22 pages • 44 minutes read
Naguib MahfouzZaabalawi
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Money
“Zaabalawi” explores the concept of money, which often intrudes when the narrator is trying to gather information to aid in his search. In many spiritual traditions, money and gold represent an unhealthy attachment to earthly possessions. Mahfouz echoes this idea, using wealth as a marker of greed and spiritual disconnection; the district magistrate has gold-plated teeth, and Sheikh Qamar is so preoccupied with earning money that he can scarcely be bothered to entertain the narrator’s questions about Zaabalawi. By contrast, Zaabalawi seems to have no job or wealth. His former home is now a local dump, and the district magistrate cautions the narrator that Zaabalawi is likely to be “concealed among the beggars and […] indistinguishable from them” (5). Mahfouz thus uses money and poverty to speak subtly about the dual nature of his fallen Cairo—one divided along both economic and spiritual lines.
Wine
At the Negma Bar (“Star Bar” in Arabic), the narrator faces his last trial when a confidant of Zaabalawi, Hagg Wanas, refuses to speak unless the narrator becomes as drunk as he is. This presents a challenge to the narrator, as Islam forbids imbibing alcohol as a distraction from God. However, Wanas’s belief that he and the narrator will only understand one another once drunk has a counterpart in Sufi tradition. Although Sufi mystics do not seek out drunkenness for pleasure, Sufis consider wine a symbolic portal to a hidden world of deeper knowledge. Although the narrator at first tries his best to avoid drinking with Wanas, he eventually falls into a deep dream: “No sooner had the wine come to rest inside me than I lost all willpower. [...] The man leaned toward me attentively, but I saw him—saw everything—as a mere meaningless series of colored planes” (11). As the narrator slips into the rapture of his dream, he notes that no discord exists in the world. It’s while he is observing this great harmony that he at last encounters Zaabalawi, though he doesn’t realize it at the time.
Mirrors
When the narrator joins the drunkard Wanas, he finds him surrounded by four mirrors: “[H]e gazed into the mirror in rapt contentment, the sides of his face, rounded and handsome despite the fact that he was approaching old age, were flushed with wine” (10). Mirrors symbolize self-knowledge, but also illustrate the problems of perception and consciousness; seeing oneself clearly is important, in part because it paradoxically helps one avoid seeing only oneself (that is, projecting oneself onto everything). As the narrator enters the bar, he is nearing a critical point on this journey to self-discovery. Although he thinks he has been looking for a holy man called Zaabalawi, the narrator is actually on a spiritual quest to better know himself. As Wanas gazes at himself, the story foreshadows the powerful change that is ready to occur in the protagonist. Like wine, mirrors are taboo in Islam, which cautions Muslims not to pray near them lest they become distracted. By employing them here, at the height of the narrator’s spiritual awakening, Mahfouz is making a political statement and subverting dogmatic edicts.
Music
From the story’s opening lines, Zaabalawi is associated with music. The narrator recalls him in a song lyric from his childhood, and Sheikh Gad insists that Zaabalawi is “the epitome of all things musical” (9). Music also features elsewhere in the story. When the narrator meets the district magistrate, the magistrate mentions the “places where the dervishes perform their rites” (5); in Sufi mysticism, these rites are prayers that involve music, dance, and meditation. By spinning in perfectly synced geometric patterns, Sufis believe they can join with the totality of the godhead and shed their individual identities. Zaabalawi symbolizes a similarly transcendent state, which explains the musical symbolism that surrounds him.
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