Iuliia A. Bogdanova

The article reviews studies of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy published over the last twenty years and groups them according to their research methods.

The article studies two key novels by the Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate (1988) Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), The Cairo Trilogy (1956–1957) and Children of Our Alley (1959), through the prism of the Muslim allusions embedded in them. They play major role in the allegorical work Children of Our Alley which is stylized as a sira (“folk novel”) and shows the life of many generations of Gabalawi’s descendants. In The Trilogy, the symbolism is hidden, but the comparison between it and the next novel of Mahfouz through the lens of Muslim allusions, primarily in names, made it possible to reveal the symbolic meaning of the novel and establish a common philosophy underlying the two works. The main source is the Qur‘an; the authors also turned to texts of classical Islamic studies and early Islamic history. Relevance: 1) drawing attention to the Cairo Trilogy, famous in Arab countries, but not translated into Russian; 2) popularizing the method of analyzing religious connotations, which is rarely used in literary studies, but is productive for understanding and translating the literature of Muslim countries in which religion plays a large social role. Conclusions: both novels present an allegory of the history of mankind which is going through radical changes in modern times. At the beginning, they show a traditional world where religion is associated with vital energy (in the first two issues of the Trilogy, the Islamic aspect of names is associated with success in society and large offspring; in Children of Our Alley, the names allowed to connect the main characters with the prophets of Islam). During the course of the plot, the order in the world of the novels is disrupted. At the end of them, the father leaves the world (in both novels, the patriarch is an allegory of God); Muslim references in names and the religious piety of the characters cease to be a defense against chaos. Religion is being replaced by scientific point of view (Kamal in the Trilogy and ‘Arafa in Children of Our Alley; their names do not have Islamic connotations). Science which is free from religious rules is not able to resist immorality and the depletion of the human race. The author’s view of the new era is pessimistic: the old model of the world is destroyed, and the new one is corrupted.