Return of the soul

Author's name: Tawfiq Al-Hakim

It was never just a novel with some events taking place in a house full of characters with unique characteristics, nor was it a love story centered around that delicate young neighbor and all the longing, yearning, flirting and flirting that revolved around her and everything in between. Rather, this novel, written by the pioneer of romanticism, Tawfiq al-Hakim, was a novel about an entire people represented by the members of that family, brought together by the same scene at its beginning and end. A people united around one thing, gathered around it and enveloped by the spirit of the crowd until it became a single, indivisible and inseparable individual. It was also a "family" novel that represented the characteristics of the Egyptian people when they went through an ordeal, just as a people goes through a stage of labor they experienced in 1919 AD, giving birth to a single body to which the spirit returned and permeated all its members without exception. And as the family coalesced, it joined the people, and everyone gathered around a single deity, as has been the custom since the dawn of history, as we have seen in many scenes that traverse the length and breadth of history and life. Starting from the words and lines of the Book of the Dead of the ancient Egyptians, and in the image of the peasants in their blue galabiyas like the sky around the wheat ears, and even the faces of the Egyptians gathered around their leader “Saad Zaghloul”, always and in all the scenes they become all in one, the ordeal brings them together and the spirit takes possession of them again when they find the deity. It is the masterpiece of “Tawfiq Al-Hakim” that inhabits the pages of this book, taking us to that historical period with its feelings, flying with us in heavens that are much more welcoming than just reading it as a historical event and about it the memory of days, but rather it presents to us in its lines a deep depiction of the Egyptian person represented in the individual, in the family and in the people.