Amina and the Breaking of the Secular Silence: Revisiting The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

Following critiques of secularism, feminist theory and literary analysis, this article revisits the much interpreted yet never exhausted Arabic masterpiece, the Cairo Trilogy (1956-1957), by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006). The Cairo Trilogy depicts the lives of the middle-class 'Abd al-Jawad family in colonial Cairo during the interwar period amidst the process of modernization and national uprising against British colonial domination. Scholars have considered the relations in the Jawadi family through a patriarchal lens via the perspective of the son Kamal, the protagonist who represents the secular Arab intellectual. This study, instead, follows Amina, the mother of the family, and her relationship to her two sons, Kamal and Fahmy, to explore the different options and various relations between the religious and the secular in this colonial context. By reading the Jawadi family this way, this article uncovers the orientalist-secular construction of religion and religious ways of resistance despite colonial disruptions.