al-Insan wa-l-Zill

Al-Insan wa-l-Zill ("Man and the Shadow") is a play in two acts by the Egyptian writer Mostafa Mahmoud; the copy used here is the second edition from Dar al-Ma'arif ^{4 5}. Its dialogue is in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, and it turns on a judge and his conscience.

By the cast list: the judge Rahmi Sa'udi, aged fifty; his wife Kawthar, thirty-five; Tawfiq, a lawyer and Kawthar's cousin; the judge's mother; Fadl al-Sharqawi, a defendant sentenced to death; the court usher; a postman; and "other defendants sentenced to death in earlier judgements and hanged" ¹.

In the prologue Rahmi pronounces the death sentence on Fadl al-Sharqawi; a woman in the courtroom cries that he is innocent, while al-Sharqawi himself shouts that he did kill the man and would kill him again if he saw him ². The first act moves to the judge's house, where his mother and wife complain that Rahmi "has changed" ^{6 7}. Rahmi sees people his mother cannot see, and asks her whether God exists; she answers that He is "the most merciful of the merciful" ^{8 9}. The second act brings out his crisis with his wife and with Tawfiq, who tells him he never tried to understand her and sits with case files more than with her ^{10 11}.

At the end Rahmi stands accused before a court presided over by al-Sharqawi and the executed, which rules that he be released and handed to his family; the guard says the accused "has no family", and al-Sharqawi rules: "Then let him be handed over to his conscience" ³. The court vanishes and Rahmi is left alone, looking for a door that will not open; then his mother's face appears, young again, telling him "no one dies, my son", and the play ends with his cry: "There is no end" ^{12 13}.

• Citations use PDF page numbers; printed page = PDF page − 2.
• The edition is undated, and the deposit number is illegible in the OCR.
• The edition ends with a list of the author's books and a note on the 1970 State Prize for the novel Rajul taht al-sifr ^{14 15}.