From al-Azhar came howls of protest and charges of blasphemy. The matter was taken to court in a blaze of publicity that echoed the Scopes trial over teaching evolution in the United States, and presaged future furors such as the one Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses sparked sixty years later. A liberal judge dismissed the case, arguing that Husayn’s intent was not deliberately hostile to Islam. Nevertheless, the scholar was fired from his post at Cairo University. Subsequent editions of his book excluded any mention of the prophets.
The liberal climate of prerevolutionary Cairo ensured that Taha Husayn was to fare better than his disciples would a few generations later. The university reinstated him. In fact he rose to become first a dean, and later rector of the university, before becoming minister of education in 1950. Yet the movement that secularists hailed as Egypt’s Enlightenment had begun to lose momentum. Obscurantist litigators had laid their mines. Certain subjects were to remain taboo. From now on, intellectuals who were bold enough to assert the primacy of reason over revelation knew they were doing so at their own peril.
BETWEEN 1930 AND 1950 Cairo’s population doubled, to 2 million. At midcentury, as antibiotics reduced the toll of disease, it was growing at a rate of 3.7 percent a year. World War II, which had brought foreign armies and great events to Cairo’s doorstep, had shaken up the new generation. The disastrous 1948 war with Israel had embittered it. Its members could not be content with the paternalistic ways of the past anymore. They wanted action. The revolving cabinets of the late 1940s tried to cope. But their liberal legislative agenda—freeing labor unions; expanding public health, housing, and education; promoting national industry; and limiting foreign domination of business—could not keep pace with demand for change.
Cacophony reigned in this city that produced 11 Arabic daily newspapers, 190 magazines, 60 feature films a year, and scandals and strikes every day of the week. Tolerance succumbed to violence as Fascists and religious extremists rallied to radical visions of an Egypt “purified” of alien influence. The populist sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali captured this feverish mood, warning in 1950 of the dangers of Western cultural imperialism and its supposed agents: “The West surely seeks to humiliate us, to occupy our land, and to destroy Islam by annulling its laws and abolishing its traditions….The faction that works for the separation of Egypt from Islam is really a shameless, pernicious, and perverse group of puppets and slaves of Europeans.”
Trade unionists, Communists,*2 and Muslim Brothers—the Brotherhood, though banned in 1948, boasted half a million members in the late 1940s—played cat and mouse with King Farouk’s secret police. Each claimed an exclusive right to the masses; each claimed a monopoly on the future. But Cairo in its confusion longed not for slogans but for a savior.
Coming just six months after the great Cairo fire on Black Saturday, the silent coup of July 23, 1952, brought a sense of tremendous relief. Cairenes were only too willing to surrender their troubles and to project their hopes onto the army, which at the time seemed the only uncorrupted institution left. Crowds cheered the self-effacing new rayyis or president, General Muhammad Naguib, so trim and modest compared to the elephantine Farouk. The youthful officers surrounding Naguib—earnest, articulate soldiers untainted with foreign affectation—seemed the ideal of a new kind of Egyptian man. They looked confident, and this was the quality Cairo yearned for.
For most, the enchantment endured. For some—and not only for Cairo’s cosmopolitan elite—it was soon cut short. Police shot dead eight striking workers within a month of the coup, putting to rest notions that Egypt’s new leaders were sympathetic to the powerful Communist movement. Rather than hold elections as promised, the regime abolished political parties. Hapless politicians were rounded up, tried, and imprisoned. In 1954 the handsome, broad-shouldered leader of the younger officers shunted aside General Naguib and declared himself rayyis. Gamal Abdel Nasser was soft-spoken and bookish. His favorite tune was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Orientalist fantasia Scheherazade; his favorite writer was Voltaire. But this army colonel was no lily-livered Candide. His security forces squashed critics with unprecedented zeal, dispatching some 3,000 of them by 1955 to prison camps, where many endured torture. Charged with plotting Nasser’s assassination, the Muslim Brotherhood was crushed. As six of its leaders were led to the scaffold, one of them cried out a curse on the revolution.
To its detractors the revolution was a cruel joke. The old order had been torn down, only to be replaced by a regime that harked back to Mameluke rule. Trusting no one, Nasser handed out fiefdoms to his officer friends: governorships of the provinces, directorships of nationalized companies, editorships of newspapers. Like a jealous sultan of old, he chiseled away the memory of his predecessors. Street names changed: Ismailia Square, the hub of the modern city, became Tahrir (or Liberation) Square. King Fouad Avenue was now called 26 July Avenue, after the date of Farouk’s departure into exile. The new government claimed all the achievements of the past as its own. Free public education, progressive labor laws, public health and housing, the Arab League:*3 all these things were expanded under the new regime, which neglected to mention that they had been initiated by the old. With the school curriculum sanitized, a whole generation grew up ignorant of its own past, believing that Egypt before the revolution had been a sorry place of oppressed peasants lorded over by imperialist lackeys and wicked feudalists.
Cairo forgot itself. Privately funded institutions moldered in disuse: the Geographical Society, the Institut d’Égypte, the Agricultural and Ethnographic and Railway and European Art Museums that celebrated Victorian ideals of progress. The monuments of the Old City were again allowed to decay; the private charity that had restored and preserved them was subsumed, like nearly all voluntary organizations, into the state bureaucracy.*4 Farouk’s palaces, which had at first been thrown open to the public as exhibits of royal decadence, were closed and converted to offices for the army, the police, and the presidency. A single, soft voice poured from the radio, drowning the old cacophony of debate, reducing the old quandaries to idle café chatter.
To the chagrin of Nasser’s victims, it was a voice that touched the masses. The rayyis was a masterly orator. Egyptians thrilled to hear a leader speak in words they could understand, proclaiming a vision they had only dreamed of. Forget democracy, forget Islam; it was Nasser who embodied the aspirations of the real people. He was Rob Roy and Robin Hood: See the rayyis in the newsreels passing title deeds to sharecroppers, busting up the great estates. See him biting the tail of the British lion, nationalizing the Suez Canal. See him champion the cause of the little man, opening schools, granting diplomas, working for Arab independence and unity, hobnobbing with those other great liberators Tito and Nehru and Kwame Nkrumah.
The hero leaped from one seeming success to another, and Cairo basked in his glory. The city took on a new, serious look. The swelling number of police exchanged the quaint tarboosh for the beret (those police in uniform, that is; the number of secret police grew disproportionately). Bureaucrats wore military-style safari suits instead of the pinstripes favored by pashas—whose titles were now abolished anyway. Belly dancers were required to cover their midriffs. Prostitutes and beggars were shooed off the streets. Stark, functional angularity ruled in the new monuments rising along the Nile—the river itself having been tamed by the massive Soviet-funded and -designed High Dam at Aswan. The Cairo Tower, a 600-foot-high lotus blossom in concrete mesh capped with a revolving restaurant, rocketed skyward near the Gezira Sporting Club in 1955.*5 Symbols of the new age replaced the old British army barracks at Qasr al-Nil. In their place rose the headquarters of the Arab League, a Hilton hotel, and a low-budget copy of the U.N.’s Manhattan offices that was to house Nasser’s monolithic political party, the Arab Socialist Union. The radio and television tower, a thirty-story rectangle planted in a massive round base, beamed Cairo’s revolutionary ideals across the Arab world and beyond. South of the city, the shady spa of Helwan-les-Bains was transformed into an industrial complex
complete with steel mills, cement factories, and assembly plants for cars, electronics, and armaments. Here, proclaimed Nasser, Egypt would manufacture everything from needles to rockets. (Note the virile imagery.)
After a decade in office Nasser announced a social revolution to complete his political coup. In the new Egypt, the paternal state would take care of everything. Along with finance and heavy industry, the press, cinema, theater, and publishing were nationalized. From now on the Ministry of Industry would make things, while the Ministry of National Guidance and the Ministry of Culture would channel thoughts and their expression. Just as in the early years of the Soviet Union, the arts did indeed flower at first in the enthusiasm of change. In the three years following 1962, Cairo theater audiences grew sixfold and became acquainted with Brecht, O’Neill, and Chekhov as well as a maturing dazzle of local talent. The city gained a symphony orchestra and a classical ballet troupe. Realism touched with a stylized hint of folklore set the visual tone. Muralists glorified the new institutions with neopharaonic warriors piloting MiG fighter planes instead of chariots; with musclebound, tractor-driving peasants and wrench-wielding proletarians. Studios toned down the soft focus of romance and tuned up clean-cut images of peasants rising against feudal overlords and of Omar Sharif on the waterfront, fighting for the rights of the working man.
One summer morning in 1961, many an ex-pasha was to spill his Turkish coffee on reading the headlines in Al-Ahram. To finance the march to socialism, the government had just made it practically illegal to own assets worth more than £10,000. Anything in excess of this amount, whether it be a Garden City villa or a stake in the Cairo Electric Tramways Company, was to be seized. Four thousand of Egypt’s richest families were ruined. The Syro-Maltese, Greco-Armenian, and other polyglot titans of industry found their desks occupied overnight by bureaucrats and army officers. The change of command had a peculiar historical resonance; just as in Mameluke days, the “depredations of the Soldan” were again to suffocate private enterprise.
As the state took over, it took on responsibility for housing, even as Cairo’s population doubled again, to 4 million by 1960. Ranks of slab-concrete tenements sprouted, and whole new districts were laid out to absorb both the urban poor and the new bourgeois cadres created by the regime. The City of Engineers, the City of Journalists, and Victory City promised vistas of neat, modernist cubes marching into fields and desert. The facts that the dwellings were cramped, hot, and shoddy; that the neat street plans often dead-ended in sand dunes or farming villages, were of no account. The important thing was the dream.
The vision seemed so real that Egyptians were by and large willing to forgive the imprisonments, the dispossessions, the cronyism, and the atmosphere of fear. The cosmopolitans were leaving; the sons of the soil would be in charge. Until the flood of university graduates became so huge that their degrees were debased, Nasser’s education policies seemed a triumph. (The ratio of teachers to students at Cairo University went from 1:6 in 1950 to 1:60 in 1962.) Until buildings decayed and collapsed for lack of maintenance, his 1961 decree fixing rents at the level of 1944 seemed an act of mighty magnanimity to the poor. Until it became clear that they were madly overstaffed and lost money, state industries were seen as the engines that would drive Egypt to a prosperous future.
The Egyptians were not alone. To all the nations that were, like Egypt, just recovering from European colonization, Nasser’s Cairo seemed a vanguard city. Half the liberation movements of the 1960s set up offices here. From Radio Cairo, the African National Congress broadcast encouragement in Zulu and Xhosa to its oppressed brothers in South Africa. At Cairo University, Yasir Arafat stirred exiled Palestinians to fight for their rights. It was to Cairo that the youthful Saddam Hussein fled after his first murder—he had gunned down an Iraqi politician in the streets of Baghdad in 1962. Here the future dictator skulked in university corridors, drank in ideology, and studied, of all things, law. Nasserism was infectious: by the end of Nasser’s term most Arabs lived under totalitarianisms inspired by his. Their political language was Cairo’s; from Algiers to Aden they spoke of the inevitability of socialism, of Arab unity and Afro-Asian solidarity, of freedom from Western hegemony.
IN JUST ONE day the mighty edifice of the New Egypt collapsed. On June 8, 1967, Radio Cairo declared that the sneak attack launched by Israel three days before had collapsed. Egyptian forces had shot down 200 enemy warplanes. Its triumphant army would soon be marching down Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. On June 9 Gamal Abdel Nasser addressed the nation. His voice trembling, the rayyis confessed that his country and its allies had just suffered the most humiliating defeat since the fall of France in 1940. The enemy had not only wiped out three-quarters of the air force in one morning’s surprise attacks, not only lopped off the whole Sinai Peninsula—and with it, Egypt’s richest oil fields—not only killed 12,000 Egyptians, captured 60,000, and entrenched itself behind the impregnable barrier of the now sealed Suez Canal, it had also occupied the Holy City of Jerusalem. The disgrace was so complete, Nasser concluded, that he had no recourse but to resign.*6
A wail of pain and anger rose up from the defeated city. The millions who had spent a week glued to radios, chain-smoking through the nighttime blackouts and air-raid sirens, now poured out of houses and offices. It was a kind of spontaneous mass enactment of an operatic finale. The Hero was wounded, but the People would carry him to a dignified end. “Gamal, Gamal,” the crowds shouted, and even many who detested Nasser joined in, enthused by the moment, refusing to let him quit. And so the savior was resurrected.
In following years Cairo paid the price of Nasser’s folly in full.*7 It was a somber period. Lines for rationed food curled around corners. Brick antiblast walls obstructed building entrances. Windows and headlights were painted over in blackout blue. Soldiers’ boots thundered on the roofs of trains. Israeli warplanes screeched arrogantly overhead, dropping the occasional bomb on schools and factories. Imagined spies lurked everywhere. Loiterers were arrested as saboteurs; a woman of my acquaintance was picked up and hauled in for the crime of painting a picture of the University Bridge: Had she not seen the sign that said “No Photo”? All investment was halted in favor of rebuilding the army. Telephones, roads, and sewers decayed. Toilet paper and lightbulbs and scores of other necessities grew scarce. As Israeli guns wrecked the cities along the Suez Canal, half a million refugees swarmed into the already overburdened capital.
The old question returned with a new, accusatory urgency. Who was to blame for Egypt’s weakness? Generals were tried and jailed for criminal incompetence. Nasser’s best friend from army days, Minister of Defense Abd al-Hakim Amir, committed “suicide” while under house arrest. The regime itself split. The fainthearted said socialism had sapped the country and carried it into the losing Cold War camp. Diehards said it had not been strictly enough applied; that the West—through its agent Israel—had cut Nasser down to size precisely because his success made him a threat. Students chanted in the streets for more justice and less oppression. They shouted for guns to fight the enemy. Imprisoned fundamentalists rattled their bars to say “We told you so.”
Even the common people—Nasser’s “masses”—divided. For every illiterate street-sweeper who had proudly seen his school-smocked children learn to read, seen them gain the unimaginable distinctions of a college degree and a government salary, there was another whose son had died in the war or been beaten in jail. Cairo tried to veil itself in the revolutionary image, to see nothing but the factories, the crowds of students and workers, the wide streets of the new quarters. But demoralizing tales kept stripping away the emperor’s clothes.
Take the story of an architect
friend whom I will call Iskandar. (One legacy of the Nasser period is a lingering fear of speaking out.) Like every able-bodied man, Iskandar was drafted into the army after the Six-Day War. One day his general summoned him in a panic. The rayyis was to inspect an air base in the desert the following week. But there was a hitch. The base did not exist. The president could not inspect an empty patch of sand. Something had to be created, double-quick, and Iskandar, being an architect, after all, was the man to do it. My friend was given trucks and a squad of peasant conscripts. They slapped together prefab buildings. They hauled rocks into straight lines suggesting roads and runways, and for good measure painted them republican red, black, and green. But Iskandar’s master stroke was this: he trucked his men into Cairo at night and had them uproot dozens of roadside trees, carry them into the wasteland, and stick them in the sand. Within days the trees had wilted, and in fact Nasser never showed up to congratulate Iskandar’s commanding officer on his green thumb.
THE REVOLUTION WAS by no means all farcical artifice. The changes, and many of the gains, were real. Nasser had opened the Cairo of aristocrats and cosmopolitans to the common people, much as Saladin had done seven centuries before with the court city of the Fatimid caliphs. The street that had divided the old quarters from the new—the former Shari‘ Ibrahim Pasha, renamed Shari‘ al-Gumhuriyya, or Republic Street, after the 1952 revolution—was no longer such a barrier between values. (Now, cynics said, the whole town decayed evenly.) The creation of a vast, centralized bureaucracy had raised Cairo’s primacy in Egypt. The revolution had built a dominant new class of petits bourgeois, of commuters and managers. It had exposed new ranks of Egyptians to the ideals of social justice; given them the sense that they could be modern without selling out to the West. It had given Cairo a self-image as the unchallenged capital of a renascent Arab world, a light to the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa.