Two civilizations overlapped at ‘Ataba Square. To the British authors of an Egyptian yearbook published in 1909, their meeting was like a scene of battle:
What with the raucous shouting of the pedlars, the rattling of the water-carriers’ tiny brass trays, the blowing of motor-car trumpets and the ringing of tram bells, the grinding of wheels and the clanging of iron-shod hoofs against the cobbles—the uproar heightened by the voices of men and women in passionate controversy—it is as though an Oriental Bedlam had been let loose….Here East meets West, and the struggle between the two elements still rages at its greatest height….To the West lies Europe, to the East the Orient. Gradually the former is encroaching upon the latter, so much so that in the Mousky, a Levantine thoroughfare interlaced by Arab lanes, the huge signboard of a well-known whisky firm tops a wakf or religious establishment.
By 1910 an eighth of the city’s 700,000 people were foreign-born. West of ‘Ataba Square they outnumbered Egyptians three to one. The khawagāt had their own coiffeurs, their haberdashers and bootmakers, their hospitals and clubs and schools. The other Cairo became to them a mere backdrop, a place to venture for occasional thrills or for sketching picturesque views. Increasingly, the foreign way of seeing became the way the city saw itself: by 1925 a third of Cairo’s pupils were enrolled in foreign schools, taught in a score of religious persuasions and half a dozen languages. To ambitious Egyptians the acquisition of technical English or diplomatic French became a prerequisite for advancement.
The khawagāt constructed not just attitudes and whole new districts that soon dwarfed the old town, but also a social order whose very complexity reinforced their sense of security. Down near the bottom—but still several notches above native day laborers—were the Maltese, South Italian, and Greek artisans: master masons, plasterers, and ironmongers, and also the waiters and petty criminals, and the prostitutes whose trade flourished under consular protection. Their privileged position outraged Egyptians such as Amin Boktor, an American-educated professor. Under the banner of the Capitulations, he wrote, Cairo had become a haven for the outcasts of Europe: “the Athenian vendor of adulterated drinks, the Monte Carlo keeper of a gambling den, the Parisian matron of a house of prostitution, the Neapolitan receiver of stolen goods, the Viennese apothecary who sells narcotics under the guise of patent medicine, and white slave traffickers, smugglers, murderers, and pugilists of all sorts.”
Next up the social scale came a clerical class of Francophone effendis, Armenian tram conductors, Bosnian salesgirls, and Bulgarian secretaries. Cairo’s pharmacists and physicians, its engineers and its caterers and fancy jewelers came from farther north. The best photographers were German, the swankiest bespoke tailors English, the finest confectioners Swiss-Italian. The French and their speech dominated intellectual life. Jews from throughout the Diaspora took prominence in finance; Syro-Lebanese in trade. Behind the foil of the khedive and his cabinetfuls of landowning pashas, 2,000 British and several hundred French bureaucrats managed affairs of state. The foreigners’ salaries were so comfortable that when one Italian judicial adviser returned to his former post in Italy he found he was earning less than his secretary in Cairo.
Tongues and races mingled amid the tight ranks of tenements in Cairo’s new working-class districts—Shubra, Abbasiyya, Bulaq. They mixed happily on the whole, even if the influence was mostly one-way, and even if marriage across religions remained rare. Middle-class Syrian Christians and Sephardic Jews, then native Copts, and finally many Muslims adopted Mediterranean dress, manners, and phrasing. Copts named their children Marie and George instead of their Arabic equivalents, Maryam and Girgis. Courting Levantine couples whispered “Je t’aime”; to say the same thing in Arabic came to seem a touch vulgar. By the Bulaq railyards, Italian anarchists roused native workers to strike. Under the ceiling fans of cafés called Rex and Excelsior, Trieste-born retailers in spats and Borsalinos experimented with water pipes while turbaned Upper Egyptian wholesalers struck deals over their first glasses of whiskey. Drink was the least of the vices foreigners brought: by the 1920s cocaine and heroin were supplanting hashish as the drugs of choice.
North of the Azbakiyya Gardens, Cairo’s two pleasure quarters sat snugly back to back. At one end khawāga pimps with switchblades watched over pale Smyrna tarts with medical certificates. At the other brooded darker-complexioned baladi professionals, the king of whose roost (in 1916) was a hugely fat transvestite Nubian. In a mockery of Muslim prudery he would sit enthroned in his alley, veiled in white, patchouli-scented, encumbered with gold bangles and anklets, extending a bejeweled hand to be kissed by some passing minion. Eventually the British-officered police hauled him off to prison.
Although a sprinkling of Egyptian pashas were Francophile or Anglo-phone enough to meet with the approval of the haute khawagerie, most were reckoned to fail in their attempts. “They dance with foreign ladies, wear Frankish clothes, smoke cigarettes, enjoy French plays and, but for their Eastern habits of tyranny, peculation, insincerity and corruption, they might for all the world be Europeans” was the archly backhanded judgment of the British historian Stanley Lane-Poole in 1892. The colonial arrogance was even fiercer in private. At an English official’s sumptuous villa on Opera Square in the 1880s, the gloomy hostess gave Caillard the impression that “if anyone so high-born could have feelings at all, hers were concentrated on her detestation of the country in which she was forced to reside, of the native servants, of the climate….” The poet Robert Graves, who taught at Cairo University in the 1920s, met an English cotton manufacturer who defended the conditions in his factory on the grounds that pulmonary consumption was one of the few checks on Egypt’s unhealthy population growth.
At least the British were evenhandedly aloof. While the French patronized the Continental, the Savoy, and the Semiramis, the British stuck strictly to Shepheard’s Hotel. Their Turf Club and Gezira Sporting Club were exclusive. One snooty Brit dismissed the rival Khedivial Club as being the resort of “foreigners and gyppos.” The corseted matrons who taught at an English school in Cairo, recalled a former student, “regarded the French as wogs and the Egyptians as a cut above camels.”
Of course, everyone else exacted quiet revenge: the prices in Cairo shops, notes another memoir, varied according to whether the customer spoke Arabic, French, or English. English-speakers always got skinned.
IT WAS MONEY that sealed the peace. The British ran Egypt as a business whose simple object was to pay the debt dividend and generate wealth on top with which to buy British goods. To this end—and over the protests of Egyptian nationalists—the school system founded by Khedive Ismail was largely dismantled. The British downgraded the Ministry of Public Instruction into a department of the Ministry of Public Works and reduced its share of the government budget to less than 1 percent. (The department’s reputation sank so low that wags claimed a British employee implored an old school friend he had met by chance not to let on that he was working in Education, since he had told everyone “at home” that he played piano in a brothel.) The health and housing needs of the poor were ignored. Investment was channeled instead into the maintenance of order and the expansion of infrastructure: into telephones and tramways, dams and canals and roads.
The formula worked—at least to the advanta
ge of the occupiers and the native elite. The momentum of that Western notion Progress seemed to be sustained. Great fortunes grew out of real estate, cotton, tourism, and, beginning in the 1920s, large-scale industries such as sugar and textiles. Egypt was still an overwhelmingly poor country, but its per capita income in 1913 was two-thirds of Italy’s—and much higher among the growing urban middle class. The capitalization of the Cairo Stock Exchange soared from £7 million in 1890 to £100 million in 1910. Oval Egyptian cigarettes, rolled by barefoot girls in the dimly lit manufactories of Cairo and sold under the gold-embossed name of Coutarelli or Simon Arzt, became the world standard of smoking elegance. Land prices spiraled wildly upward. Despite the hiccup of a crash in 1907, the value of lots in one suburb soared in the twenty years before World War I by a heady 1,000 percent.
A storm of property development transformed Cairo. With the completion in 1902 of the first dam at Aswan—built by the British firm John Aird & Co. with Egyptian labor and money—the banks of the Nile became stable enough for construction. Garden City, an enclave of grand town houses by the river, was laid out in sweeping French curves. A Swiss hotel magnate developed the island of Gezira. French interests plotted the suburb of Qubba Gardens. The Belgian industrialist Baron Édouard Empain bustled into Cairo, fresh from business successes in the Congo and in building the Paris Métro. Armed with plenty of money and a visionary’s enthusiasm, he persuaded the government to grant him a huge tract of desert land northeast of the city. Here he resurrected the ancient town of Heliopolis as a modern satellite city of neo-Moorish villas and apartments. Connected to Cairo by high-speed tram lines, his desert oasis boasted a racetrack, a Luna Park fairground, a sumptuous hotel,*1 and 25,000 well-heeled inhabitants by 1925. Baron Empain’s own villa was modeled on a Hindu temple, complete with naughty gargoyles and sugar-loaf domes. The centerpiece of the new Heliopolis was, as in the ancient one, a house of worship. But this time it was to be a neo-Byzantine basilica. The obligatory mosque was far more modest, and set amid the third-class housing of Heliopolis’s “servants’ quarter.”
Fifteen miles south of Cairo, facing the ruins of Memphis across the Nile, an ancient sulfur spring had been developed into a chic spa. Aside from healing baths and luxury accommodation, Helwan-les-Bains was equipped with a Japanese garden fitted with pagodas and plaster Buddhas. The fresh air of the nearby desert made it an ideal place for pony rides and picnics.
Beginning in the 1890s a group of closely intermarried Sephardic entrepreneurs quietly bought up fields along the railway that linked Cairo to Helwan. By 1904 they had amassed enough land to incorporate the venture. Landscapers were brought in and building codes were laid down. Maadi, as the village was called, had grown by the 1930s into a smug and exclusive suburb peopled by Egyptian patricians as well as khawāga bankers and brokers. Alpine chalets abutted pillared and porticoed neoclassical mansions. Bougainvillea hedges separated Raj-style bungalows from steep-roofed manor houses that could have graced Surrey or Scarsdale. Garden competitions, Boy Scout and Brownie troops, a sporting club with a golf course and a yacht club on the Nile, churches, mosques, and a thriving synagogue completed this suburban dream.
By 1910 even the first of Cairo’s modern districts had succumbed to progress. Apartment blocks and office buildings had supplanted the original villas of Khedive Ismail’s model city. The city center had shifted westward, away from ‘Ataba Square and toward the Nile. What was now downtown Cairo had become a dense zone of shops and offices that looked little different from Milan or Barcelona. Mabel Caillard, returning in 1912 after five years’ absence, was dismayed by the speed of change: “The spaciousness, the dignity and quietude of the old residential quarters were utterly gone; the old mansions had yielded to rows of buildings and garish shops….Even Gezira, that green isle of recreation, had on its fringes houses.” And again, another Briton returning after World War I: “All the glorious avenues of trees are cut down, great gardens swallowed up by enormous European buildings, and the beauty is gone.”
AS CAIRO SWEATED out the summer heat wave of 1914—thermometers bubbled at 117 in the shade—Europe went to war. When the Ottoman sultan stopped equivocating and backed Germany, his Egyptian province found itself in the absurd position of being formally a part of one power while physically under occupation by its enemy. This was an anomaly that not even the muddle-loving British could stand, so they quickly ripped away the veil that had shrouded their rule. They replaced the khedive with his more pliable uncle Husayn Kamil, proclaimed him sultan, declared the country a British protectorate, and clamped it under martial law. Turks, Germans, and Austro-Hungarians were tossed into internment camps. Armenian refugees flooded in (and later Ionian Greeks and White Russians). The leading Egyptian nationalists, meanwhile, were deported to Malta.
Fresh troops swelled Cairo’s token British garrison, as well as the pockets of the city’s whores and hawkers. Australians drilled by the Pyramids and rioted in the sleazy dives behind the Azbakiyya. One in eight picked up venereal disease from the red light district’s 3,000 registered prostitutes. But Cairo was still a lot safer than Gallipoli, where half the 500,000 soldiers sent to beat Johnny Turk were killed or wounded. Cairo’s hospitals bulged with Gallipoli evacuees, and when the doomed campaign was at last called off, some 200 generals were said to have checked into Shepheard’s Hotel. They were not idle for long. In 1917 British forces pushed out of Egypt by the overland route, capturing the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Palestine.
The real war touched Cairo only once, when a German zeppelin dropped a bomb that killed a lady walking her dog in front of the Eastern Telegraph Company headquarters. Meanwhile, the rich profited. The poor suffered—starved, even—as food shortages doubled wartime prices. The British Army not only requisitioned thousands of horses but also commandeered 20,000 peasants into work battalions, where a quarter perished from disease.
The high-handedness stoked Egypt’s long-smoldering nationalism. Within months of the armistice in November 1918 it had burst alight. The spark came when Britain banned an Egyptian delegation from the Versailles peace conference, and instead jailed or exiled its leaders, chief among them a stern, straight-backed pasha named Saad Zaghloul. In the spring of 1919 strikes and riots paralyzed the country. Cairo crowds, joined by all classes and even—a key precedent—by women, clamored for the release of the nationalist heroes. Mobs taunted and sometimes attacked British soldiers, who occasionally shot back. Railroad, telegraph, and electricity lines were sabotaged. British goods were boycotted. After three years of unrest, Britain relented. Egypt regained both its pride and its independence in 1922. A landslide election brought in Zaghloul as prime minister.
The wildly popular nationalist was also a realist. In the interest of maintaining order, Zaghloul agreed to lingering British influence. Foreign advisers stayed on until retirement age. Consular privileges remained. British troops controlled the Suez Canal, and in Cairo they continued to occupy the Citadel and their Nileside barracks by the Egyptian Museum. Husayn Kamil having died, the new monarch was given wide powers and a grander title. The Italian-educated twelfth son of Khedive Ismail, King Fouad I was dapper and dour. He was also rapacious, authoritarian, and contemptuous of his Egyptian subjects, whose language he could speak only haltingly. (“Ces crétins” was his habitual slur.) While his personal fortune expanded—his son Farouk inherited 75,000 acres of the world’s richest farmland—Fouad saw to it that his parliament’s nationalist leanings were contained. The legislature was in any case stacked in favor of those who could buy peasant votes—which is to say cotton-planting pashas whose ultimate interest lay in defending their vast estates.
With money gushing in from the postwar boom, the native and foreign elites began to mingle more freely. Pashas summered on the Riviera, browsed the bookstalls by the Seine, and occasionally—like the American millionaires of the time—picked up Impressionist artworks to take home to Cairo.*2 Their sons, educated by Jesuits or Franciscans, maintained the habits of the khaw�
�ga administrators they replaced. The rich Cairene wore his tarboosh with pride, observed a visiting New Yorker in the 1920s, yet he lived “like a Parisian” and had a club that in cuisine and luxurious appointments was “second to none in London.” As Egyptians took up tennis and golf; poker and bridge, even the Gezira Sporting Club began to admit a token few smart-set natives. (Famously, Gezira’s squash pro would allow his British trainees to get far ahead, then declare “My game” and proceed to ace every volley.) Patrician ladies began to discard their veils like autumn leaves. Department stores such as Cicurel, Hannaux, Orosdi-Back, and Sednaoui catered to the new tastes with the latest fashions from Paris and the catalogs of Christofle, Louis Vuitton, and Mappin & Webb. Even middle-class Egyptians now sported jackets and ties, hung tableaux romantiques on their walls, and stuffed their salons with all the Louis XVI fakery that Signor Pontremoli’s fancy downtown furniture showroom flaunted.
The visitor from New York claimed he had seen no town outside America where so many “large and rich-looking houses” were being built:
They are not all beautiful, but they are undoubtedly very costly. It is costly to build an imitation Gothic cathedral as your private dwelling; it is costly to put in Moorish ceilings, and Arabesque marble floors, to have huge and lofty rooms, and loggias with marble balconies….The roads are broad; luxurious motorcars abound; and there is a dazzle of expensive finery which is not the less alluring because the face of the wearer is half-veiled….