El-Meligi, by Kamal Rohayem, (Cairo: Sphinx Publishing), 2014

Naguib Mahfouz influenced a wide segment of writers when he wrote his famous novel El-Harafish in 1978. He based the novel on the alley as a place and the various bosses who controlled it, took money from the rich merchants in exchange for protecting their businesses from the poor and the thieves. In other words, they were the informal law and quite unjust. Kamal Rohayem took a stab at that world when he created his characters.

Having two narrators and two parallel stories at the same time is a hard technique to master in any novel. In El-Meligi, Rohayem decided to venture into this technique and brought us into the world of Kenawy, a bitter character who lost his job when the government privatised the company he works for and sold it to an investor who got rid of all the employees, brought his own men and applied a new philosophy that depended only on making profits, ignoring social justice in operating his business.

Kenawy is not only an administrator in that textiles company, he is also a novel writer. He wrote a few novels that never saw the light, no publisher would print them. He is simply an unpleasant, frustrated character that failed to attract the reader’s sympathy throughout the novel. On a friend’s advice, he decided to write scripts instead of novels and hence enter El-Meligi, a boss or a fetewa of an imagined alley based on the poor small alley where he lived, but with a grandiose dimension that actually does not change it from the poor dirty place where the marginalised, poor, ordinary people live.

The narrator Kenawy is interacting in both worlds, he is talking to El-Meligi and asking him to come into his world so that he can continue the story, drawing his stick that he fights with and creating this world where the fetewa is the main character. El-Meligi, on the other hand, is talking to himself, analysing his men, subjects, and the way he rules the alley.

The reader sometimes feels that they are the same, but the lines are clear. One character, the narrator, lived a pathetic life in the basement of a poor building and his neighbour is the doorman. All his worries after leaving work are concentrated on his neighbours that he despises; his daily quarrels with the women, street vendors who put their produce in front of his only window, and he eventually gets them to stay away by reporting them to the authorities.

El-Meligi, on the other hand, explains how he rose to be the alley’s boss, his philosophy, and how to manage the various people around him while maintaining his power over them.

El-Meligi had to fight with other fetewas from a nearby alley. We see a master planning a field battle for reasons of honour and not letting them overstep on his territory or the people who live under his protection. He uses the alley’s people from the young boys with their darts to the women who were prepared with stuff to throw on the invaders, plus of course his men with their sticks. He starts by a small battle outside the alley then withdraws with his men to pull the other “army” into the middle of his alley and then all hell breaks loose. He emerges victorious. The people in his alley rever him more. The scene feels like a well-directed shot from an old movie.

There are two sets of characters, one in each world and Kenawy gave them nearly the same names but altered them to his own liking. The writer has many episodes with his fetewa, he basically swears at him for not coming to him when he wants to write and welcomes him when he is embodied in the imaginary world, but the reader does not feel any love between the creator and the character, which affects the whole novel.

We feel that the novelist didn't not like the novel he was writing.