FICTION

THE JOURNEY OF IBN FATTOUMA by Naguib Mahfouz, translated from the Egyptian by Denys Johnson-Davies (Doubleday: $20; 160 pp.). The publisher of this short novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, has good reason to note that the book was first published in Arabic in 1983; without that knowledge, the reader might be tempted to see “The Journey of Ibn Fattouma” as a parable inspired by Salman Rushdie’s life on the run. Ibn Fattouma, Mahfouz’s narrator, is nothing like Rushdie in personality, but he is a devout Muslim who becomes a perpetual traveler after his fiancee is appropriated by a powerful politician; disappointed by his own culture, Ibn Fattouma journeys to see his country “in the light of other lands, that I might perhaps be able to say something of benefit to it.” He visits five different countries with as many different political systems, and each turns out to be both less and more than it initially appears. Mashriq is a paternalistic slave state where Ibn Fattouma takes, and then loses, a wife and family; Haira is a theocracy, kind to Fattouma until it imprisons him for blasphemy; Aman is a tyranny, much like the stereotypical communist nation; Halba is a Western democracy, whose freedom reminds Fattouma of anarchy. Ibn Fattouma is essentially a latter-day Gulliver, but Mahfouz is interested in teaching, not satire, so “The Journey of Ibn Fattouma” becomes something of a morality play extolling the virtues of tolerance and understanding. It’s significant that Ibn Fattouma never returns to his homeland, but equally significant that Mahfouz leaves him on the road to Gebel, “the land of perfection” many have heard about but no one has seen.