CAIRO

Which?	Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz (1956)
What?	Medieval Egyptian labyrinth of mosques, souks and secrets

PEEK THROUGH the mashrabiya window: what lies beyond? This boxed-in balcony, concealed by a carapace of woodwork and lattice, allows furtive glimpses to the bustle below. Down there is another world – of barbers and bean-sellers, street hawkers, brass workers, stereo blare, human traffic; of lamb kofta on hot coals, bitter-black coffee and sacks of spice; of the sweet smoke of sheesha pipes, wafting like restless jinns (genies). Out there, life ebbs and flows, roars, revolts, moves on. A world whizzing by, oblivious to the eyes peering down from behind the screen …

Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk is a literary look through the mashrabiya – gazing out and gazing in. Part one of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, it demystifies the rituals, rhythms and ructions present in the Arabic world at the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed, it’s less a novel than a rich carpet, woven with both the story of Egypt at a time of upheaval and the intricacies of urban Muslim family life, with its faith, fears, love and oppression.

This was a tumultuous period in Egyptian history. Britain had grasped control of the country in the 1880s and, in 1914, it became an official British protectorate. However, when the First World War came to a close, but hoped-for Egyptian independence did not come with it, nationalist fervour began to bubble. All strands of society – educated elite and working-class masses, Cairenes and country dwellers, Muslims and Christians, men and women – were united in a bid to be rid of their colonisers. It was the original Arab Spring.

Mahfouz witnessed the chaos first-hand. As a child he lived in the al-Gamaliyya area of Islamic Cairo, the city’s oldest neighbourhood, and saw protests outside his window. Later, having learned his literary skills from the storytellers of the ashwa (coffee houses) – then great hubs of cultural debate and exchange – he wove these early experiences into his epic trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. Palace Walk, which runs from 1917 to the 1919 nationalist revolution, is a story of the sights, sounds and souls of Islamic Cairo at a defining moment.

The novel was published in 1956 under the Arabic title Bayn al-Qasrayn (Between the Two Palaces), the name of the old city’s chief thoroughfare but also a nod to Egypt’s cultural and political transition. The wider public turmoil is channelled through the personal saga of the al-Jawad family: despotic, philandering patriarch Abd al-Jawad, his subjugated wife Amina and their five children. Since marrying 25 years previously, Amina has been a virtual prisoner in her own home, viewing the world beyond only through the latticework windows. But one day, when her husband is away, she ventures out …

Amina, face veiled, draped in black cloth and escorted by her younger son, leaves the house on Bayn al-Qasrayn to walk along the backstreets of Islamic Cairo and visit the Al-Hussein Mosque, supposed burial spot of the head of Hussein, Mohammed’s grandson. Here, Amina, so long locked up, proceeds to ‘devour the place with greedy, curious eyes: the walls, ceiling, pillars, carpets, chandeliers, pulpit, and the mihrab niches … How often she had longed to visit this site.’ The mosque is off limits to non-Muslims. But a stroll amid the same timeless alleys is not.

While the Egyptian capital is now a mega-sprawl – the biggest in the Arabic world – in Islamic Cairo, the streets narrow and modernity melts away; in parts it feels little different from when the Fatimid Caliphate first founded their new city here in AD 969. From the 10th to the 12th centuries the Fatimids constructed a great walled citadel, sliced by the main thoroughfare of Bayn al-Qasrayn. This ‘Palace Walk’ runs north–south linking Bab al-Futah and Bab Zuweila; between these turreted medieval gates lies an open-air museum of dishevelled palaces, dusty caravanserais, adhan-calling minarets, forgotten tombs, underground cisterns and fit-to-burst bazaars. From it, alleyways run off into quiet squares and Aladdin’s caves of tat and treasures.

Working northwards from Bab Zuweila, you first pass the Al Ghouri wikala, a beautifully restored 16th-century hostel for African merchants where Sufis still gather to do their whirling dance and where artisans sell local crafts. Comprehensive shopping possibilities lie a little further to the east, where, adjacent to the Al-Hussein Mosque is the crazy maze of Khan el-Khalili. Turn two corners in this labyrinthine souk and you’re lost amid an avalanche of bric-a-brac, stuffed into an impossible tangle of alleys. Mahfouz used to write and people-watch in the El-Fishawy Café, Khan el-Khalili’s oldest coffee house, though these days its scuffed wooden chairs and cracked marble-topped tables are more frequented by tourists than Nobel laureates.

Beyond this is the gold-sellers’ souk, the awesome mausoleum and madrassa (Islamic school) of Qalawun, the 12th-century Al-Aqmar Mosque and the 10th-century Al-Hakim Mosque, the street’s oldest building. And somewhere in the middle is Beshtak Palace. This 14th-century home of a rich amir occupies the site of Mahfouz’s fictional al-Jawad family home. The interior is exquisite, with its marble floors and coloured glass. You won’t, of course, find Amina trapped inside, but you can imagine it: at first-floor level, dark-wood mashrabiya windows project over the street, exactly the sort of secretive boxes from which she might have viewed the comings and goings of a world both unchanged for centuries and in dangerous flux. A world she wasn’t permitted to enter.