Prayer service for Naguib Mahfouz
A policeman directs onlookers as the late Naguib Mahfouz arrives for funeral prayers at Al Hussein mosque.
Al Hussein Square was surprisingly quiet – the only people waiting around were soldiers dressed in white, lining the park and guarding the entrance to the mosque. Naguib Mahfouz had died the day before and this morning he would be brought to the Al Hussein Mosque in Gamaliya for a prayer service before taken to the state military funeral in Nasr City at noon.
We expected crowds of fans in the square, waiting to pay their last respects to the Arabic speaking world’s, and Egypt’s, only Nobel prize-winning author. But there was mostly only TV cameras and photographers, standing at the entrance to the mosque ready for the arrival of his casket. Across the street from the mosque, a handful of women stood, wearing bright pastel dresses, talking quietly to each other and watching for the hearse. It seemed as though Mahfouz was still a controversial figure in his own country, nearly twenty years after Muslim militants declared him to be an infidel due to the religious depiction of characters in his novel “Children of Gabalawi.”
The casket of Mahfouz carried into the Mosque.
Mahfouz’s mother took him as a child to pray at the Al Hussein Mosque, in the neighborhood where he grew up and inspired his writings about the lives of common Cairenes. The mosque stands at the edge of the Khan al Kahlili bazaar, famous for its narrow and winding streets, miles of shops where almost anything can be bought, and crowds of shoppers and tourists ready to bargain hard. The shops were closed this morning though, and the streets were quiet. The tour buses had not yet arrived.
A bronze Mercedes hearse pulled up to the front of the mosque and we watched from across the street as the green velvet shrouded coffin was taken out, brought past a line of soldiers and into the mosque. The prayers could just faintly be heard and the few people outside the mosque who had come to witness the event stood off to the side, away from the soldiers and plain-clothes security men.
A line of soldiers waits for Mahfouz to be carried out of Al Hussein Mosque.
The prayers soon ended and we saw cameras flashing inside the mosque as the pallbearers brought the coffin outside, through the line of soldiers, and wrestled it into the hearse. In a matter of minutes the hearse zoomed off with three security men standing on its rear bumper. A man in the crowd cried privately.
A tour bus pulled into the square.
The casket being taken away to the state military funeral.
Umbrella outside Al Hussein Mosque
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