Politics & Power Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

Paranoia and nihilism arrive here as a matched set: the feeling of being hunted is inseparable from the suspicion that the hunt itself is pointless. Mahfouz’s line works because it refuses the comfort of treating fear as merely personal psychology. “Peculiar and persistent” is the tell; this isn’t a single scare but a climate, the kind of low-grade dread that settles into the body when surveillance becomes a social norm. You don’t need to see the pursuer to be pursued. The sentence builds a world where anxiety is rational.

Then comes the sharper blade: “under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.” Mahfouz doesn’t blame fate, or God, or even individual villains. He blames an order, a system that manufactures insignificance. The subtext is bureaucratic power at its most intimate: it doesn’t only threaten your safety, it colonizes your sense of purpose. That “our” matters, too. This isn’t a private confession; it’s collective diagnosis, a portrait of a society trained to doubt its own worth.

Contextually, Mahfouz wrote through Egypt’s violent transitions: monarchy, revolution, Nasser-era authoritarian consolidation, ideological crackdowns, and the everyday compromises required to survive shifting regimes. His fiction often maps how grand political projects filter down into the moral weather of streets, apartments, marriages. The genius of the quote is its double exposure: the state as both predator and meaning-machine, chasing you physically while hollowing you out metaphysically. In that world, to search for meaning becomes a quiet act of resistance.