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.