The Book of Epiphanies
Gamal al-Ghitani
(translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab)
American University of Cairo Press
Arguing for the primacy of history writing to the effort of human beings to understand themselves, the great historian of western culture Jacques Barzun writes: "The use of history is for the person. History is formative. Its spectacle of continuity in chaos, of attainment in the heart of disorder, of purpose in the world is what nothing else provides: science denies it, art only invents it."
This is an ingenious argument. But can we let it pass before considering what the novel form, which comes under Barzun's rubric of "art", might have to say in reply? After all, novelists often imagine the private lives of individuals from past eras, or reprise well-known historical events allegorically. Can such work be dismissed simply as "invention"?
Might it not be more true to say that at least in the best instances - Tolstoy in War and Peace, Rushdie in his comic linking of national and personal histories in Midnight's Children, the Indian novelist Yashpal in his epic novel about the partition of colonial India This Is Not That Dawn - the novelist is not just as much an agent and an adept of history as the historian? Such books might be said not to be history in the formal sense, but they are doubly so in a more informal way. They show us how "the use of history is for the person" not just at the level of writerly conception, but also inside the story, through the spectacle of protagonists being pressured by history, by past and present matrices.
A particularly revealing consideration of this question in the context of Arabic history and Arabic art might be found in the history-obsessed books of the Egyptian novelist Gamal al-Ghitani. Al-Ghitani is one of modern Arabic literature's most prominent voices - founder and longtime editor-in-chief of the Arabic literary weekly Akhbar Al-Adab, recipient of a Zayed Book Award and the Lettre Ulysses Award, and briefly jailed in the 1960s for his criticism of Gamal Abdel Nasser's repressive state. Hs books include Pyramid Texts, set in the Pharaonic Egypt before the advent of Islam, the great novel Zayni Barakat, set in the Mamluk era but also an allegory of Egypt under Nasser, and now the newly translated The Book of Epiphanies, which roves freely across a thousand years of Arab and Egyptian history.
Across these works, al-Ghitani makes a collage of the multifarious roots of Egyptian identity more complex than the nationalist identities asserted by the repressive Egyptian regimes of the 20th, or the new Egyptian identity asserted by the recent revolution and culminating in the victory for the Muslim Brotherhood in last year's elections. And stylistically, al-Ghitani draws on the indigenous traditions of Arabic narrative - works of history and philosophy by Islamic historians, Sufi parables and poems - to produce novels that might be thought of as Arabic not just in content but also in form.
This endeavour might be thought of as the shared project of the second generation of great Arabic novelists - writers from the 1960s onward like al-Ghitani, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury and Emile Habibi - moving on from earlier pioneering works, such as Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, that adapted the form of the western realist novel more or less wholesale to life in Egypt and the Arab world. (It is a tribute to Mahfouz's narrative agility that his work represents the concerns of this second generation just as surely as he embodied the first.)
In the modernist Arabic novel - with Egyptian novelists such as Ibrahim and al-Ghitani often at the vanguard - the narrative line is typically more jagged and fragmented than in the novels of old, and the focus and frame of narrative time is not just the society of the present day but the whole field of Arab history. One of the most ambitious, stylistically challenging, and open-ended - and difficult - of these books is al-Ghitani's 1983 novel Kitab al-tajalliyat, translated into French by Khaled Osman a few years ago as Le Livre des Illumations and now into English by the acclaimed translator Farouk Abdel Wahab (who died in April) as The Book of Epiphanies.
Al-Ghitani's books often draw on classical Arabic texts for their structure or language. In The Book of Epiphanies his sourcebook, so to speak, is the great medieval Arabic scholar Muhyuddin Ibn Arabi's enigmatic and digressive text al-Futuhat al-Makkiya, or The Meccan Revelations, written early in the 13th century and reverberating ever since though the halls of Arabic letters. Ibn Arabi writes towards the beginning of his book: "Neither this book nor my other books have been composed in the manner of ordinary books, and I do not write in the way authors normally do." The same could be said about Gamal, the narrator of Epiphanies, a character who begins as an individual in a particular place and time - Egypt of the present day - but progressively becomes a figure more and more ethereal, amorphous and disembodied, not so much a body but a super-consciousness glowing "like a nightlight".
Gamal is a man dissatisfied with his lot in life, spiritually ambitious, embittered by his nation's lowly position in the world and recent humiliations at the hands of its enemies (particularly Israel in the June 1967 War). In the manner of the Sufi initiate, he desires a release from his material and spiritual chains through an unquestioning submission to a sheikh or spiritual master.
Seeking a flight "from myself, within myself and to myself", Gamal hears his name being called out by a mysterious voice, and finds himself in the presence of none other than Ibn Arabi himself, the Shaykh Al Akbar ("Greatest Master"). He journeys with his guide into an unknown realm, and finds himself in front of the reigning spirits of the Diwan, the cosmic centre of the world. At the Diwan he is sent on a journey through various spiritual states or "stations", states in which he transcends time and space and roams through all of history.
Gamal's companions on his journeys are the three men who represent his personal and political traumas and obsessions. They are his late father, an immigrant from an Egyptian village to Cairo who brought him up lovingly but was neglected by him in his old age; Gamal Abdel Nasser, the proud Egyptian leader and Arab nationalist; and the nephew of Mohammad, Imam Husayn, whose martyrdom in the Battle of Karbala in 680CE is one of Islam's reference points. The figure of Nasser, indeed, is surprisingly sympathetic, considering that al-Ghitani was jailed by Nasser's regime, and shows al-Gitani has been able to subsume his view on history to the more religious and nationalist imagination of the protagonist Gamal.
This unusual triad helps al-Ghitani fuse Islam's historical and mythical pasts. And between them these three men also constitute a portrait of - and implicit criticism of - a widely prevalent view of Arab masculinity. There are almost no women in the book, and "the beloved" is a phrase used to describe the male spiritual master, not the wife or loved one.
Space and time are indeed dissolved in al-Ghitani's narrative, but in a historical and not a religious way. In the first half of the novel Gamal is no more than a spectator at the great scenes of Arab history. But as the novel progresses (as does Gamal through the "stations") he begins to inhabit the worlds, and bodies, of his forebears more and more from within. In the book's most affecting scenes, his consciousness fuses with that of his father as the older man arrives in Cairo and begins work as a lowly labourer.
Set up as a narrative in the tradition of a mystical spiritual quest, The Book of Epiphanies proclaims its independence from mystical literature in the protagonist's dissolution not into the infinite, but into the worldly yearnings of an impoverished, labouring man - Gamal's father Ahmad - for a wife, family and security just before he drifts into sleep. In The Book of Epiphanies, and the modernist Arabic novel more generally, we find doors into history on a spectrum that ranges all the way from grand narrative to the unexpressed thoughts of anonymous men.
Chandrahas Choudhury is an Indian novelist based in Delhi.
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
How to apply for a drone permit
- Individuals must register on UAE Drone app or website using their UAE Pass
- Add all their personal details, including name, nationality, passport number, Emiratis ID, email and phone number
- Upload the training certificate from a centre accredited by the GCAA
- Submit their request
What are the regulations?
- Fly it within visual line of sight
- Never over populated areas
- Ensure maximum flying height of 400 feet (122 metres) above ground level is not crossed
- Users must avoid flying over restricted areas listed on the UAE Drone app
- Only fly the drone during the day, and never at night
- Should have a live feed of the drone flight
- Drones must weigh 5 kg or less
Nepotism is the name of the game
Salman Khan’s father, Salim Khan, is one of Bollywood’s most legendary screenwriters. Through his partnership with co-writer Javed Akhtar, Salim is credited with having paved the path for the Indian film industry’s blockbuster format in the 1970s. Something his son now rules the roost of. More importantly, the Salim-Javed duo also created the persona of the “angry young man” for Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s, reflecting the angst of the average Indian. In choosing to be the ordinary man’s “hero” as opposed to a thespian in new Bollywood, Salman Khan remains tightly linked to his father’s oeuvre. Thanks dad.
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Book%20Details
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2025 Fifa Club World Cup groups
Group A: Palmeiras, Porto, Al Ahly, Inter Miami.
Group B: Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Botafogo, Seattle.
Group C: Bayern Munich, Auckland City, Boca Juniors, Benfica.
Group D: Flamengo, ES Tunis, Chelsea, (Leon banned).
Group E: River Plate, Urawa, Monterrey, Inter Milan.
Group F: Fluminense, Borussia Dortmund, Ulsan, Mamelodi Sundowns.
Group G: Manchester City, Wydad, Al Ain, Juventus.
Group H: Real Madrid, Al Hilal, Pachuca, Salzburg.
The White Lotus: Season three
Creator: Mike White
Starring: Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Natasha Rothwell
Rating: 4.5/5
Test
Director: S Sashikanth
Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
Star rating: 2/5
FIGHT CARD
From 5.30pm in the following order:
Featherweight
Marcelo Pontes (BRA) v Azouz Anwar (EGY)
Catchweight 90kg
Moustafa Rashid Nada (KSA) v Imad Al Howayeck (LEB)
Welterweight
Mohammed Al Khatib (JOR) v Gimbat Ismailov (RUS)
Flyweight (women)
Lucie Bertaud (FRA) v Kelig Pinson (BEL)
Lightweight
Alexandru Chitoran (BEL) v Regelo Enumerables Jr (PHI)
Catchweight 100kg
Mohamed Ali (EGY) v Marc Vleiger (NED)
Featherweight
James Bishop (AUS) v Mark Valerio (PHI)
Welterweight
Gerson Carvalho (BRA) v Abdelghani Saber (EGY)
Middleweight
Bakhtiyar Abbasov (AZE) v Igor Litoshik (BLR)
Bantamweight:
Fabio Mello (BRA) v Mark Alcoba (PHI)
Welterweight
Ahmed Labban (LEB) v Magomedsultan Magemedsultanov (RUS)
Bantamweight
Trent Girdham (AUS) v Jayson Margallo (PHI)
Lightweight
Usman Nurmagomedov (RUS) v Roman Golovinov (UKR)
Middleweight
Tarek Suleiman (SYR) v Steve Kennedy (AUS)
Lightweight
Dan Moret (USA) v Anton Kuivanen (FIN)
The%20specs
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Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
Specs
Engine: Duel electric motors
Power: 659hp
Torque: 1075Nm
On sale: Available for pre-order now
Price: On request
Result
Arsenal 4
Monreal (51'), Ramsey (82'), Lacazette 85', 89')
West Ham United 1
Arnautovic (64')
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
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Election pledges on migration
CDU: "Now is the time to control the German borders and enforce strict border rejections"
SPD: "Border closures and blanket rejections at internal borders contradict the spirit of a common area of freedom"
MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League semi-final, first leg
Barcelona v Liverpool, Wednesday, 11pm (UAE).
Second leg
Liverpool v Barcelona, Tuesday, May 7, 11pm
Games on BeIN Sports
