Not even Farouk’s own mother, Queen Nazli, left him in peace. Knowing her wild ways, his father, King Fouad, had locked her in purdah. Released by her son, the widow twirled through a string of affairs that culminated in a Continental ménage à trois with her youngest daughter and a junior Egyptian diplomat who was half the queen mother’s age (and a Copt into the bargain). When the trio steamed off to the United States in a fireworks of flashbulbs, Farouk was outraged. And when his mother told the San Francisco papers that her daughter was marrying this Christian commoner, he disowned them.
Humiliated by the war, disgusted by family and politics, Farouk sailed to Europe. The summer of 1950 was to be a season of epic debauch. His entourage of Albanian bodyguards, secret police, tasters, doctors, aides, and cronies (among them a former palace electrician, Antonio Pulli, now a procurer of lady companions) filled eleven fresh black Cadillacs. This king’s fleet cleaved a wake of scandal from Marseilles to Deauville to Biarritz and San Sebastian and back to the Riviera. Farouk was on a roll. One night he cleared $60,000; the next, $40,000—which were heady takings in 1950. Finally, at Cannes, the king’s luck bombed. To his credit, he lost to a pro—“Lucky Mickey” Hyman. But just as the winner reached for his $80,000 pile of chips, a heart attack dropped Lucky Mickey dead.
Cairo smoldered. Unemployment soared. The gulf between rich and poor overspilled with grotesquerie. Two thousand pashas and beys kept a third of all fertile land in vast estates. The royal family alone owned 600,000 acres. Four million peasants shared all the rest, or worked the big plantations at a wage of ten cents a day. While the chefs of the Carlton Hotel at Cannes slaved to satiate Farouk’s bottomless stomach with lobster thermidor and dozen-egg omelettes, the typical Cairo family rarely ate meat or fruit, even while hemorrhaging half its income on food. The stock market tumbled. Flight capital drained from the country. Cabinets revolved and fell. While khawagāt complained of being spat at by patriotic hotheads, one visitor was appalled to see an Egyptian officer upbraid a soldier by slapping him, then opening his mouth and spitting into it Politicians tried to ride popular anger. Foreigners, unprotected now by the exhausted European powers, made an easy target. New legislation rolled back their privileges. Arabic became the sole legal language. Quotas squeezed foreign ownership and employment. Italians and others released from internment found it hard to reclaim their confiscated property. The upper crust of Cairo’s Jewish community began to slip away—to Paris, mostly, rather than the Promised Land: the lights of Tel Aviv looked pretty dim from Cairo.
Then, as if his summer binge were not enough to keep tongues clucking, Farouk had the bad taste to marry a plump sixteen-year-old named Nariman Sadeq. (He had seen her with her fiancé in a jewelry shop, and split the couple with an offer they couldn’t refuse.) The palace publicity boilers were by now unrestrained by modesty. Among the lashings of kitsch they cooked up: a wedding gown for Nariman studded with 20,000 diamonds, a song on the radio titled “Glory for the Reign of King Farouk,” electric victory arches that flashed the initials N and F, and hundreds of fatted calves slaughtered for charity.
On one night of his thirteen-week European honeymoon, at a single marathon baccarat game, Farouk blew a record $150,000. Back in Cairo the next winter Nariman bore him a son. Farouk made the delivering doctor a pasha on the spot. The following Saturday—January 26, 1952—as the Egyptian Army’s top brass toasted the baby crown prince at a palace banquet, Cairo burst into flames.
THE CHIEF BUFFOON of Egyptian folklore is a fellow called Goha. No one is as maddening as Goha. His naïveté is so preposterous that it amounts to cunning.
Goha sells his house. The new owners have hardly settled down when the buffoon barges in like he still owns the place. Saying nothing, Goha crosses to a wall, hangs his cloak on a nail, and leaves. The next morning he returns to retrieve his cloak. At night he hangs it up again, and so on for several days. At last, driven to despair, the occupants demand to know by what right he keeps intruding. Goha shrugs. “I sold you the house,” he says, “but I did not sell you that nail.”
To Egyptian eyes the colonial endgame Britain played was just like Goha and his nail. Egypt had gotten its house back: in 1947, after shooting dead thirty demonstrators outside their Qasr al-Nil barracks in the center of Cairo, British troops withdrew from the capital. The star and crescent flag was raised over the Citadel for the first time in sixty-four years. But Britain, like Goha, kept a thorn in Egypt’s side. Eighty thousand British soldiers remained in control of the Suez Canal. In Cairo, British officers on leave still tippled on the Shepheard’s Hotel terrace. The Turf Club and the Gezira Sporting Club remained their preserves.
As Britain refused to budge from the canal and as unrest in Cairo matured into strikes and rioting, orators upped the nationalist ante into pure demagoguery. In October 1951 Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahas abrogated the treaty granting Britain bases on the canal. His minister of the interior, Fouad Serageddin, openly urged the Muslim Brothers to mount guerrilla attacks. Britain clamped curfews and roadblocks on the Canal Zone. In response, Serageddin ranted on Cairo radio that the Inglīz were unleashing dogs to savage bound female captives. A Cairo daily offered a £100 reward for the murder of any British officer. All Britons in government employment, including university lecturers, were sent packing—some after lifelong careers in Egypt. King Farouk himself decreed that the boards of all clubs be Egyptianized.
Then disaster struck. Seeking a scapegoat to blame for guerrilla attacks, Britain’s commanding general sent troops to disarm an Egyptian police barracks in the canal city of Ismailia. Fouad Serageddin ordered his men to resist, and so the British blasted the barracks with tank fire, killing fifty police conscripts.
As it became clear that the police were not going to intervene, the mood turned menacingly festive. Bands of arsonists—many blamed the Muslim Brothers, others claimed they were right-wing hooligans or Communists or even secret police—fanned out through the European Quarter. They jimmied open hastily shuttered shops and torched them. They drenched movie houses with gasoline and set them alight; the Rivoli (Spy Hunt), the Cairo Palace, and the Metro (The Valley of Decision, with Greer Garson and Gregory Peck) were all gutted. They stormed the Turf Club; ten khawagāt were burned alive. As the Cairene novelist Naguib Mahfouz described the scene, the din was unbearable:
It was as though all earth’s atoms were screaming at once. Flames swept everywhere, dancing in windows, crackling on rooftops, flickering at walls, and lunging up into the smoke that hung where the sky should have been. The burning stank hellishly, a combustion of wood, clothing and oil….Repressed anger, stifled despair, pent-up tension, all that had been brewing inside the people burst forth, erupting like a whirlwind of demons.
At 2:00 P.M. the mob crashed into Shepheard’s Hotel, where the service buttons in the vast bedrooms with their Persian carpets and fifteen-foot ceilings were marked “Native.” The vandals stacked the lobby furniture and cheered as the whole grand Victorian pile burned to the ground in twenty minutes flat. Miss Christina Caroll, an American soprano who was to play Desdemona at the Cairo Opera that night, threw a sable coat over her negligee and escaped with other guests into the hotel garden. An anonymous call girl was less lucky. She plunged to her death from a fourth-floor balcony.
The incendiarists then set off in trucks, burning bars and nightclubs across town and right along the Pyramids Road. Not even King Farouk’s favorite casino was sp
ared: Paris at Night, a revue starring Annie Charlier and Serge Lancy, would not be staged at the Auberge des Pyramides that Saturday. At last, as opportunists looted the scorched merchandise of chic stores such as Ben Zion, Gattegno, and Davies Bryan, the army moved in. Shots echoed, and the streets cleared under curfew.
What people who saw Black Saturday all remember—and they differ about nearly everything else—is the smoke. An inky, ash-flecked pall swallowed the whole of downtown Cairo. At nightfall the sky glowed a sickly pink. When morning dawned with a sodden, carbonized stench, even those who had set the fires were astounded by the damage. Nearly every symbol of cosmopolitan Cairo lay in ruins. Some 700 shops and buildings, whole avenues of smart premises—banks, bookshops, stationers, car dealers, travel agencies, and every single liquor outlet—were wrecked. Aside from the 100 dead, 12,000 were made homeless and 15,000 jobless—including the Shepheard’s Hotel’s Swiss head porters, Italian headwaiter, and German head housekeeper.
Unable to pull out Goha’s nail, Cairo’s malingerers had burned the house down.
Six months later, while Farouk frolicked at his seaside castle in Alexandria, armored cars rumbled through the heat of the Cairo night. Without firing a shot, the army occupied the ministries and parliament and palaces. On state radio a young officer broadcast a statement. A secret society of Free Officers, said Anwar al-Sadat, had assumed power to restore stability.
THE COUP OF July 23, 1952, sealed the fate of Cairo’s cosmopolitan elite. Farouk and family were dispatched into exile. His court and cronies were tried and packed off to prison. They shared cells with a roster of public enemies that grew to include Freemasons and Rotarians as well as leftists and fundamentalists. Pashas lost their titles; they were now called feudalists. Their country estates were sifted into peasant-sized morsels.
The rise of Egyptian nationalist passion brought particular unease to members of the venerable Jewish community. Their alienation from the Egyptian mainstream—by class, as many were rich, and by language and outlook, as many had adopted French speech and European manners—was compounded by their inevitable association with Israel. Despite assurances of protection from Gamal Abdel Nasser, who took over the leadership of Egypt’s revolutionary government in 1954, Jewish anxiety was to deepen further. In that same year, police caught fourteen Israeli agents who had tried to sabotage Egypt’s foreign relations with a bombing campaign aimed at targets such as Cairo’s American Cultural Center and British Council offices. Several of the saboteurs were Egyptian-born Jews. In February 1955 Israeli paratroopers ambushed an Egyptian Army convoy in Gaza, killing thirty-eight soldiers. As Egypt’s border with the Jewish state subsequently heated up, so did popular antipathy to all that was Jewish.
Cairo may have swiftly rebuilt its European-looking facade after Black Saturday’s fire, but for most of the city’s Europeans it was now just that: a facade. They could feel their place in the country’s future shrinking by the day. At the Hellenic Club, the Circolo Italiano, and the Alliance Israelite the talk was of timetables, of cousins in Montreal, and—sotto voce—of false-bottomed suitcases. Fortunes began to filter out of Cairo—so many that a Swiss banker I was to meet forty years later smiled at the memory: “Ah, the early fifties. Now that was a golden age,” he sighed.
The furtive trickle overseas was soon to burst into a flood. Denied Western finance to build a new and mightier dam on the Nile, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956. Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in response. International outrage forced the aggressors out, but the damage had been done. In Cairo—whose outskirts British jets had bombed—xenophobia scaled new heights. All British and French nationals were deported, their property seized. The many Cairene Jews who had secured French citizenship in the advantageous days of the Capitulations were sent packing, too, along with unlucky colonials such as the British-passport-holding Maltese. Other aliens took the hint, which was given added edge by new laws that banned foreigners from owning property while making Egyptian nationality all but unobtainable.
The deportees were to have one consolation. They escaped the staggering calamities of the early 1960s, when the military regime systematically ruined what remained of Cairo’s prerevolutionary elite—native Copts and Muslims included—confiscating hundreds of companies, homes, and farms in the name of the people. By the end of that decade the foreign community had dwindled into insignificance. All of Cairo’s Jewish schools, its Jewish hospital and orphanage, and all but two of the city’s twenty-nine synagogues had closed for lack of custom. In the 1970s stone merchants and squatters began to take over the untended Jewish cemeteries. On a visit in the 1980s I found a young couple with four children cozily installed in a particularly splendid neopharaonic vault. The tomb dwellers had unsealed the columbarium inside, finding it made convenient built-in shelving for clothes, cooking pots, and a color TV set.
Other alienated Cairenes fared less badly. The Greek and Italian contingents faded slowly, not so much because Cairo had lost its gloss as because their booming old countries drew away the youth. Those fixtures of Cairo for a century—the Greek grocer and the Italian workshop foreman—were reduced to a tiny few. Among those who stayed was my mechanic Beppo, a fourth-generation Calabrian Egyptian—but his children went to Italy. The Syro-Lebanese mostly held out and intermarried, growing more Egyptianized and less Francophone with each generation. The Armenians thrived; their 2,000-strong community kept up its schools, clubs, and charities (and certainly did better than those who accepted an invitation from Stalin to settle in the Soviet republic of Armenia in 1949: on arrival in their homeland they were stripped of all possessions and packed off to Siberia).
In the new, Egyptianized Cairo some of the old khawāga habits and institutions survived. The best private schools continued to teach in French, English, German, and Italian. Evening dress was still required at the opera, where even Arabic orchestras continued to wear dark jackets and bow ties. Cairo’s elite stayed in fashion sync with the West, adopting blue jeans and disco dancing and aspiring to install fitted kitchens and to take the kids to Disney World.
Quietly, inexorably, the bland new style of global commerce began to replace the old homegrown cosmopolitanism. Instead of the musty but charming Shepheard’s and Continental Savoy, the city’s flagship hotels are now high-rise Hiltons and Sheratons. (One international chain has redeveloped the old palace where Empress Eugénie stayed for the Suez Canal opening, and calls its bar Eugénie’s Lounge.) Downtown restaurants such as Caroll and Estoril still serve escalope panée, macaronis au four, and artichauts à la Grecque. But the old establishments have begun to feel like relics. Trendier venues have proliferated. Cutting-edge Cairene taste now runs to Tex-Mex vegetarian, drive-thru Big Macs, sushi and satay, and Milanese modern. The patrons of such fare are mostly native Cairenes, but they see themselves as citizens of the world. They are watchers of satellite TV, browsers of the Internet, and consumers of multinational-brand detergents that fight out turf wars on the local airwaves.
* * *
*1 The Heliopolis Palace Hotel was later nationalized, renamed the Uruba Palace, and remodeled into the offices of republican Egypt’s head of state.
*2 Such gleanings can be seen today at the Mahmud Khalil Museum in Giza, whose collection includes originals by Pissarro and Monet as well as Ingres, Courbet, and Millet.
*3 Most Italian Egyptians were ardent Fascists: in a junk shop I came across a snapshot of a Blackshirt rally on some Cairo street, complete with Duce salutes and bemused native bystanders.
*4 The spy also ushered a key player into the limelight: convinced that his radio was on the blink, he had called in an Egyptian signals officer named Anwar al-Sadat. Like many Egyptian nationalists, Sadat had been impressed by German might and was eager to help the enemies of his own British enemy. Exposed, Egypt’s future president spent the rest of the war in jail.
*5 The queen dropped her own name, Safinaz, to adopt the royal name of Farida. A fortuneteller was said to have told K
ing Fouad that the letter F was lucky. Farouk’s sisters were named Faika, Fawzia, Fathia, and Faiza.
Chapter Eight
CONFLICT AND FUSION
In order to escape from the West they had to learn from the West. Must they abdicate their personality, then, to survive?
—Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, 1967
THE OLD CLUBHOUSE terrace at the Gezira Sporting Club makes a fitting stage for deposed royalty. It is a brick and plaster replica of an ocean liner’s lido deck. Where the ship’s funnel should be stands a chimney inscribed with the year 1935. Perched up there, cawing black crows take the place of seagulls. Down below, outside the shade of the faded awning, beyond the swimming pool and the curve of the rail where the ship’s broad wake should churn under the setting sun, mongrel kittens scamper over ragged flower beds.
Most afternoons the prince sits alone here, primly aloof from adjacent tables of garrulous retired generals and gossiping divorcées. Small, pale, and baby-shaped, he wears an immaculate gray suit of 1940s cut. His expression hints that an invisible pomander is floating somewhere near his noble nose. His mother may have been, as some say, a Spanish dancer, but the prince is still every inch a royal. He is a descendant of Muhammad Ali Pasha and a cousin of King Farouk—and the only prince to have stayed on after the 1952 revolution. A big fish in an evaporating pond, so to speak, he drifts daily in Garbo-like solitude from the peeling elegance of the Automobile Club dining room (where his cousin played poker) to the dowdy old Gezira (where British Hussars and Lancers sparred at polo).