Naghib Mafuz and the market of Khan el-Khalili |
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Collection title
Stella del Sud : il piacere di viaggiare
First broadcast date
01/25/2009
Abstract
“Stella del Sud” and Chiara Perino invite us to the discovery of the market of Khan el-Khalili, in Cairo. The great Egyptian writer Naghib Mafuz used to get inspiration in the well-known café of the market. We discover interiors and exteriors views of the music school, the mosque El Azar, the Alley of the Mortar. Some artisans are working. Interview with Ahmed Adel.
Broadcaster
RAI - RAI Uno
Audiovisual form
Documentary
Primary theme
Art, Culture and Knowledge
Credits / Cast
- Perino Chiara - Journalist
- Adel Ahmed - Participant
Map locations
- Egypt - Lower Egypt - Cairo
Original language
Italian
Context
Naguib Mahfouz and the Khan al-Khalili bazaar
Richard Jacquemond
Khan al-Khalili, a large souk in Cairo, was originally a caravanserai (khan), in other words a large building with shops, warehouses and living quarters. Khan al-Khalili takes its name from a Palestinian emir from Hebron (al-Khalil in Arabic), who built the caravanserai in the late fourteenth century. By association the name then came to mean first the surrounding area, then the whole district occupied by the souk, or bazaar, a market which became less traditional and more for tourists, located between Al-Azhar Avenue on the south side, Al Mu'izz on the east and on the west the Al-Hussein mosque. This is Cairo's old city, in Arabic al-Qahira, “the victorious”, founded by Egypt's Fatimid conquerors in 969. A few years later they built the mosque and university of Al-Azhar: described in this archive footage as “the oldest university in the world still operating.” For centuries it was a major intellectual centre for Sunni Islam.
A few streets away, in the neighbouring district of Gamaleyya, Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911. He is Egypt's – and the Arab world's – most famous writer (winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature, see background piece about the archive film “Naguib Mahfouz” – ERU00276 ). In the early twentieth century, the old city of Cairo was still inhabited by all sections of the population, from powerful merchants to small craftsmen and labourers, and including civil servants like Mahfouz' father. But already the middle classes were leaving Gamaleyya for the more spacious districts on the periphery (Abbasiya, Heliopolis, etc..), and in the 1920s the Mahfouz family followed this trend. But the writer remained attached to the district of his childhood, he continued to spend most of his time there and his great realist novels of the 1940s and 1950s are all located there – indeed he used real place names for many of their titles, including Khan al-Khalili (1946). Over time this created and built up a mythical Cairo as powerful as the mythical London of Charles Dickens or the Paris of Balzac, Hugo and Eugene Sue (see background piece about the archive footage “La ruelle de Naguib Mahfouz” - ERU00359).
The archive footage sustains this myth: it places Midaq alley, the title of Mahfouz' 1947 novel (Zuqaq al-midaqq, translated as Midaq Alley), close to what is described as “Naguib Mahfouz's café” while the images mix through from a photo of Mahfouz reading the newspaper in the Ali Baba café (in reality located two kilometres away, near the now famous Tahrir square), to shots of the Fishawi café (a veritable institution, used by the writer whenever he was passing through the district) and shots of the Café Naguib Mahfouz, a high-class coffee-shop which opened in 1990 to provide tourists in the Khan al-Khalili with the sort of quality treatment – and high prices – they might expect in Europe. The recent renovations carried out in Al-Mu'izz street are part of the same sanitizing process, to meet the requirements of the tour operators. But in fact Al-Mu'izz street is one of Cairo's oldest, the district's lung (and the district itself is none other than Bayn al-Qasrayn, used as the title for the first volume of Mahfouz' Trilogy (1956) and translated as Palace Walk), and if you just step into one of the alleys leading off it you will find yourself in the real Cairo, the Cairo of Mahfouz ...
Bibliography:
Naguib Mahfouz, Passage des miracles, trad. Antoine Cottin, Arles, Actes Sud (Babel), 2007 Naguib Mahfouz, La Trilogie : Impasse des deux palais, Le palais du désir, Le jardin du passé, trad. Philippe Vigreux, Paris, Le Livre de Poche (Pochothèque), 1993
Naguib Mahfouz, Le cortège des vivants, trad. Fayza et Gilles Ladkany, Arles, Actes Sud (Babel), 2010
In English:
The Palace Walk; Palace of Desire; Sugar Street (The Cairo Trilogy) pub: Black Swan in UK.
Midaq Alley published by Anchor Books (Random House) and Khan al-Khalili published by Anchor Books