Daily Inspiration Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

“Insults are the business of the court” lands like a throwaway line until you notice how coldly managerial it is. Mahfouz isn’t describing an occasional lapse in decorum; he’s describing an institution with a job description. The phrase turns cruelty into bureaucracy, suggesting a legal system where humiliation isn’t a bug but a service rendered, as routine as stamping papers.

The subtext is a critique of power dressed up as procedure. Courts are supposed to launder conflict into legitimacy: facts, rules, impartiality. Mahfouz flips that promise by implying the court’s real output is degradation, especially for the weak who come seeking justice and leave with their dignity picked apart. “Business” is the knife. It implies profit, incentives, professionalism - a machine that runs on small violences. The insult isn’t merely personal; it’s structural, produced by clerks, judges, and rituals that demand deference and punish ambiguity.

Context matters: Mahfouz wrote with intimate knowledge of mid-century Egyptian institutions and the postcolonial state’s appetite for performance. In many of his novels, authority presents itself as rational while behaving as arbitrary, and ordinary people learn the bitter etiquette of surviving it. Here, the court becomes theater: the accused is not just tried but chastened; the petitioner is not just heard but reminded of their place.

The line works because it’s compact, cynical, and specific. It doesn’t moralize. It indicts by normalizing the indictment: of course insults are the business - what else would the court be doing?