Mapped
Children of Gebelawi
Naguib Mahfouz
Mahfouz builds a single fictional alley, and the whole of scripture and history play out inside it: a founding ancestor in a great house at the desert edge, an endowment fought over by strongmen, and a line of reformers who each try to win the poor their share. The alley is drawn from the Gamaliya of his own childhood, the old Islamic quarter below the Muqattam hills, near the mosque of al-Husayn and the northern gate of Bab al-Futuh.
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Midaq Alley
Naguib Mahfouz
Almost the whole of Mahfouz's novel happens in one cul-de-sac of old Islamic Cairo, Zuqaq al-Midaq, a real alley off the Sanadiqiyya near al-Azhar. Its café, barber's shop, bakery and the flat of the beautiful, restless Hamida make a world unto itself, jolted by the Second World War and the money of the British camps. When Hamida is lured out of the alley into the modern city, the closed world of Midaq Alley cracks open.
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Palace Walk
Naguib Mahfouz
In the Gamaliya quarter of old Cairo, the merchant al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad rules his household as a tyrant and lives his nights as a pleasure-seeker, while his cloistered wife Amina and their children chafe against his despotism and the world beyond the latticed windows. The first volume of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy maps the real old city: the family house on Bayn al-Qasrayn, the merchant's shop, the mosque of al-Husayn, the night world of Ezbekiyya, and the streets where the 1919 revolution against the British breaks out.
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