The city also attracted distinguished European professionals. The French physician Clot Bey founded Cairo’s first modern hospital and medical school in the 1820s, and instituted basic public health services which were considered a model of their kind, including a nationwide network of trained midwives. It was at Clot Bey’s hospital that the German scientist Dr. Theodor Bilharz discovered the life cycle of schistosomiasis, a debilitating disease endemic to Egypt, in 1853. The Palermo-born Onofrio Abbate arrived in Cairo in 1846 and stayed on for sixty years—excepting a return to Sicily in 1860 to join the victorious Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Redshirts on their march to unify Italy. (Abbate was a staunch republican—he even named his son Washington.) Aside from being chief physician to Egypt’s rulers, Abbate published research into such variegated topics as the anaesthetic properties of cocaine and the transmission of rabies among street dogs. He accumulated state decorations from Brazil, Hawaii, and Bavaria as well as Turkey and Egypt. The French archaeologist Auguste Mariette not only founded the Egyptian Museum but also was one of the first antiquarians to introduce scientific methods of excavation. In 1854 his compatriot Ferdinand de Lesseps inspired the viceroy with the vision of a Cairo that would once again control the greatest trading route in the world: work began on a sea canal across the Isthmus of Suez.
Along with the effendis, these khawagāt*6 began to impress their needs. Together they formed a prospering ruling class that demanded plate-glass windows and balconies instead of wooden screens, carriages instead of donkeys, staged artifice rather than bazaar storytellers, servants not slaves. They required modern laws and means of communication, running water and paved streets. Under the constant gaze of these people who saw the old city as a picturesque anachronism, Cairo grew uncomfortable in its skin.
WHILE THE CIVIL War raged in the United States, momentous events overtook Egypt. An Englishman named John Hanning Speke discovered the source of the White Nile in 1862. A new viceroy assumed the throne at Cairo. The value of Egypt’s cotton sales quadrupled in a single year when the Union fleet blocked Confederate harbors. The effect of the windfall was to delude the new ruler, Muhammad Ali’s French-educated grandson Ismail, that he was rich enough to turn Egypt into France, Cairo into Paris, and his court into Versailles. Egged on by European banks who stampeded to offer credit, Ismail spent and spent.
The khedive—for this was the grand title Ismail acquired by means of a hefty bribe to Constantinople—was in a hurry. He was planning the biggest party the world had ever seen. For the opening of the Suez Canal he was determined that his capital should be a showcase, a seat fit for royal European guests. It required open squares adorned with heroic statues, and gas-lit avenues lined with palaces and villas. It needed parks with grottos and Chinese pavilions and pleasure lakes rippled by pedal boats. It simply had to have a comedy theater and an opera house, a museum and library, and learned institutes like the Khedivial Geographical Society.
And so, until the debts were called in, the great one- by two-mile tract of land between Cairo and the Nile became a vast building site. Roads with sidewalks were laid. Plots were given to any person who would spend not less than £2,000 on a villa and finish it within eighteen months. Concessions were granted—to a certain Charles Le Bon—for municipal gas and water. Monsieur Barillet-Deschamps, the chief landscaper for the city of Paris and whom Ismail had met at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, was hired to landscape the Azbakiyya district into a municipal park on the model of the French capital’s Bois de Boulogne.
As for the city’s medieval core, it was simply ignored except for two cannon-shot-straight carriageways driven through its core. It might have suffered worse: Ali Pasha Mubarak, Ismail’s energetic minister of public works, was all for tearing down the great funerary mosques. To him they were simply painful reminders of Mameluke oppression. “We no longer want to preserve such memories,” Mubarak declared, “we want to destroy them as the French did the Bastille.” He actually said this later, in 1881, but the intent was there. He was stopped by yet another modernizing innovation: the conservationist lobby.
The canal’s inauguration in 1869 was a triumph for Ismail. Europe’s nobs and nabobs migrated to Cairo en masse for the occasion. The crown prince of Prussia, Prince Louis of Hesse, Henry of the Netherlands, and a trail of other luminaries trundled through the new streets in a flotilla of sumptuous landaus. The khedive, being a great ladies’ man, was conspicuously attentive to Empress Eugénie of France.*7 The residential and guest palaces, the cast-iron bridge over the Nile flanked by bronze lions, the Opera House, and landscaped parks were in place. So “civilized” was Cairo that it had actually become the center of Egypt’s own vast colonial empire. In his bid to compete with the Great Powers, Ismail had hired ex-Confederate American officers—then the most experienced military professionals available—to lead his army deep into Africa. The slice of territory they had carved out by 1870 was half the size of the United States, making Egypt’s empire the largest in Africa at the time. The European explorers sponsored by Ismail had mapped and described the whole of the Nile basin, which for the first time in history had fallen almost entirely under Egyptian rule.
Long after the festival flags came down, Ismail’s Cairo enjoyed many a splendid occasion. The khedive was keen to surround himself with sparkling company. With an official salary double that of Queen Victoria’s, he could afford to lavish stipends on assorted down-at-the-heels royalty. One such was the Contessa della Sala, who was to remain a fixture of Cairo society for thirty years. She had married a dour Russian nobleman, whom her lover, a handsome Austrian count, fortuitously killed in a duel at Saqqara. She was famed for her wit: when a performing Indian fakir’s loincloth slipped at one party, she broke the embarrassed silence by chirruping, “Ne vous inquietez pas. Ce ne sont que des bronzes!”*8 In later years the contessa liked to regale friends with tales of the khedive’s Trimalchian extravagance, such as the production of Aïda at his opera house in which genuine Ethiopian slaves numbered among the 3,000 performers.*9 The effigies of ancient gods required for the opera’s grand processional march were real ones, purloined for the occasion from Mariette’s museum. At the banquet afterward in Ismail’s new 500-room, 24-acre Italianate palace at Abdine, six of the sultriest dancing girls were borne into the dining hall on gold platters, garnished with custard. Or so the contessa claimed.
Ismail’s energy was not all wasted on fun. Under his rule 5,000 schools opened, giving Egypt a better state education system than, say, czarist Russia had at the time. Egypt’s networks of railways and irrigation canals expanded by 10,000 miles each. Ismail created a parliament and codified laws on the Napoleonic model: in the view of the effendis, Islamic Sharia was simply too cumbersome to deal with the modern world of affairs. Ismail welcomed immigrants, allowing them to own land, and creating a special foreigners’ court to replace the tangle of consular jurisdictions bequeathed by the Capitulations. Some newcomers were to have a lasting influence. Syrian Christians, such as the Takla brothers, who founded the daily newspaper Al Ahram in 1876, were to pioneer Arab journalism.*10 The fortunes of Egypt’s native minorities also improved. Reforms greatly increased the amount of land in private ownership, and for the first time in a millennium Egypt’s landed aristocracy was to include a large number of Coptic Christians. Non-Muslims were well served indeed by Ismail: in 1872 no fewer than 486 retailers of wine and spirits competed for custom in Cairo.
The khedive also abolished the slave trade. Admittedly, the move was halfhearted; Ismail’s own favorite concubine, a Circassian named Nesedil who owned her own magnificent palace outside the city, was allowed to keep her staff of eighty Caucasian and Abyssinian slaves. Ownership of eunuchs remained a status symbol for the upper classes into the early twentieth century. Yet Cairo’s slave population—estimated at some 12,000 in the 1850s—did dwindle away. Sadly, what Gérard de Nerval’s Javanese purchase had probably feared came true: most freed slave girls ended up as prostitutes, joining a growing class of Cairenes who f
Ismail’s liberality bore other dreadful costs. When his lavish spending overtook revenues from cotton, his creditors sealed their grip on Egypt’s future. Even as peasants were taxed to destitution, the khedive’s Paris and London bankers bided their time, cranking the interest on successive loans to outrageous heights. In 1878 Egypt’s debt stood—by their sleight-of-hand accounting—at a whopping £100 million, an amount then equivalent to ten years of cotton exports and far surpassing, in relative terms, the debt burden of any developing country in the late twentieth century. Having mortgaged his own properties—not even Cairo’s Opera House was spared—Ismail was obliged to sell the family silver. Egypt’s share in the Suez Canal was knocked down to Britain for a paltry £4 million, a sum the waterway was soon earning in annual revenues.
Still the creditors pressed. When the khedive refused to surrender his finances to foreign controllers, they called in their chips. The Ottoman sultan, a debtor himself to the same gang of usurers, was arm-twisted into firing off a telegram addressed to “the ex-khedive of Egypt.” Despised by his overtaxed subjects, Ismail sailed obediently into exile in 1879. He left the throne to his milksop son Tawfiq, who happily abandoned the hot potato of Egypt’s finances to a cabal of foreign accountants. From that point on, half of Egypt’s revenue was to be siphoned into European banks.
Cairo boiled with indignation—not for love of Ismail, but out of wounded pride. Effendis joined with clerics and soldiers to protest against European interference and privilege. Orators expounded terms never heard before in Arabic: “liberty,” “tyranny,” “the Egyptian people,” “nationalism.” The weak new khedive seesawed. One day he supported the nationalist army officers, who were led for the first time not by a Turk but by a native Egyptian colonel, Ahmad Urabi. The next day he cravenly pleaded for European intervention. As Cairo grew more impassioned, the foreign powers blustered and sent their fleets to Alexandria. Events began to spin out of control. Native xenophobes rioted in the port city. European newspapers howled at their “Oriental savagery.” Soon after, British ships destroyed Alexandria with a bombardment of astounding ferocity. Colonel Urabi became a national hero overnight. Khedive Tawfiq sped offshore to the safety of the Royal Navy.
To European powers at the starting line of their race to colonize the world, it was unthinkable that so rich a prize as Egypt—straddling as it now did the world’s most vital waterway—be left to a rabble-rousing dictator. Intervention was inevitable; the only question was who was to intervene. At the last minute France balked, so it was a solely British force that marched to fight Urabi. At Tel al-Kabir, fifty miles northeast of Cairo, its Gatling guns cut the Egyptian army to pieces. Khedive Tawfiq returned to his capital under British escort. On October 30, 1882—by which date some 30,000 “rebels” were interned in desert camps—the second European army in less than a century paraded through the stunned city.
* * *
*1 A year later, the society will host Stanley himself in Cairo and hear of how, at the end of the grueling 1,000-mile march to the safety of the coast, Emin Pasha (a Viennese Jewish convert to Islam) toppled accidentally to his death from a balcony just after toasting the kaiser at a celebratory banquet thrown by the Kommandant of German East Africa.
*2 To this day, peasant women of the Nile Delta wear dresses cut in the fashion of late eighteenth-century France.
*3 This was not the only destruction wrought by the French. They had already damaged the remaining palaces in the Citadel so as to improve its utility as a fortress. “They disfigured its beauties,” lamented al-Jabarti. “They demolished the palace of Salah al-Din and the council halls of kings and sultans that had high supports and tall pillars, as well as mosques and chapels and shrines.”
*4 The insurgents were a puritan anti-Sufi sect known as the Wahhabis. A century later their champions, the al-Saud family, captured Mecca and conquered most of Arabia. Saudia Arabia still adheres to strict Wahhabi Islam. The Greek insurrection (1824–25) was the first round of Greece’s War of Independence. Muhammad Ali’s success in crushing it roused European sympathy for the Greeks, which helped them win independence from the Ottomans in 1829.
*5 Known as the Capitulations, the privileges included preferential trading terms, tax-free status for foreign residents, and exemption from local laws. Here is Rudyard Kipling’s explanation: “Everyone in Cairo has the privilege of appealing to his own consul on every conceivable subject from the disposal of a garbage-can to that of a corpse. As almost everyone with claims to respectability, and certainly everyone without any, keeps a consul, it follows that there is one consul per superficial meter, arshin or cubit of Ezekiel within the city.” Onerous to Egyptians, the Capitulations remained in effect until 1947, albeit in diminishing form.
*6 The term, derived from a Persian word meaning “lord,” referred in Egypt originally to Greek and Italian merchants, particularly slavers. By the twentieth century it embraced all Europeans, and had come to have a mildly pejorative sense akin to the Mexicans’ gringo. The singular is khawāga.
*7 The khedive was rumored to have presented Eugénie with a solid-gold chamberpot, in the bowl of which glittered an emerald set in an eye: Ismail, too, had green eyes.
*8 “Don’t be alarmed. They’re only bronze!”
*9 Ismail had commissioned Giuseppe Verdi to produce an Egyptian-themed opera for the Suez Canal inauguration. The Italian composer failed to complete Aïda on time, so Cairo’s Opera House opened with a performance of Rigoletto—perhaps a more appropriate work anyway, considering what was to befall Ismail.
*10 Incidentally, many of these modernizers had fled their native Beirut because American missionaries there denounced them as Darwinists.
Chapter Seven
WHERE WORLDS COLLIDE
With the polo, the balls, the racing and the riding, Cairo begins to impress itself upon you as an English town in which any quantity of Oriental sights are kept for the aesthetic satisfaction of the inhabitants, much as the proprietor of a country place keeps a game preserve or deer park for his amusement.
To be French-speaking in Cairo before the 1952 Revolution was to belong to a group of people who felt themselves deeply rooted in Cairo as a place, and probably believed that their lives would be spent in that city until death disseminated them to their various cemeteries, distinguished only by religion or rite….It was to think of Cairo as home, but to believe that Paris was the navel of the world.
—Magdi Wahba, “Cairo Memories,” 1978
OCCUPIED CAIRO WAS a city of veils and mirrors. Britain exercised power from behind a screen of niceties, downplaying its role as first among equals of the controlling powers. The khedive stayed on his throne and sustained his nominal allegiance to the Ottomans. Britain’s consul general merely “advised” him as to who his ministers and what their policies should be. Like the khedive himself, these morning-coated, tarboosh-capped officials were shadow puppets. European undersecretaries made sure they jigged to London’s tune. “The British are easy to deceive,” joked Nubar Pasha Nubarian, a French-educated Armenian who was three times prime minister of Egypt, both before and after the occupation. “But just when you think you have tricked them, you suddenly get a tremendous kick on your backside.”
Up in the Citadel, homesick soldiers scratched bad English verse over the fading French and Turkish and Arabic graffiti. Down below, the Old City lost its glamor. It crumbled just as Gérard de Nerval had predicted. Whole streets of traditional houses vanished, and were it not for the last-ditch efforts of a few conservationists, the great mosques and schools would have, too. Rich Cairenes aspired to a different standard now. Finding the old winding alleyways claustrophobic, they moved to Italian-style villas along the broad carriage streets of the new quarters. The traditional guilds disbanded. Their trades collapsed in the face of European manufactures—all except for the crafts sold in the t
ourist bazaar.
Across town, foreign businesses prospered, their position bolstered by British arms and by a legal system skewed in their favor. By the turn of the century the khawagāt owned 96 percent of the capital on the growing stock exchange; they owned the banks, the hotels, the luxury shops, and the factories working flat out to supply the construction boom that was rapidly realizing Khedive Ismail’s ambition of a Paris by the Nile. Along the Ismailia Quarter’s avenues, said a visitor in 1908, there was nothing to be seen that could be said to be native, “except it be a Sudanese porter seated on a bench outside a sumptuous mansion, half hidden by palms and tropical shrubs.”
German, Austro-Hungarian, French, and Italian architects had given much of this new city a belle époque veneer, with a twist here and there of Islamic decor to maintain the Oriental atmosphere. A sort of French municipal dream progressed staidly from Opera Square to nearby ‘Ataba Square, the hub of Cairo’s rapidly expanding tramway network. An equestrian statue of Ismail’s father, Ibrahim Pasha (from the Paris studio of the sculptor Cordier), faced west in front of the Opera House itself. To his right were the Azbakiyya Gardens, with their winding paths and fountains, their banyan trees and bandstand, and the Italianate quarters of the Khedivial Fencing Club. Behind Ibrahim and to his left stood the domed main post office and the fire department, with its shiny red engines pulled by thirteen specially imported English carthorses. Foreigners saw justice done at the imposing Mixed Courts building across the street, in the middle of ‘Ataba Square. (The Native Tribunal was tucked away in a back alley.) Behind the square’s arcaded shopfronts there rose the wrought iron and glass roof of the new Marché Central. The facility, with its numbered aisles of vendors, its strict opening times and sanitary inspectors, seemed to challenge the ways of the Old City that spread out from here to the east. Nearby, a designer named Oscar Horowitz had capped the five-storied department store of Victor Tiring et Frères with a glass globe illuminated from inside and held aloft by four cast-iron strongmen. Native ladies giggled at their nakedness. (A hundred years later, black loincloths would be painted over the offending parts.)