In Cairo, as in Paris or Krakow or Budapest, life isn’t a cabaret; it’s a café. Whatever their other differences, the café is where Europe and the Near East meet. After all, coffee first came from Arabia — the word is of Arabic origin — and coffee drinking itself arrived in Hungary and Austria in the 16th century on the heels of the invading Ottoman Turks. Coffee and coffee shops spread west, becoming the rage of London and Paris.

Can we imagine Samuel Johnson’s inspired rodomontades or Kafka’s piercing fancies emerging from any other milieu than the café, with its cozy yet hectic ambiance? The caffeinated wits who thronged the rickety little tables in the cafés of London and Prague created a culture all their own. Fueled by coffee, conversation flourished, schemes were paraded and hypotheses hatched — the zanier the better. For the true café isn’t just a refuge from the street; it’s a theater of repartee, a proscenium of opinion, where the talk is as distilled, and sometimes as bittersweet, as an espresso.

The great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who died last August at age 94, took the café as a shifting prism not only of his native Cairo, but of Egyptian society at large during an unusually ugly time in its long history. In his little novel “Karnak Café” (American University in Cairo Press, 110 pages, $19.95), translated for the first time by Roger Allen, Mahfouz, himself a long-time habitué of the Café Riche in Cairo, captures both the privileged intimacy and the hidden horror of the Karnak. This is a place that offers the allure of freedom in a steadily repressive police state. The young intellectuals who frequent it are drawn by their own fervor to dream of a new order of society. They are the “children of the revolution” of 1952, launched by Gamal Nasser; they are full of hope and have yet to learn how unerringly revolution “devours its own children.”

Like much of Mahfouz’s work, this is a caustic novel, laced with harsh ironies and mordant insights. It exposes the dislocations suffered by a whole generation in the wake of what Arabs call al-Naksa — “the setback” — a somewhat disingenuous term for the utter rout and despair occasioned by the Israeli victory of 1967. As Mr. Allen notes in his informative afterword, much enlivened by his own close acquaintance with Mahfouz, “Karnak Café” is one of Mahfouz’s few novels to which he attached a date — December 1971 — as a pointed signal to his readers. But the gesture is superfluous; no reader could miss Mahfouz’s intent.

Like Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” or Victor Serge’s “The Case of Comrade Tulayev,” this fierce yet subtle novel lays bare the worst evil of totalitarian states. The evil lies not solely in the sudden arrests, the interrogations, and tortures, all of which are conveyed in stammered disclosures in “Café Karnak” — a device that gives them the impact of testimony — but in the way in which state terror contaminates its victims. Friendship becomes suspect and love is riddled with mistrust. In the characters of Qurunfula, the retired dancer who runs the café (and whose name means “clove,” a fragrant but biting spice), the young dreamers Isma’il and Zaynab, as well as the sinister Khalid Safwan, we witness the relentless extinction of hope.

In other hands this novel might have become a tract. Although every page smolders with justified fury, Mahfouz was above mere denunciation. His loving descriptions of the Karnak, with its passionate and enigmatic proprietress — every café worthy of the name must have a lady with a past — together with his self-effacement before his characters, each of whom speaks in turn to the unnamed narrator, push the novel beyond simplistic categories. (Mahfouz wrote screenplays in addition to some 40 novels and in his evocation of the café there are even sly allusions to such films as “Casablanca.”)

Mahfouz was outspokenly political — he was courageous enough to support Anwar Sadat and the Camp David Accords publicly — but here, despite savage indignation, it is his characters who concern him most profoundly. His artistry is revealed in his final chapter when the villain of the story, the atrocious Khalid Safwan, enters Café Karnak and, in a twist worthy of Dostoevsky, finds a seat alongside those he once tortured.

This is a novel of voices and though utterly contemporary, carries a heavy burden of the past. The earliest Arabic prose narratives drew on fantastic dialogues, and the tales of “Thousand and One Nights,” compiled in Mamluk Cairo, echo with voices whispered in the face of death. Although Mahfouz’s young idealists reject the past, even the name of their café evokes the immemorial Egyptian past. The temple complex of Karnak at Luxor — once ancient Thebes — dates from the 16th century B.C.E. But in Cairo, Mahfouz suggests, the humblest café can lift momentary colonnades, even if formed only of voices.