أولاد حارتنا

First serialized in Egypt's Al-Ahram in 1959, Naguib Mahfouz's أولاد حارتنا — known in English as Children of the Alley or Children of Gebelawi — retells the moral and religious history of humankind within the walls of a single Cairene alley. The alley is founded by a remote, all-powerful patriarch, Gebelawi, who withdraws behind the walls of his great house, leaving his descendants to quarrel over his estate and his will across the generations.

In each era, the people of the alley are ground down by the futuwwat, the brutal strongmen who seize control and extort them, until a new hero rises to challenge the injustice — figures who echo Adam, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad — only for the cycle of tyranny to begin again. In the final movement, a man of science named Arafa stands in for the modern age and its ambivalent promise.

A landmark of modern Arabic literature by the first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize, the novel's bold allegory of prophecy and religion provoked fierce controversy and bans across the Arab world, and remains one of Mahfouz's most daring and debated works.