ABSTRACT
On 11 December 1911, in al-Jamaliyya quarter in the heart of the old city of Cairo Naguib Mahfouz was born. Though he only lived there up to the age of 12 (in 1924 his family moved to the then new Cairo suburb, al-cAbbasiyya), there is a sense in which we can say that he has never left Jamaliyya, or in other words that it has always lived in his mind and consequently in the creations of that mind. Most of the novels of his early realistic period are set in Jamaliyya, notably Midaq Alley and The Cairo Trilogy, while in later works such as Children of Gebelawi, Fountain and Tomb, The Epic of the Harafish1 and many others, though not mentioned by name and not recreated with the same meticulous detail as before, Jamaliyya continues to haunt his work in various mantles of disguise and lends to it many of its typical characters and physical assets. The hara (plebeian street/quarter) with its warring futuwwas (thugs) and their gangs, its mysteryenveloped takiyya (dervish-house), its qabw (dark vault or arch which once housed a city gate), its ancient sabil (drinking-fountain), its shops, its café and the adjacent qarafa (cemetery)—all these components which make up the distinctive features of much of Mahfouz’s work in the past twenty years originate in the old quarter of Jamaliyya whose images were indelibly impressed on the novelist’s consciousness during his childhood years.
