“Finally I became convinced that I had to find Sheikh Zaabalawi.

The first time I had heard his name had been in a song.”

The narrator begins by announcing his urgent need to find Zaabalawi—the task that occupies the story’s pages. This introduction frames Zaabalawi’s existence as uncertain. By painting him as a song lyric that the narrator seems barely able to remember, Mahfouz gives us a sense of Zaabalawi’s fleetingness. This passage also introduces the important motif of music, which recurs throughout “Zaabalawi.”

“‘Who is Zaabalawi?’ He had looked at me hesitantly as though doubting my ability to understand the answer. However, he had replied, ‘May his blessing descend upon you, he’s a true saint of God, a remover of worries and troubles. Were it not for him I would have died miserably—’” 

Zaabalawi’s identity is a recurring question in the text. Here, the narrator’s father hesitates before he answers, likely because Zaabalawi is not a physical man but rather the personification of spiritual awakening. By providing a more specific answer—that Zaabalawi is a healer—the father has already begun to obscure Zaabalawi’s full significance, and we enter a world of illusion as our narrator’s sense of the world becomes unreliable.

“The days passed and brought with them many illnesses, for each one of which I was able, without too much trouble and at a cost I could afford, to find a cure, until I became afflicted with that illness for which no one possesses a remedy.”

Nostalgia is an important theme in the story, here evidenced by the narrator reflecting on the many illnesses that came with the passage of time. Such a statement suggests that the natural world itself has become colder and less tolerant. The narrator’s encounters bear this out; many of the people the narrator meets disregard him or greet him with outright hostility.