The Work
Awlad Haratina (Children of Our Alley) was first published serially in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 1959, then published as a book in Beirut by Dar al-Adab in 1967. It was not published in Egypt during Mahfouz's lifetime due to its controversial content. An authorized English translation by Peter Theroux was published in 1996 as Children of the Alley (Anchor Books). The novel is approximately 450 pages and is one of the most structurally ambitious Arabic novels of the twentieth century.
The novel is set in an unnamed Cairo alley (hara) whose residents descend from a powerful patriarch, Gabalawi, who has walled himself up in his mansion at the end of the alley. The alley's history is organized in five books, each corresponding to a significant figure from the Abrahamic scriptural tradition: the opening section corresponds to the expulsion from Eden (Adam/Adham); subsequent sections correspond to Moses (Gebel), Jesus (Rifa'a), Mohammed (Qassim), and finally a modern secular scientific figure (Arafa) who represents the Enlightenment project. Each reformer attempts to recover the rights and legacy that Gabalawi bestowed on the alley's inhabitants but which have been usurped by brutal overlords.
The novel was immediately recognized as a revolutionary work in Arabic literature and a central factor in Mahfouz's receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988 - the first Arabic-language Nobel in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited it explicitly.
Biblical Engagement
Genesis 3:23 ('Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken') is the foundational event of the novel's opening section. Gabalawi (God) expels Adham (Adam) from the estate for an act of disobedience - reading the secret book in which Gabalawi has recorded the bequest to his children. The parallel with the Garden narrative is close: the forbidden knowledge, the expulsion, the founding of a new life in hardship outside the protected space. Mahfouz retains the essential structure of the biblical narrative while giving it a specifically Egyptian social setting.
Exodus 3:10 ('Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my children of Israel out of Egypt') is the structural model for the Gebel section. Gebel is a man of Adham's lineage who has lived in the house of a powerful overlord (the Pharaoh parallel), escapes, receives a call from the estate, and leads his people to a better portion of the alley. Mahfouz retains the essential narrative pattern of the Exodus - the commissioning of a leader, the confrontation with power, the liberation of an oppressed community - within the allegorical framework of the alley.
Matthew 5:3 ('Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven') is the resonance of the Rifa'a section. Rifa'a is a healer who rejects violence and power, who blesses the poor and outcasts, who makes enemies among the powerful by his very gentleness, and who is eventually killed by the overlords. His followers are scattered but his teaching persists. Mahfouz presents Jesus through the lens of the Sermon on the Mount - the revolutionary ethics of poverty of spirit, meekness, and peacemaking - without the christological claims of the Gospels.
Amos 5:24 ('But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream') is the prophetic vision of social justice that the Qassim section embodies. Qassim is the most politically effective of the reformers: he organizes the alley's poor, defeats the overlords in battle, and establishes a more just community - a community, however, that is soon subverted by new oppressors after his death.
Author and Context
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was born in the al-Gamaliyya district of Cairo, which provided the urban setting for much of his fiction including Children of the Alley. He studied philosophy at Cairo University and spent his career as a civil servant in the Egyptian government while writing prolifically. His Cairo Trilogy (1956-1957) had already established him as the preeminent Arabic novelist before Children of the Alley raised the stakes dramatically.
Mahfouz was a secular Egyptian intellectual of broadly socialist sympathies whose engagement with the Abrahamic religious tradition was philosophical and cultural rather than devotional. He was formed by Islamic culture but read widely in Western literature (Dostoevsky and Zola were particular influences) and was deeply concerned with the social and political condition of Egypt in the postcolonial period.
The novel's serial publication in Al-Ahram immediately generated controversy. Al-Azhar University, the primary institution of Islamic scholarship in Egypt, demanded its suppression on the grounds that its allegorical treatment of the prophets (particularly Mohammed) was blasphemous. President Nasser declined to ban it in 1959, but subsequent governments were less tolerant, and it was not published in Egypt as a book until 2006, after Mahfouz's death.
In 1994, a young Islamist stabbed Mahfouz in the neck in an attempted assassination, leaving him partially paralyzed in his writing hand. He survived and continued to write, though with greater difficulty.
Themes
The novel's central theme is the recurring pattern of prophetic liberation, social revolution, and institutional corruption. Each reformer achieves a breakthrough - liberating the alley from oppression, establishing a more just community - but the breakthrough is always temporary: new overlords arise, the reformer's followers fragment, and the alley sinks back into oppression. This pattern raises the question of whether genuine, lasting transformation is possible, and the novel's ending - the modern scientist Arafa kills Gabalawi (apparently accidentally) - suggests that the Enlightenment project of scientific progress has not resolved but accelerated the problem.
The novel also develops a sustained critique of religious institutionalization: each reformer's living teaching is eventually reduced to a set of external observances that serve the interests of new overlords rather than the liberation of the poor. This critique is directed simultaneously at Islamic, Christian, and Jewish institutional religion.
Reception
The novel was immediately recognized as a masterpiece and a scandal. Its reception was shaped by its controversy: banned in Egypt, celebrated in the West as the work that earned Mahfouz the Nobel Prize, and the occasion for violence against its author.
Legacy
The novel established the possibility of allegorical engagement with the Abrahamic tradition in Arabic literature - demonstrating that an Arab Muslim writer could engage the full sweep of biblical and Quranic narrative with literary freedom and philosophical seriousness. Its influence on subsequent Arabic literature has been enormous, and it remains a landmark in the encounter between Islamic culture and the Western literary tradition.