The Story Archive

Midaq Alley

Naguib Mahfouz · 1947 CE · Novel · Arabic · Contemporary

A dead-end lane off the Muski keeps its own hours through the last years of the war: a café owner on hashish, a dentist with no qualification, a man who breaks the limbs of beggars for a fee, and a barber's foster daughter, Hamida, who is beautiful and will not stay. The British camps outside Cairo are paying wages nobody in the alley has ever seen. The last of Mahfouz's books of the old quarter before the Cairo Trilogy.

Open Midaq Alley in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Attributes

Genre
HistoricalTragedy
Theme
Class & InequalityWealth & GreedTraditionVanity & Beauty
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Fallen WomanEverymanVillain / Tyrant
Plot structure
PolyphonicEpisodicRise and Fall
Symbol / motif
The CityThe GarmentThe Mirror
Conflict
vs Societyvs Person
Mode / tone
RealistIronic
Culture / tradition
Arabic

Closest analogues