Cairo: City of Sand (Topographics)

Cairo City of Sand

Maria Golia

Cairo

topographics

in the same series Fragments of the European City Stephen Barber

The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur Ziauddin Sardar

From Berlin Armando

Extreme Europe Stephen Barber

Some Cities Victor Burgin

Airspaces David Pascoe

The Ruins of Paris Jacques Réda

Intercities Stefan Hertmans

Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930 Joachim Schlör

Romania Borderland of Europe Lucian Boia

Robinson in Space Patrick Keiller Tokyo Donald Richie Tel Aviv: From Dream to City Joachim Schlör Liquid City Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair At the Edge of the World Jean Mohr/John Berger

Bangkok William Warren Macao Philippe Pons Zeropolis The Experience of Las Vegas Bruce Bégout Warsaw David Crowley Cambodia Michael Freeman

Cairo: City of Sand Maria Golia

reaktion books

For my brothers: Christopher, David and Frank

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street, London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2004, reprinted 2004 Transferred to digital printing 2006 Copyright © Maria Golia 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: Golia, Maria Cairo: City of Sand - (Topographics) 1. Cairo (Egypt) - Description and travel 2. Cairo (Egypt) - Social life and customs - 21st century I. Title 962.1’6’055 isbn-13: 9 781 86189 187 7 isbn-10: 1 86189 187 3

Contents

Preface 7 i

Vanishing Point 13

ii Artifice and Edifice 47 iii

The Guests 95

iv

Listening 139

v

Ensemble 169 References 215 Select Bibliography 230 Acknowledgements 231 Photographic Acknowledgements 232

Kamal Shimi balanced on Mohammed Shimi’s arm atop the Great Pyramid of Khufu, Cairo, 1960.

Preface

Some of us wonder, watching Cairo teeter between a barely functional glide and an irretrievable nosedive, what keeps this plane in the air? How goes the city, when it looks and acts like it’s held together by rubber bands? The intention behind this book was to try to make sense of how and why, given some of the most gruelling, incongruous conditions imaginable, Cairo retains its allure and its people their sanity. If it were a matter of thermodynamics one might eventually sort it out. In fact, Cairo is an essay in entropy, which is a measure of the degree of disorder or randomness in a system. Here, like the rest of the universe, energy is subject to dissipation and everything runs downhill, but order is nevertheless maintained, if barely. To readers in other world cities, some aspects of life in Cairo will no doubt sound familiar, while some may strike them as strange. Cities, like people, share the essentials, but each has a combination of qualities that is distinctive and recognizable. One of Cairo’s attributes is grace under pressure, and that is mostly what this book is about. Another distinction is the pride of place and influence the city enjoys vis-à-vis Egypt. Egyptian geographer Gamal Hamdan went so far as to call his country a ‘vast suburb of Cairo’, but he said it ruefully, knowing that Cairo’s prestige has come at the expense of the rural provinces. Indeed, a significant portion of Egypt’s population lives in the capital or its environs; it is the country’s administrative, political, religious, cultural and media centre. A book about Cairo is in some ways a book about Egypt, but this book focuses as much as possible on the capital and its people. The literature on Cairo is vast. Many books concentrate on its past, which is long, so that historicity has become one of the city’s defining qualities. A number of academic treatises study aspects of Cairo’s social or urban fabric, sometimes from an anthropological viewpoint, or else statistical studies to make projections for the 7

Central Cairo and the Nile, facing northwest.

future, usually grim. Cairo’s broader present moment, its giddy equilibrium and unfolding contemporary nature, is less frequently explored. With that in mind, Cairo comprises five interlocking essays. Part One, ‘Vanishing Point’, explores the given circumstances, Cairo’s living conditions and people’s attitudes of response. Part Two, ‘Artifice and Edifice’, is a brisk historical overview describing Cairo’s layered texture and narrative. Part Three, ‘The Guests’, surveys the city’s relationships with its significant others, from foreign occupations to current influences like Western consumerism, Gulf Arabs and refugees. Part Four, ‘Listening’, tunes into the city’s subtext, examining linguistic memes, jokes, grandiloquence and the art of dissimulation. Part Five, ‘Ensemble’, steps inside the interactions, discussing family, marriage and death, and the perceptions of community emerging between the cracks in a time-worn paternalist bureaucracy. One way of seeing a city is as a metaphor for an individual life, but with all a life’s possibilities, its triumphs, downfalls and trans8

Cairo and the Nile island of Zamalek, facing northeast.

figurations, stretching into time and space. Maybe knowing a city, or trying to, is a way of knowing oneself, or more accurately, what one learns or chooses to learn is self-revealing. In that case, Cairo has taught me many things, my capacity for being wrong not the least of them. So much to say that any factual errors found here are my own. As for perceptions and misperceptions that I hope are never offensive to individuals or to the truth, this is an interpretative work, and my wish has been to open or pursue lines of inquiry, not arrive at fixed conclusions.

9

a note on transcription When Arabic words or expressions appear, they have been transliterated and italicized following a fairly standard academic format. Those who know Arabic should note: fi = the letter ayn. √ = the glottal stop when it is not the letter qaf. q = the letter qaf or a glottal stop in today’s Cairene dialect. Where names and Arabic terms that have become accepted into the English lexicon are concerned, English standard practice is followed, with all the inconsistencies that this may imply.

The visible world is a trace of the invisible one, and the former follows the latter like a shadow. al-ghazali, THE NICHE OF LIGHTS

Rooftop billboards overlooking the Sixth of October Bridge crossing the Nile at the heart of Cairo.

i Vanishing Point

I swear by the city, and you yourself are a resident of this city, by the begetter and all whom he begot: We created man to try him with affliction. QUR√AN, sura 90:1 ‘the city’ On 2 May 1997 at three o’clock in the afternoon, a troubled sky over Cairo congealed to virulent crimson before it went dark as night. The city gasped and held its breath. A number of distressed individuals ran pell-mell in the streets shouting ‘Judgment Day! Judgment Day!’ (yom il qiyama). Their voices were lost in the wind as a rolling mountain of sand swallowed Greater Cairo. Advancing from the deserts of Libya and Egypt’s southwest, an 80-kilometre-per-hour gale delivered a wall of sand that wreaked havoc for 30 minutes. If you happened to be standing atop Cairo’s highest elevation, the Muqattam Cliffs, you might have seen the storm coming before everything just disappeared. After a muted night, at dawn Egypt’s capital re-emerged, pearlescent and draped in the settling sand. Most people were relieved to find themselves no closer to heaven or hell (or justice, for that matter) than they’d been the day before, but not everyone was as lucky. Twenty-three deaths were attributed to this unusually voracious sandstorm. The resulting dust cloud rose on a warm air current and rode all the way to Miami, Florida, where the sunset was particularly purple, spiced with the sighs of sixteen million Cairenes.1 Cairo is accustomed to an annual spate of sandstorms, the khamasin (the Fifties), so-called for their arrival 50 days before Coptic Easter and their duration of around 50 days.2 A more atmospheric etymology says the khamasin recall Cain’s 50-day desert trek with his murdered brother on his back, looking for a place to bury the body. On a good day with a little wind, Greater Cairo receives tons of sand and dust precipitation. During the khamasin, the air is thick enough to turn scent to substance, trapping car exhaust and kebab smoke, 13

incense and cologne. Every breath is laced with grit and the stifled sun casts a disapproving glare over 350-square kilometres of urban ant heap.3 Virtually surrounded by desert, the people of Cairo have stuck together so long they’ve become agoraphobic. Milad Hanna, an Egyptian intellectual and a housing expert, describing how ‘nature and climate affect the psyche of human groups’, observed that ‘the desert with its infinite space stimulates imagination and awakens fear of the approaching stranger’.4 Whether the fickle desert horizon is to blame, Cairenes live unimaginably close to each other, bound by constraints and propensities inextricably shared. Theirs is a 1,400-year-old city of one-thousand-and-one contingencies, improvizations, renewals and debacles. Cairo is a millennial model of entropy and it looks it, a dilapidated brown conflation of cubes, domes and spires, glorious in the incongruity of its daily survival. London and Paris are built on solid sedimentary rock. Chicago has as its foundation a massive coral reef. Cairo, by contrast, was founded on mud, six million years’ worth of alluvial deposits from a river 160 million years old.5 Ah, the Nile, what hasn’t been said of it? A thin blue vein of geographical fate, once worshipped, now abused, yet the source of all life for Egypt, and of growing contention between the countries obliged to share it. Cairo, parched and pulverized, its inhabitants increasing like merry amoebae, lies near the end of the river’s 6,818 kilometre line.6 Observe Egypt from the outer edge of earth’s atmosphere and admire the lotus-shaped Nile, the triangular blossom of its delta open wide to the Mediterranean, its impossibly slender stalk extending deep into African soil. Cairo occupies the throat of the flower and it is strangling it. In 2001 the French research organization cedej sponsored a satellite image study to map Cairo’s land use digitally with unprecedented precision, things like formal (licensed) and informal (slum) housing, utilities buildings and green space.7 The Egyptian government was reluctant to acknowledge cedej’s dire findings, perhaps in the belief that the city, like any sacred cow, would not bear too close a scrutiny. Facts, in Egypt, are hard to come by, even when they’re staring everyone in the face. Cairo’s administrators are wizards of obfuscation. What difference does it make, they seem to be asking, how many people live in a single room or how many kids occupy a single classroom, as if it 14

was nobody’s business but their own. This cavalier attitude towards statistics may be the mark of enlightenment, for the real question is indeed not ‘how many’ but ‘how at all’, not to mention ‘why’. The Roman Stoic Seneca might have been describing Cairo’s implausibility when he wrote: You say: I did not think it would happen. Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it is already happened . . .? 8 Outrageous fortune is familiar to this city, where streets are inscribed with sagas and where the pressures of life and people’s equanimity approach the supernatural. It’s hardly surprising that a large segment of the population believes in magic, a swathe so wide it cuts across classes. Egypt’s monarchy purportedly relied on the talents of astrologers and soothsayers. Some say, with pride, that belief in magic is an inherited trait from the Pharaohs, and they may be right. Talismans decorate Cairo’s streets and households: the eye of Horus, the Hand of Fatima and the colour turquoise blue. Exorcists are in demand along with dream interpreters and fortunetellers who read everything from coffee cups and bowls of water to hands, feet, foreheads and backs. The Cairene brand of magic is, however, less esoteric than pragmatic. Many people consult practitioners for their health, preferring a trip to the neighbourhood healer than to one of the derelict, statesubsidized hospitals. Magic is a socially acceptable refutation of unpleasantness, hence a man without a job or a couple without children engage practitioners to remove the curses that have fallen on them. A woman seeking to resist the advances of a loutish husband may find herself possessed of a djinn (one frequently of another faith, i.e., Christian versus Muslim), rendering her person untouchable until purified. Magic serves Cairenes as an excuse for the perennial dysfunction of every ill-conceived thing around them. Djinns, for example, who often announce their arrival by a bad smell or loud noise, notoriously dwell in bathrooms, a fine comment on the state of the local art of plumbing. Magic is a last resort, a court of higher appeals in matters perceived beyond one’s powers, which, these days can be quite a lot. This feeling of helplessness is but one side effect of paternalism, that wearisome evolutionary glitch that informs every aspect of the 15

Beneath the Munib Bridge that bisects Dahab Island in south central Cairo.

city’s life. If it was not born in Egypt, then patriarchal rule was institutionalized and enshrined here so confidently that people still travel great distances to gawp at its bones. Tyranny, Egyptian-style, is the rote response to a given circumstance: one river, originating outside the country’s sovereign borders. Controlling water, ensuring its adequate distribution, is a matter of life and death, and the consummate tool of power for the state. Water is subsidized in Egypt, as are food staples and rail transport, baqshish (tips) for putting up with poor education, scarce jobs and housing and lack of participation in decision-making processes. The militaristic Emergency Law, enforced since President Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981, throttles civil society and poisons every sort of initiative with fear. That Cairo remains one of the world’s safest cities is due to the nature of its people, not its police. People prefer to avoid the attentions of a government they equate with setbacks rather than help. They find ways of working around the authorities, of making do and approximating the forms and functions of their households and their lives. Everything and everyone is multi-use, its value negotiable, a methodology at vibrant 16

odds with the western model of consumerism. Recycling is a vocation, its creative manifestations endlessly ingenious. Against all odds, and perhaps because of them, Cairo is radiant with life and adamant in its self-assertion. Cairenes tend to be outgoing types who love nothing more than laughter, a lively conversation or clever retort. ‘Prosperity’, Seneca tells us, ‘fosters bad tempers’. Egypt’s ruling class has done its best to keep the people happy.9 Following a presidential address in November 2002 on Egypt’s development, the state-owned daily Akhbar al-Yom (Daily News) went on record as follows: We tell the Egyptian president, in whose era 26 million new Egyptians were born and for whom he is responsible, that we are with you in your suffering . . . 10 If President Hosni Mubarak, in office since 1981, is in need of consolation, he’s certainly not alone. Half of Egypt’s population leaps to mind, who are nineteen years old or less and have never known another leader, nor been much acquainted with the process of choosing one. The youth factor is critical in a city like Cairo, swarming with students attending overcrowded schools in two to three shifts throughout the day. Young men line the streets looking for jobs or tourists to assist, or else setting up shop on sidewalks to hawk everything from shoelaces to Chinese kitchen appliances and knock-off designer perfume and clothing. At night a new middle class of adolescent hopefuls crowd air-conditioned shopping malls, while a growing number of child runaways sleep al fresco downtown. Malls and street children were rare phenomena before the 1990s. Meanwhile, young people find it increasingly difficult to marry, an expensive undertaking that requires a fully equipped household as part of the contract. ‘Cairo’, in the words of a teenager from the city’s medieval quarter, ‘is becoming more and more’. The capital is saturated with humanity, half of Egypt lives or works within its relatively prosperous 100-kilometre radius. 11 Density levels vary across town, from an overall average of 385 people per hectare to 1,000 per hectare (ten square metres per person) in some of the older quarters. 12 Few studies exist of the informal communities, but in at least one of them, Manshiet Nasser, 17

beneath the Muqattam cliffs, densities reach 2,000 people per hectare.13 Cairo’s population and residential growth is highest in these informal areas, where houses fill as fast as they are built.14 There’s a classic Egyptian joke that obliquely describes the national attitude towards living in such close proximity. It’s about the safiidi (doltish Upper Egyptian farmer) who comes to Cairo with a toothache. Tapping the offending molar, he tells the dentist angrily: ‘Take out all the other teeth and leave this son of a dog by himself.’ For the average Egyptian, solitude is punishment and privacy an obscure concept. Even the posh, gated communities in Cairo’s desert outskirts feature giant villas no more than a hair’s breadth apart. The state-operated Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (capmas) nevertheless claims that there were 1.1 Cairenes ‘per room’ according to its 1996 census, which, given the city’s area and population implies both a verticality and optimism of stratospheric dimensions.15 Egypt is in fact among the most densely populated country on earth, its 70 million inhabitants clinging to the Nile and a few oases amidst a sea of sand. Arable land is precious, yet Cairo’s informal brick slums consume around three-and-a-half million square metres of it per year. The demand for low- to mid-income housing has long outdone government efforts to supply it. Those who can afford a legal bit of land and a building permit must endure six to fourteen years of hellish bureaucracy to get them.16 Consequently, nearly 60 per cent of the city’s people live in under-serviced, illegal dwellings. 17 Nor is building-code enforcement an administrative strength, a fact well known to unscrupulous contractors and their suppliers. Gravity is murder in Cairo, where buildings collapse regularly, taking their toll in lives.18 According to facts disclosed for the first time in 2002 by Cairo’s governor, Abdel Rahim Shehata, 25 per cent of the city’s buildings were about to collapse while 40 per cent didn’t meet health standards and 850,000 were condemned. Nevertheless, Cairo’s housing budget was reduced from le120 million in 2001 to an insignificant le22 million in 2002.19 The municipality is unprepared to deal with catastrophic building collapses, despite their frequency. In February 2002 the Al Ahram Weekly, a state-owned newspaper, reported that a woman trapped with others in the rubble of their home managed to call a rescue squad on a mobile phone and was instructed to call back on the landline. In all fairness, Cairo’s exigencies would tax the most 18

Kasr al-Aini bus stop in summer.

enlightened teams of virtuous experts; no wonder the city outwits the fractious mix of military men, socialist-educated elders and parvenu survivors entrusted with its care. While there are surely dedicated individuals in Cairo’s bureaucratic maw, they are just as surely outnumbered. As Cairo’s governor, appointed by the president in 1996, has said in regard to the city’s management: ‘Only God is all-powerful.’ 20 Cairo is an architectural pastiche of whimsical artistry, cheap functionalism and unflinching kitsch. Rows of government-sponsored shoeboxes and multi-storey brick piles are interspersed with monuments of sublime proportion and texture. A third of the world’s antiquities are in Egypt; the Cairo governorate alone claims responsibility for restoring and maintaining 500 historic sites, many comprising multiple monuments.21 The work is executed by foreign and local agencies using a variety of techniques, from the meticulous to the criminal. Despite the lofty rhetoric lauding Cairo’s patrimony, the official attitude regarding maintenance resembles that of spoiled offspring towards their invalid elders: monuments are the source of noisome 19

demands or potential income rather than the central features of community life. There is a worrying trend to isolate historic buildings from the people for whom they constitute generational landmarks, a strategy involving forced evictions designed primarily with tourists in mind. Officious justifications – that people don’t know how to care for cultural sites – ring hollow given the haphazard state of the city at large. The palaces and villas of Cairo’s recent monarchic and colonial past are nearly extinct; at least 2,000 have been destroyed to make way for high-rises that could only have been erected with government-issued permits.22 Following the 1952 revolution, many belle époque buildings were converted to state-owned facilities, a fate worse than demolition, as they’ve been mostly left to decompose. Children attend school in some of the wrecked palaces, acquiring an early lesson in contempt for property. Yet Cairo still boasts remnants of empires – Roman bastions, early Christian churches, Mamluk mosques, Ottoman water fountains (sabil), European fin-de-siècle residencies, not to mention the Pyramids and the Sphinx, all standing ground against an encroaching forest of rectilinear monstrosities. The question is, for how long? Given the seasonal sandblastings and corrosive pollutants, even the marble towers of the nouveau riche swiftly acquire an unasked for patina of age. As for the gimcrack constructions with which Cairo is rife, they look old and broken before they’re even occupied. Cairo is expert at making things and people age before their time. Indeed, nowhere is the process of erosion so eloquent as in Egypt, which is made of sand, the final stage of rock before it enters the atmosphere as dust. Cairo is a sound museum, an aural diorama of transistor radios, farm animals, satellite tv and mobile phones. Officially, there are around 10,000 mosques, but there are tens of thousands more zawaya, prayer corners, some no more than a microphone and a few green mats on a sidewalk or in a vestibule. Most of the communal prayer places issue a hyper-amplified call to prayer five times a day, beginning at the crack of dawn. On Fridays, Cairenes are treated to a barrage of khutab (sermons), pious weekly admonishments delivered at punishing volumes. There are church bells and bellowing street vendors, not to mention the multi-lingual chatter of millions of born talkers, shouting and coughing amidst a cacophony of horns. 20

Although neighbourhoods vary widely in character and mood, sound levels often breach what is considered permissible (80 decibels). If there’s such a thing as unbearable, Cairenes have yet to agree on what it is. Construction work, flat renovations and street repairs are performed at all hours of the night. Wedding celebrations and funeral services (the latter involving amplified Quranic recitals) are both loud enough to raise the dead. ‘All outdoors may be bedlam’, said Seneca, ‘providing there’s no disturbance within’. The people of Cairo seem fairly calm, but it’s a safe bet many are hard of hearing, a condition that is both the consequence of, and reason for, earsplitting auditory stimuli. In a 1995 study, a sample of 2,300 individuals identified the main sources of noise pollution as overcrowding, cars and microphones – in other words, themselves. No wonder when asked what they would do about noisy neighbours, 86.5 per cent said ‘nothing’ or that they would ‘speak to [the offenders] politely’. The seven per cent who said they’d consult the police represent a bellicose minority. Three per cent handled the situation more diplomatically ‘by complaining to the neighbours’ relatives’, a circuitous strategy none the less preferred to ‘getting angry and quarrelling’, the option adopted by only one per cent.23 Under the circumstances, the indignant category is probably greater than people are bound to admit. In the heartfelt words of a gentleman interviewed by the Cairo Times: Noise pollution is my worst nightmare. It’s everywhere and it gets on my nerves especially since I have a quick temper. When I hear a loud noise I feel like dashing to the street and killing whoever is responsible for it, [an impulse that] makes me edgy all day . . . 24 Complaints, at best, can only interrupt the din, which is a fact of life, especially in close quarters. It’s impossible to scold the author of every insensitive racket, so people just raise their own volume to outdo it. Forbearance makes a lot of noise, but who can afford to be fastidious? Sound is life asserting, especially in a mass of humanity so dense it threatens to overwhelm itself. Like most crowded cities, Cairo has traffic problems, but, unlike in other cities, the worst thing to do is walk, which most people are obliged to, absent sidewalks notwithstanding. 25 Pedestrians are unloved by drivers and the municipality alike, as if their failure to 21

South central Cairo, with Dahab Island to the left.

achieve greater mobility was somehow embarrassing. The city is an obstacle course, its cracked snatches of pavement mined with metal protuberances or patches of slithery marble. Danger lurks at every turn: pipes poking from storefront awnings, intrusive phone booths occupying narrow passages, gaping holes, mountains of sand and pools of freshly mixed cement. In shows of prowess, drivers graze street-crossers caressingly with their fenders – just the flick of a matador’s cape. The city would be littered with bodies except that space is too tight to gather speed and people take little for granted. Cairenes possess an occult ability to dodge obstacles, a diffuse but panoramic attention that warns at the last instant to avoid perilous objects, some of which may be hurtling from decrepit balconies or building scaffoldings towards their very heads. Fortunately, people have several affordable transport options in addition to their feet, including privately operated microbuses and taxis, or public transport buses and the metro, each with its idiosyncrasies. The city’s behemoth buses, for example, do not properly stop for passengers. Catching one is a trapeze act between those hanging from the crammed vehicles and those trying to hop on. Microbuses have the advantage of taking only twelve people and are 22

slightly more expensive than the bus. Their drivers, however, are notoriously reckless and accident-prone. The metro, opened in 1988, is the best bet for those who live along its limited lines, and its cleanliness and generally smooth functioning are sources of civic pride. Smoking and littering are strictly forbidden and everyone respectfully obeys, but the metro security guards have been known to act overzealously, on at least one occasion issuing a fine for whistling. 26 Cairo’s taxi drivers are more lenient, transporting everything from live animals to living-room furniture while offering plenty of garrulous advice en route. Cairo’s streets witness over 14 million so-called ‘person trips’ or movements daily.27 Since the 1980s, dozens of flyovers increased capacity on major arteries by adding a second storey, chopping adjacent buildings in two and exposing inhabitants on upper floors to traffic a few unholy metres from their windows. Cairo is scarred with partial and often tragic solutions to grand-scale problems. Unsightly high-rise garages replace elegant centennial buildings judged too far-gone for restoration. A bridge was added to the Nile in the late 1990s, just south of the city’s centre. It brutally bisects the exquisitely green agricultural island of Dahab, farmed for generations to provide vegetables for the surrounding city.28 Having dismembered countless neighbourhoods, a portion of Cairo’s traffic was directed underground in 2002 via the al-Azhar Tunnel, designed to ease circulation through the heart of the medieval quarter. While it is wise to protect major tourist destinations, there are other pressing concerns. Only one in five families can afford to own a car, yet public transport (metro and bus) handles but a fraction of their needs. The microbuses, which made their appearance in the early 1980s, are an improvization on the theme of getting there, one of many ways of making do, an occupation for which Cairenes have developed considerable flair. In January 2001 the authorities debuted a traffic law obligating drivers of four-wheel vehicles to use seatbelts and motorcyclists to wear helmets. Fines were liberally issued for infractions, provoking a rash of improvised headgear, including helmets from the 1973 October War. Similarly, as the cost of sturdy, imported seatbelts soared exploitatively to several hundred Egyptian pounds per set, taxi drivers purchased lengths of belt fabric they confidently draped across their shoulders and laps, asking passengers kindly to do the same. The contrivance 23

was soon refined, the strips of cloth equipped with plastic buckles and adhesive to attach them to car doors. These efforts satisfied many of Cairo’s traffic cops, a remarkably easygoing bunch despite blood-lead concentrations so high they could probably set off metal detectors. Sales on ersatz belts received an even bigger boost when word got around that the expensive, legitimate ones were manufactured in Israel and contained an alloy that would render their (Egyptian) wearers infertile. Egyptians love a conspiracy theory, and the male of the species fears impotence more than death. Prices on the allegedly toxic imported belts bottomed out, traffic cops relaxed their attention and even the fake belts grew knotted and gathered dust. Car owners are fond of accessories, things like stuffed toys, prayer beads, the usual amulets and cds that dangle from rear-view mirrors, because they’re shiny and thought to bring good luck.29 People need all the luck they can get, especially if they’re looking for a parking place, the demand for which has tripled in the last twenty years. Cairo’s two million vehicles each occupy space (around 15m2) rivalling that of human beings. The minadi profession, Cairo’s citywide valet-parking service, was the spontaneous response of thousands of otherwise unemployed people to a glaring need for creative parking solutions. The city’s self-appointed minadis would fold cars up and put them in their pockets if it meant earning an extra pound or two. A top-form minadi artfully manoeuvres rows of densely packed vehicles, extracting them on demand by main force, steering while pushing. Unimpressed by the minadis’ labours, the Cairo governorate decided in 2002 that what downtown needed most were parking meters. The meters are sophisticated mechanisms with led panels that, considering local wear and tear, have a shelf life of a couple of years at most. The meters use special magnetized cards, on sale nearby from men and women dressed in yellow plastic aprons. The disenfranchised minadi eye the meter maids and their little receipt books with disdain, in the certain knowledge that a meter cannot push or clean a windshield. ‘What can we do except become criminals?’ one erstwhile minadi exclaimed. Those old enough to remember Cairo when its meter-less boulevards were lined with trees, pick their way with difficulty along today’s fractured streets. Their eyes are glued to the ground for booby traps, which is why some complain of getting lost, but it’s also because 24

Mechanic rebuilding a car in Herafiyeen City, northeast Cairo.

Ramses Square after rain.

things keep changing. There’s even talk of moving the 90-ton monolith of Ramses ii from his place by the train station that bears his name. The statue left its home in Memphis (one of Egypt’s ancient capitals, just south of Cairo) in 1955, on the orders of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Having reclined in the Temple of Ptah for over 3,000 years, Ramses was made to stand up and take top billing in the tumultuous Ramses Square. If current plans are carried out, the statue will have the chance to lie down again in a calmer place near the pyramids. Meanwhile, a flyover whizzes within a few metres of Ramses’ right ear and he looks pinched beneath a cloak of brown velvet grime. Cairenes, it must be said, are not fussy about appearances. Cars are unabashedly scraped, clothing is casual and just about everything is a magnet for the city’s dust, which is sticky and vaguely narcotic. As part of its unceasing effort to spruce things up, the Cairo Sanitation and Beautification Authority dutifully sends forth a listless army of green-clad men. They push plastic wheelbarrows and homemade witches’ brooms fashioned from crooked sticks and the twigs of a species of palm. Trees, alas, are scarce, in many quarters. In some upscale parts of town, smaller-than-life plastic palms have been 26

installed in patches of garden. At night, they oscillate hypnotically in red, yellow and orange neon. After 5,000 years of watering trees, it must be fun just to plug one in. Some might even call that progress. Cairo’s transformation from belle époque to burlesque is complete. For the purposes of a 1997 environmental survey, a sample composed predominantly of Cairenes was asked to define what was understood by ‘nature’. Answers like air, weather and sunshine, or the countryside and farms, comprised the majority. Only fifteen per cent of the sample defined nature more spiritually, as related to God and creation. Responses provided by still smaller groups included ‘beauty and tranquility’, ‘safety, good people and cooperation’ and ‘life in general’. Aside from these rather disparate conceptions, the researchers deemed a number of other responses ‘unclassifiable’, and a further portion of those surveyed left the question unanswered.30 Groping for the meaning of nature, Cairenes are like the blind describing colour, visualizing something unfamiliar and external to themselves. This ambiguity is perhaps unsurprising where green space is so rare that people picnic on scraps of grass separating lanes of busy traffic and on the pedestrian parts of bridges.31 Although many families have rural antecedents, they have never looked back, unless the current fad for psychedelically hued plastic houseplants is a sign of nostalgia. Aesthetically, modern Cairo betrays a passive–aggressive detachment from nature, at odds with Egypt’s austere and verdant grace. According to Berndt Lotsch, an urban ecologist: An intensive involvement with Nature can reduce stress, increase powers of concentration, harmonise blood pressure and mood as well as relax tension. The landscapes of national parks contribute to reducing the ‘mental starvation’ of industrialized man . . . The German photographer Ehlert supplies hospitals with posters from the last European wildernesses . . . and the doctors observed a marked positive effect upon the patients.32 The same therapeutic knowledge may be behind the frequently encountered wall-size posters of the gardens at Versailles that decorate the homes and shops of Cairo. People seem to know what they’re missing, but have settled for less, and have taken the city on, warts and all. 27

Sensible homeowners choose cheaper synthetic over natural materials even when it comes to plants. Meanwhile, city administrators have neglected to provide greenery for the public and continue to squander what little is left. Perhaps Cairenes have abandoned nature and its aesthetics because of associations with a rural past they’d rather leave behind. Indeed, Cairo’s growth and prestige has arguably come at the expense of Egypt’s agricultural provinces, the atrophied limbs of a slender body with the capital its unwieldy head. The Nile went unnoticed in the above-cited understandings of nature, because it’s a given and not worth mentioning. The Egyptian sense of propriety regarding the river is legendary, and solidly based on the riparian rule of ‘first in time [historic use]; first in right’. Every scheme ever hatched for the country’s development involves the Nile and boldly ignores the nine other Nile Basin countries that get to it first. Eighty-five per cent of Egypt’s water comes from the Blue Nile originating in Ethiopia, the country that coincidentally supplies the nutrient-rich silt that’s fed Egypt for millennia. Egypt is Ethiopia in these material ways, yet that country has been consistently excluded from grand designs of Nile Basin management concocted by British hydrologists during the occupation (1882–1952) and their Egyptian counterparts today. According to a 1959 Treaty with Sudan, Egypt gets 55.5 billion cubic metres of water annually, Sudan gets 18.5, and everybody else gets mad about them taking the lion’s share. Egypt relies on civil war and political rivalries in neighbouring lands to contain the threat of developmental demands for water. In Cairo, alarmed experts gather for water conferences, deliver papers and go home, while governmental rhetoric on the issue is little more than a river of denial. The Cairo Water Authority decants six million cubic metres of vintage Nile daily. Divided among sixteen million inhabitants, that should mean 375 litres per person per day, or 136 cubic metres (1m3=1000 litres) per year.33 Availability, however, is actually far less for many people. The Water Authority admits to losing 35 per cent of its product to pipe leakage prior to 2002, a figure allegedly reduced by half through subsequent maintenance. Whether this is the case, estimating average water use is further complicated by the fact that Cairo’s 15,000 kilometres of pipeline are fair play for informal communities, whose thirsty inhabitants pool their resources to pirate pipes off the main lines. A portion of these clandestine exten28

sions (serving around one million people) were metered and incorporated into the municipal system, an on-going effort saving money, face and product for the Water Authority. But at least a third to half of the city’s households do not have direct access to water. Subsidies cushion 80 per cent of the cost of water production and distribution, but many taps remain dry because they lie beyond the reach of an overburdened municipal water grid.34 Water has been the ballast of legitimacy for Egyptian governments throughout history, and Egyptians believe that Nile water is their sacred right. Nevertheless, they must go to backbreaking lengths to obtain it. A 1997 usaid-sponsored study states that people without a water connection spend five times as much (and expend 28 hours per month of labour) for water as those who have it piped in. 35 Many must observe the time-honoured tradition of buying water from mule-drawn carts, these days offering 20-litre jerricans at around 0.35pt to 0.75pt. Others make deals with their neighbours and carry water home, or else draw it from outdoor communal taps. Even in serviced areas supply is sporadic, so water is hoarded at night in bathtubs and sloshed around throughout the day. Water distribution varies wildly between neighbourhoods. Some Cairenes enjoy swimming pools and golf courses; others manage with sponge baths and a small cup of thick coffee. The Egyptian geographer Gamal Hamdan was fascinated by what he called the ‘social ecology’ of the Nile, referring to the interaction of human and geographical phenomena. He rightly observed that ‘people will relinquish their freedom in exchange for water and justice’.36 But what happens when they get neither? The flipside of drinking water is waste water, another sticky problem citywide, from the informal settlements to the older quarters, as well as in the hastily built new ones. In the late 1970s, 64 per cent of Cairo’s households did not have a sewage connection. Twenty years and 1.3 billion usaid dollars later, many still don’t because the city has never stopped growing. Cairo generates around three million cubic metres of domestic sewage daily. Add to that 200,000 cubic metres of industrial effluents plus almost a ton of heavy metal waste, all discharged into the nearest Nile-fed canal.37 The canals are often smothered in a carpet of water hyacinths, known locally as the ward il-nil (Nile flower). Pollution facilitates the spread of this fecund parasite that guzzles a litre of precious Nile water every 24 hours and reproduces itself in twelve days. But even 29

the prolific hyacinths can’t beat the Cairenes; a new one of those is born every minute and a half.38 According to a seemingly ancient tradition still recorded in the 1980s, Egyptian women who give birth at home throw the placenta in the Nile, although a canal will do, or even a toilet or drainpipe, so long as the mother smiles while performing the act. Researchers could not identify the origins of the practice, whose benefits were variously described by several mothers in Cairo. Some said this precaution would ensure ample breast milk. Another mother believed that whatever her child’s eventual ills, they would be cured with Nile water. Still another told researchers that the afterbirth was disposed in water so that the child’s life would flow ‘like the Nile’.39 The river’s life-giving flow, despite the Aswan High Dam, is still subject to capricious Nile floods, like those that tested its mettle during the record-breaking lows and highs of the late twentieth century. Although the timing of the annual flood is always reliable, its volume never is, depending, as it does, on a web of variables affecting rain in the Ethiopian highlands. In the 1980s it became clear that the Lake Nasser reservoir could run dangerously low, while Cairo tasted the shortages that squeeze ever harder as the city grows. The Egyptian government’s Statistical Yearbook tells us that the Nile is the world’s second-longest river.40 Well it’s not, it’s really the longest, yet who should know better than those before whose eyes it is vanishing? The Nile is a ‘strange attractor’; a term employed in chaos analysis referring to a phenomenon with well-defined parameters whose behaviour is nevertheless unpredictable. This unpredictability, the river ’s floods and droughts, have served history as protagonists, ensuring the longevity of governments in times of stable water supply and rebellion and downfall when the supply is too much or not enough. Cairo was and remains a whim of the river, its morphology determined by the western shift of the Nile banks and the gift of a series of islands. Seneca sounds almost Egyptian when he says ‘Fortune gives us nothing we can really own. Nothing whether public or private is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.’41 Most of Cairo’s inhabitants are Muslim. Those who pray the prescribed five times daily are the minority, but millions more pray at least once a day, especially on Fridays. Each act of prayer requires a preliminary, so-called minor (wudu) ablution, the washing of 30

hands, face and feet. Mindful of the water this consumes, the Prophet Muhammad recommended rinsing each body part no more than three times, admonishing that ‘whoever goes beyond three transgresses’. Realizing that water shortages could interfere with prayers, he allowed that sand be used for ablutions and advised the faithful to ‘proceed to an elevated land, the soil of which is pure, fine and soft so that it is easily blown into dust’. Ritual cleansings are but one item in the manual of Islamic hygiene and grooming compiled by the twelfth-century Sufi scholar al-Ghazali. In his Mysteries of Purity we learn that the Prophet was a stern advocate of dental health: ‘Why do you come before me with yellow teeth? . . . Use the toothpick. It is a purifier for the mouth and well pleasing unto God.’42 The Prophet was also particular about grooming, saying ‘He who has but one hair on his head, let him honour it.’43 Conversely, armpit and pubic hair were supposed to be removed altogether every 40 days, by plucking or shaving. The women of Cairo (rather more than the men) obey tradition en masse, using a depilatory made of sugar and lemon juice (halawa) on the sensitive areas, as well as legs and even forearms, since hairless skin (and, who knows, an infantilized mons veneris?) is considered attractive to the opposite sex. Cairene coiffeurs not only style hair, they get rid of it, but whether performed in a salon or at home, depilation is considered a chance to socialize, a pleasant afternoon or evening with the girls, having the short hairs yanked out at the roots. Men enjoy the more soothing ambience of the barbershop for regular facial shaves and clips. ‘Barbers’, said Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson in his The Ancient Egyptians: Their Life and Customs, ‘may be considered the offspring of civilization’, referring to a boy’s first shave as a rite of passage into manhood. ‘So a people’ he enlarges, ‘until they have adopted the custom of shaving, may be supposed to retain a remnant of early barbarism’.44 Wilkinson would have found Cairene barbers to be especially civilized. At least until the mid-eighteenth century, they performed surgery, extracting teeth, excising cataracts and removing gall-bladder stones. It’s alarming to note that one of the oldest traditional barber-doctor services is circumcision, still considered cutting-edge in some quarters of the city, a practice that lends fresh anxiety to the request for ‘a little off the top’.45 31

The Egyptian approach towards health has always been pluralistic, a combination of traditional remedies, scientific innovation, religious invocations and magic spells. This is most obvious in the capital, where people consult healers for their aches and pains despite the long-established presence of Western medicine. Privately operated clinics offer decent options to government health facilities, but few can afford them or a proliferation of alternative therapies, such as Reiki, yoga, acupuncture and homeopathy. The first medical school in the Arab world was founded in Cairo in 1827 on the orders of Muhammad Ali, who hired a French surgeon named A. B. Clot to train Egyptians in Western methods. The school still functions alongside a public hospital, where a derisively underpaid staff copes with overcrowding and substandard equipment, not to mention inadequate education and supervision. A further symptom of institutional malaise is the nursing profession, degraded in terms of training and recompense, also considered, for restrictive cultural reasons, a disreputable occupation for women. Egyptian medical practice has seen better days. According to Homer, ancient Egypt ‘produced the greatest number of medicines, many of them good mixture, many of them potent. Every man is a doctor there and wiser than men elsewhere.’46 Homer’s high opinion seems to be shared by a number of local wise guys. The city experienced a rash of quack exposés in 2002, including that of the assistant general manager of one of the city’s best-known hospitals, as well as a busy obstetrician and a respected neurologist, who all turned out to be frauds. The neurologist was nevertheless the author of 28 books, including The Psychology of the Modern Egyptian Woman, a subject on which he had evidently gathered significant data. In the course of his ten-year practice he received as many as 40 patients per day, charitably declining to take payments from the poor.47 Allowing self-styled specialists to operate does little for the image of the Ministry of Health, likewise widely reported incidents of gross medical neglect, things like towels left in abdominal cavities, a broken pen undetected in a child’s brain, and a nipple that was somehow lost during a breast reduction procedure.48 Lack of confidence in local health care has its basis in unfortunate fact, for example in the revelation that a vaccine for bilharzia, administered in the 1960s and 1970s with unsterilized needles, has resulted in a catastrophic epidemic of hepatitis C.49 Also disturbing was the accidental infection of seventeen people with the hiv virus from 32

contaminated blood issued by a Cairo blood bank in 1997. In 2002 the case went to court; doctors were fined, but the blood bank’s responsibility was never called into question. The number of people suffering from hiv, incidentally, is uncertain, since testing can end in deportation for a foreigner and, for Egyptians, in public disgrace. Nevertheless, the incidence of aids is low compared to other African countries, probably because conservatism and overcrowding conspire to reduce the opportunities for its transmission.50 A more prevalent problem is cancer, which goes by the euphemism ‘the cunning disease’ (il marad il khabis). The superstitious are careful when describing someone else’s cancer not to touch the corresponding parts of their own bodies, believing this will render them vulnerable. Many are reluctant to consult doctors for unusual symptoms; should a woman, for example, be diagnosed with cancer, her husband may divorce her and take the children in the belief that the disease is contagious. Illness is feared for the pain and stigma it brings but also for the financial hardship. Perhaps this is why people tend towards optimism when describing their health, unwilling to confront the ramifications of sickness on top of everything else. In a 1997 study performed by the authors of People and Pollution, 74 per cent of the sample said they felt their health was good or excellent, yet a quarter had had surgery for some ailment, and a quarter reported having been sick in the last two weeks, their complaints covering rheumatic, liver, kidney, gall-bladder, chest and high-blood pressure disorders, in other words, the works. One in ten of the households questioned had a child who’d recently suffered from diarrhoea, and nine per cent reported respiratory illness in the family, usually children. Between the low standard of health care, poor nutritional habits and off-the-scale pollution, millions of baby Cairenes are in for a long hard haul.51 The treatment of choice for most illness is denial, but people are willing to take the advice of pharmacists. Mistrust of doctors and lack of funds are behind the reliance on pharmaceutical medicines, often ill-advised cocktails more damaging than the problem they’re meant to treat. Those who would consult a doctor but cannot afford it number in the millions, and the government is understandably wary of denying them access to subsidized medication. The local drug manufacturing industry reaps healthy profits while excessive 33

use of antibiotics promotes pernicious infections that sweep the city with impunity, their spread facilitated by tight living conditions. Another side-effect of easy over-the-counter drugs is addiction to tranquilizers and painkillers. But the fact that pharmacists must now fear for their lives if they deny drugs to addicts, some of whom are looking for a heroin substitute, signals an unpleasant new reality for Cairo. Heroin was an unknown substance on Cairo’s streets until the early 1980s. Aside from a small trade in opium, the drug market was monopolized by hashish from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley sold citywide at user-friendly prices. The hashshash (smoker of hashish) is a Cairene type, a familiar character of many attributes, the high side of which are visionary thinking, spirituality and congeniality. In the words of the nineteenth-century French physician and connoisseur Jacques-Joseph Moreau: The hashish user is happy not in the manner of the glutton, . . . or even of the hedonist who gratifies his desires, but in the manner, for example, of the man who hears news which compounds his joys.52 The low side of hashish use, denigrated in jokes and newspaper cartoons, is confusion, dreaminess and delusion. President Anwar Sadat’s reputation as a hashshash of the visionary, spiritual variety added to, rather than detracted from, his early popularity. During Sadat’s tenure, hashish traffic was largely unhindered by what was perceived on the streets as a wisely sympathetic government. Drug raids were perfunctory, and the kingpins were left in peace. In the medieval quarter, behind the Fatimid mosque of al-Azhar, lies the neighbourhood called Batniyya (from batin or ‘hidden’), a marketplace where vegetable stands once mingled with tables piled high with pyramids made of bricks of hashish. Cairo was a city of hashshashin, and popular odes were sung to intrepid dealers. A large segment of the adult male population gathered in discreet cafés to puff water-pipes filled with molasses-soaked tobacco and topped with small discs of hash. Some women smoked too, but in the privacy of their homes. Alcohol was never as popular as hashish in Cairo, where people look down on the belligerent behaviour it provokes. The hashshashin, by contrast, enjoined a social ritual as genteel as four o’clock tea, full of zestful conversation interspersed with contemplative silence. 34

Whether Sadat was a hashshash or not, within twenty-four hours of his assassination, a tank appeared in Batniyya Square, signalling the passage of a man, and as it happens, a more congenial era. Despite the current administration’s success in rendering hashish scarce and therefore expensive, lower-priced Sinai-grown marijuana is a hot commodity and heroin addiction destroys more and more lives. Until the end of the last century Cairo did not know violence as it has long been known and accepted elsewhere. It knows it better now. Drugs are behind most crimes, and murder, once primarily a crime of passion, is often drug-related too. According to a former assistant to the Minister of Interior quoted in the state-owned Al-Ahram Weekly, the victims are frequently the nearest at hand, the young addict’s mother or father, incredulous relics of a kindlier society that is failing, under the circumstances, to perpetuate itself.53 In a city where the frontiers of well-being are under constant assault, physical and mental stress accumulates and manifests itself variously. The local dread of impotence suggests the pervasiveness of the malaise as well as the pressures involved in caring for a family, a task involving two and sometimes three poorly paying jobs. One of the best-known actors in the Arab world, Egyptian Adel Iman, starred in a film about impotence that could only have been made in Cairo. Where else, to defuse the tension, would an epidemic of erectile dysfunction be portrayed as a comedy? Iman is a police chief who discovers he’s not alone in his marital distress as his headquarters fills with quarrelling couples and the city erupts in riots. A more realistic and poignant account of a man in the throes of doubt was written by one of Egypt’s best-known authors, Yusuf Idris, a short story called ‘You Are Everything to Me’. The protagonist is Sayyed, an ageing traffic cop who, following another frustrating night with his wife, is feeling vulnerable: When he met Abu Sultan, his greeting was curt and he avoided his eyes, hurrying along the sooner to get out of sight. It was the same with Abdel Razek, the newspaper boy, and Hagg Mohammed who sold beans and everyone else he knew or did not know. Every movement betrayed his secret; every word was a calculated jab; in every smile he saw irony. 35

Sayyed tried everything: He consulted the writings of old. He went to the wise and learned, he visited the shrine of every holy man in town, and he ate the pigeons and mangoes provided by [his wife] out of her own savings. He sucked the acid tops of sugar cane and he swayed to the beat of the tambourine when a zar [exorcism] was held in his honor. Many times he was up at dawn in order to throw the charms written for him into the river. Obediently he ate the pies his wife baked for him, kneaded with her own blood, and he drank all the potions the herbalist concocted especially for him. Nothing worked. Then he made his way to the vd hospital . . .54 Finally, an emotional rapprochement with his wife and the sudden recognition of his son as an inviolate seal of manhood restores Sayyed to himself where religion and magic had failed. It should be remarked that Islam does not condone the use of magic. It does, however, uphold belief in angels and djinn, whose powers are items of faith. When it comes to healing, the line between pious pleas for intervention and remedies like charms and spells is seldom drawn. Today, men suffering from impotence have recourse to the same therapies that Sayyed tried, and some say that health problems, especially virility and fertility-related ones, provoke the majority of visits to magic practitioners. The manufacture and sale of herbal and other aphrodisiacs (tiny tubes of cream in boxes featuring crocodiles, vamps and hippopotami) is an enduring cottage industry, but today’s wounded male is apt to turn to science. Viagra (‘a pill that treats impotence by helping you have an erection’) took Cairo by storm shortly after its usa release in 1998. An ecstatic black market sold the little blue pills for a big le60 (livres égyptiens or Egyptian pounds). It took four years for the Ministry of Health to ‘undertake the necessary studies into its properties and side effects’, that is, to figure out how best to capitalize on a large captive audience. According to research conducted by the Qasr al-Aini Teaching Hospital following the appearance of Viagra, around 30 per cent of married men in Egypt suffer from impotence. It was elsewhere reported that Egyptian households spent the better part of their disposable income on after-school tutoring for their children, and Viagra.55 36

Until its licensing for local production in 2002, Viagra smuggling was a lucrative pursuit and stories made the papers about thwarted efforts, like the Syrians who were caught with a thousand pills hidden in their lunch. The event might have inspired the Cairo restaurant that briefly offered a ‘Viagra sandwich’ made of fish, shrimp and lobster, all believed to stimulate the sex drive. Unfortunately, everyone had a harder time than expected: 36 customers contracted dysentery, and the restaurant owner was arrested for spreading food poisoning. Another food said to have restorative powers is gargir (rocket) a bitter green leaf that freshens the breath, costs just a few piastres and features prominently on daily menus. For protein, concerned wives and mothers serve their men plenty of eggs, ‘the poor man’s meat’, fried in quantities of ghee. Real meat, alas, is a sometime thing and an object of desire. ‘It makes men rise’, said an enthusiastic taxi driver, an opinion that is widely shared. The average annual meat consumption of twenty-one kilos, however, amounts to a skimpy five grams per day, mostly consumed at feasts and on the occasional Friday. Despite government subsidies, meat is dear, and families augment their supply by keeping animals at home. A 1999 study revealed that in low-income quarters, 30 per cent of the households raise duck, geese, chicken or goats on their roofs, balconies, stairways and landings. Aside from the special meals it provides, livestock is barter for quick cash in case of a minor household emergency.56 No matter how tough things get, people manage to put puffed spheres of fresh wheat bread (fiesh baladi) on the table, purchased at five piastres apiece and sold from government kiosks and street vendors everywhere.57 A disc of this versatile bread serves simultaneously as plate, dipping utensil and nourishment, and its consistency fosters strong teeth and healthy gums. Even old and rock-hard, fiesh baladi, reanimates beautifully with heat and a bit of moisture, mirroring the resilience of its eaters. When warm and perfectly turned out, it’s a joy whose price, size and availability are intimately linked to the city’s well being. Bread is the single largest source of caloric intake in Egypt, which is nevertheless a wheat-poor country and the biggest wheat importer in the world. In 1977 riots broke out when Sadat tried to lower bread subsidies and bring prices up to market speed. Once the uprising was quelled, and bread back on the streets, the president remarked that ‘democracy has sharp teeth’. Egypt spends over le3 billion per year 37

to keep prices low and deliver the daily bread, a cosy arrangement that prevents people from starving and allows the government to indulge in comforting illusions of patriarchal beneficence.58 Cairenes eat around three discs of bread per day, often accompanied by a bit of fresh water-buffalo cheese and perhaps a spring onion, tomato or cucumber. Every neighbourhood has one or many vegetable sellers, stocked daily with a bounty of muddy but succulent produce year round. Ingredients are abundant, but Egyptians eat to live and not otherwise. The scarcity of cooking fuel in a desert country may account for the lacklustre development of the local culinary art. The bean dominates the average diet. Fava bean paste (ful) is a staple, along with fried bean balls (tafimiyya) served in fiesh baladi with a bit of pickled carrot or radish on the side. Another popular dish is kushari, a starch fest of rice, pasta, chickpeas and lentils topped with fried onions and a garlicky tomato sauce. Fruit, although plentiful, is a luxury purchase in Cairo. There are small sweet bananas, bursting pomegranates, fat figs, fragrant apricots and peaches, but yellow apples are the height of exotic delicacy for the average Cairene. Mid-summer is mango season, when fruit-juice shops churn out a cloying drink of mango pulp, an alternative to sugar-cane juice, another local favourite. People dine in the streets beside their workplace, leaning on a car or sitting in a café. Most meals end with a glass of strong sugary tea, ‘the poor man’s dessert’, and in some cases his breakfast and lunch too, which helps account for the ubiquity of street cafés. Cairo’s café society is hardly glamorous but it has the virtues of affordability and familiarity, perfuming neighbourhoods with cardamom-scented coffee, herbal and black teas, apple-flavoured tobacco and the charcoal used for water pipes. The offer of coffee or tea is an inducement to conversation, or negotiation, or simply the reminder among friends and acquaintances to take time out and relax. Peoplewatching is a favourite café pastime, and Cairenes are good at it. Character assessments form the subject of as many conversations as do politics or economics. Women, needless to say, are another hot topic. The café atmosphere is calmly convivial, seldom intrusive, always leisurely and almost exclusively male. Cairo is warm for nine months of the year; for three of them it’s stupefying. Stepping outside is like walking into a wall, the sun slaps and the streets hold the heat like a cauldron. The human body has three 38

million sweat glands, which do their best to prevent aestivation, a state of extreme torpor in which the metabolic rate is drastically reduced. Cairenes need no doctors to tell them that prolonged heat dims the consciousness and melts the edge of purpose and intent, rendering one astute at distinguishing what appears to be necessary from what actually is. According to metro passengers interviewed by the Cairo Times during a heat wave in 2002, ten days and nights of over 45º Celsius had reduced them to ‘a frightening state of laziness’ and ‘total incapacitation’. In summertime the Ministry of Health issues this helpful advice: ‘avoid direct sunlight, crowded areas, badly ventilated rooms and food prepared outside the home’; in other words, die, and be reborn somewhere else. A more feasible solution is the use of fans and air conditioners, which not everyone can afford but are apparently numerous enough to strain Cairo’s electricity grid. Blackouts are lapses in the municipal attention span. When power cuts occur, whatever you are were doing, you probably can’t anymore and must try something else. Depending how long outages (blackouts) last, food may rot in the fridge, water won’t make its way upwards without the assistance of electric pumps, and life becomes just a tad more irritating, especially at night. One source of comic relief during blackouts is the Ministry of Electricity itself, who blames the power cuts on ‘people putting their laundry out to dry on high voltage pylons’. It was later relayed that the cause for cuts in the summer 2002 was a child’s kite made of aluminium caught in high-tension wires above an informal community. In response, a café owner from the area remarked on behalf of his neighbours: We would like someone to come to talk to us. Then we would tell them that while they are upset about a few hours outage, we suffer power cuts all the time, every day. We have no sewage, no potable water and no schools for our children.59 The heat is on in Cairo, where economic and population pressures are so great that each day that passes without havoc and rebellion is a sign of either sublime fortitude or exhaustion, and probably both. It doesn’t help that the air is a witches’ brew, containing ten times the who’s permissible levels of suspended particulates, three times the hydrocarbons and five times as much sulphur dioxide as advisable.60 In some parts of town, like Shubra al-Kheima, lead emissions are 24 times the level permitted by Egypt’s Environmental Law.61 39

Breathing is not easy but that doesn’t stop half the male population from smoking. The most popular cigarette brand is Cleopatra, one of the world’s cheapest, the manufacture of which is one of the few profitable businesses in the state’s portfolio of lumbering nationalized industries. More women smoke these days, to signal rebellion and individuality. Despite advertising bans, smoking is also attractive to underprivileged kids who assume responsibilities early, and take up cigarettes to mimic grown-ups even before the age of ten.62 People are aware of the damaging effects of smoking and pollution on their health. In fact half of Cairo’s doctors and teachers smoke. Nevertheless, there is a strong public consensus that this behaviour, indeed, living conditions in general, are unwholesome and harmful. People feel that ‘environmental problems [are] primarily related to health and cleanliness, rather than to nature, as in the West’. It’s also believed that the government is lax and unlikely to improve.63 Cairenes follow their noses when it comes to identifying pollutants, naming first sewage and garbage followed by air quality and finally noise. A 1996 report issued by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (eeaa) cited 15–20,000 deaths annually in the city due to air pollution, a modest figure, all things considered. Blood lead levels are high in Cairo and respiratory disease, especially among children, is commonplace. Since 1999, a rank lid of smog roosts over the city for a period at the onset of every autumn. Blame for the so-called ‘black cloud’ was pinned on hapless rice farmers in the nearby Delta, accused of burning massive amounts of rice husks. Identifying the phenomenon’s actual cause led to madcap bungling on behalf of the government and wild speculation from every corner, as described in People and Pollution: Two days into the crisis, the Minister of State for Environmental Affairs borrowed a helicopter from the Minister of Defense to conduct a survey of possible sources, and reported that burning garbage, industrial waste and automobile exhaust appeared to be the main sources. Meanwhile the Minister of Information mentioned ‘factories, foundries and car fumes.’ The head of the Cairo Sanification and Beautification Authority denied, implausibly, that there could be any burning garbage in Cairo. More fancifully, some rumors identified other possible sources such as an explosion in a chemical factory, a nuclear leak, the ongoing 40

Egyptian American military maneuvers or even the change to a new prime minister . . . It was reported that the prime minister, for his part, ‘met with ministers of agriculture, information, environmental affairs, interior, transport and local development as well as the governors of Cairo, Giza, Qaliouba, and Sharqia and the chairman of the Egyptian Meteorological Authority.’ As if that were not enough, the Minister of Higher Education stepped in to head a scientific committee, which came to this conclusion: ‘When the air contains a particularly powerful cocktail of pollutants and there is no wind for several days, smog appears.’64 The black cloud made at least one thing clear; Cairo was looking more and more like a conflagration and something had better be done about it. So decrees were passed, fines were issued, poor people harassed, and some farmers taught to build houses out of rice husks instead of burning them. Still the malingering cloud winters in Cairo. In the absence of adequate waste management, trash is left to pile and rot. Summertime, and the spontaneous combustion’s easy. If it weren’t for one of Cairo’s most exemplary communities, the city would be buried in heaps of compost. The zabbalin (trash collectors) number around 20,000 and have for generations made it their business to collect garbage and live off what they recycle. The work involves the entire family; men do the hauling while women sort the garbage at home, mostly by hand. The zabbalin find value in everything, identifying sixteen categories of trash, including types of metal, paper, glass, cloth, organic waste (fed to animals), bones (used for glue) and naqda, odd articles like ‘toys, vases, artificial flowers, cutlery and miscellaneous objects run by small motors.’ Finally, rabish is the residual stuff that goes to the municipal dump, the real garbage. Egypt boasts one of the highest waste recovery rates in the world, 80 per cent, because of the courage, skill and resourcefulness of the zabbalin.65 Sanitary landfills are lacking, so rabish ends up polluting the nearby desert. Through their efforts, the zabbalin save landfill space and keep many neighbourhoods functional. They do, however, prefer to collect from areas with recyclable-rich garbage, thus leaving much of the city on its own. Cairo generates 6,000 tons of trash daily, and the zabbalin handle half that amount. People in poorer formal and informal quarters must find other solutions for 41

waste disposal. Windows are the answer for quite a blasé few who toss great parcels into the air as if they would disappear before hitting the ground. Others surreptitiously deposit their garbage bags down the road near other people’s homes, a ‘very early morning mission’ timed to escape the wrath of neighbours.66 City-dwelling Egyptians generate an average of 0.7 kilos of trash per day, relatively modest compared to the American average of 2.5 kilos.67 ‘Lucky is he who dreams of garbage’, goes the adage that associates wealth with having something to throw away. Today, the unlucky zabbalin must contend with government-contracted wastemanagement companies. These foreign firms have been welcomed into the market even though they’d overlooked one of the most efficient, low-tech recycling industries in the world and consequently failed to incorporate it meaningfully into their plans. It rains sometimes in Cairo, brief sprinkles or sudden downpours that clear the air and bathe the city in a shy sparkling candour. Yet no one welcomes the rain, or cool weather for that matter. People are confused by cloudbursts and run for cover with their arms above their heads shouting and lamenting at the storm. It must be said that Cairo rain is often a chemically-altered mud that splotches glass like bird dung, stings skin and stains clothing indelibly. Streets without drainage pipes puddle queasily and drivers without windshield wipers balk and reflexively sit on their horns. The city is paralysed when it rains. Before beasts of burden were prohibited in the early 1990s, Cairo was more pastoral. But the bray of asthmatic donkeys may still be heard, along with the cry of disoriented roosters announcing dawn from rooftops throughout the day. Flocks of sheep infiltrate neighbourhoods prior to religious feasts and the sidewalks are strewn with green alfalfa left by their owners to fatten them up. Sadly, the herds of camel that once beguiled traffic while loping across the Giza Bridge have been detoured to a market outside the city. The sacred ibis, symbol of essence-Egypt and of Thoth, the god of wisdom, has been extinct here for a century. In the skies over Cairo, predator hawks like kestrel and kite and large white owls, circle and glide, waiting to spot a likely rodent rummaging in refuse on the ground or on rooftops.68 The pigeon flocks that animate minarets and domes have been a feature of the city since its beginnings, when homing pigeons were 42

used as airmail messengers to far battlegrounds. Pigeon eating has long been believed to enhance sexual performance. A ninth-century treatise describes the birds’ amorous behaviour, from kissing to lovemaking and how pigeons may be used to provide instruction and inspiration for young wives.69 Thousands of Cairenes raise the birds on their roofs, in some cases to eat, but also to exhibit in contests for prize-money. Training pigeons is an art and trainers know their charges well. One enthusiast lost a bird that only found its way home after three years. Asked how he could be sure it was the same one, the trainer replied, ‘If a friend comes to see you after three years, will you have forgotten him?’ Falcons can be messengers too, as in the case of an Egyptian soldier who sent a love letter to his fiancée in a small town on the Israeli border in 2001. ‘We will meet on 15 July when the moon rises . . . I await my beloved . . . light of my life’, said the note, according to Israeli police who captured the bird when it flew off-course.70 Bats love Cairo, especially in summer at dusk. The pyramids attract the Naked Bellied Tomb Bat while the most common inner city bat is Kuhl’s Pipistrelle, a beneficent insect-eater.71 Bats gorge on Nile mosquitoes, which are languorous and menacing, an airborne version of Portuguese men o’ war. Cairo’s geckoes, transparent lizards with suction-cup toes, eat bugs too, including the pesky flies that are thought by some to contain mischievous djinn. Insects are especially irksome in summer when several indomitable species of ant proliferate and some members of the cockroach family grow ponderously large. The rapacious weasel is another denizen of Cairo, a long slinky varmint that hides under cars and is unafraid to grapple with animals twice its size. Weasels perforate the night with their clicking call and delirious squeals when in battle. They are not, however, admired for their courage or contributions to rodent control. Their name in colloquial Egyptian (fiirsa) is used to describe shifty, cowardly people, perhaps because the weasel appears boneless when it squeezes in and out of cracks in walls or sidewalks. In all events, a potent charm guaranteed to bring luck to one’s home involves the weasel’s burial, alive, in front of the threshold. Many who would take this sort of precaution prefer the less demanding practice of hanging large stuffed lizards or baby crocodiles above their doors. 43

Cairo is a habitat where many life forms and lifestyles adapt side by side with greater or lesser ease. Gamal Hamdan, who wrote of the social ecology of the Nile, described the history of governmental tyranny resulting from reliance on one river. ‘Irrigation’, he argued, ‘is equivalent to organization, a centralized organization’ that evolved to distribute life-sustaining water, but has, over time, ‘created in the people a spirit of idleness, indolence and passivity’. Yet Hamdan also observed tyranny’s opposite, a ‘latent, original and far reaching element of socialism . . . and cooperative socialism to be precise.’72 Both assessments of Cairo’s social ecology are valid: people have been obliged to reduce their expectations of government and perhaps themselves, but life nevertheless requires effort. Cooperation arises of necessity when everyone is subject to the same unavoidable constraints and must agree on ways of dealing with or getting around them. These cooperative strategies require shared understanding and actions to mitigate harsh and limiting circumstances. This flexible reality is at odds with the perception of a passive, downtrodden people. When physicist Niels Bohr observed ‘with profound truths the opposite is equally true’, he was presumably referring to the properties of matter, not human paradox. But truths, after all, are only human, and it is through their affirmation and contradiction that people define and reveal themselves. Cairene contradictions are many, including optimism in the face of failing health and general socio-economic decline. At times, people seem to astonish themselves with their own fortitude, and take heart in the astonishment. A woman named El Hajja Fawkia Gabri eloquently describes the feeling in a short treatise in Arabic, The Big Collapse, written for the benefit of a journalist investigating the high incidence of collapsed buildings: The story defies logic but still it makes sense. Consider it like Cairo traffic – you can never grasp how it functions, but still you maneuver to establish workable rules to survive it. Our life is no different. We have a home, but it’s a daily challenge to get there; not due to bad traffic but simply because we have no staircase. Still, I can proudly declare that we have an elevator. Never mind that it doesn’t work. Stairless as we are, it’s nearly impossible to bring home groceries, since I can barely pull my own weight up [the remains of the steps] to my apartment. But we’re never starved. And even though we don’t have a proper sewage 44

system, the dishes get done by the end of the day. Last, but not least, we expect the building to collapse any minute. But we still watch the Comedy channel.73 People are stalwart at the prospects of poverty, sickness, death and even apocalypse, yet tenderly hopeful in a collective future. Indeed, survival is the one group activity at which Egyptians unarguably excel. Denied the expression of power via property or participation in politics, excluded from these essentially symbolic institutions, people invest more interest and attention in each other, in real life, so to speak. Forbearance and repetition, especially of mistakes, are understood to be the sum of the human equation, wherein every person is a small but significant variable, capable of moving mountains or creating as monumental an inertia. Mutual understanding helps make life bearable, but it is accepted that people are essentially on their own and they had better be up for it. A premium is placed on character, which translates as the ability to shoulder one’s particular burden lightly. Not everyone’s an expert, but Cairenes may be counted among the most sociable and least whiney, contentious or tragic of peoples. If cities are human experiments, then this one is a 1,400-year-old model of living together under extreme circumstances. Technique, not technology, is Cairo’s speciality.

45

The citadel, with Fatimid Cairo in the upper left and the southern cemetery in the foreground.

ii Artifice and Edifice

The most unprofitable thing that eateth up the wealth of the Believer is building. prophet mohammed1 Cairo’s history is a kind of orthodoxy replete with sacred texts and prodigies, a veritable catechism of attributes and anecdote. Fourteen-hundred years of transmissions clamour for attention, many of them baroque accounts festooned with exclamations like ‘save us from the outrage of the Franj!’ 2 There are lists of palace kitchen savouries and the perfumed contents of caravanserais, of viceroy’s gifts and assassins’ warnings. Sources can be so dense and serpentine that at times one is tempted, like the mutinous guard of a Fatimid caliph, ‘to make slippers of the precious leather bindings and bury the books in a mound of sand’. One emerges at last with the discovery that intimacy with Cairo’s historic concatenations is no guarantee of enlightenment. Communing with this city requires a leap of faith. Today it’s easier to imagine Cairo abbreviated in the mind’s eye, than it is to see it from a height and grasp its enormity. It was never conceived or organized as a whole, because its bursts of growth and present size were unimagined. The city arose and exists largely by virtue of interactions of varying degrees of spontaneity, synergies of necessity, creativity and the presence and absence of power. Cairo is oddly personal that way, coyly responsive to the observing eye, giving only as much as the viewer desires, always holding something in reserve. Cairo’s narrative sheds light on what lies behind its multifarious facades, lending nuance to character the way humour and wisdom grant beauty to a face lined with age. The city’s memes and dreams add understanding to knowledge because Cairo’s story is one of desires, responses to options and acquired tastes, more than plans. Although the urgent pressures of life continuously shape and 47

reshape the city’s present, history awards its past to individuals easily traced via an anomalous genealogy. Cairo’s family tree has arresting characters entangled in its branches, beginning with the Prophet Mohammed. Cairo’s early history, corresponding to the Arab Conquest, belongs to men stirred by a voice so confidential and convincing that they risked their lives for what it promised in this world as much as the next. Conquest, after all, meant wealth. Mohammed came from the Quraysh tribe, settled in the oasis of Mecca. They were largely merchants, a people to whom acquiring the goods to furnish a relatively austere existence became a way of life. Approximately 50 tribes gathered to form the Arab army, some more settled or nomadic than others. They shared the understanding that cities served to increase, consolidate and administer wealth. Cairo owes its formative centuries to the marriage of spiritual and material pursuits. Orphaned soon after birth in 570, Mohammed was a desert tradesman in his youth, accustomed to travel and the comforts of camels’ hair tents. He was 40 years old when he experienced his first revelation, in a mountain cave of the Hijaz. His announcement of a unitary deity attracted both adherents and the antagonism of pagan tribes that precipitated his exile to Medina in 622. While planning and executing raids on his Meccan opponents, he built a house, a small mud-brick enclosure with a portico of palm trunk columns and frond-roofed rooms set around an open courtyard. Ten years later he died, and was buried in his Medina home, having subdued and converted most of Arabia. His house served as a model for the first mosque in Egypt and all of Africa, a rustic construction that expressed continuity of purpose and embodied, albeit naïvely, traditions that evolved in time. Limitless sands, palm groves, a star-filled sky, the full moon: if there is such a thing as a desert aesthetic it derives thereof and the mosque makes neat proof with its volumes of open, luminous space, shady groves of columned arcades, lofty domes and wooden screens that animate shadow and light. The desert dwellers’ symbiotic relationship with their surroundings is self-evident, and the desert’s sublimely harsh nature, along with the importance accrued to water, are variously evoked in architecture, literature and religious concepts. Likewise, the story of the Conquest comprises characters 48

A portion of the northern cemetery with Mamluk domes, photographed in the 1920s.

and scenarios that, however idealized, colour the city’s founding. The Conquest is flavoured with the smoke and dust of milling campsites, images of horsemen gathering momentum on the move, ablutions performed with sand in the absence of water, the humbling privations of desert campaigns, not to mention valour in battle. Acting on behalf of the Umayyad caliph (deputy) Omar, General Amr Ibn al-As advanced with his troops from campaigns in Syria and Palestine to Babylon, a Roman fortress at the throat of the Nile delta. The siege lasted seven months, ending in April 641 with an Arab victory and the seeds of a new capital for Egypt, a place where the Arabs could express themselves fully. The offer of fair terms (i.e. capitulate, convert and be treated as equals; capitulate, refuse conversion and be treated kindly as inferiors; or else fight to the death) so as not to sour future relationships, was a valued strategy, and history is at pains to portray the tolerance with which Amr approached the founding and settlement of Fustat. The story goes that while decamping to take Alexandria, Amr found a dove and her brood nesting in his tent. Rather than disturb the fledgling doves, Amr’s tent stayed put and Fustat was founded on that spot. The first star in Cairo’s urban constellation, fustat (tent 49

or entrenched camp) was situated just north of the Babylon fort, commanding the Nile axis and the black-silted delta, with the Pyramids inspirationally looming west and the limestone cliffs of the Muqattam rising protectively to the east. After seven centuries of Roman exploitation, the Egyptians were not averse to change and there were converts to Islam, the Arabic word for submission. The new faith required a distinctive structure to accommodate worship centring on communal prayer. This is an intricate ritual of bowing, prostrations and cupping of the hands before the face as if reading an absent book or contemplating these instruments of power, symbols for the will. In Syria churches were adapted to mosques; their steeples as well as the remnant towers of Roman temples foretold minarets. These structures greatly facilitated the call to prayer, an innovation on the Hebrew’s horn and the Christian’s bell. In Egypt Amr built a mosque like the Prophet’s home, with palms and mud for walls and roof, and a scattering of pebbles on the ground where the faithful knelt to pray. Amr died in 663 and was buried at the foot of the Muqattam in a tomb of which all traces are lost. In 670 his mosque was enlarged and endowed with minarets, a word derived from the Arabic manara that means ‘the place of fire’, a name also used for the lighthouse of Alexandria.3 Fustat was a sprawling medley of tribal enclaves, the mosque its centre of devotional, educational and civic interactions. Gradually the campsite transformed from clusters of billowing tents into permanent dwellings. Streets evolved that followed pathways between houses and intrinsic destinations: the river and the mosque with its adjacent markets. The city’s growth was random with an organic logic and vitality far removed from the predictability of the grid. A port took form on the river and grew for centuries until absorbed by surrounding urbanization. The size of Amr’s mosque multiplied again and again, a sign of Fustat’s growth. In its present form, although entirely rebuilt, the building marks the city’s birthplace.4 Most of Fustat’s remains now lie buried beneath mounds of landfill so high they’ve created a new vantage point from which Cairo may be surveyed. The Fustat Gardens, a government-owned amusement park, is set atop the city’s millennial trash heaps. Cairo’s birthplace is its belly, a tract of land strewn with mounds of smouldering compost, the place where it digests itself. 50

When the Abbasid dynasty wrested power from the Umayyads in 750, the caliphate moved from Damascus to Baghdad and Egypt’s capital underwent a similar shift. Egypt’s new governor founded a city a few kilometres north of Fustat to advertise the Abbassid accession and identity. In pointed contrast to Fustat’s modest beginnings, al-Askar (the cantonment) was said to be a grandly appointed administrative centre, 40 years in the building, the seat of Egypt’s rule for over a century. Unfortunately, nothing remains but the reports of medieval historians and the name of a governor’s pleasure pavilion, ‘the Dome of the Winds’, set on a spur of the Muqattam. Al-Askar ’s scale and style nevertheless established building standards and upped the ante for the next contributor to Cairo’s foundations, Ahmed Ibn Tulun. Ibn Tulun’s military career was launched in Samarra, where the caliph recognized his talents by appointing him governor of Egypt (r. 868–84). In defiance of his benefactor, Ibn Tulun took autonomous control of Egypt after ten years, founding al-Qatai (the wards) on the hills above the Nile floodplain north of al-Askar, as an act of independence. The project’s scale, including the largest mosque of its time (879), invited the rumour that a conveniently unearthed trove of Pharaoh’s gold had financed it. Ibn Tulun is said to have dreamed of his city all bathed in light, except for the great mosque, which was disturbingly hidden in shadow. A dream interpreter described the light as ‘God’s splendour before which all must fall’, saying that only the mosque would withstand it. Although this cautionary tale advises a wariness of ambition that Ibn Tulun did not necessarily feel (and more hindsight than clairvoyance on behalf of the legendary dream interpreter), it illustrates al-Qatai’s ephemeral fate while reinforcing Ibn Tulun’s image as pious and prodigious. Ibn Tulun was in fact generous and resourceful; he hosted communal meals in the town square (midan), distributed alms and used slave market profits to fund an innovative public hospital. Ibn Tulun’s son Khumarawayh (884–96) was made of different stuff. To militaristic rule and the dutiful, religious existence that had so far absorbed the capital, he added the virtue of pleasure, albeit his own. Following his father’s death, Khumarawayh transformed the midan into a menagerie and gardens, filled with rare birds and blossoming trees, their trunks dressed in silver and gold. Miniature palms formed low-hanging groves where dates drooped within 51

reach. He kept a lion that dined and slept beside him and a stylish army of African guards: ‘Heads bound in black turbans, their breasts covered by iron cuirasses over which were worn black tunics, they passed in review like a black ocean rolling by.’5 Khumarawayh’s most endearing extravagance was the pool created for his nocturnal use that was filled with mercury. He floated atop the rippling quicksilver on an aircushion connected by silk cords to the banks, where the coordinated tugs of lovely girls imitated a gentle current to lull him to sleep. History’s gesture of respect to Khumarawayh’s father was to assign this inspired bit of landscaping to a court physician’s prescription for insomnia. Al Qatai remained the seat of the short-lived Tulunid dynasty until 905. Abbasid emissaries from Baghdad, anxious to reclaim Egypt following its spell of independence, razed the town leaving only Ibn Tulun’s mosque, just as he is said to have dreamed. The hills where al-Qatai once stood have since dissolved in the groundswell of generations, but the mosque defied time and several earthquakes and remains the oldest intact one in Cairo. Sheer-rising walls sever the structure from its surroundings. The interior is an airy place of grounded strength, reflecting the deft assurance of power, a place, perhaps, to dream of looking-glass lakes. Claiming descent from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, the Fatimids were Shia Muslims of the Ismaili sect who contested the Sunni (orthodox) authority of the Abbasids. The Fatimids originated in Syria, but founded their first dynastic city, Qayrawan, in 915 on the Tunisian coast, thus staking their claim as a rival to Abbasid Baghdad. The fourth Fatimid caliph, al-Mu√izz, took an interest in astrology and was accustomed to watching distant stars. In Spain, he observed, an Umayyad pretender had founded another rival emirate. Baghdad glittered on al-Mu√izz’s horizon like a shattered mirror and Egypt beckoned, especially Fustat, whose port seethed with commerce. Counselled by stars and spies, al-Mu√izz chose the year 969 to conquer Egypt, sending his General Jawhar (‘jewel’) to see to the details of building a city from which he could overcome the Abbasids and rule the world. At the head of his troops of horsemen, Jawhar entered Egypt virtually unopposed. He chose a site just north of the Ibn Tulun Mosque, with the Muqattam on the east and the khalij, a canal built 52

by Trajan, bordering the west. He ordered the entire perimeter, about a kilometre square, to be encircled with ropes furnished with dangling bells. Soldiers were stationed all around it, ready to simultaneously break ground at the command of court astrologers. The oft-told tale of a crow landing on the rope and precipitously sounding the bells, may be the comment of a people to whom such esoteric pains were somehow suspect. Nevertheless, on 6 July 969, the ascendant planet was Mars, called in Arabic, al-Qahira (the conqueror), and so the city was named to suit its promised destiny.6 The industrious Jawhar soon walled al-Qahira’s perimeters and installed its main axis, the Qasaba (now al-Mu√izz street) that connects the north gates of Bab al-Futuh (Gate of Conquests) and Bab al-Nasr (Gate of Victory) with the southern one, Bab Zuwayla, named for a Berber tribe that assisted the Fatimid conquest and settled there. Jawhar then built a mosque, named al-Azhar (the radiant, 972), still the centre of Islamic teaching. A palace was constructed within the enclosure, a royal complex whose buildings faced each other across a midan called Bayn al-Qasrayn (between the palaces), large enough to hold 10,000 horsemen. Al-Mu√izz ’s arrival in 973 gave the city its defining moment. The caliph’s arrival coincided with the feast following Ramadan, and alMu√izz offered a sermon so piously eloquent that it elicited both sobs and suspicions as to its sincerity. He left al-Azhar and grandly mounted his horse, escorted by four sons in armoured regalia with elephants at the head of their procession, inaugurating two centuries of brilliant theatre. Among his rich furnishings, al-Mu√izz packed the bones of his ancestors, whose ceremonial reburial rendered alQahira the Fatimid dynastic seat. According to Ismaili doctrine, the caliph was an absolute ruler, god’s hand on earth. The Fatimids already controlled most of North Africa, so Egypt’s Sunni majority adopted an attitude of guarded acceptance, resigned by tradition to ‘remain patient under the king’s banner, whether a tyrant or a just man’ and to attend prayers ‘whether conducted by a pure man or a libertine’.7 This attitude, so patently Egyptian, amounts to the tacit acceptance of the gulf between the state’s interests and those of the people, an attitude that persists to this day. The Fatimids set about seducing their subjects with feasts. They celebrated everything, Christian and Muslim holidays and Pharaonic rituals like anointing the Nilometer on Roda Island with 53

The Pyramids and the Nile flood plain in the early 1930s.

oils of saffron and musk, all amid extravagant pageantry involving multiple costume-changes by the caliph. Music sounded nightly at the palace and al-Qahira’s gates, marking royal arrivals and departures. For medieval merchants and travellers, these were mythic portals beyond which lay a city so vibrant that reports of its riches bordered on the delirious. The distance between truth and hyperbole was the thickness of the city’s walls.8 Al-Qahira owed its wealth to Fustat’s commerce, and the tariff placed on pilgrimages to Jerusalem. It was an open city with Fustat its emporium, where goods moved freely and efficiently. Fourteen camel-loads of snow arrived daily from the mountains of Lebanon to serve the palace kitchens. When al-Mu√izz desired the trunk of a rare Yemeni tree for his funerary bier, a Meccan contact announced its arrival from an Aden agent within two months. The Fatimids traded with India, China, Byzantium, and Western Europe (via Italy) as well as the Islamic world. Following al-Mu√izz’s death in 975, his son al-Aziz (975–96) ruled in a relaxed, prosperous atmosphere. Legend places al-Hakim, al-Aziz’s eleven-year old heir, in a fig tree when summoned to hear of his father’s death. If al-Hakim had qualms regarding his precociously acquired rank, they vanished as 54

swiftly as his orders were obeyed. His edicts were alternately inspired, contradictory and vicious. An exasperated and voluble public attributed the caliph’s real and imagined excesses to ‘a dryness in his brain’. He forbade the consumption of mulukhiyya and gargir (favourite local vegetables) as well as raisins, shellfish, beer and wine. He ‘turned night into day’ by causing all business to take place after sunset; women were forbidden to leave their homes or, indeed, to wear shoes.9 At the age of twenty, al-Hakim founded the Dar al-Hikma (house of knowledge), a magnificent library culled from the Fatimid palace collection, while rumour accused him of dismembering infants for black magic rites. Under al-Hakim’s patronage, the astronomer Ibn Yunus elaborated the trigonometry of the sphere; Ibn al-Haitham, famous for his Treatise on Optics, wrote about the distance of the Milky Way, about rainbows, mirrors, sunlight and magic squares; and ophthalmologist Ammar ibn Ali pioneered techniques for cataract treatment.10 In 1012 al-Hakim completed a mosque begun by his father near Bab al-Futuh, calling it al-Anwar (the brilliant) in reference to alAzhar, and perhaps to his luminous self. 11 In 1019 he declared himself divine, sparking destructive riots in the city. In 1021 while riding in the desert one night, as was his habit on his favourite donkey named ‘Moon’, the 36-year old al-Hakim disappeared. Although believed murdered, his body was never found and members of the Druze, a Shia sect, still await his return. The rule of al-Hakim’s grandson, al-Mustansir (1036–94), was long and troubled. Al-Mustansir ’s Sudanese mother introduced a Sudanese palace guard, causing violent antagonism with the established royal guard of Turkish slave troops. Incompetent regents and wazirs (ministers) contributed to the caliphate’s deterioration, as did famine so dire that children were sold or stolen for food and hapless individuals fished with hooks from balconies with the same purpose. Badr al-Jamali, Armenian governor of the Syrian provinces, rescued al-Mustansir in 1074. He established order, enlarged the city enclosure and rebuilt its walls against the advancing Seljuk Turks.12 His stint as wazir aided the recovery of Fatimid affairs, but poised between the Seljuks (converts to the rival Sunni faith) and the Crusaders, the empire would soon loose its footing. The caliphs were weak, spoiled and unconcerned with defence, their ministers often unscrupulous. 55

William of Tyre, a Frankish ambassador, ecstatically describes his 1167 visit to the last Fatimid Caliph, al-Adid. In the sumptuous labyrinth of the Great Palace, he passed through rooms of increasing intricacy of décor, finally reaching the throne room where a gold embroidered curtain dripping with pearls was swept aside to reveal the caliph, ‘a swarthy youth emerging from boyhood’. He dwells on the originality of palace art, describing it as ‘ardent and revolutionary’.13 Fatimid patronage had in fact nurtured the coalescence of a style brought to bear by a cosmopolitan array of artisans. New architectural forms emerged from the myriad influences (Byzantine, Coptic, Persian, Mesopotamian and North African) that prefigured the city’s fabled aesthetic. Avid for luxury and discerning of taste, the Fatimids’ artistic appetites extended to every medium: metalwork engraved with infinitesimal arabesques, textiles with delicate patterns wrought in silver and silk, rock crystal cunningly fashioned into ewers and cups. The Fatimids favoured human and animal motifs that eventually disappeared in accordance with the belief that art should not presume to imitate the Creator ’s hand. Despite their beauty and because of their lush wealth, many Fatimid buildings did not survive the piety of those who considered their embellishments heresy, or coveted their central location to erect their own buildings. In 1168 Almaric, Crusader King of Jerusalem, invaded Egypt. In desperation, the caliph appealed to the Sunni Prince of Damascus, Nur al-Din, sending the shorn locks of his wives’ hair as a symbol of their great distress. Nur al-Din answered with his best general, a Kurd named Shirkuh who insisted on a nephew’s presence for the campaign. This serious, sensitive 29-year-old was Salah al-Din Ayyub (Saladin), who soon found himself heir to the Fatimid dynasty. At their height, the Fatimids had ruled North Africa, Sicily, Palestine, Syria and the Red Sea coast of the Hijaz from their Egyptian capital. The Mongols would extinguish Baghdad in less than a century, but al-Qahira endured, as if born to conquer time itself. Three deaths catapulted Saladin to power. Having rid Egypt of the Franks, his uncle Shirkuh died following enthusiastic participation in an otherwise triumphal banquet, leaving Saladin wazir. The sickly young Fatimid Caliph was next, followed by Nur al-Din, struck down by angina in Damascus. Saladin seized the day, claiming Syria as his own along with Egypt, and requesting the Abbasid Caliph in 56

Baghdad to legitimize his rule. Meanwhile Almaric succumbed to dysentery before executing a planned Crusader invasion of Egypt and the Seljuks obligingly neutralized the threatening Byzantine army. This relentless good fortune surrounded Saladin in a mythic aura that was enhanced by his purported penchant for humility. He had initially refused to accompany his uncle, pleading a ‘state of financial embarrassment’, but finally acquiesced, ‘like a man being led to his death’. Saladin’s generosity and lack of interest in finance concerned his collaborators, whom he silenced saying that for some people ‘money is no more important than sand’. His distrust of wealth sealed the fate of al-Qahira’s Fatimid palaces. Their riches were dispersed to build schools for the reinstated Sunni doctrine and to build an imposing citadel. Saladin let his wazir, the eunuch Qaraqush, handle the construction of the fortress, while he continued his quest for Jerusalem. During his 24 years in power, Saladin spent only eight in alQahira, ‘the mistress who tried in vain to separate me from Syria, my spouse’.14 Nevertheless, to secure the Egyptian capital, he ordered an immense fortification designed to wed the areas of Fustat, al-Askar, al-Qatai’i and al-Qahira within a stone embrasure twenty kilometres long. Set on the Muqattam, where the Dome of the Winds once stood, the citadel construction was executed by a corvée of Crusader prisoners, using blocks from the Abu Sir pyramids of Giza and limestone quarried on site. The combined length of the walls and towers of the northern enclosure (the military portion of the citadel) was nearly seven times vaster than the Crac des Chevaliers in Syria, the grandest fortress of the time. Work began in 1176, one of the monumental aspects of which was a well (Bir Yusuf), pierced through 90 metres of solid rock. Halfway down the well was a cistern filled by ox-driven water wheels; a second set of wheels brought water to the surface. The beasts that turned them spent their lives in the dark and were only removed from the shaft when they died.15 Much of the citadel’s northern enclosure wall still stands, as do Saladin’s towers and those built by his Ayyubid descendants. A foundation inscription dated 1183 is visible near the entrance of Bab al-Gadid: The building of this splendid Citadel, overlooking Cairo the Protected, on the terrace, which adds use to beauty and space to 57

strength, for those who seek the shelter of his power, was commanded by our master, Salah al-Din . . .16 Lauded in the East, their master’s name rang throughout Europe as well, thanks to the chivalry with which Saladin conducted his victorious end of the Crusades. So anxious was Christendom to claim him, that the story was concocted of his deathbed conversion, a redemptive tribute to his mother, a mysterious countess of Ponthieu shipwrecked in Egypt. The queen of France, wife of Philip ii (1180–1223) was said to have fallen in love with Saladin, ‘the affair [being] pursued under the guise of theological discussions’.17 Dante was kind enough to exclude Saladin from hell, assigning him to the limbo reserved for virtuous pagans, along with the likes of Aristotle and the Queen of the Amazons.18 Although it was meant as his residence as well as that of his garrison, Saladin never lived in the citadel. His dynastic heirs, the Ayyubids (1171–1250), completed the southern enclosure and occupied the residential palaces. The fortress walls, nearly four metres thick, extending like sheltering arms from the Muqattam to the Nile, were still under construction 45 years after Saladin’s death in Damascus.19 Their presence, crowned by the citadel, unified and delineated the city’s field of action for the coming millennium. Saladin may have been married to his work in Syria, but he gave the city of Cairo a valiant heart. Thirteenth-century Cairo was a growing, cosmopolitan entity with over six hundred years of urbane past. The militaristic rule of the Mamluks would make the city the centre of the Islamic world. Mamluk means ‘owned’, but ‘possessed’ better describes the furious energies that shaped their empire. They were slaves, purchased as boys, trained to fight.20 While the Mamluks’ heavy-handedness did not please the people (whose labour helped finance their purchase and careers via taxes), there was much to be said for security in an era beset by Mongols and Crusaders. The Mamluks, sometimes called the ‘slave-kings’, were coincidentally prodigious builders of grand residences and grander mosques, so that the city’s tradesmen and craftsmen prospered in their employ. Because of these essential interdependencies, the needs for security and employment as well as finance for the purchase and training of more Mamluks, the roles of slave and master were perfectly confused. 58

The shift from an army composed of conquering tribes to one comprised of slave troops acquired and trained by the caliphs began with the Fatimid’s use of a Sudanese palace guard. Saladin had replaced them with Turkish Mamluks, especially from the Kipchak tribe, a preference maintained by his descendants. Saladin’s last heir, Negm al-Din al-Salih, built a barracks on the Roda Island for the Mamluk corps (called bahri or ‘river’ Mamluks), with whose help he had temporarily regained Jerusalem. 21 The Bahris were mostly culled from migrating Turkish tribes driven west by the Mongols, or as prisoners from conquests in the eastern provinces. Believed to possess a ‘warlike nature’, these youths were drilled to master spear-lancing, swordsmanship and archery on horseback. The logic of their employment was that, bereft of family, their sole allegiance belonged to their master. However, multiple owners (called emirs, or princes who had the right to own ten, 40 or 100 Mamluks and to command up to one thousand in battle) resulted in group rivalries, which accounted for endless disputes and the emergence of a Mamluk rule in its own right. Islam forbade the enslavement of Muslims, so only non-believers could be purchased as slaves, but only Muslims could exercise military authority. The conflict was sidestepped by the Mamluks’ admission to the faith upon reaching manhood, when they were awarded freedom and a healthy salary. The realm of war belonged to this military elite, its theatre lying far enough beyond the borders of everyday life to seem another world to Cairo’s inhabitants but real enough to merit their docile dependence. This reliance encouraged ruthlessness in the Mamluks, whose feuding factions clattered through narrow streets on horseback, terrorizing a population that experienced the benefits of Mamluk power and wealth largely as an afterthought. Forbearance was not misplaced, since the Mamluks subdued the Mongols – something that half a world, from China to Baghdad, had failed to do. Baghdad was sacked in 1258, but Cairo remained inviolate thanks to Mamluk martial prowess in Ain Jalut (1260). The Mamluks systematically rid the Holy Land of Crusaders and reigned as far as the Euphrates, dominating an Islamic world that had at first subjected, then absorbed, and finally was absorbed by them. They carried their exhilaration home to the city where many of them had begun as lost boys and where now they built their homes and mosques. No wonder the Mamluks felt that Cairo belonged to 59

them. Having vanquished so many foes, the only worthy adversaries they had left were themselves. The rise of the Mamluk meritocracy marked the end of the Ayyubid dynasty. The first Bahri to establish and hold power as sultan was a Kipchak Turk named Baybars al-Bunduqdari (1260–77). He had been purchased in Aleppo for a lowered price because of the cataract that veiled one of his blue eyes. For seventeen years Baybars (aka Prince Panther) built the Mamluk empire, dividing his time between crushing Mongol and Crusader interventions while keeping his rivals in Cairo at bay. He died after drinking a poisoned cup of fermented mare’s milk, the Kipchak beverage of choice.22 Consensually drawn from the ranks of the emirs, the sultan was first among equals, the ultimate reward for a cocktail of merit, seniority, intrigue and murder. The attendant glory was mitigated by the promise of violent death, which inspired the Mamluks’ fervour for building mosques and mausoleums as twin claims of piety and posterity. Islam’s requirement that the faithful dedicate a portion of their incomes to the poor also influenced the city’s growth. Rich patrons built public buildings whose maintenance was financed from the income of farmland endowments. This system of waqfs (holds, or pious endowments) evolved to circumvent restrictive heredity laws: providing the property was designed for charitable purposes it could be left to whomever one chose as the manager of the waqf. Children could not inherit Mamluk status, however (though exceptions were made in the case of sultans), so fresh slaves flowed from the east to fill the Mamluk ranks. These sons of shamanistic nomads were grafted onto Cairo, where they acquired a new language, faith and identity. They shaped the city with their strivings, imbuing it with restless vigour, a thirst for refinement and a passion for triumph. The Mamluks expressed all this in their buildings and the flavour of their wilfulness still lingers. Their works give substance to the praise of medieval travellers and are living outposts of the city’s past. Following Baybars, another Kipchak named Qalawun (1279–90) became sultan. Nicknamed al-Alfi (the thousander) for the unusually high price his looks commanded on the auction block, he was 60 when he took power and successfully repelled another Mongol invasion. On his victorious return he started work on a complex that included a strikingly modern hospital, a madrasa (school) and his 60

own splendiferous mausoleum. 23 Qalawun’s third son, al-Nasir Mohammed, would contribute far more to the city. Al-Nasir’s early reign was perforated with intrigue that made him the pawn of a pair of contemptuous regents. At 25 the young sultan took revenge. One of the former regents, Salar, was left to starve, and the other, Baybars Jashnakir, was strangled in al-Nasir’s presence. These sentences, coincidentally, were considered honourable among Turco-Mongol tribesmen, presumably since they cause no blood to be spilled.24 Al-Nasir’s cruelty, as well as his extraordinary memory for every detail of his work, became legends in their time.25 Under his administration (1293–1340) Cairo expanded in all directions as Egypt flourished astride international trade routes. Al-Nasir dedicated significant resources to repair damage from the earthquake of 1303. Fifty-four mosques and madrasas were erected, several under the supervision of the sultan, whose love of architecture was only matched by his attachment to his stables of thoroughbred horses. Curiously, despite (or because) of their near adoration of horses, the Mamluks had an appetite for horseflesh and at important feasts consumed horses by the dozen.26 Al-Nasir revived a hippodrome (built by Ibn Tulun) at the foot of the citadel where the Mamluks trained and played polo. Eleven daughters served to bind him through marriage to a coterie of emirs. They followed his example of noble patronage, building mosques, caravanserais and palace residences around and within the citadel that was greatly enlarged and equipped with an aqueduct to meet its growing needs.27 Al-Nasir ’s heirs ruled for over 40 years, but their times were marred by catastrophe. Subject to the Nile’s caprice, Cairo’s inhabitants knew famine and epidemic too well, but the Black Death of 1348 was like nothing they had ever experienced. Plague struck the city at its demographic and financial height, suffusing its dense quarters like a virulent sigh. A third of the population perished in five months.28 Al-Nasir’s seventh son, Hassan, was sultan (1347–61), and the gargantuan mosque he raised was either an act of bitter defiance towards the inexplicable scourge, or a monumental plea for mercy. The city’s dead were so numerous that inheritances funnelled through as many as five family members’ hands straight into the sultan’s coffers in the course of a single day. Financed by calamity, Sultan Hassan’s masterful mosque and madrasa was never completed, its drain on the moribund country too great. Cairo’s decimated, grief stricken population faced major floods in 1354, another 61

outbreak of plague in 1374–5, accompanied by severe famine and yet another wave of plague in 1379–81.29 This string of disasters contributed to a shift in the ranks from Turkish to Circassian Mamluks, instituted by the reign of Barquq (1382–99), during which the city struggled to recover, with some success.30 Economic activity warranted a new wikala, a wholesale trade centre, and an emir named al-Khalili chose the prime location of a Fatimid cemetery off the Bayn al-Qasrayn to build one. In a gesture emblematic of the times, he disinterred the skeletons and tossed them on a trash heap to make way for the Khan al-Khalili, a fourteenth-century prototype of the air-conditioned mall that thrives today. By most accounts, the Circassian Mamluks were temperamental, and cultivated a ghoulish brutality that appalled Cairo’s beleaguered citizens. Barquq’s coup was accomplished by mass murder; his son and successor, Faraj (1399–1412), drank to excess and had one hundred Mamluks suspected of treason sliced in two and hurled from the citadel. Suspicious of infidelity, Faraj beheaded his own wife, having first chopped off the tips of her hennaed fingers. 31 Faraj’s assassination was not long in coming, and al-Mu√ayyad (1412–20), the author of an earlier unsuccessful revolt, was removed from prison and installed as sultan. He ordered the prison demolished, replacing it with a mosque whose two minarets are attached directly to the city’s southern gate, Bab Zuwayla. Bab Zuwayla was the Mamluks’ favoured city portal because of its easy access to the citadel. Around it, one could visit food-vendors, consult astrologers, learn stick fighting, buy musical instruments and enjoy storytellers’ recitals from the One Thousand and One Nights.32 Bab Zuwayla also had a reputation as a gathering place for ‘libertines and other unsavoury characters’, but its most lurid attractions were public amputations and executions. The heads of traitors were displayed on Bab Zuwayla’s spiked gate, doubtless to the edification of the Mamluks still in one piece who passed by. During a ‘celebratory procession’, a captive prince wearing an iron collar was ushered to Bab Zuwayla along with his retinue, all chained and nude on camels, amid the sound of flutes and drums. The prince ‘was hung on a hook in the middle of the gate for a day and half. After which he was buried and the flags and decorations taken down’.33 Mamluk arrogance flared following the siege of Cyprus, commanded by Sultan Barsbay (1422–38). A Florentine named 62

Northern cemetery in the 1920s, with the domed mausolea of Mamluk sultans Barsbay (centre) and Farag ibn Barquq (far right).

Felice Branacci, described his audience with Barsbay at the citadel. After much delay, and walks through endless vaulted corridors lined with rows of shouting and lance-clashing Mamluks, Branacci finally entered the great hall in which the sultan sat beneath a canopy of gold brocade. Musicians and singers added to Branacci’s distraction: ‘I whose eyes were dazzled and whose ears were deafened and who had moreover to kiss the ground with each step, renounce trying to give an orderly description . . .’. 34 Branacci’s interpreter hardly had time to state the purpose of their visit, before the sultan abruptly stood up and left without saying a word. Barsbay’s victory in Cyprus would be one of the Mamluks’ last, and his decline due to mental illness mirrored the downward spiral of vicious politics that contributed to their undoing. Alert to his precarious condition, Barsbay engaged the best physicians, but when they failed to cure him he had them sawn in two. His tomb complex was completed several years before his death, its stone dome carved according to his wishes, with an arabesque of stars.35 63

Thirty years passed before a ruler of merit emerged, Qaytbay (1468–96), a formidable politician and exceptional patron of the arts. Mamluk Cairo was a world city, its impressive buildings displayed influences from Andalusia to China. Qaytbay had Cairo’s streets widened, a necessary adventure since buildings mushroomed randomly and half of the city’s tight winding alleys were dead ends. Shop-owners’ goods spilled into streets thronged with people, peddlers, tens of thousands of camel water-carriers and donkey taxis. Popular literature flourished, the One Thousand and One Nights were set down in writing, and aside from building, poetry was for a while the fond occupation of the elite. Qaytbay wrote verses in Arabic and Turkish, but several buildings commemorate him best. His sabil (fountain) incorporated a school for learning Qur√anic verse (kuttab) in its second-storey loggia.36 Designed in accordance with the Prophet’s dictum that the worthiest of acts are the offers of ‘water for the thirsty and knowledge for the ignorant’, this highly ornate and innovative public facility was much imitated. It is a wonderful paradox that Islamic decorative art, having once contrived to conceal the living form, finally succeeded in capturing its vitality with an intricate, almost cellular intimacy. The point is well made by Henri Focillon: These combinations are produced by mathematical reasoning. They are based upon cold calculation, reducible to patterns of the utmost aridity. But deep within them, a sort of fever seems to goad on and to multiply the shapes; some mysterious genius of complication interlocks, enfolds, disorganizes and reorganizes the entire labyrinth. Their very immobility sparkles with metamorphoses. Whether they be read as voids or solids, as vertical axes or as diagonals, each one of them both withholds the secret and exposes the reality of an immense number of possibilities.37 This description of a virile art may be superimposed over the entire urban matrix to illustrate an organism on the verge of its next convulsion. Streets like veins and arteries link the citadel (the city’s head) with its heart (Fatimid Cairo), their tendrils stretching towards the river as well as north and south. Yet plague, burdensome taxes and insurrections weakened the dynamic entity from within. The ‘immense number of possibilities’ inherent in the city of the 64

‘possessed’ dwindled to one: defeat at the hands of the Ottomans, who had already toppled the thousand-year-old Christian capital of Constantinople, in 1453. The last notable Mamluk Sultan was al-Ghuri (1501–16), an elderly man whose artistic sensibilities overshadowed matters of state.38 More poet than equestrian, he had the hippodrome of alNasir transformed into a garden in which he hosted massive banquets. On the Muslim New Year in 1510 he presented each of his emirs with a rose. Aware of the Ottoman advance, al-Ghuri installed cannons in the citadel, a questionable addition since the cavalry would have benefited more from mobile field weapons. But the Mamluks deemed these ‘arms for women’, preferring the challenges of horsemanship, bows and swords, anachronisms that cost them an empire. On a plain near Aleppo the Mamluks encountered light artillery for the first time. Their reckless bravery may well be imagined, as may their shock at the greatly expedited proceedings of battle. AlGhuri accompanied the campaign against the Ottomans but he fell from his horse and was trampled to death, his body lost in the carnage. A few months later his successor, Tumanbay, was hung from Bab Zuwayla. The gallows rope broke twice before he died, a gruesome fait divers that was nevertheless swiftly incorporated into street entertainment, in this case, a shadow puppet play. An enthusiastic spectator tipped the play’s director handsomely and invited him to Istanbul to stage the play for his son. The appreciative audience member was the new Ottoman Sultan, aptly named Selim the Grim.39 Portrayals of Ottoman Cairo are often tinged with dismay. The city once celebrated by fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun as ‘the metropolis of the universe, the orchard of the universe, beehive of nations, gateway of Islam and throne of royalty’ was reduced to a provincial capital, one of 32. The ensuing three centuries do lack romance; the decades dissolve in a litany of bland pashas (governors) and their tedious bureaucratic exploits. Bereft of the royal presence, Cairo was no longer the stage for its munificence or whim. Yet it was precisely this absence of overweening power that the city required to become itself.40 For 300 years, under an administration anxious to reap the rewards of Egypt’s economic well being, Cairo’s population stratified to produce a variegated social fabric. Some members of the 65

Ottoman infantry (janissaries) intermarried and built houses, as did merchants, from the modest to the princely, along with caravanserais and public drinking places (sabils). Nor had Cairo seen the last of the Mamluks, as the Ottomans employed a number who had survived the power shift thanks to wits or wealth, a decision the Sublime Porte in Istanbul had cause to regret following several Mamluk comebacks. The emirs maintained opulent households that rivalled those of janissary lieutenants (katkhuda) and a panoply of tradesmen, so that the city grew as members of an ambitious bourgeoisie scrambled to outdo each other. Wealthy Ottoman households resembled those of their Mamluk predecessors; both owed their style to practical considerations, peace and quiet foremost among them. Tall facades with grand portals enclosed a world of spacious luxury far removed from the raucous streets. The height of the rooms, often in excess of ten metres, fed the proprietors’ sense of grandeur and offered a respite from Cairo’s suffocating heat. Wall hangings, carpets and cushions adorned the interiors whose wood-pillared balconies opened onto inner courtyards replete with gardens and fountains that were the centrepiece of every large household. Since merchants wished to live close to commercial areas, Cairo’s Fatimid centre swelled to bursting and the overflow helped weave the city’s outer edges into a greater whole.41 Considering that the Ottomans began as nomadic frontiersmen of a mystical bent, they swiftly developed an almost maniacal flair for urban administration. In Cairo, fifteen judiciary courts operated within a tangled range of jurisdictions. Aside from the military hierarchy there was a High Council and an Ordinary one to advise the pasha. Trade guilds had spokesmen to protect their interests, with different ethnic groups controlling specific activities. Market inspectors (muhtasibs) checked weights and measures in shops to ensure fair play. Interestingly, the punishment for cheating suited the crime; if a butcher was caught shortchanging his customers, a slice was carved from his backside, a pastry maker made to sit on his hot pans. There were religious councils of scholars (fiulama√), and individual sheikhs who oversaw tax collection and street repairs in the various neighbourhoods of Egyptians, Syrians, North Africans, Turks, Palestinians and others. With over a quarter of a million inhabitants spread over eight square kilometres, the necessity for control imposed itself. Law and 66

order was the province of the state, whose primary method of crime prevention consisted of harrowing, but well-attended public punishments, including ‘fierce and picturesque’ customs such as impaling.42 Private groups handled municipal functions like street lighting, water supply, transport and trash collection, collecting payment from their customers. Nothing was more important than water. The city was removed from the Nile banks because of seasonal floods. Camels and donkeys delivered water directly to inhabitants, but also to public bathhouses and cisterns established by rich patrons. During the Ottoman period over 300 sabils (many of them with kuttabs) were erected, emblematic of the ruling class’s urge to do and look good. The buildings combined the beautiful with the beneficial, providing water and an elegant way for the wealthy to wash their hands of a teeming proletariat with whom they wished little contact. One such jewelled structure was endowed by a woman named Nafisa al-Bayda in 1796 and still stands near Bab Zuwayla.43 A slave from Anatolia, Nafisa had both beauty and wit, which attracted an elderly emir, who married her and died shortly thereafter. She inherited his estate and was soon remarried to Murad, another powerful emir, who helped establish Egypt’s temporary independence from the Ottomans. Murad’s and Nafisa’s combined resources made them Cairo’s most influential couple, and despite outbreaks of plague, famine and civil unrest, their fortunes multiplied. The romance ended unhappily with the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte. In July 1798 the French landed near Alexandria. Days later Murad led 10,000 Mamluks to a plain east of the Pyramids to meet three times as many well-armed Frenchmen in battle. Murad’s troops were massacred and he fled to Upper Egypt, where he eventually succumbed to plague. Nafisa negotiated hard to hold on to their property, inviting General Bonaparte to her home and lavishing him with Cairene hospitality. He was appreciative enough to extract a ruinous tribute in gold dinars. Cairo’s days of relative seclusion and rule by Ottoman nonentities were over. The city was about to become modern, that is to say, subject to the machinations of the West. Bonaparte (in Egypt from 1798 to 1801) introduced the first Arabic printing press to Cairo, using it to issue a proclamation regarding his intentions towards the citizenry. The rhetoric was calculated to imitate Arabic’s flowery formalism and play on what its authors 67

perceived as the population’s frustration with the Mamluk usurpers. An indicative portion reads ‘if Egypt is a Mamluk fiefdom, let them produce the title deed that God conferred on them’. 44 One can imagine the mixture of puzzlement, suspicion and admiration with which this mass-produced document was met. The proclamation was the subject of careful study by Cairo’s fiulama√, who found the phrasing vulgar and numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes. As for the Revolutionary motto of ‘liberty and equality’ that headed the page, the French weren’t fooling anyone. Cairenes were used to duplicity and they knew an invasion when they saw one. Al-Jabarti, Egyptian chronicler of the French occupation, provides us with a closely observed alternative view of Bonaparte’s expedition. His sarcasm is at times hard to miss: ‘When a Frenchman has to perform an act of nature he does so wherever he happens to be . . . and goes away as is without washing. If he is a man of taste and refinement, he wipes himself with whatever he finds, even with a paper with writing on it’, al-Jabarti tells us, underlining the fiulama√’s distaste for French hygiene and perhaps the fate of a quantity of Bonaparte’s pamphlets.45 The French fancied themselves at the vanguard of modernity, and the Egyptians as quaintly barbaric. The latter viewed Bonaparte and his retinue of geographers, mathematicians and scientists through the narrowed eye of a complex and illustrious history. When Bonaparte invited the fiulama√ to witness examples of chemical transformations and ‘electrical commotions’, the sheikhs remained unfazed. One of them asked whether the chemist ‘could make me be in Morocco and here at one and the same moment’, a minimum requirement for any respectable Cairene metaphysician. 46 This nonchalance is at odds with popular European portrayals of Bonaparte’s impact, for example, Victor Hugo’s poem Lui: Victor, enthusiast, bursting with achievements, Prodigious he stunned the land of prodigies. The old sheikhs venerated the young and prudent emir. The people dreaded his unprecedented arms; Sublime, he appeared to the dazzled tribes Like a Mahomet of the Occident.47 Within months of Bonaparte’s arrival, the people of Cairo rose in protest, spreading incendiary anti-French propaganda from the 68

minarets in place of the call to prayer. Bonaparte crushed the insurrection and ordered daily beheadings to remind the people that he wasn’t too modern to speak the language of oppression. Bonaparte felt obliged to strike hard. The British had destroyed his fleet and his forces were marooned, a fact that elicited sedition in the ranks of his plague-ridden troops. The French had failed in their objective to loosen Britain’s grip on the land route to India, and a British-Ottoman incursion ended their occupation in 1801. Cairo greeted the Ottoman army with a mixture of relief and trepidation; indeed the re-conquerors were hardly conciliatory. Despite their short stay, the members of Bonaparte’s scientific entourage had succeeded in compiling 23 volumes full of detailed drawings and observations. The publication of the Description de l’Egypte (1810–29) marked the birth of Egyptology, launched a wave of Egyptophilia in Europe, and served as an enticement to travellers.48 Although Bonaparte’s Egyptian adventure left less obvious a mark on Cairo than on the furnishings of Parisian salons, the repercussions of his visit were profound. Aside from establishing Egypt as a point of active contention between the French and British empires, Bonaparte, with his scientists and superior weapons, infected the capital’s new ruler-to-be with envy and discontent. Leader of an Albanian militia stationed in Egypt by the Ottoman Porte, Mohammed Ali (1805–49) rose to power amid conflicts between pillaging janissaries and persistent Mamluks. His ability to restore order earned the population’s appreciation, while the Ottomans’ absorption with a janissary uprising in Istanbul left the Egyptian field open to his ambitions. Recognizing France and Britain as far greater threats to Egypt’s future than the Ottomans, Mohammed Ali yearned to compete on the high ground of modernity. If asked what that word meant, he would have said guns and factories. Illiterate until the age of 40 but aware of the effects of disease on the efficiency of troops and labourers, he might have added schools and doctors, too. In the coming years, this gifted, unfaltering leader would see to it that Cairo had all four. Mohammed Ali once famously remarked, ‘My history shall not commence until I can rouse this land from the sleep of ages’. He approached the task of awakening Egypt with severity. First, he invited the city’s 24 surviving Mamluk emirs and their entourages of 69

over 400 men to a banquet at the citadel. On their way out, he had them shot en masse. So much for the Mamluks. Next he attacked the economy, reclaiming vast tracts of arable land with new, year-round irrigation systems and introducing cotton crops that greatly augmented Egypt’s revenues (especially when Civil War in the usa disrupted its cotton trade) and helped finance the Suez Canal. Mohammed Ali hired French military officers to equip and retrain his army, and with the help of French engineers, he built arms and textiles factories.49 Europeans also helped design an educational system with engineering, military science and language curricula. Promising students were awarded scholarships in France. Mohammed Ali gave Cairo its first publishing house, the Bulaq Press, to translate and print manuals and textbooks. In response to outbreaks of cholera and plague, he commissioned the world’s first international quarantine board; his Western-style school of medicine was the first in the Middle East.50 Mohammed Ali dramatically modified the citadel enclosure where he resided, destroying historic buildings to erect audience halls, a national archive (the world’s second archives, after France’s), diwans or ministries, and a voluminous mosque. In 1824 the French government sent him the gift of a horse-drawn carriage, but only one of Cairo’s streets was wide enough for it to pass. He accordingly slashed the city’s fabric to make connective boulevards.51 Stern, decisive tactics, such as forced labour, heavy taxes and the appointment of officialdom composed largely of foreign (TurcoCircassian and European) advisors, were not calculated to win Egyptian hearts. Nor had Mohammed Ali intended to create a local intelligentsia exposed to foreign travel, education and industrial techniques that would question the mechanisms distancing them from the rewards and responsibilities of self-governance. Their disenchantment, along with that of conscripted Egyptian soldiers rising in the ranks, would soon form the basis of a nationalist revolt.52 Mohammed Ali’s citadel mosque with its silvery domes hovers above the city like a sentinel, dominating so many visual perspectives that it is difficult to imagine Cairo’s skyline without it. Yet its style is drawn entirely from Istanbul and bears no trace of local tradition. Given its scale and location, the citadel mosque symbolized Mohammed Ali’s ascendancy over the city and over Egypt, and may have also been interpreted as the concretization of his claim for independence from the Ottomans. 70

Whether Mohammed Ali’s architectural pretensions in Cairo displeased the Sublime Porte, a series of successful military expansions gravely alarmed both the Ottoman sultan and the British, who attacked his positions in Syria, obliging him to withdraw. Britain placed the force of empire behind its preference for an ineffectual Ottoman sultan rather than a revitalized, expansionist Egypt, and so aborted Mohammed Ali’s quest for autonomy. His army dismantled, Mohammed Ali was forced to relinquish rich, state-owned monopolies to the Europeans and was patronized for his compliance with the assurance that his heirs would continue to rule in Cairo as Ottoman governors. That Britain should presume to grant him what was his, made defeat the more bitter. In Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage Lord Byron describes the ruler’s years in the magnificent palace of Shubra, buried beneath what is now one of Cairo’s densest quarters. In marble paved pavilion where a spring Of living water rose, Whose bubbling did a genial freshness fling, And soft voluptuous couches breathed repose, Ali reclined, a man of war and woes.53 Mohammed Ali’s grandson Ismail continued the work he had begun, devoting himself to building his own version of a modern Egypt, beginning with the capital, his Galatea. Ismail’s wish to imbue Cairo with a European persona created a vain but seductive simulacrum. His modernization efforts, including the Suez Canal, had paradoxically rendered Egypt a more coveted prize for the powers he’d wished to flatter through imitation, and greet on equal terms. Ismail’s (1863–79) most telling gift to Cairo was the first bridge uniting the Nile’s east and west banks. Transforming this architectural allegory into a cultural reality was an elusive goal beyond his means, though he spared no expense to pursue it. Educated in Paris and Vienna, inured to Ottoman luxury and a familiar of Europe’s royal courts, Ismail was a confident, sophisticated leader. He surrounded himself with the trappings of occidental and oriental affluence while directing a feverish entrepreneurial focus towards attracting finance to reinvent Egypt and its capital. His progressive politics and prodigious building reflected as much his desire to 71

Portrait of the Khedive Ismail, c. 1860s.

impress as to improvise a new urban whole whose (Western) value would exceed the sum of its (Eastern) parts. What he succeeded in producing was a divided city, two worlds living side by side across a gap too wide for a bridge to span.54 72

Lady of the court (c. 1880s) in front of a palace built by the Khedive Ismail for Empress Eugenie on the occasion of her visit for the Suez Canal opening ceremonies. The palace is now part of the Marriott Hotel.

Ismail acquired Egypt’s greater autonomy from the muchreduced Ottomans by doubling the annual tribute. His title of khedive (a prince above provincial governors) was part of the bargain. Free to act, he banned slavery and built schools by the hundreds, including the first ones in Egypt for girls. He founded a library, a museum of Pharaonic antiquities and a geographical society to encourage the mapping of Africa.55 He enhanced Mohammed Ali’s industrialization programmes, improved agricultural output, established a postal system and extended telegraph and railway lines. The khedive’s most lauded and closely watched project was the completion of the Suez Canal, as grandiose a scheme as that of refiguring Cairo as Paris on the Nile. 56 Ismail understood the importance of appearances, and the two projects were intimately linked. The opening of the Canal in 1869 was a masterfully orchestrated public relations event, combining opulent pageantry and hospitality. Enough of the new Cairo was in place to win choruses of praise from Ismail’s influential guests and heads of state, a necessary prelude to their support for an Egypt free of its withering Ottoman attachment. 73

Opera Square in the 1920s.

Considering the twelve hundred years of rambling that constituted Cairo’s erstwhile expansion, Ismail’s detailed urban plan was revolutionary.57 Implemented by the ministry of public works under the highly competent direction of Egyptian engineer and educational reformist, Ali Mubarak, it involved a huge tract of land between the existing city and the Nile’s east bank. The new city was designed along the lines of Haussmann’s Paris, with a grid of squares and radiating boulevards. Crisp new streets, lit with piped-in gas, equipped with water lines and swept three times per day, extended from the edges of the old city like a bright beaded fringe from a fusty shawl. It was a monumental endeavour that demanded international participation. Businessmen, architects and engineers flocked to Cairo in their thousands, where they watched elegant blocks of neoclassical residences rise from the dust on the outskirts of the chaotic medieval quarter. Twenty-seven newspapers were published in Cairo at the time, in Arabic, French, Italian, Greek and Turkish. The Ezbikeyya gardens to the north of the new quarter rivalled the Bois de Boulogne. There was a grand opera house, inaugurated during the Canal opening ceremonies with a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Magnificent banquets and balls illuminated the long, stately Italianate façade of Ismail’s Abdin Palace, that stood with its back to the old city, looking out towards the new. Ismail joined his guests beneath chandeliers as large as trees in champagne toasts to 74

Egypt’s future, while interest on national loans accumulated insidiously in European banks.58 In 1870 Ismail’s strongest backer, Napoleon iii, fell from power in France, heralding the beginning of the end. Although work on the new city continued sporadically until 1875, Ismail was overextended and desperate enough to ransom his country’s future. Having sold majority shares in the Canal enterprise to the British, yet still unable to satisfy his creditors, Ismail’s Egypt was bankrupt. The British foreclosure on the Canal was a great stride towards occupation. The French and British governments forced the Ottoman sultan to strip Ismail of his powers, and austerity measures were applied to the population. Ismail saluted his son Tewfiq as the new, diminished khedive in 1879 before departing in exile to Italy.59 Humiliation whets a people’s appetite for dissent. An Egyptian army officer named Ahmed Urabi led the first nationalist military revolt in 1881, protesting against foreign manipulation and the ostentatious behaviour of the ruling elite. Britain responded to the turmoil with characteristic alacrity and its troops met the Egyptians in the Canal Zone. The engagement lasted under an hour. In 1883, Evelyn Baring (later Earl of Cromer) was appointed British consulgeneral in Cairo (1883–1907). The khedive was reduced to a figurehead under the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan. With solemn and perhaps sardonic deference the Cairenes soon referred to Baring as al-Lurd (the lord). Cairo entered the twentieth century a colonial city under the strict ministrations of the British, whose ‘temporary’ presence lasted 72 years. Following the Urabi revolt, Egypt’s flirtations with self-governance were checked by the bestowal of the chaste status of ‘veiled protectorate’. At the outbreak of the World War i, the veil fell, as did all pretensions of Ottoman authority, when a quarter of a million British Commonwealth troops mobilized to defend the Suez Canal. Over the next decades, several forces combined to add impetus and direction to the city’s growth. The monarchy, trapped by their aspirations between two worlds, was not one. Installed by the British to quell a nationalist uprising in 1919, Ismail’s son Fuad became constitutional monarch in 1923, the perfect autocratic foil to deflect the conflict between British interests and those of a dangerously coherent nationalist party. Aside from the impressive Fuad University, the royal family built little for the public, devoting them75

King Fuad on his throne at an opening session of Parliament, c. 1920s.

selves largely to the maintenance of existing mosques and a regal lifestyle.60 In the midst of two wars, against the background of an uneasy three-way political standoff, British garrisons filled the citadel and a new barracks by the Nile. The British administrative and military community, close knit, largely middle-class, and in wartime very young, played a role in the city’s development. The work begun by Ismail was completed, while the picturesque old city was left as a curiosity, a charming medieval counterpoint to British preeminence. It was this self-absorbed conviction that reshaped Cairo, along with 76

Kasr al-Nil Bridge in the 1920s.

the first Aswan Dam built under British supervision in 1902, and the arrival of the automobile in 1904. With Nile floods more contained, the riverbanks stabilized, drawing the city’s development westwards. Three new bridges helped weave the Nile islands of Roda and Gezira into the urban fabric. Once the site of a Khedival palace, Gezira became the home of the Sporting Club, where the elite played polo and golf. Grand residences, including several royal palaces, sprung up around this verdant bastion of colonial mannerisms. Likewise the island of Roda was gentrified and the expansion continued in Giza, where Ismail’s phantasmagoric botanical gardens and royal menagerie (once part of his Harem Palace) were converted into public parks and a zoo.61 During the occupation, the suburbs of Maadi and Heliopolis (the latter founded in 1906 by the Belgian Baron Empain) arose to the east of the Nile. Also on the east bank, Garden City was created in close proximity to downtown, a lushly landscaped residential community dotted with villas. Beside it, the British Residence was a monument to colonial amour propre. Its rolling lawns stretched straight to the 77

Nile, obliging the constant stream of riverside traffic to take the long way around. By 1931, Cairo had over 24,000 motor vehicles and the street system expanded accordingly, though the old city remained entangled in medieval alleys that only a trio of arteries passed through.62 Barely serviced by the municipal water system, its souks eclipsed by the new western business district, with population density ever rising, the old city could look back on the Ottoman days with nostalgia. Downtown Cairo had banks, boutiques, bookshops, cinemas, department stores with liveried guards and the Groppi Tearooms where people danced in the afternoons to the music of live orchestras.63 The Shepheard’s Hotel was a favourite gathering place for foreigners, its terrace alive with travellers, army officers, entrepreneurs, dragomen (guides) and adventurers. There were wide tree-lined boulevards and multi-storeyed apartment buildings, their prow-shaped facades facing circular midans like ships sailing into harbour. They only differed from their European counterparts by virtue of a smattering of neo-Pharaonic or neo-Mamluk whimsy, the odd sphinx or lotus, the occasional keel-shaped arch. The buildings contained spacious flats with high ceilings, shimmering parquet floors, tall shuttered windows and storage areas on the roof that were later converted to living quarters for servants or the poor. Meanwhile, to the north beside the Nile, a cluster of factories fuelled the growth of Shubra and Bulaq, whose working-class inhabitants enjoyed few Industrial Age amenities. Cairo’s population tripled in the first 50 years of the occupation, with the majority concentrated in the older, more affordable areas. Influx from the countryside, as well as lower mortality rates due to improved sanitation and health, inflated Cairo’s population from 374,000 in 1882 to 1,312,000 in 1937. By 1960 the number of inhabitants would more than double yet again.64 The pressures of life, compounded by the thankless task of supplying food and labour for the world’s largest army base, had begun to fray the Egyptians’ resilient nerves. Disgust and disappointment with an ineffectual, self-serving monarchy, a cabinet embroiled in intrigue and the socio-economic and legal disparities that favoured a foreign elite, darkened the overburdened Cairenes’ morale. In 1936 Cairo was a city of over one million people, most of them hungry for the good news that the unloved Fuad’s death and the 78

Wedding portrait of King Farouk and Queen Farida, 1938. Farouk was eighteen and Farida sixteen at the time.

coronation of his sixteen-year-old son Farouk (1936–52) seemed to provide. The precious only boy in a family of girls, Farouk grew up in Egypt and spoke Arabic, unlike his father, and on him the people pinned their specious, tradition-bound hopes. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty signed in the same year gave Egypt command of its own army and appeared to be a nationalist triumph that would break Britain’s hold. The outbreak of World War ii, however, delayed the treaty’s full implementation. Over 170,000 Allied troops overran Cairo and its environs, infusing the city with excitement and trepidation. 79

The aftermath of Black Saturday, 26 January 1952: Shepheard’s Hotel.

By that time King Farouk had begun to grow alarmingly stout, spending more time in Cairo’s nightclubs than suited his station. The British ambassador, and Egypt’s administrator during the war, Sir Miles Lampson, had never bothered to conceal his contempt for the young king (referring to him notoriously as ‘that boy’ while Farouk called Lampson gamusa basha, ‘water-buffalo pasha’), but his high-handed, clumsy attempt to force Farouk’s abdication in February 1942 was widely condemned. At the end of the drama that began with tanks rolling into Abdin Square at night, the king was humiliated but still king. Wafdist party leader Nahas Pasha was installed as prime minister, a ‘nationalist victory’ engineered by the 80

British. The army felt cheated of the chance to protect Farouk and Egypt’s honour because of Lampson’s covert tactics. And finally the Islamists, who along with the king had nurtured Axis sympathies, were also dismayed. When Farouk allowed his beard to grow in 1943, some said that this symbol of piety had pan-Arab significance and that Farouk was plotting to reinstate the caliphate. Others said he’d stopped shaving because it was one of the few things he could do without asking permission. Farouk later declared he’d grown his beard because it was the most binding thing a Muslim could swear by, and following an intrigue that linked the much admired Queen Farida with a British portrait artist, he swore by his beard he’d divorce her. This he did in 1948, and his popularity plummeted, while Egypt’s defeat in the first Israeli war left the country overwhelmed. In October 1951 Egypt abrogated its treaty with Britain, a blunt ‘farewell’ that Britain chose to ignore. Tensions accumulated until 25 January 1952, when British troops attacked a police station in Ismalia (said to be the headquarters for anti-British harassments) where 60 Egyptians lost their lives and many more were wounded. The next day, while Farouk feted his only son’s recent birthday, Cairo imploded. Gangs armed with gasoline stormed the streets of downtown and anywhere else in the city they perceived ‘foreign’ influence, setting it all aflame. Hundreds of buildings were damaged; Shepheard’s Hotel was destroyed, as was the British Turf Club where six foreigners died, some of them lynched. A military coup followed the events of 26 January 1952. When the ashes settled, Egypt had a president and a new constitution placing the future in its own hands. Farouk abdicated and was sent off from the port of Alexandria, where the new military leaders offered him a twentyone-gun salute. He lived in exile in Italy until the age of 44, when he died in a restaurant, choking on his food. Royalists still suggest he was poisoned.65 Following the 1952 coup, the Revolutionary Command Council headed by Generals Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser had control of Egypt. Nasser soon ousted Naguib, and became president in 1956 under a new constitution. The 34-year old Nasser was perceived as the first native son to rule since the pharaohs, a fact that places in context, but cannot adequately convey, the love Egyptians initially felt for him. It was an exultant 81

love, absolving the pain and redeeming the hopes of a proud but weary people. In 1956 the last British troops left the country, although they returned with French and Israeli support in a surprise military attack designed to prevent Egypt from controlling the Suez Canal. The United States under Eisenhower upbraided the authors of ‘the tripartite aggression’, and United Nations’ intervention awarded victory to Egypt’s nationalists, lending Nasser’s rule a heroic, international dimension. Deep emotions imbued the new Republic with a sense of drama, not least of them the loathing of those on the wrong end of Nasser’s Robin Hood-esque socialist policies. Many foreigners and Egyptians who could afford it left the country and, with them, a wealth of much needed expertise. As the historian al-Maqrizi once noted, ‘such is the custom of kings that they efface that which came before them’. So it was with Egypt’s Nasser. Across the country, buildings, factories and utilities were nationalized, and many elegant downtown Cairo residences emptied of their inhabitants and occupied by government companies. The gardens of the British Residence were clipped so that traffic could finally circulate, and an immense plaza was installed on the site of the razed British barracks, renamed Midan el-Tahrir, Liberation Square. Near the train station another square was levelled and a pedestal built to support an ancient red granite colossus of the pharaoh Ramses the Great (1304-1237 bc), founder of the 19th dynasty, a great conqueror of humble descent, not unlike Egypt’s modern-day hero.66 People swarmed to Cairo from the countryside to taste the revolution’s promise so that the city could barely hold them, nor could the government build low-income units fast enough, although it tried. Likewise industry could not create sufficient jobs, however much emphasis was placed on its importance for Egypt’s economic future. People needed work and one expedient way to provide it was through employment directly under the government’s increasingly all-embracing wing. New ministries were constructed, blandly officious beehives whose concrete-box style reflected a frantic desire to cheaply contain the burgeoning national enterprise and its civil servants. Even before 1956 the Suez Canal conflict (locally known as the ‘Tri-partite aggression’) ruined whatever chances for cooperation that existed between the Western powers and Egypt’s new govern82

The monolith of Ramses ii in a warehouse for repair, including the provision of a pair of legs to replace the missing originals.

ment, Nasser had turned towards the Eastern Bloc for inspiration and support. He needed finance to build the Aswan High Dam, his revolutionary overture merging the themes of electrification for industry, urban development, perennial farming and, above all, modern man’s triumph over nature, as embodied in the taming of the Nile. Nasser ’s provocative new alliance with Russia helped achieve these aims, while colouring Cairo an unfortunate shade of 83

Cold War grey. In Midan al-Tahrir the grim hulk of the Mugamma building, housing a warren of governmental offices, still conjures bleak images of wintry Muscovite institutionalism. In 1961 a 187-metre-high landmark was added to the city’s skyline, the Burg al-Qahira (Cairo Tower), Egypt’s Eiffel, its Empire State, the tallest freestanding concrete structure of its time. Designed to evoke the lotus flower, the tower looks more like a giant, decapitated palm. It stood out from the villa-studded gardens of Gezira like a cheap souvenir on an heirloom dressing table. Indeed, wherever the eye falls in the contemporary city, aesthetics and good housekeeping seldom appease it. An understanding of the demographic cataclysm that transformed the city in the half-century following the revolution is enough to make one marvel that it wasn’t ground to dust. In 1956 urban planners predicted that Cairo’s population would reach 5.5 million by the year 2000. In 1965 there were already 6.1 million inhabitants in Greater Cairo.67 To this, add socialism’s principle of state ownership that theoretically placed everything in the hands of the people. This ‘all and nothing at all’ proposition perplexed Cairo’s inhabitants, who experienced their new and abstract ownership in a predictably human way. They took possession of the city like a large, active foot in a tight but game shoe. Although construction began in several areas to the west of the Nile slated for development, it could not keep pace with rampant demand.68 Responsibility for the maintenance of individual buildings and the city overall, was perfectly diffused between a state consumed with pan-Arab dreams, and a people to whom ownership meant being the complacent guests of a close but lukewarm relative. The decay of the city and its inhabitants’ relationship with their new landlords could not fail to follow. Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war with Israel exposed a painful new reality. The revolution was apparently little more than a military coup brought to bear by the same men who had managed to lose the war. The wealth liberated from the past was not enough to secure a future. The new government lacked follow-through; they were bad managers. Everyone’s expectations had been perhaps a little too high. The real revolution, in terms of Cairo’s explosive growth and transfiguring expansions, would be the people’s work. Their daily needs and limited means of achieving them became a force as inexorable as wind and rain. 84

Nearly two million people mobbed Tahrir Square to mourn Gamal Abdel Nasser, who died, exhausted, in 1970. The new president, Anwar Sadat (1970–81), to his great distress, would never elicit the unconditional trust his predecessor had briefly inspired. Pride resulting from the Sadat-led victory over the Israelis in October 1973 would barely mitigate the subsequent misgivings caused by his treaty negotiations with the mistrusted American and inimical Israeli governments. While feted in the West as a peacemaking hero, Sadat’s dance with the enemy and his ostentatious lifestyle aroused scorn at home, especially among the Islamists. Sadat’s shift of alliance from the Soviet East to the Americandominated West was meant to distance him from the political past and set the country on a forward-thinking and internationally engaged economic track. In reality, his policy of ‘liberalization’ amounted to a rhetorical prosperity, powerful enough to attract people to the capital but inadequate to shelter and employ them. The Camp David peace talks opened the floodgates of subtly intrusive foreign aid, whose immediate benefits eluded the average citizen in favour of a handful of government and private sector cronies. Despite Sadat’s histrionic posing as a pious and concerned patriarch, indeed, despite his exceptional charisma and occasionally visionary politics, the people knew they were on their own. The earthly attractions of Cairo’s vast Islamic burial grounds had long been apparent to squatting families squeezed from the old quarters by poverty and mishap. In 1937 the population of the toorab (Arabic for cemetery and dust) exceeded 50,000; in 1986 it was 179,000.69 Situated along the base of the Muqattam Cliffs, the sandy expanse of the City of the Dead is scattered with the concrete tomb markers of the poor but also with thousands of cut-stone mausolea of the millennial well to do. Many of these mausoleums comprise spacious courtyards and enclosing walls; some have water, trees and even gardens, since they were designed to accommodate the families of the deceased whose visits often extended overnight. Unlike most of Cairo, the cemetery is organized on a grid with wide avenues and connecting lanes, reflecting the sentiment that the only thing worth planning for is death. The funerary buildings of varying size and quality ended up offering an often splendid refuge to generations of inhabitants for enjoyment in this world no matter what might happen in the next. In 85

the 1970s and ’80s the number of people living in the tombs swelled, many of them recent émigrés from the countryside, whose large families and small animal herds lent the cemetery a strangely bucolic air. The term absentee landlord acquired new meaning in the City of the Dead; left to their own devices, the tenants grew confident. They pirated telephone and electricity lines, operated informal transport and added mud and baked brick wings to their tombs. Entire freestanding buildings, several storeys high sprung into being and these days between the living and the dead it’s hard to say who has gained the greater ground. Another unlikely city stratum came alive during the Sadat years, namely the rooftops. Downtown buildings in particular boasted invitingly wide-open spaces comprising storage rooms that were soon inhabited by building guardians (bawwabin) and their very much extended families. The roofs also inspired an irresponsible building trend spurred by high living densities coupled with greed. New floors were piled precariously on top of existing buildings, which gave birth to another still current trend: collapse. Unscrupulous contractors worsened the problem by choosing cheap materials and bribing officials to cut quality-control construction costs.70 Meanwhile, Sadat travelled between his new villas in Cairo and around Egypt in a sleek Westland helicopter he had received as a token of Richard Nixon’s affection. One can imagine him flying over Cairo, surveying his sprawling house of cards. Enamoured of American history, particularly the settlement of the ‘Wild West’, Sadat envisaged the same exodus for Egypt’s spiralling Nilo-centric population. From his scientific advisor, Sadat learned of huge ground water resources in Egypt’s remote southwestern desert that could open a new corridor of land for farming and habitation.71 His visionary mega-project would not be acted on until the 1990s, but in his lifetime Egypt’s capital looked west in more ways than one. Foreign companies responded to Sadat’s ‘open door’ policy, and the employment they provided helped launch a new middle-class, future consumers of Western goods. On the Nile’s west bank, highrise office and apartment buildings began to replace the emerald green alfalfa fields of Giza. Mohandeseen (Arabic for ‘engineers’) developed its commercial and residential mix around pockets of old, still rural, communities, while the nearby upper-class community of Dokki took shape beside an upscale Shooting Club. On the opposite 86

side of the river, in Garden City, the American Embassy began a series of expansions that would make it the largest us diplomatic installation in the world. An urban master plan devised in 1970 called for satellite cities in the desert around Cairo to absorb catastrophic projected growth figures. Several of their names (the Fifteenth of May City, Tenth of Ramadan City and Sixth of October City) are dreary tributes to Sadat’s political exploits, although one stands out from the rest. The Sixth of October War, a surprise attack on Israel that regained the Sinai Peninsula, was Sadat’s greatest triumph. Cairo’s biggest bridge, spanning the Nile from downtown across Zamalek to the west bank, is also called the Sixth of October. The date would be remembered for darker reasons after 1981, when on the eponymous national holiday Sadat was assassinated while reviewing his militia at his Victory Day parade. The assassination struck a fine note of historic symmetry since 6 October fell that lunar year on the great Islamic feast of sacrifice (Eid al-Adha). The October War had coincidentally been launched on Yom Kippur, a major Hebrew feast, by an Egyptian surprise attack. The Eid al-Adha marks the end of the Islamic month of pilgrimage (hajj) and involves the dawn slaughter of sheep or cattle by those who can afford it, who then distribute the meat to the less fortunate. On 6 October 1981, the usually joyful proceedings were enveloped in an ominous cloud. Under the circumstances, Vice-President Hosni Mubarak’s ascension to power was received by a subdued and wary city with even deeper ambivalence than the arrival of Sadat. During the construction of the Cairo Metro in the 1980s, downtown looked like a patient on an operating table. There were gaping holes everywhere, telephone cables trailed coloured-wire nerve endings, gigantic water pipe arteries were severed and left to dangle and ooze. By the time the first Metro line was inaugurated in 1985, Greater Cairo’s population was nudging the nine million mark and needed more than an air-conditioned subway to cool things off. The new Opera House in Zamalek, with its Museum of Modern Art and surrounding greenery, demonstrated the new regime’s broadminded dedication to culture and learning. The Opera House, elegantly designed in neo-Islamic style, was a gift of the Japanese as was the opening performance of a renowned Kabuki theatre troupe that somehow left its audience unmoved. More successful was the 87

new administration’s emphasis on infrastructure development in Cairo’s newer quarters as well as the satellite cities. In the 1990s, reform policies of the Sadat era were given more legislative impetus to attract investment and free private investors to act. A tidal wave of construction, mostly upscale and Western-style, spread from the capital to the sea coasts, and American fast-food franchises sprang up like weeds. Soon many quarters would boast a shopping mall with cinemas, amusement parks and even iceskating rinks. These postmodern souks failed to supplant traditional markets in the older neighbourhoods and, as long as they refuse to bargain or offer credit, they probably never will. Nevertheless consumerism is having its way with Cairo, branding meandering slums and high-rise abodes with glaring billboards and blindingly lit storefronts. In 2004, with a population of around sixteen million, Greater Cairo fits Giordano Bruno’s description of the universe: the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Commercial and residential establishments are so thoroughly and repetitively intermingled that each quarter, indeed, every city block, is a world in itself. Downtown’s remaining older buildings are atomized, each apartment fractured into office space, gracious old flats split into threes. A single building’s frontage may support a dozen semi-legal sidewalk vendors’ enterprises, propped up against its walls or built directly into façade niches and windows. Many ground floors have been converted into nightmarish clothing or shoe-shops and the paths between buildings transformed into makeshift souks. In every available space there is action, sustained at a varying pitch over 350 square kilometres of surface.72 Yet the city continues to fill and overflow, flooding out into the desert and devouring the Delta. An estimated 60 per cent of Cairo’s housing is informal, cheaply built without licence or expertise, most of it (85 per cent) on precious agricultural land. The building bricks are made from stripped layers of topsoil, so that instead of farming the rich soil, people are living inside of it, reaping a harvest of ramshackle houses instead of food. Informal dwellings built flank-to-flank fill the cracks in and around the ‘formal’ city, their roofs bristling optimistically with steel reinforcement bars, left exposed so that more miserable floors may one day be added on. Varying in size from a small room to several storeys, these houses climb the Muqattam cliffs behind the City of the Dead and spill into the clefts of desert at 88

Shuruq City housing development in the desert east of Cairo, 2003.

their feet. They spread west on the plains of Giza, so that, driving along the new Ring Road, the Pyramids appear incidentally on a foreshortened horizon like another unusually tall and orderly pile of bricks. The controversial Ring Road, billed as an anodyne for Cairo’s traffic ills, encircles the city and provides access to the satellite cities on its periphery. It also pens in the Pyramids while trespassing the possibly treasure-rich plateau that surrounds them, a World Heritage Site under the protection of unesco. Following the death of the Ring Road controversy, a brief period of respect was observed before nocturnal building sessions on the highway began anew. However necessary the road, indeed, however certain its absorption into an ever-widening urban web, it might easily have been situated to allow the monuments and their visitors the honour of space and perspective. The Pyramids plateau is thus a zone of dispute, where the claims of archaeological glory barely contain a mob of greedy expansionists craving a ‘Pyramids view’ to publicize as one of the features of their new villa or hotel. For now, a few Pharaonic bones and the odd sarcophagus are all that hold them at bay. Of the several ‘first generation’ satellite cities, the Sixth of October is the most successful, its development eerily reminiscent of the science fiction colonization of outer space. At 25 kilometres west of central Cairo it is somewhat more accessible, but not long ago the Sixth of October ’s desolate desert location resembled nothing so much as a slightly more beige Mars. Intrepid investors snatched up plots at dirt cheap, subsidized prices and all projects were granted a 10-year tax holiday. Today, an estimated 1,000 factories operate (or are under construction), and there are rows of glum government-sponsored housing units for workers, although many employees are still bussed in daily. There are thousands of middle-class apartment buildings, built by individuals to live in and rent out, although only a portion of each is so far inhabited and current population figures number around several hundred thousand.73 Two universities and a major medical facility have opened, as well as the Media City complex for film and tv production. But by far the most Olympian addition to the Sixth of October is a pantheon of gated residential communities, whose names embody the new mythology of Cairo’s satellite cityspace age. 90

A roll-call of the new communities sounds wistful and ingenuous: Green Land, Tree Land, Gardenia Park, Belleville, Royal City, Palm Hills, Beverly Hills and the evocative Moon Land. While it is perfectly natural that a new elite should desire something they never had, the architecture in the communities, often designed by American firms, is as alien to the local setting as the lifestyle it represents. Indeed, there are only two things that link the new compounds with the city that spawned them. One is the fact that in this incalculable expanse of desert, the huge pastel villas with their turrets and cupolas are built practically on top of one another. The other corollary is that they occupy an area well removed from the ragtag constructions of individual families and the governmentsponsored housing blocks. Built by a handful of powerful investors, they recall the walled palatine cities of Cairo’s early founders. The largest and most extravagant of the compounds provides a case in point. Covering ten square kilometres, Dreamland, its cheapest property selling for le100,000, will remain just that for the vast majority of Egyptians. Perhaps that’s what Dreamland investors had in mind when they equipped it with a public amusement park (42 rides), a Shopping Resort (with an indoor artificial lake), a 27-hole golf course (largest in Egypt) and an ‘affordably priced’ neighbourhood called Equestrian City ‘featuring some of the finest stallions in Egypt’.74 It doesn’t hurt to dream – or does it? While it seems inevitable that Cairo’s galactic growth will subsume the desert cities, for now, those who can afford it are reluctant to leave their friends and relatives behind. A gregarious, family and tradition-oriented people, Cairenes tend to prefer the inner city’s earthly straits to the promised pleasures of the parallel universe. According to David Sims, urban planning consultant, ‘in 1996, after twenty years of promotion, the total population in all the new towns in Egypt represented less than the increase in Greater Cairo over a six-month period’.75 The city crowds as close as it can to its icons in Giza, nearly overwhelming them. Approaching the Pyramids from downtown Cairo, one travels the Pyramids Road, a jumbled street-front mixing shops, third-rate hotels and fast-food joints with the foyers of standardissue concrete high-rise apartments. Between this and the parallel artery of Faisal Street, everything that less than twenty years ago was farmland is covered in cheap housing. Hard by the monuments, 91

Nezlit al-Samman (Quail Landing), a village said to have been settled by the Pyramids’ builders and once remote from the city centre is now a prosperous and fully integrated neighbourhood in the voracious Giza Governorate. The compact but ornate villas of stable owners, as well as gold and perfume merchants, are surrounded by their places of business. Modest souvenir stalls decorate their entries with spangled scarves and plaster statuary of the animal-headed gods. The town, with its bazaars, papyrus sellers, camel drivers and stable hustlers reaches to within whispering distance of the Sphinx, whose head is much smaller than the rest of its body, as if it had shrunk from exposure and longed for the days when it was still sensibly covered to the neck in sand. Perhaps today’s greatest riddle is not so much ‘Where is Cairo headed?’ as ‘Where is Cairo at all?’ Is it in the old quarters, or the remnants of belle époque downtown, or in the new middle-class areas on the west bank, or in the satellite cities of the desert? Or is the real Cairo to be found in the myriad hovels in which most people actually live? If so, then what of the city’s persistent allure and the loyal pride of those who live here? Does a collective hallucination sustain the image of an ancient and venerable city when it is in fact disfigured with slums and crass consumerism? Can Cairo’s dust, deprivations and decay vanish in a mirage of history when most of the inhabitants are barely acquainted with its past? The glories of fourteenth-century Cairo prompted a traveller to comment that ‘what one sees in a dream surpasses reality, but all that one could dream about Cairo would not come up to the truth’. Today, what most beguiles is what is unseen but perceived through the doors to past and future that the city so unselfconsciously leaves ajar. It is impossible to say how much of the past can be gathered from the cues of edifice and historical narrative. A sense of language, legend and custom surely aids understanding, but the city’s people add far more, possessed as they are of a tincture of culture, even while acting as its solvent. Cairo is a city poised on the fulcrum of history and its obliteration. Whatever their connection to a variegated past or to the generations yet to come, Cairenes have one thing in common: they are a people fated to endure in a city destined to outlive itself. In the arc of fourteen centuries, against a background of ongoing change, Cairo’s longevity and continuity belong to what the poet 92

and inventor John Allen calls ‘the human constant, an infinite world of potential actions’.76 The cumulative choice of actions, as well as the surrounding field of potentiality, amounts to a culture whose attributes, or memes, are transmitted as artlessly as humans reproduce and as inescapably as death. Cairo, with its relics of the past, and moving evidence of a more immediate and monumental survival, is an elaborate memento mori. It is a city of paradox because it lives on its ruins, these days so defiantly that people rebuild not for posterity, but as if to hasten decay, and so to build again.

93

Samurai at the Sphinx, c. 1860s.

iii The Guests

We’re all guests in this life. egyptian proverb For the average provincial Egyptian, a trip to Cairo is an unforgettable, once in a lifetime event. Cairenes, for their part, fortunate to dwell at the centre of the world, take the adage ‘Who leaves home, lessens his prestige’ quite literally, leaving their neighbourhoods only if necessary for work or the odd excursion. Many will visit the Pyramids but once or twice, nor are the great temples of Luxor and Karnak at the top of the list of places to see. The hajj, or pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, is a coveted destination for many Egyptians, to whom the idea of owning a passport would be otherwise unlikely to occur. The economist and social commentator Galal Amin quotes his father’s description of being assigned a teaching position in Tanta, just 100 kilometres from Cairo in the early 1900s: If, at the age of sixteen . . . a young man would hear today that he is to travel to Singapore or Tokyo or Malaya, he would not feel the anxiety that I felt about my trip to Tanta. I . . . said good-bye to my family and spent the journey crying. Amin goes on to describe his mother’s reaction to the news, in the 1940s, that his brother had received a scholarship to study in England: [She] was stricken with grief . . . She tried everything to make him give up the idea . . . but was unsuccessful. She spent several months before her son’s departure sobbing and wailing and we would sometimes be woken in the middle of the night by her crying and screaming while she described the flame that was eating up her heart at the thought of being separated from her son.1 95

Soliman Pasha Boulevard, c. 1950.

The 1970s oil boom sparked unprecedented migrations of job seekers to the Arabian Gulf and enterprising Cairenes comprise a significant portion of those countries’ professional and semi-skilled workers. Yet despite the financial rewards, even those who can emigrate eastwards do so halfheartedly. Arrivals and departures, even for relatively short trips within Egypt, remain emotionally charged events. There is a certain angst attached to the prospect of leaving home, inadvertently captured by the name of a downtown Cairo tour agency called One Way Travel, suggesting an exclusivity its owners surely did not mean to imply. Aside from the wealthy who have always enjoyed greater mobility, Cairo’s youthful population nurtures a desire for exploration and escape unknown to previous generations. For them, satellite tv, Hollywood films, pop music, the internet, as well as the tantalizing presence of American commercialism and a flamboyantly visible upper class, have awakened a longing akin to that defined by Heidegger as ‘the agony of the nearness of the distant’. They long for other schools and other lives in places like Europe, 96

Canada, even the United States, despite alienating post-9/11 events – any place, in short, that might have them. Unfortunately, the closest most young people will come to their dream are the visa lines at the embassies. Consequently, people’s knowledge of the ‘other’ derives primarily from observations and surmise regarding an unremitting stream of visitors, alongside reports from friends and relatives who managed to travel, and exposure to the virtual realities of foreign environments. The Cairene perception of foreigners and foreign lifestyles is formed through these interactions, illumined and at times obscured by traces of the foreigner ’s historic presence in the city. Foreign influences are real, because foreigners and remnants of their past as well as current activities in the city exist. But influences are also imagined, in that they are subject to post-colonial propagandist spins, and ever shifting, under social and political pressures. Even if a Cairene never meets one personally, it is known that income from tourists assists in keeping Egypt afloat, which helps account for the deference towards foreigners that is never so much forced, these days, as fatigued. Perceptions and interactions are moreover shaped by a powerfully enduring tradition of hospitality that, in addition to frank curiosity, characterizes the people of Cairo. The Sufi notion that ‘Knowledge of the stranger is knowledge of the self’ may not be a conscious motivation for Cairene hospitality, but the city’s persona is abundantly revealed through its manifold roles as host. The impact of a particular group’s presence on Cairo seems to form a negative correlation with the duration of their stay. The French stayed for four years, the British for 70, the Turks for 300, yet Cairo’s romance with the French is in greatest evidence. ‘The best visits are the shortest’, as the saying goes. French is the lingua franca of a dwindling old-world elite and more broadly esteemed as a language of expression associated with culture and the arts, whereas English is the language of business and the nouveau riche. In matters of décor, Cairene taste runs to Louis Farouk, a pseudo-style instated by the monarchy, blending French Empire with Ottoman Baroque, exemplified by the interior of the Mohammed Ali Mosque and the bulky, gilded home furnishings that Egyptians love and find grand. The British are more prosaically recalled: ingilizi is a colloquial adjective describing someone possessed of the rare and suspicious virtue of punctuality. Then there is the name of the currency (the pound) and the joyless annual 18 June celebration of Evacuation 97

Day. This is not to say that Cairenes dislike the British. They may be the villains in televised soap operas about the monarchy and Egypt’s independence, but all is forgiven, the details of the occupation goodnaturedly blurred or forgotten, to the extent that many a tv viewer takes these cheaply staged historical dramas for fiction. Foreign actors suitable for the British roles are hard to come by, so that fairhaired East Europeans or Russians often play the colonialist heavies, a caricature enhanced by the actors’ scant facility with Arabic, resulting in uniformly stern, taciturn portrayals. Turks suffer a similar oversimplification in the historical imagination. The power of the royal family and ruling class was linked to Turkish descent so children now learn how the Turkish language infiltrated and corrupted Egyptian Arabic and how the Turks kidnapped Egyptian crafts and culture to Istanbul. The Ottoman rule is described as a time of stagnation and decline that persisted until the 1952 officers’ revolt restored Egypt’s ‘Egyptian-ness’. Today, a common association with modern Turkey is the film turki, meaning a soft porn film, a genre most Egyptians encounter via Turkish satellite tv. No matter how unusual or abrasive a foreign behaviour may seem by local standards, Cairenes tend towards tolerance of others’ eccentricities, preferring to accommodate rather than censor activities that may well turn out to be profitable, entertaining or, at least, the subject of heated moralizing. In World War ii, for instance, when the city roiled with Allied troops, Egyptians supplied a quality of food and lodging for the occupier they often could not afford for themselves, in addition to anticipating the soldiers’ varied needs. According to Artemis Cooper, author of Cairo in the War: hawkers tried to sell them fly-whisks, razor-blades or dirty magazines called Zip, Laffs, Wam or Saucy Snips . . . young pimps called, ‘Hi George! You want my sister? Very nice, very clean, all pink inside like Queen Victoria.’ . . . Sex-starved troops coming in from the desert turned Cairo’s oldest profession into a major service industry, focused on the run-down quarter of Clot Bey . . .2 The British called Egyptians wogs (wily oriental gentlemen), an acronym that back in the time of Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring) referred to local clerks ‘working on government service’. This relatively inoffensive title was offset by the dismissiveness with which it 98

was used. The British played derisive games like knocking the tarbushes (fezes) from the heads of Egyptian men, hijacking taxis and mugging civilians. With the same combination of arrogance and exasperation, Miles Lampson, Egypt’s wartime administrator, played golf at the Gezira Sporting Club armed with pistols he used to kill irksome birds. ‘His targets were the scavenging kites that floated over the city for which he had a passionate hatred because they stole his golf balls in the mistaken belief that they were eggs.’3 In the summer of 1942, word went around Cairo that the Germans were headed for the capital. Lampson’s response to ‘the flap’ was to order the British Embassy’s railings repainted and go shopping with his wife. The threat was nevertheless real enough to have quantities of sensitive files burnt on 1 July, a day that, among the British ‘became famous in Cairo as Ash Wednesday’. So great a quantity of files were incinerated, Artemis Cooper tells us, that ‘The air was thick with smoke. The heat of the fires blew some papers high in the air before they had been properly burnt; and, days later, peanut vendors were still making little cones out of half-charred and strictly-classified information.’ Local feelings about the possibility of yet another European invasion ranged from fear to yearning, but regardless of politics, the ‘tired and beaten’ British troops who flooded the city in truckloads from the desert, ‘prompted the kindness of the local people, who gave them soft drinks and cigarettes’.4 The remains of the beautifully wrought villas that once surrounded the British Embassy, as well as the neo-classical residences in the adjacent downtown, all bear the marks of a half-century of government stewardship and the accompanying dust and disillusionment. Yet people still come from all parts of Cairo to stroll and shop downtown, perhaps because the streets are more welcoming and the buildings, however defaced, more evocative, suggesting how people once lived in a generic ‘over there’, that comprises both the West and the past. Some critics contend that Cairo was disfigured when the Khedive Ismail built the western quarter to make his foreign guests and financiers comfortable about investing in Egypt. Ironically, the travellers were probably less interested in Cairo’s version of modernity, than the city’s unfamiliarity and their own Arabian Nights-inspired expectations. The unwitting guests are thus also accused of creating ‘the exotic orient’, and conspiring to keep Cairo steeped in the past 99

At the citadel in 1996, celebrating the feast of Eid al-Adha.

so that it might be visited for entertainment, as one would a theme park or a zoo. It’s true that residents of the medieval quarter no more consider their faulty sewage oriental, than office workers crowding fractured downtown flats mourn the passage of the belle époque. People do, however, tend to find the new exotic and even beautiful. 100

That’s how plenty of Egyptian males feel about Scandinavian girls, but they can scarcely be blamed for inventing blondes. What is objectionable is the condescension characterizing so many interactions that influenced and continue to influence local history, attitudes of unquestioning superiority that the information age has done little to inform. If Cairenes are wary of a diffusely foreign influence they see as domineering and even threatening, the view is not unfounded. Countless rivalries played themselves out with Cairo as backdrop, oblivious to the inhabitants’ needs or desires. In World War ii Cairenes were stagehands in Europe’s theatre of war; in the 1990s the Gulf War created economic hardships requiring years to overcome. The intifada in 2000 didn’t help business, nor did the American-led Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003. People are jobless as the city is invaded by goods either too expensive to afford (made in the usa) or too cheap to manufacture competitively (made in China). The men in charge, meanwhile, seem to mimic the despised colonialists, posing with a self-importance they mistake for authority and understanding. Of the many paradoxes that characterize Cairo’s relationship with its past and the role of foreigners therein, there is one to which several monuments exist. These are Cairo’s museums, ostensibly built to celebrate and preserve evidence of Egypt’s, and therefore humanity’s, achievements. How strange that the museums’ European founders should exclude Egyptians from their development and administration. Yet, if the outsiders hadn’t tried to appropriate history, Egypt may not have hastened to claim it. The ruins of the past created an unexpectedly inviting canvas on which the differences between peoples and their intentions could be drawn. The French, having witnessed Pharaonic achievements with eyes unclouded by expectation and sharpened by technical appreciation, conceived a passion to decode the past, hoping to find in that greatness some measure of their own. Egypt held so many secrets, the truths about shared beginnings that might have served to close the gap between explorer and explored. Instead, the early adventure of Egyptian archaeology belonged to Europeans, while ‘Egyptians flickered in the shadows as trusty foreman, loyal servants, labourers, tomb robbers, antiquities dealers, obstructionist officials and benighted nationalists’. 5 The word egyptology (from égyptologue, 101

coined in 1827 by Champollion) referred exclusively to Pharaonic history, leaving those who would study Egypt as a wider subject short of an appropriate noun. Three of Egypt’s four museums are located in Cairo, the Pharaonic, Islamic and Coptic, but only the lastnamed was founded by an Egyptian. 6 Administrative control of museums and excavations did not come fully into Egyptian hands until 1952. Until the mid-1800s European consular emissaries stocked their own national museums by mining Egyptian antiquities. To gain a measure of control, Mohammed Ali issued a decree in 1835 forbidding them from exporting monuments, since he himself relied on antiquities as barter for foreign services and expertise and may have been worried about running out. The decree called for the creation of a ‘depot . . . to display [the monuments] for travellers’ and to spare no expense in their maintenance, but this resolve seems to have slipped his mind by the following year, when he considered quarrying the Pyramids to build a dam.7 An Armenian engineer had even visualized a railway to facilitate the dismantling. Fortunately, the French Consul-General, Jean-François Mimaut, issued a public cri de cœur, calling the Pyramids ‘the most venerable monument of the ancient human race . . . a trust which the ancient world has left on the soil of Egypt’. Mohammed Ali changed his mind, and a gratified Mimaut relieved the soil of Egypt of a portion of the Abydos temple. Collecting antiquities was a gentlemen’s sport and an imperialist contest, especially between the French and British, who fought over the Rosetta Stone and competed to be the first to decipher it. Champollion, who broke the code in 1822, felt that removing antiquities was a virtuous act of salvage, so long as they were for display and not profit, the prevailing view being that the Egyptians were incapable of appreciating them. An examination of Arabic texts (dating from the tenth, thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) suggests otherwise, where several enthusiastic historians described monuments in some detail, but the Europeans were more interested in hieroglyphs and, of course, the loot.8 The French and the British bickered over who had the better obelisk as a gift from Mohammed Ali. So complacent had they become about their right to harvest Egypt’s past that the British refused to pay for their obelisk’s shipment, whose transport was finally arranged (by an Englishman) in 1877 and now stands on the Embankment beside the Thames. The French put their obelisk in 102

Paris’s Place de la Concorde, and if it wasn’t for a budding French Egyptologist named Auguste Mariette, the Sphinx itself might have emigrated.9 In 1858 Mohammed Ali’s successor, Said, re-launched the national museum project in earnest when he awarded Mariette the exclusive right to dig in Egypt. Mariette, a keen and proprietary organizer, put an end to the antiquities free-for-all. He deployed 7,000 corvée workers at sites throughout the country to dig for the future contents of Egypt’s first museum. The workers may have preferred a decent wage to the honour of contributing to their cultural heritage; the only ones paid were the foremen (rais) who took bribes from wealthy rural villagers so they wouldn’t have to join the corvée. Sometimes the foremen tricked Mariette by seeding statuary in dud sites to keep them digging near a particularly lucrative village. Life on the farm was rough, but it was a picnic compared to the desert corvée. In 1863 Mariette and Ismail (Said’s successor) inaugurated Cairo’s first museum, a neo-Pharaonic structure in Bulaq on the Nile corniche. Nearby, in 1869, Ismail and the multi-talented Ali Mubarak (variously minister of public works, education, communication and railways), founded Egypt’s first school of Egyptology (‘the school of ancient tongues’ in Arabic), placing a German named Brugsch in charge. 10 Five years passed before Mariette’s differences with Brugsch caused the school to be closed, its usefulness undermined by Mariette’s opinion that graduates were not adequately qualified to work in his museum. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that Ahmed Kamal (died 1923) became Egypt’s first Egyptologist, quite an accomplishment in the midst of the British occupation. To Lord Cromer ’s mind, Egyptians weren’t civilized enough to manage their own history, nor was he anxious – by providing access to education – to be proved wrong. The fact that Egypt’s monumental past could act as a rallying point for its growing (anti-British) nationalist movement was one of al-Lurd’s legitimate concerns. Pharaonic achievements had been evoked at various times to strengthen a shared sense of identity, notably by Rifaa al-Tahtawi, an al-Azhar educated reformist, author of historical works about Egypt, the Arabs and the French, whom he visited on a scholarship from Mohammed Ali. In Paris Tahtawi witnessed the July Revolution of 1830 and wished to introduce the concepts of patriotism and social 103

justice back home. Thanks to him and a handful of others, the ensuing three decades are referred to as the nahda or Awakening, largely associated with Ismail’s reign and the founding of a variety of scientific, cultural, communication and educational enterprises, mostly in the capital.11 Foreigners may have had unseemly control of some institutions, thanks to the management priorities of Mohammed Ali and his heirs, but they were still hired hands in Cairo at the ruler ’s behest. The British occupation in 1882 represented a dramatic derailment in terms of self-determined development. The image of Gamal Abdel Nasser, his broad-shouldered back to the camera, standing tall before the colossi of Abu Simbel, became an icon of the 1952 coup that placed Egypt in charge of its past. If the results of this recently acquired stewardship appear mixed, a realistic assessment must encompass not only artefacts and their management, but attitudes towards them, indeed, towards history itself. The geographer and historian Gamal Hamdan wrote that ‘continuity is the genuine trait in the personality of Egypt’, a characteristic often portrayed in the West as plodding sameness.12 The short history of Cairo presented here is ample illustration of the contrary, that change is the only constant in a plot full of twists and turns, many of them the product of outside interference and ambitions to own history. Egyptians are different; they possess their past with the detached assurance of a woman who keeps a box of mementos beneath the bed to admire from time to time. Perhaps the very breadth of the past, perforated as it is with intrusions, helps account for the perception of ‘history as outsider’ that manifests itself so clearly in governmental practices that reduce a vibrant, complex narrative to a dead letter. These include the narrow scope of educational curricula, the clichéd distortions and stultifying restrictions imposed on popular historical representations (in tv, film, etc.) and the jealous secrecy with which documents relating to the revolution, or anything else for that matter, are withheld; all tactics that distance people from history, as if too much might be bad for them. But paternalism aside, who would have thought that something so incidental to the present as the ruins of the past would sustain such unflagging, widespread interest? Or that after thousands of years, Egypt would look to the crumbs of their ancients’ tables for sustenance? Or that this surplus, this intrinsic generosity, 104

Schoolchildren welcome Prince Charles to Cairo in 1997.

would make an industry of hospitality? Owning history may have an advantage or two after all. When the Minister of Tourism, Mahmoud El Beltagui, says that Egypt hosted four million guests in the year 2000 and expects a whopping nine million by 2012, he sounds as self-satisfied as if he’d picked them all up at the airport himself. His triumphant recital conjures bus and buffet logistics and the incalculable contingencies associated with so many guests, so that one thinks, Good God, how does he do it? Likewise, post-9/11, when he announces that Egypt recovered approximately 3.5 million guests despite the ‘conditions’, we applaud and count our blessings. What he’s not telling us is that France receives 76 million tourists annually, Spain nearly 50, and the uk 25; in fact, Europe captures half the world’s tourist market, while the entire history saturated Middle East barely manages a measly two per cent. Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London gets almost as much action as all of Egypt.13 Conditions hereabouts are admittedly daunting; the Gulf War, a massacre in the temple, a vicious occupation up the road, Baghdad sacked, the threat of more of the same; all coupled with the rote misconceptions of a largely unsympathetic world press. A notional 105

geography places Egypt in an amorphous Arab (read terrorist) place, too close to conflict for comfort. Marketing, some say, is the answer, look at what ‘I love ny’ did for Manhattan, or what ‘Paris is for lovers’ did for the French capital. Cairo’s millennial motto – ‘The mother of the world’ – is outdated and invites facile profanity. Why couldn’t they come up with something snazzier? Then one day, a provocative poster made its appearance in the first-class cars of the Cairo–Alexandria express train, a picture of the Sphinx, illuminated at night with a caption reading: ‘Egypt. There for a Thousand Years’. Was that the best they could do? And why a thousand? Perhaps because the word for Egypt (misr) doubles for Cairo and was mistranslated, but even Cairo is 1,400 years old. But is it really enough to just be there for so long? The government seems to think so, viewing everything from marketing to efficient services as infra dig, something akin to bribing the character witnesses. Cairo, like a rich heiress, wants to be loved for herself.14 Luckily, guests are unlikely to be seduced by appearances. Although plenty skip the city and head straight for Luxor, Aswan or the beaches of Sinai, Cairo is still the port of call for the bulk of Egypt’s visitors, and the airport (opened in 1963) looks it – in fact, it looks as if all three million were there at once and have been for some time, sharing the same bathrooms. Even the wing called Terminal Two, completed in the 1980s, after a few years’ usage acquired a melancholic air, reminiscent of hand-operated Chinese kitchen appliances. But if Cairo appears shabby to its guests, it’s worth asking how the guests look to Cairenes. The short answer is they look lost, slightly dazed, and to many entrepreneurial types ‘like they’ve got sucker written on their foreheads’. As far as Cairenes are concerned, tourists dress funny, as if they’d confused the desert city with a beach resort. They wear hats and socks, carry water bottles and read books while walking, which seems overnice to the gregarious dust warriors of the capital. And when gaggles of skimpily clad visitors appear, the quantities of shimmering flesh on display can distract even the most diffident city dweller, who may frown at the lack of decorum while struggling to contain the pinch impulse. And if he succumbs, who can blame him? He’s probably just checking to see if it’s real. There is a wealth of literature describing the wishes and desires of tourists; far less regarding their hosts’ perceptions and discomfitures. In the latter category we have ‘Doxey’s Irritation Quotient’, 106

which plots the course of host perceptions from ‘euphoria’ through ‘apathy’ ‘annoyance’ and ‘antagonism’, like a romance gone sour, offering little advice to the lovelorn. In the more lucrative ‘tourist motivation’ department there are sensitive typographies, earnestly complied by market research firms for mega-clients like American Express. They identify ‘explorers’, ‘drifters’ ‘indulgers’, ‘worriers’ and the mysterious ‘pyschocentrics’, outlining the consumerist tendencies of each.15 Travel industry pundits would profit from a seminar uniting the senior members of Cairo’s khirtiyya, the band of latter-day dragomen who can spot a tourist and name his or her nationality, temperament and sexual preferences at fifty paces, in addition to determining the contents of their pockets with uncanny precision. The downtown khirti differs somewhat from his Khan al-Khalili and Pyramid counterparts, but most can exchange pleasantries in three to seven languages, including Russian and Japanese. The tourist is generally invited into a souvenir shop, offered tea or Turkish coffee, then mildly fleeced and left feeling like he or she has struck a hell of a bargain. Sometimes the khirti will become a tour guide, occasionally a husband; flexibility’s the key, and Cairenes are nothing if not flexible. Urban tourism is not exactly Egypt’s forte; it’s a stretch to envisage sweltering, cacophonous Cairo as a ‘leisure product’ like Brussels or Amsterdam. Yet in a world where everything is known, where exploration itself has become a niche market in a global industry, navigating Cairo still smacks of the expedition where surprises and mutual misapprehensions await at every turn. It’s easy for Cairenes to forget that tourists are on vacation, a concept without much currency amongst the poor. They see the visitors as pampered and bemused, their scanty dress suggests a morality to match. Curiosity and admiration for the guests’ heightened possibilities are leavened with disdain, since Cairenes value endurance and sharp-wittedness (not to mention virginity) as proofs of character. Few pause to imagine the visitors’ daily routines, their financial struggles and minor triumphs. Tourism nurtures illusions such as these, on the one hand of wealth and freedom, on the other of ‘authenticity’ and discovery. In an attempt to describe the phenomena of contemporary travel, sociologists tell us that ‘a reaction to the harshness of modern mass-produced life has been the belief that “authentic” life is occurring elsewhere in the world’. Travel, therefore, offers ‘a transient 107

opportunity to capture’ some of this ‘authenticity’ that presumably exists just beyond one’s reach. Today’s travel urge is characterized as ‘a wanderlust not for other places but for other lives . . . for new, more satisfying self-images’.16 A similar sentiment was conveyed in the last tale of the One Thousand and One Nights by Ali, a merchant from Cairo, who said: ‘The world is show and trickery, and in the land where no one knows you, there do what you like’. Authenticity is more desirable and less accessible than ever before; like exoticism, the demand extinguishes the supply. So tourists are milked, although seldom aggressively, a practice institutionalized by the government that charges foreigners higher rates for domestic flights and cultural sites than the locals. Every dollar or euro is atomized among middlemen, a mist so fine it evaporates before it hits the ground.17 Egypt’s overlords never stopped to ask ‘What’s a city for, to make bucks or to live in?’ That would be out of character and a waste of precious time. Nile-side real estate goes to the highest bidder, massive towers that consume prime locations in order to serve members of a migrant population that only spends a few nights of their lives in the city. The attempt to incorporate the new buildings harmoniously into the urban fabric is nil. Thus, the shortest visits have the most lasting impact, convulsing entire neighbourhoods, most of whose inhabitants will only see the inside of the upscale buildings if they happen to work there. Whatever authenticity Cairo may possess, the developers of its five-star hotels do not admire it. Although relatively few in number, tourists contribute around four billion us dollars to Egypt’s bottom line and provide jobs, directly and indirectly for approximately two million people. Tourism is therefore a social and economic force, one of whose farreaching effects is to justify, by virtue of their investment, the developer’s greed and poor taste. Gulf, especially Saudi, developers are big winners, holding fat chunks of tourist real estate thanks to government officials who treat the city like a game of Monopoly. The Egyptian relationship with the Saudis is one of exceptional tensions and constraints, in which profiteering, religion, cultural variants and sour grapes all play a part; the attachment draws its breath from tenderly incubated enmities lying beneath a coverlet of regional co-operation. Egyptians generally perceive themselves as more cultured than their Gulf neighbours, whose joy and astonishment at the oil boom of the ’70s they did not share. Local sentiments may be understood 108

by imagining how Cinderella would have felt if the prince married one of her ugly sisters. The coup de grâce is having to work for them, to bear the brunt of childishly cruel experiments with newfound power and wealth. Unsurprisingly, the reports of Egyptian workers regarding Gulf employers are lurid and legion.18 The grudge runs so deep that whenever Cairo suffers a heat wave, people complain that it comes from the Gulf, or as popularly expressed, ‘from one of the mouths of hell to the east’. Although antagonism is officially downplayed as quarrels among cousins, annual family reunions suggest otherwise. Since Egypt is not subject to the severe religious restrictions enforced by Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf countries, each year during the fasting month of Ramadan, thousands of Gulf tourists flock to Cairo like migratory birds, their women fully veiled and gloved, wearing beaked masks, the men in flowing white galabiyyas and kufiyyas (headgear). In the summer, to cool down, they come again, so that June through August is known as the ‘Arab season’, a time when Gulf pockets are plucked like ripe fruits and the humiliation of formerly Gulf-employed menial workers (often cab drivers) is assuaged.19 Although visitors from some Gulf countries are treated with respect, in the eyes of the average Cairene, the Saudis and Kuwaitis are many karmic lives short of redemption. The Kuwaitis are considered arrogant and held responsible for the decline in Egyptian tourism related to the 1992 war waged on behalf of their so-called democracy. Blame is laid at the Saudi door for untoward religious proselytizing. Some say they’re making a bid to re-establish the caliphate, and that, susceptible to Saudi religious rhetoric, more girls are taking the veil and more people are becoming intolerant of the generally relaxed attitude towards religion for which Cairo has long been known and appreciated. The Saudis’ religious pretensions, or ambitions as they may be, are undermined by the fact that Gulf guests crowd the casinos, restaurants and bars of Cairo’s five-star hotels, drinking freely. Gulf visitors are not your typical tourists. Rather than visit the monuments, they love to go to movies, to walk the thronged streets or else drive up and down them in sports cars showing off. The closest most get to the Pyramids are the belly-dancing joints on the Pyramids Road, where they carouse and stuff the dancers’ sequined bodices with dinars until dawn. It is known, though not much discussed, 109

that some Gulf Arabs acquire Egyptian women during their vacations, usually young ones, by means of the urfi, or temporary Islamic marriage contract, which is one of convenience for the male. There are also hints of a darker connivance, the prostitution of underage girls and boys. For worldly-wise Cairenes, this can only amount to one appraisal, that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and for the Gulf Arabs, it’s affordable. There’s a joke about Saudi King Fahd discovering Aladdin’s lamp. He rubs it and a genie appears who asks what the king desires. The king rolls his eyes and says, ‘Get lost, genie, I have everything.’ Hence the colloquial expression describing Arab affluence, ‘They live above the djinn’ (fiayshin foq il-ginn), even though many Gulf visitors dispose of the same hard-earned means as any other tourists. The perception of unassailable wealth is magnified by the fact that Gulf Arabs appear to live above the law as well as the djinn. While Cairenes can look forward to the firm hand of martial law for offences both real and imagined, Saudi nationals flaunt their connections, as in the notorious case of Prince al-Turki bin Abdel Aziz and his wife, Princess Hind Shams al-Fassi. The princess was convicted of grand theft in February 2001 for neglecting to pay for a million dollars’ worth of jewels. Sentenced in absentia to three years jail with hard labour, she has yet to be apprehended, despite the fact that her address is quite well known. Along with a small army of bodyguards, the al-Turki family occupies the top three floors of the Ramses Hilton, a dingy postmodern castle keep overlooking the Nile in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Former chief of Saudi intelligence, Prince al-Turki is King Fahd’s brother, and fourth in line for the Saudi throne. He left his country in the early 1970s, shortly after marrying his strikingly attractive Moroccan wife. While the prince purportedly languishes under her spell (as well, some say, as tranquillizers) Hind rules their videomonitored kingdom with sensational malice. In November 1998, two Egyptian servants suspected by the princess of stealing were beaten and imprisoned on her orders, without food or water. They attempted to escape by climbing from the 29th floor on knotted sheets, an act of action film-inspired desperation, during which one of them broke his back, yet the charges against the al-Turki family were eventually dropped, a settlement presumably arrived at. In 1999 an Egyptian police lieutenant allegedly did not clear the way quickly enough for the Prince’s retinue to enter the hotel coffee 110

shop. He suffered a detached retina when one of Hind’s relatives whacked him in the face with a walkie-talkie. The lieutenant’s lawyer told the Cairo Times that the al-Turki entourage was involved in 50 incidents of assault and torture against hotel employees, servants and bystanders during the ten years of their ongoing residence. Following an incident where Hind herself thrashed an errant bodyguard about the face and head with a wire clothes-hanger, his colleagues (several of whom stood by and watched) weighed the pros and cons and decided she’d gone too far. The entire group mutinied but was quickly replaced. Privy to a wealth as esoteric as the traditions of her father, a Moroccan Sufi sheikh, Hind al-Fassi is a neotype, the Arab villainess, a bandit queen trapped in her own high-tech tower. Cairenes follow the details of the al-Turki drama with understandable avidity. It confirms what’s easiest to believe about Gulf decadence and about their own government, which must bow before Saudi influence and wealth. When Cairenes refer to offensive Gulf visitors as arabs, it is to distance themselves from something they look down on, the same way African–Americans may refer disparagingly to unappreciated members of the community as ‘nigger ’. Egyptians use the term arab without a trace of irony, because they consider themselves apart, rooted in a rich heritage they share willingly enough with their various guests, safe in the knowledge that it belongs to them alone, indeed, is the one thing that no one can take away. From its inception Cairo was cosmopolitan, comprising diverse peoples and influences. This remains true at the turn of the millennium, with European, Levantine, Arab, Turkish, Central Asian and African citizens as well as tourists, refugees, expatriates, students and business people of every background, inhabiting or transiting the capital. Cairo’s cosmopolitan character may be worn-at-the-heel but it holds its ground, albeit barely, against the great levellers of poverty and entropy. In recent decades, a third force entered the fray, less pervasive but arguably as relentless: commercialism, American style. Cairo owes its early evolution and many-faceted brilliance to the fact of its being a great emporium, a place to exchange goods and ideas. The new consumerist wave is different, a mephistophelean arrangement whose products are superficial, their benefits shortlived. As a nation sworn to the cause of capitalism, Egypt’s leaders 111

have provided the people with some of its ways, but less of its means. They don’t call it ‘fast food’ for nothing. At the vanguard of American tastes and entertainments was Mickey Mouse, who arrived in the late 1950s via Dar al-Hilal, a Cairene publishing house. At a time when children’s publications were few and fleeting, the Mickey Magazine supplied middle-class kids with an enticement to read. The Disney-generated stories were translated into classical Arabic and characters duly adapted: Donald became Battut (Ducky), Uncle Scrooge, fiamm Dahab (Uncle Gold), Goofy was Bunduq (Hazelnut) and Minnie dubbed Mimi. Mickey stayed Mickey, though in Egypt he’s not the character with the most fans. According to Effat Nasser, managing editor for Disney publications from its inception to 2002, and probably the first Egyptian woman to act as intermediary with corporate America, ‘Mickey is a know-it-all, so kids find him boring’. Storylines in which Battut is the protagonist are more popular, she says, ‘because he’s simple-minded and makes mistakes, and his clever nephews (three ducklings) get to correct him. Egyptians identify with the nephews.’20 A number of adjustments were required to make Mickey and his friends more consistent with local values and expectations. Donald and his fiancée Daisy tended to kiss overmuch. These frames were cut, as were entire stories that had to do with snow. Uncle Scrooge’s top hat was systematically erased in the ’50s and ’60s, since it evoked the dress of the colonial overlords.21 In the ’70s more insidious characterizations were suppressed, like the plots featuring a trio of villainous bearded Arabs that were popular back in the States. Meanwhile, Mickey the cover-mouse appeared in full Pharaonic gear like King Tut, and a galabiyya and skullcap like Egyptian farmers. The magazine was distributed throughout the Arab world and featured 25 per cent local content. This included the serialized lives of the prophets Moses, Jesus and Mohammed and stories from Arabic literature adapted for kids, written by renowned Egyptian authors. The weekly edition sold for three piastres from kiosks all over town. An inspired vendor calling himself Uncle Pigeon (fiamm Hamam) circulated the new middle-class neighbourhood of Mohandeseen on a bicycle, shouting out the headlines of the new adventures of Mickey to the delight of a generation of upwardly mobile kids. Distribution peaked at around 100,000 copies per edition regionally, the bulk of which were sold in Egypt. The magazine still exists in a diversified market that it helped, antago112

Fast food, on the 26th of July Street, in 1997.

nistically, to create. Despite the quality of its local content and the attention paid to screening the foreign content, Mickey came under fire during the Nasser era, and was suspected of ulterior motives. The nationalists were afraid Mickey would teach Egyptian youths to forget their culture and become American. Actually, it was the kids who taught their parents to buy what they’d read about in Mickey, which is almost the same thing. The Nasserists can be forgiven for misreading Mickey’s intentions. They hadn’t heard of merchandising, which hit Cairo in the 1980s, in the form of Disney books, toys and apparel. Cairo was awakening to the new consumerism. In the 1980s imported goods were scarcely available in Cairo, except through the black market, where everything from Swiss cheese to French perfume could be had for a price. In normal stores there was little variety, the same monotonous foods, the same dour Soviet fashions and household goods. Eating a hamburger was an experience reserved for nostalgic expats and a handful of adventure113

some Egyptians. Between them, they managed to keep one forlorn branch of Wimpy’s in something resembling business. But by the early 1990s, in response to new economic legislature, the floodgates of foreign goods opened wide. In 2003 there were at least 200 fast food outlets in Cairo, where McDonald’s alone has 32 locations. ‘Take-out’ and ‘home-delivery’ are nothing new in a city where hundreds of thousands of kerbside food vendors and closet-sized restaurants service people without the wherewithal or kitchen facilities to prepare their own meals, nor is fast service the big draw for the franchises, because it isn’t all that fast. It’s air-conditioning, piped-in music, consistency of presentation and the welcome absence of a variety of gut-wrenching bacilli that contribute to their popularity, as does the prestige associated with taking the family out for a little taste of America. No wonder the public greeted the arrival of the McFalafel sandwich in mid-2001 with puzzlement. Falafel (or tafimiyya as it is commonly known in Egypt) is a workaday staple of the Cairene diet, a fried ball of ground beans and spices, available on practically every street corner. McDonald’s introduced their version (a thick patty, served on the inevitable bun) during a mad cow disease scare, coincidentally nine months into the Palestinian intifada, a time when people needed a good reason to spend money in what many perceived as the enemy camp. The McFalafel was a third cheaper than a hamburger at le1.50 but still three times as expensive as ordinary tafimiyya sandwiches. The Egyptians operating the McDonald’s franchises decided to advertise, hiring a popular singer named Shaban to promote the sandwich with a McFalafel jingle aired on local tv and radio. The corpulent Shaban, famous for a song entitled ‘I hate Israel’, thus sang the praises of a phony falafel for the benefit of Israel’s greatest ally. People were even more confused when the singer brazenly claimed he thought he was promoting ta fimiyya for tafimiyya’s sake, and had no idea it was for McDonald’s. His public discomfiture was relieved by none other than the omniscient American Jewish Congress, who complained about the likes of Shaban being allowed to advertise for the company at all. The ad was pulled from the airwaves faster than you can say Western hegemony. Coca-Cola, Cairo’s beverage of choice, celebrated its 60th anniversary in Egypt in 2002, not counting the Nasserist interlude during 114

which it was replaced by a less muscular local cola, called Sport. Coke dominates the Egyptian soft drink market, accounting for more than half the sales in this thirsty city and employing, by the way, around 10,000 Egyptians. That’s why people became nervous in mid-2000, when the rumour circulated that the Coca-Cola logo read backwards in Arabic announced ‘No Mohammed, No Mecca.’ It’s uncertain where or why this rumour originated, but the Cairo municipality took it seriously enough to authorize the removal of Coke signs from stores along a centre-city boulevard. The immense Coke billboard that’s been pouring red neon cola onto Tahrir Square since 1993 could have been next, were it not for the Grand Mufti of al-Azhar who examined the Coke logo and issued a statement that it was designed in Georgia, usa, in 1886 by a chemist with no knowledge of the Arabic language, a pronouncement that did not prevent thousands of Cairenes from holding their bottles up to a mirror just to make sure. The Grand Mufti was involved in the controversy regarding another pillar of American consumerism, this time to its detriment. Advertising bans affecting the tobacco industry in first world countries are slow to reach places like Egypt, where a cigarette and a cup of sugary tea is as good as a meal for a large demographic segment. Although the legal smoking age is eighteen, adolescents and preteens argue that if they’re old enough to work for a living, they’re old enough to smoke. Egypt’s youth-skewed population represents a massive potential market for tobacco sales, as do women, for whom smoking has been traditionally unacceptable. Marketing campaigns launched by Philip Morris use slogans like ‘Set off on the road to adventure’, or contest fliers featuring a cowboy puffing away beside a pristine stream. To enter the contest, all you need is proof of purchase of five packs of Marlboro red or white. The text reads: Change the Tempo! Ten days await you in a world pulsating with the rhythm of nature! Come to Marlboro Country! Be free in its vast space. Discover nature that is like magic . . .22 This is a particularly mean tack, considering that Cairo is the city that Mother Nature forgot and the only thing free or vast that is available to its citizens is the business end of governmental, or, in this case, market-driven cynicism. 115

The sibyl of the Fishawi Café, sitting beneath the mirror in 2000.

Enter the Grand Mufti, citing Qur√anic verses about preserving one’s health, declaring smoking haram (forbidden), and even encouraging women to divorce their husbands if they refuse to quit. These religious injunctions may exercise some minor constraint on the would-be Marlboro man, but there are other, more urgent ones, like the lack of cash (imported cigarettes cost more than four times as much as the local Cleopatra brand) and associations with real-life cowboys who ‘smoke [Arabs] out of their holes’.23 Boycotts on American goods began in response to the Palestinian intifada of 2000, to protest the Israeli occupation and American foreign policy in the region. Aside from the average person’s feeble buying power, the boycotts have difficulty gaining momentum because like every other grass-roots movement in Egypt, the Emergency Law impedes their organization. More importantly, following some of the largest impromptu demonstrations in Cairo in recent memory, when American franchises were pelted with stones, the Press pointed out that these were Egyptian-owned enterprises, employing Egyptians and utilizing a significant amount of Egyptian 116

goods. The demonstrations and ongoing boycotts serve to vent anger, but it is ultimately self-directed anger, since it is most often Egyptians who suffer, as powerless people do, inflicting harm on themselves in an attempt to convey a message. The boycotts have, however, focused public attention on the extent to which American interests are present in people’s lives. Cairo’s American Chamber of Commerce represents 600 companies either owned or in partnership with us firms that employ nearly a quarter of a million Egyptians. Aside from the us oil firms that dominate Egypt’s petroleum industry, multinational corporations like General Motors, Union Carbide, Microsoft, Nestlé and Xerox turn a tidy profit, thanks to low labour costs, tax breaks and other incentives. If people needed a reminder of Uncle Sam’s sway, they have only to admire the us embassy, the hulking barracks that ate Garden City; with its 350 staff, it is the biggest American embassy in the world. Re-established in 1974, following the seven-year hiatus prompted by Nasser, the embassy’s reopening marked the beginning of what seemed like a beautiful American friendship, sweetened by a us$250 million aid-package to Cairo. President Sadat began the process of weaning his arms purchases away from Russia in favour of the us, also instituting the practice that persists to this day of acquiring the bulk of Egypt’s wheat from the new allies. Today the usaid offices administer over a billion dollars in military aid and another us$655 million in developmental programmes. There are fbi and dea branches in Cairo. The American community itself numbers around 20,000, most of them living in the greener quarters of Zamalek and Maadi. In 2002 Cairenes were angry and frustrated, not just with Israel for the occupation and America