Cairo

  From an initial wary respect, relations between occupier and occupied soon deteriorated. The Ottoman sultan, Egypt’s nominal suzerain, not only denied complicity with the Franks but actually dispatched armies to chase them off his turf. Napoleon trounced the Turks on land but fared less well against the British Navy. Within two weeks of France’s victory at the Battle of the Pyramids, Admiral Nelson had sunk most of the French fleet, stranding the grand Army of the Orient in Egypt. Cut off from supplies, reinforcements, and, most important, cash, Napoleon resorted to desperate means to raise funds. It was this, more than the shame of being subjected to rule by the infidel, more than the urgings of the Mameluke beys conducting a guerrilla war in the South, that provoked uprisings in Cairo.

  The first of these broke out within six months of the conquest. When the French decreed a range of summary taxes on property in October 1798, rabble-rousing clerics—“those lacking foresight,” in al-Jabarti’s words—preached holy war. Mobs shouted for the victory of Islam and attacked the invaders with whatever weapons came to hand. The French suffered 300 casualties in two days of rioting. Their response was to shell the city continually for an entire afternoon, concentrating on the Mosque of al-Azhar. At night they stormed into the shell-shocked streets and, to the horror of the sheikhs, charged into the ancient mosque on horseback and sacked it. “When morning unsheathed the sword of dawn and the black raven of darkness flew from its perch,” says al-Jabarti, the foreigners were again in charge of the city. Some 3,000 Cairenes had perished.

  France’s Army of the Orient endured two more years. Disease and a futile campaign against the Turks in Palestine sapped its numbers. Napoleon ratted out, leaving his army to fend for itself in Egypt while he himself sneaked back to Paris to pursue his career. Rather than embrace fraternité, Cairo again rose in revolt, in 1801. This time the French lost control for five full weeks, and only clawed their way back with a bombardment that flattened whole districts. When the guns stopped firing, the port of Bulaq, the pleasure quarter of Azbakiyya, and the working-class neighborhood of Husayniyya were smashed into rubble.*3

  In the end it was not the people of Cairo and not the tired old Ottoman sultanate that chased away the infidel. A British force landed at Alexandria. Too exhausted to put up much fight against its technological equal, the Army of the Orient came to terms. It was allowed to withdraw peacefully. On July 15, 1801, the last French troops marched away from Cairo. They left the city morally as well as physically battered. They had shaken Cairo’s complacency; punctured its self-esteem.

  IN THE WINTER of 1841 a Frenchman by the name of Gérard Labrunie arrived in Cairo. The illegitimate son of a Napoleonic officer, he was a man of melancholic disposition and fervid imagination. To readers in France he would be better known as a romantic poet and by his pen name: Gérard de Nerval.

  Nerval was in mourning. His mistress, a demimondaine of the Paris stage, had just died of consumption. His career as a pamphleteer was adrift. The exotic air of Cairo, he thought, would cure his spleen. The lonely Parisian also pined for Oriental romance, it seems, because he endured slaps and rebuffs from quite a few veiled women of Cairo. One day he courted danger by trailing a giggling pair of hooded ladies halfway across the city. With a last coy glance they vanished into a doorway. The foiled voyeur shrugged. But then a manservant appeared in the door, signaling with downward flicks of his hand for Nerval to enter. The Frenchman nearly swooned in anticipation of a scene from the Porter’s Tale in The Thousand and One Nights, a story in which a humble delivery boy is inveigled by a lady client into a night of erotic revelry.

  But nothing here was quite what it seemed. The veiled houris, it transpired, were themselves French, and had set out on purpose to tease their countryman. They offered nothing more than a polite tea.

  Nerval was obliged to resort to the slave market. To his delight, the salesmen proved accommodating. They undressed their wares, opened their mouths to show off their teeth, made them prance up and down, and took particular care in showing off the elasticity of their breasts. For twenty-five pounds Nerval purchased an eighteen-year-old Javanese girl who, he was told, had been captured by Indian Ocean corsairs and sold at Mecca. Her thrilled new owner hired a donkey to transport the prize to his rented lodgings. The romance ended there. Far from being a pliant concubine, the girl proved a terrible burden. Bored, pouting and petulant, she refused to cook or clean.

  Nerval draws a veil of discretion over their more intimate affairs. What he does concede is that he was soon plotting to get rid of her. But at the merest hint of being set free, she stamped her foot. “Free?” she scoffed—and one wonders in what language that Nerval understood—“And what do you expect me to do? And where am I to go?”

  Given such frustrations, it was hardly surprising that her master should pronounce the city of The Thousand and One Nights a disappointment. “Cairo lies beneath ashes and dust,” he wrote; “the spirit and the progress of the modern age have triumphed over it like death.” Only the growing colony of Europeans seemed to Nerval to show signs of liveliness. Indeed, the foreign shopkeepers whose welfare had so concerned Napoleon were doing very nicely. A bustling Frankish quarter had sprung up west of the Old City, rising from the ruins of bomb-damaged Azbakiyya. Aside from Castagnol’s pharmacy and an English tavern selling madeira, port, and ale, rows of glass-fronted shops displayed the manufactures of Manchester and Mannheim at prices that were bankrupting local industries. Cairo even boasted a European theater where the ladies appeared unveiled. But most appalling of all, in the eyes of the thwarted romantic, were the bizarre apparitions now commonly seen trotting through the native city.

  Picture, writes Nerval, a gentleman mounted on a donkey, with long legs trailing to the ground. His round headdress, “which is half a mattress and half a hat,” is adorned with a thick quilting of white cotton piqué to fend off the sun. Under his green dustproof veil he wears two pairs of tinted goggles framed in blue steel. His India-rubber outer garment is coated with waxed linen—a safeguard against the plague and the chance touch of the passerby. “In his gloved hand he clutches a long stick to swat away any suspicious Arab, and as a rule he never goes out without having his own groom on one side and his dragoman on the other.”

  This creature, the tourist, is suddenly ubiquitous. To Europeans far less adventurous than Gérard de Nerval, Cairo has become as routine a destination as Baden-Baden. Steam packets ply the Nile. Memsahibs on their way “out” to India enjoy the starched bed linens of Mr. Shepheard’s English Hotel until the semaphore signal from Suez announces the arrival of the regular Bombay steamer. Then their well-sprung coach will follow a trail of soda-water corks across the desert to the Red Sea port—corks left, no doubt, by those heeding one British guidebook’s tip that travelers should ease the overnight journey with “two dozen bottles each of sherry, brandy and water.”

  A few years before, visitors to the Pyramids had been obliged to hire guards to scare off Bedouin bandits. Now the ancient site was firmly policed; an enterprising compatriot of Nerval’s had even turned a pharaonic tomb into a fancy restaurant. An alarmed Yankee described arriving at the Sphinx in the 1840s and being charged by tattered villagers wielding clubs; but the clubs were for beating off competitors—the other hawkers of mummy beads and jars of water for the tourists whose strange passion it was to scramble heavenward and plant their conquering feet on the summit of Cheops’s sepulcher. When Nerval himself was hoisted and propelled by a team of four native jockeys to the top of the Great Pyramid, he found there, among the multiplying graffiti rudely scratched in the ancient limestone, “some merchant of Piccadilly’s advertisement for improved patented bootblack.”

  WHAT HAD HAPPENED was this: Shortly after France’s Army of the Orient bailed out, Cairo had been commandeered by a renegade Ottoman officer called Muhammad Ali. Captaining a band of Albanian mercenaries sent to resecure Egypt for the sultan, Muhammad Ali had instead intrigued to toss the freshly installed Ottoman governor out of the Citadel. He knew
full well that the sultan in far-off Constantinople was too deeply entangled in domestic woes and wars with Russia to care. Having little choice but to accept the coup, the sultan recognized this impetuous vassal as his viceroy in Egypt.

  In 1807 Muhammad Ali’s Albanians fought off an ill-planned British invasion, and celebrated famously by spiking several hundred Inglīz heads around Cairo. Soon after, and with gangland panache, the viceroy finished off the last potential threat to his hold. He invited all the remaining Mameluke grandees of Egypt to a banquet in the Citadel. Having eaten their fill, the 24 chieftains and their 400 armed and mounted slave retainers descended in single file down the steep, narrow passage to the fortress’s lower gate. The Albanians slammed the doors shut and drilled the trapped horsemen with bullets. Cairene myth has it that one bey escaped by leaping over the ramparts on his charger. The tale does not explain whether he survived the subsequent extermination of 3,000 more Mamelukes who were hunted down in the streets of the city.

  With his position now unchallengeable, Muhammad Ali executed one of the greatest land grabs in history. He confiscated the feudal farms of the Mameluke grandees, and soon afterward stripped Cairo’s religious institutions of their 600,000 prime acres of waqf landholdings. Accustomed to financial security and high social standing, the great mosques and law colleges of the city—including al-Azhar itself—found themselves scrounging for sustenance along with the stray cats whose thirteenth-century endowment would now no longer provide a daily meal in front of the residence of the chief cadi.

  At a stroke Muhammad Ali had decapitated Cairo’s medieval order. The stifling power of both the beys and the clerics was finished. Egypt had become the viceroy’s private plantation; and this new master, unlike his predecessors, was a man of vision as well as ambition. Born in Thrace in 1769, Muhammad Ali had grown up in the polyglot and increasingly westward-looking city of Salonica. Experience in soldiering had made him fully aware of the Ottoman Empire’s relative backwardness. And so, with roughshod disregard for niceties or precedent, he set out to remodel Egypt in the shape of the disciplined European armies he so admired.

  With the help of French advisers—many of them former officers in Napoleon’s army—Muhammad Ali made wrenching changes. He ordered wide-scale planting of a new strain of cotton, which was to be the cash crop that would fuel economic revival. He broke with 2,000 years of tradition by forcibly drafting native Egyptians both for his army and for vast public works projects. He reorganized the government into bureaus staffed with salaried officials who were promoted on the basis of merit. He instituted the first secular schools in Cairo, and began to send Egyptians abroad to learn European languages and sciences.

  The building of canals brought a million new acres under cultivation and speeded the export of cotton. The cotton made Egypt—or rather its master—rich, and thrust the country into the gears of global trade and finance. The French-trained army brought advances of another kind. On behalf of the Ottoman sultan it defeated a fundamentalist insurgency in Arabia and an insurrection in Greece.*4 On Muhammad Ali’s personal account it conquered the Sudan, and then, to the impotent sultan’s discomfort, began to chip away at the Ottomans’ own domains. By the 1830s the viceroy of Egypt’s realm was more extensive than the fifteenth-century Mameluke sultanate: the provinces of Sudan, Hijaz (including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina), Syria, Palestine, and even—briefly—half of the Turkish homelands of Anatolia had fallen under Muhammad Ali’s control. His son Ibrahim led a brilliant campaign that brought the model Egyptian Army to within a few hundred miles of Constantinople. The upstart was challenging the very existence of the Ottoman Empire.

  Muhammad Ali had become a major player. His mistake was to table his cards too soon for the rough and novel game of geopolitics. Fearing that Russia would exploit the weakness of the Ottomans to make a lunge at the Mediterranean, Britain and France intervened with their fleets. With his army now in danger of being cut off in Syria, the viceroy bowed to European strength. He agreed to pull back. In exchange the Ottoman sultan granted Muhammad Ali what he really wanted: a permanent title to the viceroyalty for his descendants.

  Nominally, Egypt remained a province of the Ottoman Empire. But Cairo was once again a capital city, the seat of a dynasty.

  GÉRARD DE NERVAL may have been a fine poet, but he was also a terrible Jeremiah. (Ten years after returning to France he went mad and hanged himself.) Cairo had not yet changed as drastically as he said. Leaving aside the Frankish frills of the Azbakiyya quarter and a modest clutch of factory chimneys by the port of Bulaq—and ignoring the bulbous new mock-Ottoman mosque atop the Citadel, where Muhammad Ali Pasha was buried—at the viceroy’s death in 1849 the city looked little different from half a century before. True, it had been tidied and made secure from bandits. Streets had been labeled, numbered, and cleared of obstructions. The mountainous piles of accumulated rubbish outside the walls had mostly been leveled. Yet a very different Cairo from Nerval’s emerges from the writings of his English near-contemporary Edward Lane.

  Lane had given up a career as an engraver to learn Arabic. He arrived in Cairo in 1825, and for twenty-four years he studied the city, its language and traditions with passionate single-mindedness. His encyclopedic Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was a pioneering work in social anthropology. It still stands out as a uniquely thorough and objective portrayal of an essentially medieval city—down to the details of such things as child-rearing practices, magic, music, dress, and table manners. In Lane’s view the impact of change had reached no further than the ruling elite. “Some Egyptians who had studied for a few years in France declared to me that they could not instill any of the notions which they had there acquired even into the minds of their most intimate friends,” he wrote. “European customs have not yet begun to spread among the Egyptians themselves; but they probably will ere long; and in the expectation that this will soon be the case, I have been most anxious to become well acquainted…with the state of society which has existed…for many centuries, and which many persons have deemed almost immutable.”

  Like Lane, other Europeans were driven to capture what they knew was a world that was bound to vanish. Artists such as the Frenchman Prisse d’Avennes, the Scot David Roberts, and the Englishman Robert Hay found Cairo an incomparable source of the exotic. Writing to his daughter in the winter of 1839, Roberts painted this picture of his labors: “The narrow, crowded streets make it difficult to do drawings, for in addition to the curiosity of the Arabs, you run the risk of being squeezed to a mummy by the loaded camels, who, although they are picturesque in appearance, are ugly customers to jostle.” His grand architectural views of the city, widely reproduced in lithographs, were largely responsible for the popularization of Orientalism in Western art—a movement that would not fade entirely until Hollywood’s Sinbad films of the 1940s.

  Cairo was still a place where the European imagination could wander unrestrained by the conventions of the times. Gustave Flaubert, a more famous man of letters than Nerval, was thrilled by the city’s charms. Never mind if the viceroy had banished all the whores of the Bab el Luq quarter, he wrote to friends in Paris: the rest of the town was an open-air bal masqué. The visitor could wind up his turban, frolic in fancy Moorish robes, recline with his hookah on a divan, and drink in the sounds of the Orient. “The little bells on the dromedaries are tinkling in your ears, and great flocks of black goats are making their way along the street, bleating at the horses, the donkeys, and the merchants,” he lyricized in the winter of 1850. “There is jostling, there is argument, there are blows, there is rolling about, there is swearing of all kinds, there is shouting in a dozen languages. The raucous Semitic syllables clatter in the air like the sound of a whiplash…it is delightful.”

  Flaubert devoured this rich meal with gusto. He wandered the bazaars, had himself massaged in the Turkish baths, and sailed up the Nile to the great temples of Upper Egypt. There he dallied at last with a certain Kuchuk Hanem, a da
ncer exiled from Cairo. It may have been she who gave him the syphilis that shortened his life.

  Yet Nerval was not entirely wrong. At midcentury Cairo had indeed changed. It was just that the deeper shifts were subtle ones. European attitudes had begun to impress themselves. Whereas a visitor in 1820 had been struck by the clash between the “squalid wretchedness” of the Egyptians and the “external splendor” of the ruling class of Turks, now a new breed of native Cairene had begun to flourish. Teachers, bureaucrats, and engineers—these effendis, as they were known—had been trained by foreign instructors in the secular schools Muhammad Ali had established. They had read the scientific texts translated at his Institute of Languages and printed at his press. Some had studied, at the viceroy’s expense, in the distant capitals of Europe. The effendis not only worked behind desks in nameplated offices, they not only ate with knives and forks, they also wore coats and trousers, and occasionally tinted glasses against the sun, too. A few even drank alcohol. They scorned superstition and frowned on such practices as slavery. What was exotic to Flaubert was backwardness to them. They dreamed the European dream of Progress.

  Under their influence the pace of change began to accelerate. Telegraph and railroad networks spread. Regular train services linked Cairo to the Mediterranean in 1854, before such countries as Sweden and Japan had even begun to lay tracks. The poll tax on non-Muslims, which had lapsed in 1815, was officially abolished. Christian missionaries were allowed to practice. With the legal privileges for their nationals that the European powers extorted from the supine court in Constantinople,*5 these openings made Cairo a magnet for foreign fortune hunters. Carpetbaggers flocked from all over the Mediterranean: Levantine Christians and Jews fleeing persecution; Greek and Italian tradesmen, merchants, and moneylenders.