Mahfouz's Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih and Persian Mystic Hafiz

                As has been labeled characteristic of Middle Eastern writing, Naguib Mahfouz, in his autobiographical writings entitled Echoes of an Autobiography, writes in short and pithy riddles, proverbs, and stories. Though Mahfouz writes here in prose, the style and overall effect of the writing reminded me of fourteenth-century Persian mystic and poet Hafiz.

                Especially in the second half of Mahfouz’s book, he gives the sayings and aphorisms of Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih (106). It is especially evident here the inextricable melding of spirituality, happiness, sorrow, daily life, and death. For Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih, for Hafiz, and perhaps for Mahfouz as well, god and love inhabit the spaces, the emptinesses between joy and sadness, purpose and idleness, life and death, this world and the next. Mahfouz cites Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih: “Some people are preoccupied with life and others are preoccupied with death. As for me, my position is firmly fixed in the middle way” (109). And here he speaks of the compensations of love: “The breeze of love blows for an hour and makes amends for the ill winds of the whole of a lifetime” (111). The mystic Hafiz attests to this powerfully merciful and redeeming love in his “The Sun Never Says”:

Even

After

All this time

The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe

Me.”

Look

What happens

With a love like that,

It lights the

Whole

Sky.

These writers’ theologies leave room for loving this world, “for it hardly has a hand in what occurs in it,” and its people and the beautiful things within it (108). Even when there is “forgetfulness” and even “nonexistence,” there may be enjoyment in music, in “listening to tawashih” (9). It is divine love and love that may fill humans as well that redeems and gives beauty to this life for Mahfouz’s Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih and Hafiz. 

Gender Roles in Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness

             In his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz revisits an underlying issue including in his novel My Michael: gender roles and their emotional and mental consequences. The issue is most explicitly addressed by Amos’ Aunt Sonia, his mother’s younger sister. She claims that girls of her time were “brainwashed” into accepting their roles as women (180). And these roles were strongest for mothers: Sonia was “always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home--but only until the children are born” (178). While all kinds of “notions of freedom” were being discussed while Sonia, Fania, and Haya were adolescents, Sonia argues that no freedom was brought “between him and her” (181). Instead, women continued to live in a silent torture, “walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on” (180).

                The theme of gender roles takes on great significance in A Tale of Love and Darkness as it is offered as a contributing factor to Amos’ mother’s suicide. Though readers may not hear directly from Fania, her own frustration with stereotypical gender roles is evidenced in a story recounted by Sonia. She remembers a painting hanging in her family’s dining room of a young girl whose underskirts were showing; it “seemed modest but it wasn’t really” (185). One day, Fania exploded about the painting, saying that the image naively “ignore[d] suffering” (186). The painting misrepresented and minimized the hard work and plight of the young peasant woman. Sonia draws a more direct correlation between Fania’s suicide and the overbearing oppression of gender roles when she tearfully laments: “Every time I remember that prettified picture, every time I see a picture with three underskirts and a feathery sky, I see scorpions ravaging my sister and I start to cry” (186). The image Sonia uses to embody women’s suffering in general is applied to her deceased sister.

While there have been “freedoms” brought to the issues “between him and her,” stereotypes about gender and gender roles continue to serve as stifling forces (181). Even in the relatively egalitarian and secularized setting of the United States in the twenty-first century, one can feel the societal and cultural pressures to behave in certain ways and make certain decisions based on gender. The lamentations of Aunt Sonia in A Tale of Love and Darkness both voice the loss felt by oppressed women and remind me of the opportune advances that have been made from which I benefit today.