It refers to the great famine that followed the stoppage of the annual flood of the River Nile for seven years. 

Waqt Al-Shidda (Time of Hardship), Ali Baghdadi (script), Mahmoud Refaat (story and drawings), and Ahmed Essam Al-Sayed (dialogue), Al-Mahrousa Publishing, Cairo, 2021, pp. 94

This great famine, which was one of the severest catastrophes that Egypt has witnessed in its entire history, was so intense that people ate dogs and cats and other human beings! They even used to capture children by hooks from the top of houses while walking inadvertently in the streets. Such a gargantuan calamity was recorded by big historians, like Al-Maqrizi.

In addition, a bitter feud erupted between the Sudanese and Turkish mercenaries constituting part of Egypt’s army, and Cairo was under siege. Al-Mustansir was a weak ruler, who was controlled by his Nubian mother, Rasd.

Uncle Yahya, the protagonist, works as a gravedigger who is used to knock on house doors. Upon receiving no reply, he enters with a pushcart to carry the house’s inhabitants, who have died of starvation.

He meets Maimoon, an orphan boy, who steals the properties of the dead, specifically, what is light in weight and expensive, such as jewellery and rings. Yahya saves Maimoon from the snatchers’ hooks, who would have killed and devoured him!

Most of the novel drawings were set in the night, except on rare occasions, to denote the volume of the human tragedy that the Egyptians suffered. Throughout the graphic novel, Uncle Yahya forbids Maimoon from doing any wrong out of a solid religious deterrent. One of the lessons Uncle Yahya taught Maimoon was that if he did not find dead people, he would get them (i.e., kill them) to satisfy his urge for money by stealing their belongings.

These moral lessons led Maimoon to treat his mother better. She appreciated this betterment and gave Uncle Yahya a new cloak that she knitted. In an attempt to mitigate the crisis, Al-Mustansir summoned three men convicted of killing, dressed them as merchants, and slaughtered them in the presence of real big merchants in Cairo because of raising commodities’ prices. As a result, the big merchants immediately announced that they would lower prices. 

In another scene, Uncle Yahya rescued a corpse from the hands of men, who tried to cut pieces from it for eating. Afterwards, he heard a baby’s cry and discovered that his mother died out of hunger. He carried her on his pushcart and started to cut her! The cutting scene is alluded to with blood spilt on the wall in a small panel.

Uncle Yahya’s tragedy unfolds as a flashback. It began when his son died out of hunger and disease and his wife abandoned him and took with her their second son, Bilal, and immigrated to Morocco, leaving a letter asking for his forgiveness. Upon noticing that Maimoon was barefooted, Uncle Yahya gave him his deceased son’s shoes as a gift.

The graphic novel’s climax is when Maimoon knocks at Uncle Yahya’s house and then sneaks inside. To his horror, he saw Uncle Yahya cutting dead bodies to sell them as meat. He becomes extremely indignant. Uncle Yahya threatens him to keep his mouth closed about what he saw, even to his mother. He follows him to his home and stumbles and falls losing his consciousness for a few moments enough to see a nightmare in which he was surrounded by his neighbourhood’s inhabitants wanting to take revenge on him due to his acts. He was awakened by a man, who told him that the caliph asked the help from Badr al-Jamali, his Acre governor, to come and stop the infighting.

Thus, the crisis has ended. While the horses mounted by the Acre governor’s soldiers were running, Maimoon stepped back only to fall on a stone and die. Maimoon’s mother took Uncle Yahya by surprise while he was kneeling by his grave and put a knife on his neck to kill him in revenge for her son. But then, the knife slipped from her hand and she realized that killing him would not bring Maimoon back to life.

The graphic novel ends with Yahya revealing his crime to the neighbourhood by hanging his cloak at his door, attaching to it slips of paper with the families’ names and their weights of human flesh written on them and writing above the cloak “Pray for those you’ve eaten them out of hunger!” While trying to cleanse his soul from this great horrendous sin, it is as if Yahya is saying to them, “You are partners with me in this crime.”

Uncle Yahya’s perspective was that since the living are far more important than the dead, they must eat even if they were the corpses of their fellowmen, while Maimoon’s logic was to steal the dead belongings, such as rings, etc., as they will not need them anymore. 

There is a profound sentence by Uncle Yahya: “Everything one does comes out from hunger; if it weren’t hunger for a meal, it is hunger for power, hunger for happiness, hunger for love. They are all forms of hunger.”

The book cover is designed as a part of a stone wall with Fatimid architecture, in the centre of which Islamic writings are engraved on an arch and a hand holding a loaf denoting famine with black mountains beyond. The arch can also be seen as a keyhole. In this short graphic novel, which is not paginated, the authors provided a list of historical references, which they relied on for writing. Mahmoud Refaat, the novel’s artist, drew black and white panels to narrate the episode of a woman who screamed at the top of her voice under the caliph’s palace to give the feel as if it was a flashback, used in films.

Although Arabic graphic novels are in their nascent stage, it is the first time that a graphic novel tackles the Mustansirite Hardship. Revealing Uncle Yahya’s true work came as a bit of a shock and it was not convincing. Did the authors want to portray Uncle Yahya as a sanctimonious person, falsely pious or was he a good man put in exceptionally severe conditions and did his inclinations change especially after his son’s death?

Is Maimoon’s death (which linguistically means blessed and popularly a monkey) at the end an indication of the death of innocence or rather the accumulated price of Yahya’s crimes which he was driven to declare them? Finally, does this graphic novel come as a harbinger of what might happen to Egypt due to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam?