Children of Gebelawi

A 1959 novel by Naguib Mahfouz that recasts religious history as the lives of successive generations in a Cairo alley, where each generation confronts injustice and power.

Allegory: A narrative in which characters and events carry sustained meanings beyond their literal story. The novel’s generations and alley conflicts echo religious narratives without retelling them literally.
Naguib Mahfouz: An Egyptian novelist and short-story writer awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote the novel and shaped its blend of realism, social critique, and allegory.
J.M. Coetzee: A South African novelist and essayist awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He discussed Mahfouz and the controversy around the novel in his literary criticism.
The Cairo Trilogy: A three-novel sequence by Naguib Mahfouz portraying an Egyptian family across several decades. It uses realist family history rather than the novel’s sustained allegorical structure.
Religious allegory: A narrative that uses characters and events to express religious ideas or reinterpret sacred stories. This form explains how the novel invokes religious history while criticizing human institutions.
Gebelawi: The reclusive patriarch whose descendants inhabit the Cairo alley in Mahfouz’s novel. His property and authority set the recurring struggle in motion.
1959 in literature: The year in which notable literary works were published around the world. The novel first appeared in serialized form in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram that year.
Philip Stewart: A translator and scholar of French and comparative literature. His English translation helped make the novel available to Anglophone readers.
The Satanic Verses: A 1988 novel by Salman Rushdie combining migration, dreams, and reimagined religious material. Both novels provoked religious controversy, but their narrative forms and historical settings differ.
Political allegory: A story whose characters and events represent political actors, institutions, or conflicts. The alley’s cycles of domination and revolt invite readings of Egyptian political life.

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