 1990

RRC

v4.1

a

FOREWORD

“The trouble with most modern Arabic literature,” I have frequently heard Western editors complain, “is that it’s always about politics.” The complaint itself is interesting, not only in what it presumes to be important but also in the historical attitude it implies toward even Western literature, in which from the ancient Greeks onward politics has been a central subject during every period—except perhaps the Dark Ages. What would the Dante of the Inferno or the Shakespeare of the Histories make of this complaint, for example, not to mention Milton, whose Council in Pandemonium remains our finest description of a Cabinet debate? What, for that matter, would a V. S. Naipaul or a Gabriel García Márquez have to say? One suspects that in this instance, as in so many others, special rules of some sort have been devised for application to Arabs only.

The Beggar is an ironic case in point, since few Western readers coming to it or to Mahfouz for the first time are likely to understand that it, too, like “most modern Arabic literature,” is a political book. First published in 1965, when Mahfouz was in his mid-fifties, it belongs to a remarkable series of novels (The Children of Gebelawi, The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail, The Path, Small Talk on the Nile, and Miramar) in which he tried to assess the impact of political change upon the country he had known before the Revolution of July 1952.