ABSTRACT
The Trilogy, as we have seen, was Mahfouz’s last work written before the 1952 revolution.1 The six novels beginning with Khan al-Khalili and culminating with The Trilogy have been concerned to a large extent with a critical portrayal of Egyptian society and politics during the greater part of the first half of the twentieth century. Foremost in the author’s mind has been the representation, on both the individual and social levels, of the tensions created by the conflict between past and present-the old traditional values and the new, Western-inspired ones. On the individual plane, Kamal cAbd al-Jawwad’s spiritual schism was perhaps the highest expression of that conflict. On the other hand, it was Kamal’s two nephews, the fundamentalist cAbd al-Muncim and the socialist Ahmad, who gave that conflict its most forceful outward, social expression.
