Modern Arabic Religious Novels

I particularly appreciated the selection from Mahfouz’s novel Children of the Alley. I found the concluding pages of the novel thought provoking yet troubling. On the one hand, much of the depiction of Rifaa — his death, the the disappearance of his body, the variant accounts of his four friends — seems to correlate with the Islamic understanding of the origins of Christianity. Read in this sense, the novel’s concluding scenes might appear something of a something of an allegorical statement or critique of the Christian narrative, with the novel’s final words, “Why is forgetfulness the plague of our alley?” an indictment of the Christian forgetting of the prophetic message of Christ.

On the other hand, the depiction of the community established by Ali seems to nuance this straightforward reading somewhat. Ali’s community is recognized as a new community within the alley, “just like Gabal’s,” and enjoys equal position and prestige with the other communities in the alley. Read in this light, Ali’s interpretation of Rifaa’s life — which coincidentally results in his own prestige and power — fits into an established pattern of the distortion of a message, so that it leads people back to their worldly happiness. The interpretation of the novel as an allegory of Christianity, then, becomes less of a unique indictment and more of a concern with the reception of prophetic messages

I am left with the question of the extent to which Mahfouz engages and critiques Christianity uniquely, as opposed to perhaps a more human tendency toward “forgetfulness” (the allegorizing of Christianity — four different messages, disappearance of a body, deriving from a previous religious community, etc — seems obvious). Does the vision of competing religious communities, each with their share in the “gangsterism” of the alley, mean to indict one particular religious identity, or the human tendency to distort religion in toto? If the latter, does the criticism embrace Islam as well as Christianity and Judaism?