SOURCE: “Time and the Man: Four Egyptian Sagas,” in Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning, Routledge, 1993, pp. 70–98.

In the following essay, El-Enany explores Mahfouz's preoccupation with time and how it affects the individuals and communities in Mahfouz's “Cairo Trilogy” and Qushtumur.

A preoccupation with time is at the centre of Mahfouz's work. A thought that has been uppermost in his writings has been how time affects the individual and the community and how human memory relates to external time. In this essay I have grouped together some novels in which time is a prime concern. The first three novels treated here are all romans fleuves in the sense that they are concerned with the examination of the changing conditions of life for individuals and society across a succession of generations in a given family. However, of the three it is only “The Cairo Trilogy” which is written on...