Zaabalawi

Zaabalawi (Arabic: زعبلاوي) is a symbolic story written by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.

[2] Issues affecting restrictions and customs and sometimes rebellion against controls, which causes writers and philosophers in general many troubles.

The search for Zaabalawi has been on a downward path from the highest forms of knowledge to the lowest, and most recently to the oldest: from science to art to Sufi intuition, and no one can say that complete disappointment was the fruit of this reverse journey.

And perhaps spend days and months looking for him to no avail, Sheikh painted a map of the place in the smallest details and Present it to the narrator to make it easier for him to search for Zaabalawi.

The narrator continues his search from a shop to a neighborhood to a mosque until he was told to go to a calligrapher named Hassanein residing in Umm Ghulam.

The narrator asked him about Zaabalawi and Hassanein replied that it was difficult to meet, because he appears without a date and cuts off suddenly.

And ended his speech by leading the narrator to a person called Wannis Al-Damanhouri who spends his time in a bar inside a hotel and he may know where Zaabalawi is.The narrator went to the bar to find Al Haj Wannis sitting at a table alone drinking wine.

He soon woke up to find his head wet with water and he Al Haj Wannis about what happened and he answered that his friend Sheikh Zaabalawi was sitting next to him pouring water gently on his head in the hope that you wake up, the narrator in a state of panic asking "Zaabalawi?

[8] The story raised the issue of human existence and its significance, and the search for a goal of life, compared with the novel "Waiting for Godot" by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, Zaabalawi refers to the same idea, It is a wait and constant search for an idea that may be spiritual or existential and in the end it does not appear this idea causing disappointment to the searcher, pain and despair, and this issue of research is not new in human history, but it is one of the most important issues that human tried to solve its mystery.

Our narrator's search throughout Cairo, besides moving from West to East, as evidenced in the dress of those whom he meets, is also a movement towards timelessness, evanescence, the eternal now.

The local magistrate of the district is the narrator's next stop, and he is presented with a well drawn-out plan for canvassing the entire area.

The prayer of supplication which the Sheikh offers is the first time any one of our narrator's erstwhile helpers has mentioned God.

This is fortuitous, for immediately following this ejaculation (please pardon my Christianizing of such spontaneous prayer, but Sufism has no term for this; it is not a Sufi practice or discipline), he offers our narrator this advice: "Look carefully in the cafes, the places where the dervishes perform their rites, the mosques and the prayer rooms and the Green Gate, for he may well be concealed among the beggars and be indistinguishable from them."

We could take Schopenhauer's approach, where music is the most pure expression of the Universal Will, and it analogously reflects, within its harmony, melodies, rhythm and meter, the structure of the physical world.

This will serve to illustrate the great power of music, but it does not address why Mahfouz places it here, near the core of our narrator's experience.

We have moved from law to commerce to politics to calligraphy to music, and at every step we have come closer to the evanescent, and the ineffable.

If we don't get it, Sheikh Gad rams the point home by stating that Zaabalawi himself "is the epitome of things musical.

"[9] William Chittick, arguably the most prominent scholar of Islamic mysticism in the West, explains the place of mysticism in Islam thus: In short, Muslim scholars who focused their energies on understanding the normative guidelines for the body came to be known as jurists, and those who held that the most important task was to train the mind in achieving correct understanding came to be divided into three main schools of thought – theology, philosophy, and Sufism.

[10] Attack on fossilized religious institutions; only certain figures such as artists (musicians, the calligrapher) and the drunk seem to be in contact with the truth symbolized by Zaabalawi.

In Mahfouz's vision those who only seek personal gain and profit are distanced from the truth and genuine fulfillment; the happiness of the individual can only come through social engagement and contact with others, the merging of the self into a harmonious human collectivity.

[11] Likewise, the unnamed protagonist's desperate quest for Sheikh Zaabalawi is an allegory of modern man's futile search for God within a corrupt world where humanity has surrendered to materialism long ago.

[12] Indeed, the scene depicting the protagonist's inquiry of the bookseller in front of the Birgawi Residence where Zaabalawi once lived confirmed El-Enany's idea in that the deserted building now looks like a wasteland, occupied only by heaps of rubbish.

In Mahfuzian terms the ruined residence stands for the present plight of modern man left without shelter, forsaken by God.