The Harafish

Author's name: Naguib Mahfouz

It tells the ten stories of generations of a family who lived in an Egyptian neighborhood of unknown time and place (it is believed to be in Al-Hussein, at the beginning of the Alawite dynasty in Egypt). The Harafish have been and still are a wonderful subject for Egyptian cinema and television, having appeared in more than one film, including *Harafish*, *The Hunted*, *The Queen's Witness*, *Hunger and Mulberry*, and *Prophethood*, among other things. The three-part Harafish series discusses the philosophy of governance, the succession of rulers, and the role of the people. The Harafish novel does not stray far from the existentialist approach adopted by Naguib Mahfouz in many of his novels, despite its social nature (one character seeks immortality after being overcome by sudden death... and other behaviors in the same vein). The events, details, and characters of the Harafish novel branch out in the reader's mind as well as in the writer's pen, planting many ideas and converging on the idea of ​​the succession of generations, the loss of origins from one generation to the next, and the infiltration of races. Religion is also present in the novel Al-Harafish as a spirit that a person cannot expel from his body despite rebelling against it. It is a novel that contains all of life, takes on all its characteristics, and generously narrates most of the values.