Political censorship may be less heavy-handed today than in the 1960s, but the religious revival of recent years has squeezed the margins of free speech in similar ways. In 1985, for instance, police raided a bookshop near al-Azhar. Tipped off by the university’s clerics, they seized 2,000 illustrated copies of a work that a subsequent court ruling described as “violating the rules of decency and negating the morality of Egyptian society so as to invite youth into deviation and corruption.” The offending text was none other than that classic of world literature The Thousand and One Nights. The case was dismissed on appeal, on the grounds that the book was a necessary resource for research, but the very idea that a classic work could be banned in modern times cast a chill over intellectuals. Imagine the Vatican trying to suppress Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The chill was to grow colder. The clash between the city’s bawdy, light-hearted “café and cinema” mind and its dour, moralizing side was to grow ever more violent.
In 1991, for instance, censors banned a play because of a single prop in the set. One side of a revolving pedestal showed an image of the Kaaba at Mecca—the shrine housing the sacred Black Stone that is the focal point of Muslim prayer. Turned around, the prop became an oil barrel onto which a belly dancer leaped. This hint at the double standard of Saudi Arabia, whose citizens may be pious at home but whom Cairenes are more likely to see cavorting in the city’s gambling casinos, was judged inimical to Egypt’s relations with the oil-rich kingdom. Mosque sermons denounced the playwright, who died soon after of a heart attack, penniless, at age thirty.
In 1992 a conservative Al-Ahram columnist accused an obscure, self-published novelist named Ala’ Hamed of blasphemy for poking fun at various and sundry prophets. Hamed’s books were suppressed. The author was fired from his job as a tax inspector and charged with blasphemy. Shortly after testifying in Hamed’s favor at his trial, the outspoken secularist Farag Foda was shot dead outside his office. Police placed Hamed under twenty-four-hour surveillance for his own safety. “My only crime,” the beleaguered author told me in the cramped three-room walk-up he shared with his wife and two daughters, “is that I failed to understand the space of freedom in Egypt. It is like this.” He drew a narrow circle in the air. Hamed was eventually given a one-year jail term.
In 1995 a knife-wielding fanatic stabbed Naguib Mahfouz, injuring the eighty-two-year-old Nobel laureate so seriously that he could no longer use his writing hand. The would-be assassin’s excuse was that in the 1950s al-Azhar had banned Mahfouz’s novel Children of Gebelawi on the grounds that this story, set in a Cairo alley, was an allegory of Koranic history. A year later, in 1996, courts forbade the screening of a film by Yousef Chahine, one of Egypt’s most influential directors. Because The Emigrant was based on the biblical (and Koranic) story of Joseph, it was judged to contravene the Islamic injunction against portrayal of prophets.
Another ruling that year aroused an even greater furor. After a two-year legal battle, Egypt’s highest court of appeal declared that Nasr Abu Zayd, a respected Arabic-literature scholar at Cairo University, was an apostate from Islam. As such, he could not remain married to his Muslim wife. His mistake was to have suggested that parts of the Koran should be understood metaphorically, not as literal fact. “He denies the attributes of God in that He is a king with soldiers, angels and a throne,” thundered a report from the state prosecutor. Professor Abu Zayd’s books were removed from sale. Having no intention of divorcing, and fearing for their lives at the hands of religious extremists, the couple abandoned Cairo for a European exile.
The tribulations of Professor Abu Zayd shocked Cairene liberals profoundly. Despite its flaws, the justice system had long been seen as an ally in their cause. Now, it seemed, even this bastion of freedom both from the state and from religious zealotry had fallen. Yet those who took a longer view saw the ruckus as simply a nastier replay of the apostasy trials of the 1920s. It was another episode in the contest that has forged Cairo’s worldview in this century—a contest that has pitted those who favor an open society against those who don’t.
The important thing, in the end, may be that the contest remains unresolved. Cairo’s intellectuals have not taken Professor Abu Zayd’s defeat lying down. They have counterattacked. Films, plays, and popular TV serials have portrayed religious radicals as misguided, violence-prone opportunists. Liberal publishers have reissued controversial classics from Egypt’s brief Age of Enlightenment. Young writers still dare to challenge sexual and religious taboos.
Sadly for them, few Cairenes pay much notice. This city may produce three-fifths of all books published in Arabic, but then the whole Arabic-speaking world releases fewer new books every year than does tiny Belgium. In years of riding the Metro here I have never once seen anyone reading anything other than a textbook, a newspaper, or the Koran. Publishers consider a meager 3,000 copies to be a generous print run for a well-reviewed novel. Even such a prolific writer as Naguib Mahfouz earns far more from translation rights than he does at home: his own daughters, he says, prefer to see his books in film versions rather than read them. What do sell in the tens of thousands are overblown political exposes, religious tracts, and, increasingly, works of yellow journalism that promise—but seldom deliver—titillation galore. In 1996 seven out of ten Cairo best-sellers flaunted scantily clad women on their covers next to titles such as Sex and the Jinn, A Lady from Hell, or Girls for Export.
As much as government meddling or religious prudery, it is the fickleness of the Cairo audience that keeps artists from pushing themselves to their limits. It is always easier to play for laughs here, to serve up clichés rather than strive for refinement. The lack of audience resonance often consumes youthful talents. Such is the case, for example, with a promising filmmaker such as Khayri Bishara, whose output switched from highly sensitive dramas in the 1980s to sappy musicals in the 1990s. Cairenes, it seems, have changed little in the 600 years since al-Maqrizi accused them of exalting frivolity over substance.
IRONICALLY, the apathy of the wider public brings Cairo’s fractious thinking elite together in a shared sense of alienation. Secularists feel alienated from the religious discourse that is still the mainstream of popular expression. Religious radicals feel alienated from the Western influence they see as steadily encroaching on their Islamic heritage. The one group is accused of aping the West; the other of trying to re-create the past. Between these two extremes, other kinds of tension surface: the struggle between the entrenched, father-knows-best generation and younger voices clamoring for the oxygen of free debate; the alienating forces of Cairo’s perplexingly rapid growth and of its class divisions. Yet the poles of discord also produce a magnetic pull, a longing to fuse into a common culture the realms of high Arabic and low, of foreign style and local tradition.
Sadly, it is mostly the case that Cairo’s contrary currents fail to fuse. In fact, mutual misunderstanding often mounts to intolerable extremes.
This is what 140 upper-class teenagers found in 1997, when they were hauled from their homes at dawn by antiterrorist squads and hurled into prison. The trouble was that a scaremongering press had taken their cultish fashion for black lipstick, skull-and-crossbones T-shirts, rave dances, and heavy-metal music as clear signs of Satan worship. The narrow-minded public, propelled by class envy and led by the religious Establishment, was happy to ride the ensuing wave of witch-hunting hysteria. And even if the rich kids had never, as it turned out, engaged in the orgies and drinking of chickens’ blood that the gutter press had claimed, the common thinking was that they deserved a reprimand for straying so far West of the Egyptian mainstream.
So the satisfaction at their arrest was general. Yet even conservatives gaped at the medieval mind-set shown by the president of the Higher State Security Court, who wrote to Al-Ahram with the explanation that these wayward souls should not be blamed for their wickedness, because they were in fact literally children of devils. “A devil may marry a woman and this is a fact
without argument,” wrote Judge Ahmad Badur. Whenever a man slept with his wife when she was menstruating, or did so without the cover of a sheet, or without first invoking God’s blessing: whenever he allowed lapses such as these, said the judge, why then the Devil would slip in. And so, he concluded, “Devils’ children from human women are the gays and sexual perverts…and that is why it is neither strange nor surprising that they should lean toward their real father, the Devil….”
The predicament of Cairo’s heavy-metal fans, and indeed of its Western-oriented elite as a whole, is aptly described by the Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami: “Societies at the periphery of the [Western] world desperately flaunt the trappings of modernity, because the cosmopolitan layers intuitively feel their own isolation. On some level they realize that bourgeois civilization as process eludes them.”
Small wonder, then, that many modern Cairenes feel divorced from their fellows. Yet there is nothing new to the prevailing sense of alienation. A generation ago the novelist Waguih Ghali wrote that Cairo looked cosmopolitan not because so many foreigners lived here but because many Egyptians felt and acted like strangers in their own land.
In fact, alienation has been the central, linking theme in literature since Cairo’s emergence as a modern city. It appears in one of the first attempts in Arabic to emulate the form of the European novel, The Story of Isa bin Hisham by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (1858–1930). Published in the 1890s, this is a Rip Van Winkle tale*3 about a pasha who rises from the grave fifty years after his death. The pasha wanders from the al-Khalifa cemeteries into the great bustling capital and finds it has altered beyond all recognition. He is shocked to see native Cairenes disporting themselves in bars and to see them ruled over by foreigners in business. In one scene the old boy calls a cheating donkey driver an insolent peasant. To his astonishment the boy rebukes him: “We are in an age of liberty,” declares the upstart. “There is no difference anymore between a donkey driver and a prince.”
A generation on, the influential writer Muhammad Taymur (1892–1921) kept an almost anthropological distance between the observing author and his characters. In his short story “The Train,” a representative sample of Egyptians argue in a train compartment over the question of education. An old Turk and a village headman agree that the poor should not be educated, lest they learn to lose respect for their masters. They appeal for support to the wisdom of an Azharite sheikh. The turbaned cleric replies in classical Arabic, with the smug assurance that his hallowed dictum will seal the issue. “Offer not learning to the sons of the lower orders,” he intones. While a young, Europeanized effendi laughs off the incident, the narrator is struck with despair. It is the despair felt by the educated Cairene whose sense of belonging to Egypt is cramped by the burden of tradition. Yet as the author alights from the compartment, his ears buzzing with anger, the train roars and whistles as a symbol of the inevitable triumph of the modern world.
The novella Umm Hashim’s Lantern, published in 1943, explored similar themes. The author, Yahya Haqqi, was, however, inspired by a more romantic nationalism and sentimental Islam. He resolved his hero’s alienation differently.
The Umm Hashim of the title is a popular name for the Prophet’s grand-daughter Sayyida Zaynab, around whose shrine in the south of the Old City the action revolves. The story tells of Ismail, a boy from the neighborhood who travels to Europe, becomes a doctor, and returns to find his fiancée stricken with blindness. Ismail recoils in horror when his mother reveals she has been treating the ailment by dribbling holy oil from the lamp in Umm Hashim’s tomb into the girl’s eyes. The doctor hurls the vial of oil out the window and storms off, disgusted with the ignorance and superstition of his own family. But as he wanders for days alone through the city, he is drawn inexorably to Sayyida Zaynab. At last he comes back to his roots. Ismail enters the shrine of the saint, begs its guardian for some oil, and vows to devote his life to curing his beloved—with his science now reinforced by faith in miracles.
Cairo’s modern literati, having seen their national literature evolve from romanticism to realism, would find Ismail’s resolution unconvincingly naive. Secularists in particular would see in it echoes of the same contradictions that mark present-day debate (and, indeed, that have characterized intellectual life here since the first Cairenes returned from studying in Paris nearly 200 years ago, only to find that their people rejected the materialistic worldview they had acquired abroad). Yet the attempt such as Ismail’s to bring together heritage and intellect, heart and mind, remains the overriding challenge for Egyptian intellectuals.
This explains why many look back to the two decades before the disastrous 1967 war as a golden age. In those exciting years when Egypt overthrew its colonial masters and embarked on wrenching social reform, Cairo experimented daringly with cultural fusions. New idioms emerged in music, theater, painting, and film. The voice of Cairo became for a time the modern voice of the Arabs as a whole. If alienation was what it spoke of, the words still had resonance. In differing ways, every Arab country had suffered that split in consciousness which Western domination effected between outward-looking cities and inward-looking hinterlands. But it seemed to be only in Cairo that some kind of resolution was being forged, and articulated in a great outpouring of talent.
For the thirty-seven years before her retirement in 1973, listeners across the Arab world tuned radios to Cairo on the first Thursday night of every month. This was when Umm Kulsoum broadcast live from the Qasr al-Nil movie theater, in marathon concerts that often stretched to six hours in length, ending at three or four in the morning. So devoted were her followers that when one fervent aficionado failed to take his usual front-row seat at a concert, Umm Kulsoum sent the police to find him during an intermission. It turned out that his father had just died. The fan attended the second half of the concert anyway. In the 1960s an admirer in Kuwait sent Umm Kulsoum a silver Cadillac Eldorado fitted with a fridge and a TV A farmer in the Nile Delta sent her a cow and a water buffalo. When Umm Kulsoum went on international tour after the 1967 war she raised millions of pounds to reequip the defeated Egyptian Army. During her terminal illness Syrian radio kept an open telephone link to her hospital for spot reports on her health.
Her funeral in 1975 surpassed President Nasser’s. It brought more than 2 million mourners onto the streets of Cairo. The crowd kidnapped her body, carried it the full three miles from Tahrir Square to the Mosque of al-Husayn, and would have interred Umm Kulsoum next to the head of the Prophet’s grandson if the imam of the mosque had not pleaded for them to take the body to its proper grave.
Two decades later, Umm Kulsoum’s tomb in an al-Khalifa cemetery remains a popularly visited shrine. A Web site on the Internet preserves her memory, as does the Umm Kulsoum troupe that still performs her classics on the first Thursday of every month throughout Cairo’s winter concert season. The Umm Kulsoum radio station broadcasts from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. daily. Half the city tunes to the opening hour, carrying The Lady’s rich voice—slightly husky in her later years—across town from shop to taxi to factory floor and family kitchen. Rare is the Egyptian—or, indeed, the Arab—who does not know the lyrics to such emotion-charged ballads as “Al Atlal’,” “Inta ‘Umri,” or “Fakkaruni.”*4 Rarer still is one who does not know the story of Umm Kulsoum: of how she was born at about the turn of the century into dirt poverty in a Delta village, gained widening fame as a Koran chanter at country weddings, and then reached Cairo and enduring stardom.
Her rise mirrored the city’s transformation from a sleepy Arab town to a cosmopolitan capital. By t
he end of the 1920s this daughter of a village sheikh was earning $80,000 a year—which would have been a fortune even in Hollywood in those times. Her repertoire had shifted from traditional religious odes to love songs, with lyrics by famous poets set to tunes by modern Egyptian composers. Her accompanists were no longer galabiyya-clad yokels but top-notch musicians in jackets and bow ties. This girl who used to roll up her sleeves and eat with her fingers, wrote a critic in the Cairo weekly Rose al-Yusuf in 1926, now ate with a knife and fork, asked you “Comment ça va?” and answered “Très bien, merci.”
Early training in Koran recitation gave Umm Kulsoum perfect command of pure Arabic diction. Rigorous self-discipline gave her unparalleled vocal range and control. Her powers of improvisation were so great that it was said she never sang a phrase the same way twice. Responding to the calls for encores that make Cairene concerts as much a party as a spectacle, she could repeat a verse fifty times in a row, subtly varying pitch and intonation every time and driving listeners to ever dizzier heights of ecstasy. Nor did Umm Kulsoum rely on talent alone. Her personality was so forceful that by the 1940s she chaired both the Listeners’ Committee of Cairo Radio and the Egyptian Musicians’ Syndicate. For twenty years she exercised a practical veto over what Egyptians listened to. When the career of a rival, the Syrian-born star Ismahan, was cut short by a fatal car crash in 1946, it was rumored that Umm Kulsoum was responsible. (My bawāb still believes this was the case, just as he stubbornly insists that Umm Kulsoum herself was poisoned by President Sadat’s wife because the latter was jealous of the singer’s fame.)