Mudaakara

Picture yourself sitting under the shades of Jami’ al-Azhar, reading The  Thief and Dogs ( اللص والكلاب ) by Najib Mahfouz, feeling the weights of its existential angst and very unusual beauty. If you pay close attention, you might sense a subtle presence of a French philosopher threading through the sentences of Najib Mahfouz. This isn’t a connection most people think of, certainly not myself when I first read Mahfouz’s work at that time, but Henri Bergson’s ideas—about time, free will, and the essence of our lives as lived—played a role we can’t ignore in Najib Mahfouz’s own ideas. Bergson and the conception of time as duration At the core of Bergon’s philosophy lies the concept of la durée , or "duration,” rather than ticking seconds on a clock. Bergon saw time as something we experience in real life, something you can say is almost alive. It’s the kind of time you experience on your first heartbreak or when you fall deeply in love—an internal, personal time free from the ...