Malleem Al-Akbar (Malleem the Great) by Adel Kamel, Al-Karma Publishers, Cairo, 2019, pp.336 (first published 1942).
The novel explores a striking dichotomy between two men from very different backgrounds: an illiterate young man named Malleem (ie, millieme which is a monetary unit worth one tenth of a piastre), whose father exploited him to beg for money, and Khaled Khurshid, son of a high-ranking Turkish-Egyptian judge, who returns from England resentful of his privileged class, especially his father, after embracing socialist beliefs.
Malleem’s father did not educate him due to extreme poverty, nor did he teach him any trade. Instead, he used Malleem as a pawn to beg for money from young men at cafes during the day, while he himself sold narcotics at night.
In contrast, Khaled’s father, Ahmed Pasha Khurshid, was cruel and oppressive, regularly seizing peasants’ lands, expelling servants, and exploiting others. There is strong evidence that he may have killed his own father to inherit quickly and deny his sisters their rightful inheritance. His domineering nature was also the source of Khaled’s fragile character.
Malleem rebelled against his father’s upbringing and learned carpentry, which eventually brought him to Ahmed Pasha Khurshid’s palace, where he met Khaled. While repairing a window, Malleem discovered a purse containing 500 pounds. Khaled suggested splitting the money, but Malleem refused. Khaled then proposed returning it to the Pasha, assuming Malleem would be rewarded for his honesty.
However, the plan went disastrously wrong: Omar, Khaled’s elder brother, accused Malleem of theft and seized the money for himself. Khaled was unable to defend Malleem in court, and Malleem was sentenced to a year and a half in prison. Khaled informed his father that Omar had stolen the money and was spending it on a belly dancer, but the ignoble Ahmed Pasha refused to exonerate Malleem, fearing damage to his reputation, and instead expelled Khaled from the palace.
After his release, Malleem reunited with his father and soon met Naseef, an idle intellectual who offered him a position in his service at a dilapidated Mameluke house on Al-Khayamiya Street in Old Cairo. Naseef had rented the house from the government and sublet it to foreign artists and Egyptians with a Western outlook on life.
Meanwhile, Khaled experimented with living like the Bedouins after seeing a group nearby, purchasing a tent and a goat, and dressing in their style. He abandoned the idea when his father revealed that his mother had sold her house before her death. In response, Khaled filed a series of lawsuits against his father, who retaliated with lawsuits of his own across Egypt’s courts.
When Khaled and Malleem crossed paths again, Khaled sought forgiveness for Malleem’s imprisonment. However, Malleem tricked him into believing that Hania, a German surrealist artist living in the Al-Khayamiya house, was romantically interested in him. Hania later contacted Khaled, asking him to give Malleem money due to her financial difficulties.
Suspicious, Khaled followed Malleem to the Al-Khayamiya house, where he encountered a circle of atheists and socialists who inspired him to distribute political pamphlets. Naïve and idealistic, he believed them completely and was arrested while handing out the pamphlets in a café. In prison, he discovered that the most radical figure in the house was actually a police informant. A fellow prisoner explained that the upper class ignores the lower class, which exists in its own isolated world.
Four years later, during WWII, Cairo was bombed in a Nazi German air raid, which Kamel vividly describes. By this time, Hania was married to Malleem, who had become wealthy through work with the British Ordnance, adopting the name Muhammed Abdel-Salam and the title of Bek. Despite his success, Malleem remained humble and kind.
They visited Khaled in a bar after hearing he had reconciled with his father and dropped all lawsuits. They found him transformed into a hedonist, overweight, and broken in spirit.
Although Khaled began life with far greater advantages than Malleem, it was Malleem who succeeded because he had a clear goal: securing the money he had been denied in childhood. Khaled, by contrast, was idealistic and delicate, lacking a concrete purpose, and was easily crushed by life’s challenges.
Another contrast is drawn between women: Hania, the desirable European artist, and Nemat, Khaled’s shallow cousin, whose sole aim is to make men fall in love with her to marry her. Khaled concludes that Egyptian women, in general, are superficial and primarily concerned with marriage.
The novel is set almost entirely in Cairo and is divided into two parts, with thirteen chapters and an epilogue, narrated in the third person. It opens with a lengthy introduction on Arabic literature presented as a dialogue between the author and the protagonist.
The meaning of the title Malleem the Great is ambiguous: it may reference the protagonist’s early marginal status, forced to beg for money, or it may signify his later success in overcoming poverty and low social standing.
The novel portrays Egyptian society across social classes: the lower class through Malleem and his father, the upper class through Ahmed Pasha Khurshid and his sons, and the intellectual middle class through Naseef and his circle. Some passages, particularly Naseef’s socialist and existentialist reflections, may feel dense or slow to read.
Adel Kamel was a close friend of Naguib Mahfouz and introduced him to the Harafish (Riffraff) literary circle, which included prominent figures in literature, cinema, and journalism. In 1943, both won prizes in the same contest: Kamel for A King Made of a Ray and Mahfouz for Thebes at War.
Disappointed that Malleem the Great did not receive recognition from the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo, Kamel stopped publishing novels and focused on his legal career, believing literature to be futile.
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