Dialogues of Naguib Mahfouz:

Memories of 1967

By Mohamed Salmawy

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Naguib Mahfouz would often reminisce about the 1967 War and the despair that gripped the country in its wake. Unlike some of his contemporaries, the great writer wasn't one for moping. He felt the hurt like everyone else, and perhaps more, but he was primarily interested in learning from it.

"The first thing I learned from 1967 was that we had more than Israel to worry about. The conflict between us and Israel wasn't just a war involving two states. It was a situation where international considerations were at play, and we should have been aware of those considerations before rushing into confrontation. We should not have looked at what Israel was and what it could do. We should have viewed Israel as part of a bigger picture and learned how to deal with it," Mahfouz said.

The other thing Mahfouz realised was that major powers didn't want Egypt to exceed a certain level of strength. This was true for Gamal Abdel-Nasser's time just as it was true for Mohamed Ali's. For some reason, however, the Egyptian regime failed to take this into account and badly miscalculated. The most painful thing for Mahfouz was that the defeat was not just a military one. It was a defeat of a dream, of a national endeavour in which the entire population had a stake.

"Anyone who reads some of your work in the 1960s, especially Adrift on the Nile, gets the impression that you had a premonition of what was to come and wanted to warn against it," I said.

"Literature often predicts the future. But the writer is often astonished by how things unfold. I remember watching my father die, and yet being smitten with sadness the moment he passed away," Mahfouz remarked.

Whenever we talked about 1967, Mahfouz would mention the great effort Nasser exerted in the three years following the war, until his death in 1970. Mahfouz believed that Nasser was the man most responsible for the defeat, and yet he recalled the efforts Nasser made to rebuild the army and restore its morale, an effort that led to the 1973 victory. Still, Mahfouz was critical of Nasser's undemocratic style of government, before and after 1967. He believed that 1967 gave the country an opportunity to reintroduce freedom and democracy, but it was missed.