The prince reminisces over iced lemonade, speaking softly in clipped tones that betray prolonged immersion in the cold showers of an English public school. The army officers’ coup took him utterly by surprise, he says. He had been a young innocent at the time, a lover of music and the arts with a horror of politics. (In a 1951 Egyptian Gazette I find a paparazzo’s snapshot of a box at the Cairo Opera. The little prince stares whimsically askew, a shy cherub in a white tie, dwarfed by his long-necked, diamond-chokered mother.) The cruelest thing was seeing his family’s property scattered. He speaks of how he followed the postrevolutionary auctioning of royal belongings, of how he watched everything in his own small chambers at the Abdine Palace lotted and sold along with the jewels and Sèvres china and Cousin Farouk’s vast stashes of rare coins, guns, and girlie pinups.
“Such a magpie for trinkets, poor chap. But what he really liked was ladies’ bosoms!” An expression of distaste flickers.
Strangely, though, neither his own small collection of first editions nor his few pieces of antique furniture and not even the pictures—his prized possessions, the prince being an accomplished amateur painter—were ever mentioned in the public sale catalogs. For twenty years he assumed all the stuff had vanished, or been purloined like so much else by some cheeky army officer.
At this point the prince glances archly at our neighbors, looking more than ever like Winnie the Pooh’s maudlin friend Eeyore. “Ew,” he sniffs, “I do hope they aren’t listening. I’ve had quite enough trouble with generals.”
All those years, while the dictatorship of Colonel Nasser lurched further leftward, the prince lived hand to mouth on a penurious state pension, forbidden to travel and fearing arrest any minute on some laughable charge of a royalist plot. In his small Garden City apartment every valuable, from teaspoons to chaises longues, was labeled and regularly inventoried by zealously uncouth inspectors, just in case he might presume to try to scrape up some extra cash by flogging what was now considered state property. He never dared ask what had happened to his things in the palace.
But then sometime in the 1970s—by which date the vindictive fervor of the revolution had at last subsided—an acquaintance told him that in some flyblown alley in the slums behind Abdine there was a man who was said to be selling palace loot.
I could just picture the prince politely inquiring of an astonished grease monkey in one of the Abdine district’s car repair shops as to the whereabouts of a certain junk shop, and then finding the galabiyya-clad proprietor slumped unshaven in a lopsided cane-bottomed chair on the shady side of a dank alley, facing the two holes in the wall opposite that constituted his showroom. The crafty junk dealer would have appraised this rare customer in a single blink.
“And the extraordinary thing,” the prince continues, “was that in his horrid little cave the man did have treasures from the palace. How he acquired them I haven’t a clue. Nothing really valuable, of course, but he had my things.”
The prince was able to buy back a few of his own possessions—the first editions at least, and two of the paintings, and one favorite gilt chair.
The prince now grows serious. Leaning back in his chair, he squints wistfully into the sunset. After a long pause, he speaks.
“That was the positive thing, I suppose. Before the revolution I had never met a real Egyptian. They are marvelous people, you know.”
THE FIRST HALF of Cairo’s twentieth century saw the West overwhelm the East. High heels and two-tones clattered up marble stairs; camelskin babouches rustled down. The century’s second half saw the reverse: silken slippers shuffling down, bare peasant feet and army boots stomping up. To the cosmopolitans their fall was a tragedy, an end to Cairo’s golden age. To the vast majority of the city’s people—those faceless folk whom Cairo’s last prince had never met—it was a hard-won triumph.
The roots of that triumph ran deep.
Egyptian national consciousness had its first stirrings in the Urabist revolt of the 1880s. Then, sheikhs and soldiers, pasha landowners and urban effendis had united in the struggle against foreign domination. But that brief Cairo Spring, and with it the notion of independence, was soon crushed under the combined weight of British arms, debt, and the momentum toward modernization generated by European immigrants and their money. The gravity flattened Egypt’s self-confidence. In 1907, when the peasants of a Delta village beat off a troop of British soldiers who had come to shoot their domestic pigeons for sport, it was Egyptian, not British, judges who sentenced four of the fellahin to hang. Even a nationalist firebrand such as Mustafa Kamil, a French-trained lawyer whose speeches electrified Cairo in the brief decade before his premature death in 1908, was too timid to call for outright independence. He compromised his platform by pleading for support from Paris and Constantinople.
Rather than challenge the British head on, cooler minds turned instead to laying the groundwork for a national revival. The early decades of the twentieth century saw the founding in Cairo of Egypt’s first secular university, its first trade unions and professional syndicates, and its first bank with all-Egyptian capital. Literary and scientific salons proliferated, exposing Cairo’s intelligentsia to every issue of the modern day, from Darwinism to Lombroso’s theory of criminality to the twists of the Dreyfus case. Amateur troupes staged Arabic versions of Molière and Racine as well as the first plays by Egyptian writers. Cairo’s press and publishing industry grew, stimulated by contact with the West and by a relative freedom that attracted intellectuals from across the waning Ottoman Empire. The whole vocabulary of Progress—terms such as “enlightenment,” “democracy,” “empiricism,” “social consciousness,” and “class struggle”—were brought into Arabic usage here. In the realm of ideas, Cairo was on the move.
By way of example, as early as 1898 a judge named Qasim Amin had published a treatise that put into accessible, logically argued language what European critics had long suggested. Egypt’s backwardness, said Amin, was due to the low status of its women. The key to progress was female education. In a second volume he went further and demanded that women abandon the veil and that they be granted equal rights, including the right to vote. The response was heated. A thirty-book barrage of criticism blasted Amin as a closet atheist, an effeminate, a panderer to colonialism, a traitor to Islam. Yet history was on his side. Amin had set its machinery in motion. Egyptian women did leave the home and enter the world. When nationalist demonstrations broke out in 1919, women were in the vanguard—albeit still in veils.
This was soon to change. In 1923 a pasha’s daughter named Hoda Shaarawi scandalized Cairo by stepping off a first-class railroad carriage and brazenly tossing back her veil. The bitter experience of being raised under the tutelage of eunuchs in a harem and married off against her will had turned her into a passionate feminist. Immersion in French literature—she had taught herself the language—helped her to articulate her feelings. With her immaculate social credentials and personal daring, Shaarawi was in a position to inspire others. Only five years after the shocking incident at Cairo Station, the city’s illustrated magazines revealed that all but a few of the high-born ladies paying condolences to the wife of the great nationalist hero Saad Zaghloul went unveiled. A decade later the veil was seldom seen at all among the upper classes. It had come to be regarded as a brand of backwardness.
Some said the decline of the East was due to the ossification of Islam. Muslim r
eformers such as Sheikh Muhammad Abdu (1847–1905) called for purging the faith of useless accretions. There was no reason, believed Abdu, why reason should conflict with revelation. Couldn’t Muslims embrace useful Western ideas and still keep their identity? Again, though many disagreed, history seemed to go Abdu’s way. Subtle reforms did occur in the teaching of Islam, for instance the reintroduction of Ibn Khaldun to the curriculum of al-Azhar—where Abdu briefly served as rector. Practices such as the charging of interest, which traditionalists denounced as sinful usury, came to be widely accepted. Islamic sharia continued to define rules of marriage and inheritance, but civil, criminal, and commercial codes modeled on European law grew to dominate legal thinking.
Some intellectuals demanded iconoclasm, not reform. Islam, they argued, should be separated from public affairs. Egypt was above all a Mediterranean country, they said. Indeed, ancient Egypt was the fountainhead of European civilization. It was only natural that the current of influence should flow back again, that Egypt should assimilate European progress and grasp what was best: Bismarckian discipline, Cartesian logic, the social ethics of Bentham and Mill. In time, the liberals were confident, democracy and secular, universal education would replace religious principles with civic ones.
Others said that nationalism—passionate and even irrational—was the source of Western power. Egyptian schoolchildren, too, could learn to sing anthems and salute the flag. They could be made to feel Egyptian first, not Muslim or Christian, rich or poor. This was to be the strongest trend of all, subsuming and absorbing the work of feminists and reformers, liberals and traditionalists in the fight against foreign dominance. Nationalism was one theme around which all could unite, and they did so to great effect: uninterrupted strikes, demonstrations, and a consumer boycott against the British broke out in 1919. Passions ran so high that a Coptic priest was said to have marched into the Mosque of al-Azhar at the height of the unrest. When he shouted that the British had gotten their pink cheeks from sucking the blood of Egyptians, the Azharite students hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him to the mosque pulpit to deliver a speech. In the face of such united emotion, Britain was forced to back down. Egypt won its independence in 1922.
In the 1920s and ’30s Cairo emerged as the forward-looking capital of a young nation, a confident city graced with institutions of democratic government, of learning, and of the arts. In these years Egyptians rediscovered their ancient past. Spectacular archaeological finds—most dramatically the unearthing in 1922 of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun’s intact, gold-stuffed tomb in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings—inspired a flurry of building in neopharaonic style. Saad Zaghloul was himself laid to rest under the outstretched wings of Horus in a magnificent, templelike mausoleum. Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934), a brilliant, Paris-trained sculptor, reworked ancient themes in the granite monument he designed for the entrance to Cairo’s flourishing new university. The Renaissance of Egypt, as it was called, showed a peasant girl casting back her veil with one hand and rousing a sleeping sphinx with the other.
The city’s medieval architectural heritage was also revived. New mosques shunned the later Ottoman forms and reverted to the older, purely Cairene style of the high Mameluke era. A few notable buildings fused Islamic designs with Art Deco—a blend whose remarkable success owed much to the fact that European decorative arts, from William Morris to Matisse to the sets in Hollywood’s Thief of Baghdad, had drawn strongly from encounters with the Arab East. In a sort of celebration of Cairo’s diversity, one pasha’s 1920s villa incorporated three vast reception rooms: one in the French style; one Arabesque, with geometric-inlay fountains, carpets, and low divans; and one decorated with pharaonic motifs, including brass door handles cast in the shape of eyes of Horus.*1
Cairo produced its first generation of modern writers. Dropping the poetical, alliterative language of the past, they tackled themes such as the clash between town and country, between freedom and the constraints of tradition. Their introduction of new forms—the novel, dramatic realism, free verse—revitalized Arabic literature after centuries of stagnation. While its press experimented with biting satire and fierce polemic, the city held up a mirror to itself in theater, too. Music halls and playhouses sprouted in the vicinity of Opera Square; these were venues for pioneers of the Arabic stage such as Yusuf Wahbi and George Abyad. The first Egyptian feature film, In the Land of Tutankhamun, was screened in 1923. Cairo produced its first talkie in 1932, by which time the city could already boast a major film industry, complete with cigar-chomping moguls and preening starlets. Naguib al-Rihani was Egypt’s own, and highly original Charlie Chaplin. Muhammad Abd al-Wahab, son of a muezzin in the Bab al Sha‘riyya district, was a crooning composer—a sort of Bing Crosby rolled into Irving Berlin. He was pulling in £20,000 a picture by the 1940s. Leila Murad, the daughter of a cantor in the old Jewish Quarter, was Egypt’s screen sweetheart, the nice girl next door who was always falling into trouble and singing her way out of it.
Cairo began to project itself, and its free-spirited urbanity struck other Arabs as a revelation. Baghdad and Beirut hummed to the tunes cut at Sono Cairo studios and devoured glossy Cairene magazines, marveling at their daring cartoons and commentary and their ads for motorcars, elevators, refrigerators, and dance revues. Egypt’s capital became a magnet for Arab talent. Its lights drew a generation of performers who rebroadcast the city’s rhythm and dialect to their own countries.
BUT THE IMAGE was not quite real. In the movies, slick city reason triumphed over crusty country manners. The poor boy’s hard-won education paid off. He earned his promotion and won the heart of the rich girl, whose stern pasha father inevitably turned out to have a heart of gold.
The facts were different, and kept bumbling onto the set. In the reality of Cairo in the 1930s and ’40s, the boy whose family sacrificed all to pay for his schooling most likely remained poor. He scorned the rich girl because, with her mascara and Paris gowns, she was too “Western.” And the rich girl was bound to marry her rich cousin anyway, in accordance with Egyptian tradition. The stern pasha was in all probability a greedy capitalist and a buyer of votes in rigged elections. He lived in luxury in Cairo, while the serfs who worked his cotton plantation shared their mud huts with chickens and goats. The city slickers were not benign. They were sharpsters who, according to the joke of the day, swindled their country cousins by selling them Cairo tram cars. In return, rural newcomers disdained to use city sidewalks and grazed their sheep in public parks.
The triumph of modernism, of urban manners, was far from assured. Conundrums that were to become typical of the postcolonial world were at work: as education spread, so did discontent; as public health improved, population growth erupted. Freed from British tutelage, the government did indeed raise spending on education, from 1 percent of the budget in 1920 to 12 percent in 1940. But in that year three-quarters of Cairenes remained illiterate. The new schools produced a surfeit of bureaucrats but not enough doctors or engineers. Beginning in 1930, Cairo began to grow so fast that it lost control of its own sprawling slums, let alone its ability to “civilize” the hinterland. Outside the city, the amount of cultivable land per farmer had dwindled by a third in the first three decades of the century. Landless peasants flocked to the capital, bringing with them a deeply traditional outlook. As fast as the city could urbanize, the country was ruralizing the city. Away from the boulevards, new working-class quarters without sewage, running water, or electricity re-created the scale and habits of country villages. The old solidarities, however, were gone. In the press of urban living, families split. Jobs in factories and offices were insecure. Child labor and sixteen-hour working days were common.
The veil may have been dropped as a form of dress, but the range of traditional mores it represented remained. In Coptic churches, for example, women were no longer segregated behind a wooden screen. Yet, although they sat in full view now, modesty required that they be separated from men by the center aisle. The ways of the modern city an
d its cosmopolitan elite were attractive, but they remained beyond the financial grasp or cultural inclinations of the impoverished majority. The sense of privilege that still surrounded the khawagāt was seen as corrupting and demeaning. The ineradicable misery of the poor belied the veneer of progress.
This process was at work on other levels, too. In politics, lingering British influence subverted the triumph of independence. Palace meddling eroded the achievement of democracy. Within a decade of its proclamation, King Fouad had suspended the liberal 1923 constitution no fewer than four times. The press law of 1933 clamped a muzzle on dissent. Democracy came back, but the tampering had weakened it beyond repair. Politics turned dirty. Parties in power used the police to frame opponents, made alliances in pure opportunism, and bribed voters with impunity. The nationalist front splintered into opposing and increasingly violent factions.
The cracks in the intellectual world also widened. As literacy spread, those who had been left behind, who still lived in the traditionalist world of the village and Cairo’s back streets, found a voice. While translations of Marx and Bertrand Russell trickled off the bookstalls lining the Azbakiyya Gardens, what sold like hotcakes were hagiographies of the Prophet and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, and the pamphlets that the Muslim Brotherhood began to produce promoting Islam as a modern Utopia. The liberal vanguard discovered that their foreign ideas had propelled them out of acceptable bounds. They awoke with a shock to find themselves isolated from their own society.
Bitter feuds broke out between secularists and traditionalists. Al-Azhar expelled a professor in 1923 after he claimed that Islam did not prescribe a specific form of government, that, in effect, there was no such thing as an Islamic state. A similar fate befell Taha Husayn, a blind scholar and pioneering historian who in 1926 published his research on the seemingly innocuous subject of Arabic poetry of the pre-Islamic period. Husayn, a poor village boy who had trained at both al-Azhar and the Sorbonne in Paris, argued that nearly all this poetry had been misdated. Since it was probably written after the revelation of Islam, he claimed, its vocabulary was useless for understanding the Koran. At a stroke he demolished centuries of Koranic exegesis. Worse, in explaining his methods, Husayn stated that historians should set aside accepted belief and rely strictly on evidence. The Koran may have mentioned Abraham and Ishmael, he noted, but this was not enough to establish their physical existence.