Nasser never went as far as radical Muslim reformers such as Turkey’s hard-drinking dictator Kemal Atatürk, who abolished the Arabic script, or Tunisia’s secularizing president Habib Bourguiba, who banned polygamy. Still, to some traditionalists his revolution seemed, ironically, to serve the very colonialist goals it professed to oppose. It was Nasser who abolished the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious tribunals that had governed family law until 1956. The breaking of the Muslim Brotherhood,*8 the suppression of Sufism, and the absorption of al-Azhar into the state—along with nearly the entire educational establishment—had the effect of muting religious reactionaries. Indeed, mosque sermons now proclaimed that Nasser’s ideology of socialism had all along been inherent in Islam.
The Enlightenment project—though stripped of democracy—seemed poised to effect deeply rooted social change. The metropolis dispatched engineers, doctors, and teachers to educate the countryside in new city ways. Government subsidies and professional unions brought a sense of importance to the many artists, writers, and filmmakers who joined their persuasive skills to the revolution’s aims. Outside the capital, sweeping land reforms empowered fellahin for the first time in history. In the city, more marriages were now made more for love rather than to reinforce family alliances. Dating couples held hands as they strolled along the Nile embankment. A visitor in 1968 could remark that Cairo boasted more female dentists and physicians than most Western cities, with scarcely a veil in sight. The divorce rate—whose extremely high level before the revolution had reflected women’s low status—plummeted from one in three marriages to fewer than one in ten. Women had won the right to vote, even if this could be exercised only in referendums that Nasser always won by a stupefying margin. (Which inspired this tale: The secret police were known to transmit the latest jokes to Nasser. Hurt by all the scorn, Nasser ordered them to bring to him a man reputed for his caustic wit. “How can you say these things about me?” the rayyis whined. “Everyone loves me. It’s a proven fact—99 percent of them voted for me.” The joker raised his palms defensively. “That joke isn’t one of mine,” he said.)
But perhaps the most enduring legacy of the revolution was unintended. Egyptians had always been characterized as the most home-loving of peoples. Now they began to emigrate en masse, voting with their feet. Largely it was an exodus of brawn as workers flew to the newly rich Arab oil states to make their fortunes. But educated Cairenes, too, left by the thousand, continuing the crippling brain drain that had begun with the loss of the city’s Jews and Greeks and Italians.
In 1996 the Wall Street Journal could report that Egyptian-born Americans were the most highly educated of no immigrant groups identified in the United States; 60 percent had university degrees, a quarter of them at post-graduate level. This erosion of talent was to have devastating effects on Cairo—in a process of aesthetic defoliation as the class that patronized arts and public gardens and fine buildings disappeared; in a diminution of civil society as private initiative was abandoned and bureaucratized; in a deterioration of quality—in everything from building standards to the crafting of laws—as pen-pushers and party cronies took over the skilled professions.
NASSER DIED ABRUPTLY in September 1970—so abruptly that there were rumors of poison. Two million people trailed the fallen hero’s coffin through the center of Cairo. Like a latter-day Mameluke sultan, the rayyis was laid to rest in a giant funerary mosque—but one of reinforced concrete rather than stone, with picture windows and plaster filigree.
Anwar al-Sadat, an old and trusted colleague of Nasser’s, made his entrance. Sadat was absolutely, vividly, a man of his age, one of the inheritors of the cosmopolitan city that King Farouk left behind. Born in an obscure Delta village in 1919—the year of Egypt’s revolt against British rule—he was raised in Cairo, where his father worked as a minor bureaucrat. In 1938, King Farouk’s coronation year, Sadat entered the War College at Heliopolis. His family could barely afford the uniform. Boys of humble origin had only recently begun to be admitted to the academy, and poor cadets such as Nasser and Sadat never forgave their subsequent humiliations. Unlike well-connected graduates who were assigned to cushy jobs in Cairo, both future presidents were billeted to a dreary garrison in deepest Upper Egypt.
As a young, disillusioned officer, Sadat experimented with every political trend of the turbulent 1940s. For a time he dallied with the Muslim Brotherhood (as had Nasser). Sadat also tried on the green shirt of the Fascist-inspired Young Egypt Party, and immersed himself in the pro-Axis, anti-British underground during World War II. Most of all, though, Sadat seemed to be struggling to forget his origins. After the disaster of the 1948 war against Israel, he abandoned his officer’s uniform. Having done time for his involvement in an assassination plot, he forsook politics and went into the transportation business. Significantly, he divorced his first wife, a simple girl of lowly birth, in favor of a pale-skinned, middle-class lady who was half Maltese.
Sadat’s search for identity—incidentally, the phrase became the title of his autobiography—took a new twist after Nasser’s death in 1970. Now, as president, Sadat revealed what must have been long-repressed doubts about the course of the revolution. He tossed out Soviet advisers and threw open Egypt’s doors to capitalism. He abandoned Nasser’s Arabism and trumpeted Egyptian uniqueness. He betrayed his Arab allies and made a separate peace with Israel. His wardrobe blossomed. One day he appeared in an admiral’s starched whites wielding a baton, the next in a Paris-tailored suit gesturing with a briar pipe. When Cairo’s sophisticates laughed at such antics, Sadat turned on them. Police rounded up left-wing cynics while the president counseled his “children” to return to Islam. He rediscovered his long-discarded native village and proclaimed it a symbol of purity, of the true Egypt. There in the Delta—to the puzzlement of locals who better understood his father’s impulse to escape to Cairo—Sadat would hold court, donning peasant robes and fingering worry beads, and ponder the state of the world with visiting khawāga dignitaries.
Sadat wanted desperately to be a man of the people. But which people? His profusion of muftis echoed Cairo’s own confusion, its splintering among classes and generations and convictions. This unease, this nagging sense of incompleteness, was natural in a city that had mutated far faster than the human ability to grasp its meanings. The rocketing rate of Cairo’s growth would alone have undone dreams of a stable world. But add to that the gyrations of its politics, the beating of war drums, and the clash of symbols—Western and Eastern, urban and rural—and you begin to understand the Cairene’s deep distrust of wrappings and institutions, his longing for ideals, his resort to humor and religion.
IN OCTOBER 1973 Sadat led his people into another war against Israel. As much as a battle to retrieve captured land, it was to Egyptians a fight to save lost honor and self-esteem. In these terms Egypt did well. Its army beat back the much better-armed Israelis from the Suez Canal. Quickly resupplied by the United States, Israel counterattacked. The October War ended with a shaky stalemate, but Egypt had regained much of its pride. In subsequent negotiations it was to win back all of its land as well.
The relief of peace allowed Sadat to depressurize the system. He released political prisoners, promised elections, and welcomed foreign aid and investment and tourism. A furious storm of change swept over the demobilized capital. Money came out of mattresses. Private construction boomed. The new chain hotels on the Corniche soon d
warfed adjacent Nasserist institutions. So many old villas were ripped down and replaced by apartments that an ex-pasha I know declared it was a good thing Nasser had stolen so much property, because at least the mansions he had converted into schools and police stations would be saved from speculators. Emigrant laborers sent home color TVs and rials and dinars that were plowed into acres of jerry-built, unplanned housing. The edges of the city bristled with antennas and iron reinforcing bars. Brick tenements without power or plumbing sliced into lush, green fields in a patchwork of land grabs.
Money began to undermine Nasser’s pyramid of bureaucratic power. Inflation punished workers on fixed salaries while enriching tradesmen. Importers and contractors minted cash. Casting off wartime isolation, Cairo binged on conspicuous consumption. Lapels, ties, and trouser bottoms flared absurdly. Heels and luxury apartment buildings elevated to dizzy heights. New boutiques contorted foreign names in blinking, plastified neon. Painted floozies who catered to rich Arab visitors flounced out of shops called Up Pop and into nightclubs like the Parisiana, the Salt and Pepper, and the After Eight. Shiny Chevrolets slipped from the showrooms of Shady Motors into snarled streets that swiftly became so clogged that concrete overpasses had to be tossed up with helter-skelter disregard for beauty. Meanwhile, huddles of peasants squatted numbly outside agencies touting cut-price fares to jobs in Libya, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf.
The city rediscovered fun; it reveled in the joys of noise. As the great singer Umm Kulsoum and her generation of balladeers passed away, amplifiers squawked a new breed of ditzy Cairo pop. Admen reworked revolutionary hymns into jingles for deodorants and hair spray. Television ousted the last public storytellers from cafés. Billboards blotted out slums. In theater and film, slapstick and frivolous romance came back. Nighttime instincts, suppressed under Nasser’s austerity, resurfaced. Hashish parlors thrived—on boats in the Nile, in cemeteries, and even in salons overlooking the Gezira Sporting Club. The president himself was said to enjoy a good smoke. His own brother was rumored to be a big-shot drug runner.
Eight million strong in 1980, Cairo seemed more than ever on the verge of chaos. Public services could not cope. Sewage seeped from manholes. Stretches of the ancient Qasaba looked like a shallower Venice: I once found tourists being gamely gondoliered on a donkey cart through the sludge outside the mausoleum of Sultan Qalawun. Buses sagged under their overload while taps sputtered and died from lack of pressure. Rogue electricians made fortunes tapping high-tension wires for domestic use. And the telephones! In 1975 you could finish the paper through to the obituaries while waiting for a dial tone. Once the auspicious signal sounded, theories abounded over successful means of dialing. The most popular was to hold the final digit and say “Bismallah.”
At about this time a friend’s doorbell rang. “Congratulations,” said the beaming herald on her doorstep, “your phone has come through!” What phone? my friend wanted to know. The company official explained that it was the line her parents had applied for when she was born, twenty years before.
I recall another scene from this era. The pressure of people seemed to propel the city ever upward, and so the army had built an emergency footbridge to circle Tahrir Square. In the center of this metal ring the Ministry of Information had erected a giant poster of a pharaonic Sadat in his admiral’s whites. Circumambulating with the crowd one morning, I found a leatherfaced peasant shouting at this graven image. “Ya rayyis!” he called out over the roar of traffic, rocking on his feet, raising his arms to heaven. “O hero of war and peace! My water buffalo has died! My children are hungry!” Onlookers shrugged and grinned. A policeman came and took the disconsolate fellah by the hand.
It was in these years, too, that the state discovered it could no longer afford its revolutionary pledge to educate, heal, house, feed, and employ the masses. Preoccupied with foreign affairs, Sadat shied from admitting the rupture of Nasser’s social contract. It was easier to export the unemployed to the Gulf and to dream of new cities than to confront Cairo’s reality. It was easier to proclaim democracy and rig its results than to abolish party and police controls. It was easier to speak grandly of an Open-Door economic policy than to either upgrade or dismantle the swollen public sector whose needles rusted and whose rockets didn’t work.
For lack of any policy, state services began to privatize themselves. With schools working two or even three shifts a day, and classes averaging eighty students, teachers made up for dismal salaries by giving private lessons on the side. In government hospitals there were no bedclothes or syringes anymore, let alone medicines; such things had to be procured by patients. Some unscrupulous private hospitals, meanwhile, were found to be buying kidneys from poor Cairenes to sell them to the rich. Every city bus listed to starboard under the weight of passengers jamming the doors; private jitney buses began to pick up those not fit enough to survive the scrum. Petty corruption grew rife. Nasser’s guarantee of a government job for every college graduate became a fiasco. Bureaucrats showed up once a month to collect their paltry pay; their despairing bosses preferred it that way, because offices simply did not have enough chairs to seat them in. A peek in those days into rooms at the Mugamma‘, the colossal state office building on Tahrir Square, would reveal secretaries diligently peeling potatoes, darning socks, and knitting sweaters for their children. A survey showed that the typical government staffer put in a grand daily total of seven minutes’ real working time. Another poll found that 85 percent of university students hoped to emigrate on graduation, so pinched were jobs and wages at home.
Egypt was falling into population shock. Cairo alone was growing by a quarter of a million people a year. The cost of subsidizing staple foods rose and rose. Studies revealed not only that the average Egyptian consumed more wheat than anyone else (200 kg a year), but also that bread was so cheap—compared to everything else—that farmers were feeding it to chickens. (They were also feeding them the free contraceptive pills provided by the United States—until, that is, rumors spread that these magic hormones that made chickens fat also caused human impotence.)
In January 1977 Sadat doubled the price of bread from one to two piastres a loaf. Cairo simply boiled over. For three days enraged citizens charged through the city, smashing cars and shop windows and surprising themselves with their own fury. But no one was as astonished as Sadat. Like kings before him, he had lost touch. He had forgotten just how close to destitution his subjects were.
Soldiers quelled the rioting with curfews, tear gas, and buckshot, leaving several dozen dead. The rayyis renounced the price rise. But he never quite regained his composure. It was now that Sadat’s speeches lengthened into a disappointed father’s marathon harangues. How could his children misbehave so? From the window of the helicopter Richard Nixon had given him, Cairo looked neat and prosperous, if a little dusty. A sparkling new elevated highway sliced through its center. (It had bulldozed out of the way a last monument to British rule, the All Saints Cathedral behind the Egyptian Museum.) On the desert horizon beyond the Pyramids, lampposts staked out a future satellite city where multinational corporations would build factories to employ happy workers freed from the crowded capital. Both the overpass and the city were named for 6 October 1973, the day when Sadat’s army pushed Israel back from the Suez Canal. They were the rayyis’s gift to the October Generation, as he dubbed the new, proud Egyptians he envisaged as following him into an era of peace.
SHARI’ AL-GALA’ IS a busy tunnel of a street that smolders noisily under the 6 October Bridge. The Arab world’s two biggest-circulation dailies, the staid Al-Ahram and the racier Al-Akhbar, have their headquarters here, halfway down the bus route from Cairo Station to Tahrir Square. Tall buildings suggesting Clark Kent’s Daily Planet, they add a touch of sobriety to Gala’ Street’s high-pitched bustle. From their soundproof windows Cairo’s top editors look out over the expressway and across the city center. The shutters on the other side of these buildings, however, are all closed. That is because they overlook an eyesor
e, a huge, windblown lot that is empty except for junked and parked cars, and beyond which spreads the sprawling range of tenements, railroad yards, and sweatshops that is Shubra, Cairo’s Brooklyn or East End.
In Sadat’s time a warren of tin and mudbrick shacks jammed the now vacant lot. Here, in the space of four football fields, lived some 24,000 squatters—a density of population forty times that of New York City. At Sadat’s command this whole community was razed. Its inhabitants found themselves shunted out of sight beyond the Shubra railroad yards, shoveled into a grim housing project of stacked concrete matchboxes. The old slum may have been cramped, but it had worked out its own mechanisms of survival. In the new site there was not enough water, or power, or transportation, or room in the schools, or space in general. Worse, the social cohesiveness of the old alleyways had been uprooted.
In the summer of 1981 militant Muslim youths attacked an unlicensed Coptic church being built near the project. Rioting erupted—ominously, because this was the first serious intercommunal strife Cairo had witnessed since the Middle Ages. Central Security, a black-clad force of conscripts with karate training that Sadat had created in the wake of the bread riots, stormed the district and clubbed it into an uneasy peace. To give an appearance of balance, the rayyis banished the Coptic pope to a desert monastery.