Cairo -

“In the loving darkness of dawn, in the passage between death and life, in the sight of the watchful stars, in the hearing of joyful and mysterious chants, I offered an embodied soliloquy of the suffering and joys promised to our neighborhood.”

This is how Naguib Mahfouz begins the novel of Harafish, to go with this paragraph to a magical world as if it belongs to the worlds of "One Thousand and One Nights", and if "A Thousand Nights" presents dozens of stories that can be divided and presented cinematically and dramaticly, did "Al-Harafish" with its multiple stories persist in presenting part of it cinematically ?

There is still a lot in the repertoire of the Nobel writer Naguib Mahfouz, whose birthday falls today on December 11, 1911, and a year ago his heirs announced the signing of contracts to transform his most famous stories, “The Children of Our Neighborhood” and his immortal epic, “Al Harafish” into dramas. A red thorny line prevented its publication in Egypt for decades, and therefore transforming it into a dramatic work becomes more difficult. The huge epic was more fortunate to be converted repeatedly into famous cinematic and television works, but it remains fertile material for more and more, so what was presented did not live up to its literary level. .

The novel, published by Mahfouz in 1977, dealt with the stories of the family of the Fatwa Ashour Al-Naji in 10 chapters, spanning 10 generations in an Egyptian neighborhood in the heart of Cairo at an unspecified time.

It is noted that the directors presented their cinematic works by dealing with one of the epic stories, which loses its coherence and sequence among the ten stories in “The Harafish”, and makes it look like an independent story. Although these stories revolve in successive generations and successive times, the story is one and the place is one.

This is the Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz, and here is the Egyptian neighborhood with its fatwas and their struggles with prophecy and the competition for the fatwa that everyone cheers for.. Mahfouz’s atmosphere is usual, but in “Al Harafish” it takes a further dimension with these deep stories extending from the story of Ashour the survivor and his sons, grandchildren, wives and offspring.

The novel Al Harafish is a huge epic that was more fortunate to be repeatedly transformed into famous film and television works (social networking sites)

Cinema and Harafish

Film directors waited for 8 full years as if to absorb the events of the complex philosophical epic, until their cinematic works continued one after the other since the mid-1980s.

In 1985, the artist Nour El-Sherif presented with director Samir Seif the movie "The Huntress" about the fourth story of the epic with the same title, representing the character of Samaha Al-Naji, who escapes from a life sentence to fall in the last days before the punishment falls.

In the same year, director Hossam El-Din Mustafa presented the movie “The Queen’s Witness”, starring Nadia Al-Jundi, Farid Shawqi, Hussein Fahmy and Saeed Saleh, about the sixth story of the epic, and it tells the story of “Zahira”, the poor, ambitious girl who gets rid of her fleeing husband and sets out in the world of searching for men. Better and more powerful and powerful, and the film dominated the commercial character of the films "The Star of the Masses" (Nadia El-Gendy), which was achieving the highest revenues in the eighties.

The following year, the same director returned to the epic again with the movie "Al-Harafish", starring Mahmoud Yassin, Safia Al-Omari, Mamdouh Abdel-Alim and Laila Elwi, presenting the third story, "Love and the Bars", where a malicious woman causes the separation between two brothers.

The movie “The Berry and the Nabout” presented the tenth story of “Al-Harafish”, starring Izzat Al-Alayli, Hamdi Ghaith, Amina Rizk, Tayseer Fahmy and Mahmoud Al-Jundi, directed by Niazi Mustafa, and another story about the revolution against the oppressive fatwa.

hunger

Also, Soad Hosni, Mahmoud Abdel Aziz and Yousra presented the film "The Hunger" (1986), with director Ali Badrakhan, where a woman prepares for a massive revolution against the oppressive fatwa.

Ali Badrakhan faced accusations that he had quoted the movie “The Hunger” from the Harafish epic, without explicitly stating it. Which one story seemed to him?

Badrakhan says, "After that, I started and found that the subject is indivisible and it is not possible to photograph a separate part. Harafish is a collection of stories. Yes, it is one integrated work. I am influenced by the Harafish and I do not deny that I liked it, but if I take a part of it, I distort it, and this means that I do not understand Najib. Mahfouz, and also I did not understand Harafish as an integrated literary work.

Devil's friends

While these five films were released in only two years, the sixth movie came in 1988 entitled “Friends of Satan”, starring Nour Al Sharif and directed by Ahmed Yassin about the seventh story “Jalal His Majesty”, embodying the character of the fatwa whose wife dies, so he fears death greatly, and sets out to search for Method of immortality using magic and jinn.

Writer Ahmed Abdel Moneim comments that "Friends of Satan" was unable to present the most philosophical tale among the Harafish stories, and did not succeed in conveying the existential questions that haunt the hero and almost drive him crazy, but he considered the film the most powerful cinematic work that quoted the epic.

Abdel Moneim adds - in an article in the Cairo newspaper issued by the Ministry of Culture - that the six films did not have a common crew, were not produced in the form of a successive series, and there were no repetitive elements among them, so the stories withered away from their original land and the films came out in a flabby form.

Drama

Nour al-Sharif returned to the "Al-Harafish" epic in the series "The Ashouria Biography" (1998), with the participation of Hisham Selim and Ilham Shaheen, presenting the biography of the popular hero Ashour Al-Naji, who gained his name after surviving an epidemic that killed the residents of the region, so he returned to rule the neighborhood as a symbol of the just bully, Screenplay by Mohsen Zayed and directed by Wael Abdullah.

Thus, Nour al-Sharif is the most loyal artist to the "Al-Harafish" epic, embodied the character of its hero in the films "The Huntress" and "Friends of Satan", before presenting it in a television series, in addition to his embodiment of various roles from the rich world of Naguib Mahfouz, to reach the total of his works quoted from A world of Mahfouz 9 works.

And in Ramadan 2020, author Hani Sarhan, director Hussein Al-Manbawi and artist Yasser Jalal presented a series entitled “Al-Fatwa”, in which the viewer can distinguish well the strong influence of the “Al-Harafish” epic, even if its makers race to deny quoting the events of the series from the stories of Ashour Al-Naji and his family.