The Journey of Ibn Fattouma

This book is written by the leading Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. It is a short but important work. The Journey... is set in a mythical, timeless Middle East, and yet based on a classic of Western literature: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The story shows the challenges of exile, following a trip by a young Koranic scholar, Ibn Fattouma, who is disappointed in...more

This book is written by the leading Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. It is a short but important work. The Journey... is set in a mythical, timeless Middle East, and yet based on a classic of Western literature: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The story shows the challenges of exile, following a trip by a young Koranic scholar, Ibn Fattouma, who is disappointed in love and disillusioned with his own country -- as is the case of many young people in the Middle East. Ibn is travelling as a way of finding the true meaning of life. He joins a caravan and sets out to explore the world, his ultimate destination the enigmatic land of Gebel, where perfection, truth, and happiness prevail. Ibn Fattouma finds, to his surprise, that many of the countries he visits, though heathen, are in some ways superior to his own. His first stop results in marriage to a non-believer. However, war with another country and a clash with a city official cause him to lose his family, and he is forced to leave. In another country he is imprisoned because he is accused of crimes against the state. Civil war frees him, and he continues his journey, always seeking an insubstantial truth he is never able to find, always vulnerable to the winds of social and political change. Finally, he joins a caravan bound for Gebel -- a country so distant and mysterious that no one has ever been known to reach it and return to tell the tale. I enjoyed every chapter of this book that reveals the vast differences in the cultural assumptions between East and West.   hide