Before the Throne: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Novels) Review

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Before the Throne: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Novels) ReviewTwenty-five years after Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz wrote this novel, it has been released in English by the University of Cairo Press. An unusual book, it is more a catalog of all the rulers of Egypt since the First Kingdom than a novel in the traditional sense. Each ruler has been summoned to appear for his own trial at the celestial Hall of Justice, where Osiris reposes on his golden throne, with Isis and Horus flanking him. Each ruler must argue his own case, after which the gods and the other Immortals deliberate and assign him to the place where he will spend his afterlife--Paradise, the Inferno, or the Place of Insignificance, between the two, neither Heaven nor Hell.
The first trial is for King Menes, the mightiest monarch of the First Dynasty, who subdued Libya and joined Upper and Lower Egypt. As he presents his case, his judges counter his positive presentation with other facts he has ignored. One hundred thousand Libyans died, and two hundred thousand Egyptians from the North and South Kingdoms died. As the various kings present their cases, it is Isis who is usually the peacemaker, offering reasons to justify the kings' actions enough to enable them to sit with the Immortals.
In short sections averaging between two and five pages, the rulers are presented chronologically from the earliest of Egyptian history through the trial of Anwar Sadat. As the trials move forward, the reader perceives subtle changes--from the early kings, who are are fierce warriors and builders, to later kings who begin to show more sympathetic treatment of their subjects. At the halfway point in the novel, Thoth announces that the Egypt of the gods, pyramids, temples has come to an end, and Egypt is ruled henceforth by non-Egyptians. Persian kings seize the throne. The Romans arrive, bringing Christianity; sectarian battles erupt between the Egyptian church and that of Byzantium; and Islam sweeps the country.
Eventually, the chronology reaches the twentieth century, with Egypt's colonial rule by the British, and finally, the administrations of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat. Nasser comes under particularly hostile argument during his trial by the Immortals because he was "heedless of liberty and human rights." At Sadat's trial, one former ruler among the Immortals accuses him: "You wanted democratic rule in which the leaders have dictatorial authority."
More a catalog than a novel, Before the Throne provides fascinating research, but there are no dates included, and most of the rulers will be unfamiliar to western readers. Mahfouz's very short summaries of these rulers make the rulers difficult to distinguish from each other, and the threads uniting the earliest Kingdoms of Egyptian history--the time of the pyramids--with modern times are not strong enough to sustain a sense of thematic development. Ultimately, Mahfouz tells his audience the lessons he wants them to glean from the novel. Akhenaten, for example, advises the Egyptians "to hold to the worship of the One God." Menes admonishes them to "Be zealous for the unity of the land and the people." Khufu declares that "Egypt must believe in labor." In conclusion, Anwat Sadat adds that the goal should be "civilization and peace." Mary Whipple
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Before the Throne: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Novels) OverviewIn this extraordinary drama-in-dialogue, Naguib Mahfouz reveals his love for all of Egypt's extensive history and his deep knowledge of it. In Before the Throne, he summons nearly sixty of Egypt's rulers to the afterlife Court of Osiris, from a king who unified Egypt for the first time, around 3000 BC, to a president assassinated by religious extremists in 1981.He includes names as familiar as the pharaoh Ramesses II and as obscure as the medieval vizier Qaraqush. Defending their behavior before the divine tribunal, those who acted for the nation's good are honored with immortality, but those who failed to protect it leave the gilded hall of eternal justice with a very different verdict.Full of Mahfouz's unique insight into his country's timeless qualities, this controversial work skillfully traces five thousand years of Egypt's past as it flows into the present, through the mind of its most acclaimed author.

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