Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy follows one merchant household in the al-Nahhasin quarter of Cairo across roughly thirty years, from the British occupation to the Second World War. At its head stands al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, born around 1870: pious and imposing by day, a connoisseur of singers, lute-players and arak by night. Beneath him sits Amina, his second wife, kept indoors for decades on his orders, and five children who between them carry every argument Egypt was having with itself. The tree is worth reading because the household is the country in miniature.
The marriages set the structure. Ahmad's first wife, Haniyya, was divorced early; their son Yasin, born 1896, grew up in his father's house inheriting his appetites without his discipline. With Amina came Fahmy (1898), Khadija (1900), Aïsha (1902) and Kamal (1905). The two daughters marry two brothers: Khadija takes the mild Ibrahim Shawkat, Aïsha the doomed Khalil. Yasin marries three times: first Zaynab, daughter of Muhammad Iffat and mother of his son Ridwan; then Maryam, the neighbour Fahmy had loved silently; and later Zannuba, the entertainer his own father had pursued, a scandal that makes their daughter Karima a kind of living verdict on the family pattern.
The fractures are generational. Fahmy, a law student and nationalist, defies his father to join the 1919 Revolution and is shot dead by British soldiers at nineteen; the loss never leaves Amina or Kamal, who idolised him. Kamal becomes a secular philosopher, unmarried, permanently wounded by Aïda Shaddad, the upper-class girl who married within her own class. Aïsha loses Khalil and both her sons, Uthman and Muhammad, to typhoid, and withdraws from life entirely; Naïma survives them, only to die in childbirth before she is twenty. In the third generation, Khadija's sons split the difference between faith and revolution: Abd al-Munim (1920) joins the Muslim Brotherhood, Ahmad Shawkat (1922) turns Marxist, and both end in prison. Yasin's son Ridwan makes his way instead through political patronage.
The tree follows the trilogy as Mahfouz published it — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, all three issued in 1956 and 1957 and written in the years before Egypt's 1952 revolution. Mahfouz drew the geography from the Cairo streets he grew up in, naming each volume for one of them, and the Nobel committee cited the work when it gave him the literature prize in 1988. What keeps the genogram legible is its symmetry: a father's hypocrisy reproduced in his eldest son, a martyr's politics reproduced and then torn in half by his nephews.
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