The movie "The Heart of the Night" by Egyptian director Atef Al-Tayeb was shown in Cairo in 1989. It is based on Naguib Mahfouz's novel published in 1975. It tells the story of a young man who belongs to a wealthy conservative class, but he rebelled against the ideas of this class in search of answers to many questions.
Jaafar Al-Rawi is an orphan child. He was learning to read and write at the hands of senior writers to join Al-Azhar, but the voice of his friend - in the garden of his grandfather's palace - while he was learning to chant and sing caused him to distract his mind from religious sciences, and thus deviate from the line that his grandfather drew for him.
The novel revolves around Jaafar and his wealthy religious grandfather (Al-Sayyid Al-Rawi) who endowed his wealth for charitable works, and Jafar's first wife (Marwana the Gypsy), and his second wife (Huda Hanim Siddik), who opened the doors of culture and politics for him.
All of these heroes are similar in that they are a stage in the life of the young man in search of freedom, and stations in his unsuccessful search.
According to the writer and translator Ahmed Zakaria, the novel "The Heart of the Night" is classified among the philosophical novels that deal with an existential question that goes beyond the biography of Jaafar Al-Rawi (the protagonist of the novel) to the biography of man in general in the search for himself and his freedom.
While the writer and critic Alaa Abdel-Fattah saw that the novel included very strong symbols similar to those contained in the novel "The Children of Our Neighborhood" by Naguib Mahfouz, and that the writer Naguib Mahfouz - very cleverly - said what he wanted and left the reader to conclude what he wanted.
The film's injustice to the novel
On the other hand, some critics saw in the symbolism of the novel "The Heart of the Night" as an insult to the religious sanctuary and a simulation of pivotal events in the life of humanity, but others said that the subject of the novel is not religious but human;
It relates to the individual represented by Jafar Al-Rawi in his journey since childhood and his fluctuation between instinct, religious belief, reason and science, which is the journey of man's experience of his experience, himself, and degree of consciousness.
Regarding his evaluation of the film, the Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Criticism, Dr. Mustafa Attia, considered that screenwriter Mohsen Zayed presented a cinematic treatment of the novel that includes an amendment to the events, the presentation of some characters and the issues raised.
However, art critic Farouk Abdel Aziz commented that when reading the novel, you feel that the film is unfair to the novel.
The film moves in more than one environment to some extent, but it differs from the novel because it lacks the details provided by the writer.
According to the critic, the class struggle was one of the most obvious features of the novel.
In the end, Jaafar Al-Rawi decides to retire from the world and write his vision of guiding humanity, but his new theory leads him to a murder that throws him in prison for a while.