The Many Peoples of Africa

Analytical Essay

The narrator of Naguib Mahfouz's short story is looking for a man named “Zaabalawi”. What does Zaabalawi represent to him - what does he want from him? What is the “illness” of which the narrator complains?

Cultural circumstances of the writer shed light on the story of Zaabalawi to provide interpretation of convincing her world of structural excellence. Cultural characteristics associated with the biography of writer gives us useful information about perceptions of Zaabalawi, which Naguib Mahfouz framed through narratives to follow suit. In the broader perceptions, Zaabalawi represent the tendency of neutrality in the presentation of attitudes, ideas, and opinions, while adhering to the implicit and permanent form of religious superiority, known as relativity of knowledge (Shankman, 144).

Mahfouz presented the structural components of Sufism and Christian. He elaborated on the confinement in the present through the search for Zaabalawi in the streets of Cairo, and the concept of self and integrity. Zaabalawi is a short story centered on the narrator pursuit of the Islamic mystic. Zaabalawi is the story of a patient who seeks to heal his inner self diseases (Gordimer, 582). The symbolism of the story is a journey searching for search of God in times of uncertainty. Zaabalawi represents the pursuits of search for mystical experience, piety, and even God himself. To the author, Zaabalawi is a miracle person or symbolic object who cures the terminally ill man (Lawall, 2534). In the reality context, Zaabalawi represent the spiritual light that issues from his own spiritual discipline.

Zaabalawi shows the connection with the spirituality of God for a number of reasons. No one knows of Zaabalawi's whereabouts, except for the fact that one can find him at the Negma Bar every evening. This is similar to the idea that no one can find God physically on earth, but he resides in churches, or the houses of God, and that to commune with him people visit the churches. Second, he performs miracles that can cure people of their illnesses, which are like the stories of people who mysteriously recover from terminal illnesses with no logical explanation, but rather with the explanation that God performed a miracle on him or her (Shankman, 171). Third, Zaabalawi helps people whom He loves, which are the same with God; supposedly, one has to believe in Him in order to be in his graces and receive his help. Zaabalawi is merely a saint who serves under him; he could better be associated with Jesus, who, like Zaabalawi, was a divine man who could perform healing miracles on people and cure them of their illnesses (Gordimer, 614).

Naguib Mahfouz aimed at discovering the culture of going early to the domain of philosophical and literary understanding of areas that allow for thought wanders away from the restrictions, customs and sometimes rebellion, which controls the creation of writers, philosophers, and public. The narrator complains about conquering the inner self and how one can achieve peace in his life (Lawall, 2534). Main illness in the ...