The Holy Cord

He was in his cloak and fez, truly resembling a monk... this was how he dressed at home, and perhaps this appearance suited his life, that quiet life among books and papers, stagnant as ink in an inkwell!... For the first time in his life, he realized that a man of literature has a mission similar to that of a religious man! He had always written describing this similarity, but he did not believe it was a reality until today. The monk of thought, that ascetic worshiper who is not preoccupied with worldly pleasures and spends his life in his office immersed in reading and writing, suddenly finds his life invaded by a married woman claiming she wants to learn literature and master it at his hands, which becomes a reason to scratch his private world and his personal life, and entangle him in a series of events that make him question the nature of that eternal sacred bond. Is it the bond between the writer and his thought? Or the bond of marriage? Or the bond between a father and his son? Or perhaps a bond of another kind? One of the most famous novels of Tawfiq Al-Hakim and among the most philosophical in its questions, written in his charming and captivating style, in which he addresses the eternal conflict between the soul and the body, the freedom of men and women, and the restrictions imposed by societies on the "sacred bond."