The Art of Living: Bergsonian Lens in Najib Mahfouz’s Novels

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 rigidity of seconds and hours.

Najib Mahfouz, who made his novels full of multifaceted characters, came in aware of this; it gave him a perspective to explore lives marked by being lost, very intense passions, and by the flow of memory and being stuck in the past. Mahfouz a lot of the time intertwined narratives that go through the character’s inner lives and memories as though the present and past were coexisting. Through characters like Said Mahran in The Thief and the Dogs, Mahfouz presents individuals caught up in their emotions, trapped between grief and the horribly haunting present, lost in their deep inner world—a situation Bergson would have understood deeply.

Intuition Over Intellect

Like Ibn Taymiyyas’s ideas on Fitra, Bergson also argued that life can’t be understood with pure logic and reason alone. He championed intuition as a means for finding and understanding truths that pure reason could not reach. In other words, the dimensions of life, melodies, and the depth of human suffering are not something that could be understood with pure logic.

These ideas on intuition resonated deeply with Najib Mahfouz’s deeply spiritual view of life. While Bergson’s vital impulse was perhaps philosophical, in Mahfouz’s hands, as the man who wanted to write philosophy for the common folk, it became poetic, almost sufi-like, that touched on the mystery of life. In The Child of the Alley, Mahfouz intertwines themes of spirituality and mysticism, revealing Qahira’s hidden spiritual life, much like how Bergson would argue that intuition reveals hidden layers of reality.

Free will and determinism

Bergson, unlike many thinkers of his time, believed in free will—a free will rooted in our experience of time as something fluid and alive. Life, in this view, is open-minded, unpredictable, and not entirely bound by causality. This belief allowed for freedom that isn’t mechanical or entirely bound by past choices. For him, each moment offers us the potential to act, to shape ourselves and our future in a way that isn’t bound by the past.

Mahfouz’s characters often struggle with the idea of taking control from the restriction of social and political forces in Egyptian society. In Midaq Alley, characters like Hamida are caught in this struggle between the pull of tradition and the drive towards a future they can’t fully grasp or control. Like Bergson, Mahfouz shows us this journey of self-discovery is uncertain, a process shaped by our choices and by forces we may not fully understand. Yet within this ambiguity lies beauty: the bittersweet beauty of human life, as Mahfouz saw it, where hope, betrayal, and redemption intermingle unpredictability.

A shared vision of life’s beauty

Though these two philosophers belong to different worlds, they both shared a commitment to searching life’s most profound questions. Their work reminds us that life is not a fixed, measurable event but an unfolding mystery and beauty.

And in reading Mahfouz through a Bergsonian lens, perhaps we see a little more clearly why his novels feel so timeless. Like Bergson’s philosophy, they speak to something deeply and universally human—a search for meaning in the fluid, unpredictable journey that we call life.