Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo (Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World)

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Author: Mara Naaman

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Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature

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Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World Edited by Hamid Dabashi Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Hamid chaired the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures from 2000 to 2005 and was a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His most recent books include Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire; Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker; Iran: A People Interrupted; and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East: The Chaotic Imagination Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of `A’isha Taymur Mervat F. Hatem Islam in the Eastern African Novel Emad Mirmotahari Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo Mara Naaman Poetics and Politics of the Shahnameh, Iran’s National Epic Mahmoud Omidsalar (forthcoming)

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Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature Portraits of Cairo

Mara Naaman

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urban space in contemporary egyptian literature Copyright © Mara Naaman, 2011. All rights reserved. Map of Greater Cairo reprinted from Sabry Hafez’s article, “The New Egyptian Novel: Urban Transformation and Narrative Form,” courtesy of the New Left Review. Isma‘il’s Cairo (1869–1870) (after Abu-Lughod) reprinted from André Raymond’s Le Caire, courtesy of Études et Cartographie (Lille), Editions Fayard (Paris), and Harvard University Press (Cambridge). Map of downtown Cairo (the east bank) originally published in Samir W. Raafat’s Cairo, the Glory Years and reproduced by permission from Harpocrates Publishing, Alexandria, Egypt. Photograph of Tal‘at Harb Square (1986) reprinted by permission from Zbigniew Kosc. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10865–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Naaman, Mara. Urban space in contemporary Egyptian literature : portraits of Cairo / Mara Naaman. p. cm. — (Literatures and cultures of the Islamic world) ISBN 978-0-230-10865-3 (hardback) 1. Egyptian literature—History and criticism. 2. Public spaces in literature. 3. Cities and towns in literature. 4. National characteristics, Egyptian, in literature. I. Title. PJ1488.N33 2011 892.7'093586216—dc22

2011002892

A catalog record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: July 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For my mother Mary Jacqueline Namen

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It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create modernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead. To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities—and in the modern men and women—of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. —Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity

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Contents List of Figures

ix

Map of Greater Cairo

x

Note on Transliteration

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Note from the Editor

xvii

Preface

xix

Introduction: The Urban as Theoretical Frame

1

1

Specter of Paris: The Staging of Cairo’s Modern City Center

11

2

Reconstructing a National Past: Radwa ‘Ashur’s Revisionist History of the Downtown

37

The Indigenous Modernism of Khayri Shalabi: Popular Intellectuals and the Neighborhood Ghurza

71

3 4

The Proletarian Revolution That Never Was: Idris ‘Ali’s Nubian Perspective

105

The Nation Recast through a National Bestseller: Alaa al-Aswany’s Ode to Downtown Cairo

139

Conclusion: Wust al-Balad as Neo-Bohemia: Writing in Defense of a Vanishing Public Sphere

169

Afterword

177

Notes

179

Bibliography

205

Index

215

5

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Figures 1.1 Isma‘il’s Cairo (1869–70)

22

1.2 The Shepheard’s Hotel

23

1.3 Ramsis Railway Station

24

1.4 Opera Square

26

2.1 Fire at the Rivoli Cinema, Fu’ad Street, January 1952

38

2.2 The triangles of Sulayman Pasha Square, 1949

48

2.3 Mustafa Kamil Square

49

2.4 Map of downtown Cairo

52

2.5 Café Americain pictured at the intersection of Fu’ad and ‘Imad al-Din Streets

54

5.1 Tal‘at Harb Square, 1986

149

5.2 Modernist plans for the area of Tahrir along the Nile Corniche, 1962

150

5.3 Tahrir Square, also known as “Liberation Square,” 2006

150

5.4 The Mugamma‘ Building in Tahrir Square, 2006

151

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Map of Greater Cairo

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Note on Transliteration I have used the simplified International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) conventions for most Arabic transliterations in this work. The ‘ represents the ‫( ع‬ayn) and the ’ stands in for the ‫( ء‬hamza). There are a few exceptions. In the Egyptian dialect, the Arabic letter ‫( ج‬jiim) is generally pronounced as a hard “g” as in “girl.” Thus when referencing places in Cairo, I have chosen to transliterate the name of the area using the more common Egyptian colloquial form of pronunciation (e.g., the district of Gamaliyya instead of Jamaliyya). I have done something similar when referring to Egyptian writers and intellectuals (e.g., Gamal al-Ghitani and not Jamal al-Ghitani). Furthermore, for Arab writers and intellectuals whose works circulate fairly widely in English translation, I have referenced these proper names using the spelling most common to their publications in English (e.g., Alaa al-Aswany instead of ‘Ala’ al-Aswani).

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Acknowledgments I am indebted to so many people and institutions that have helped make this book a reality. The late Magda al-Nowaihi—my advisor at Columbia when I first began my PhD—taught me the value and importance of intellectual friendship and collaboration between fellow feminists. Beyond her expertise in the field, her unconditional support and amazing spirit carried me through those years. Hamid Dabashi has been a force of conviction and unwavering faith in this project. His Theories and Methods course my first year at Columbia was one of the most existentially challenging experiences I have had. So many years later, I am grateful for all that he stirred up with his intellectual provocations. Muhsin al-Musawi was a wonderfully warm and insightful advisor. With his gentle hand and encyclopedic knowledge of Arabic literature, he guided me and kept me on track as I was piecing this work together. His consistent belief in me meant a great deal. Finally, if not for the creativity and bold ideas of Elliott Colla, this book would never have taken shape. Through our many conversations he managed to take a diffuse set of ideas and help me see the theoretical outline of a much more focused project. His meticulous readings have held me to the highest standards. I am also grateful to Roger Allen, Noha Radwan, and the two anonymous readers of this manuscript for taking the time and patience to read this work and for giving me valuable insight into possible avenues for revision. It would be unfair not to mention the many wonderful Arabic and Arabic literature professors I have had throughout what has seemed a lifetime of language training; in particular Farouk Abdel Wahab, Ahmed Ferhadi, Hoda Awad, Sinan Antoon, Elias Khoury, Nevenka Korica, Nadia Harb, Zeinab Taha, and Shahira Yacout. A special thanks is reserved for Abbas al-Tonsi, who first introduced me to the work of Khayri Shalabi in his Modern Arabic Literature course, and for the warmth and encouragement that his family extended to me throughout my time in Cairo. My language training and fieldwork in Cairo would not have been possible without the generosity of several outside fellowships. In particular, I am most grateful to the Middlebury Language Schools in Vermont, the CASA Program (I

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and II), and a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship and Mellon Foundation grant I was awarded to study Arabic. My last year of writing and research in Cairo was made possible by a Fulbright International Education award. In Cairo I benefited from the generosity of several scholars and friends who took an interest in my research. Professor Muhammad Badawi of Cairo University and Professor Samia Mehrez of the American University in Cairo took the time both to meet with me and to discuss my ideas as I gradually narrowed my topic. Their acknowledgement of the value of this project gave me the confidence to continue working. I would also like to thank Riem El-Zoghbi for discussing many ideas with me and whose comparative course on cities at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in the spring of 2006 gave me many crucial insights as I was outlining the contours of this work. I owe a special thanks to Professor Hussein Hammuda, whose work on the city and the Egyptian writers of the 1960s informed many of my ideas. For his willingness to talk with me at length about Egyptian writing, I am most grateful. Also Hassan Sarour, an editor at the Journal of Folklore Studies, taught me more about Cairo than probably anyone else. His wise reflections on popular Egyptian life and culture hover beneath these pages. Amira Mittermaier introduced me to many people and parts of Cairo I might never have known without her. The moulids I attended with her and her mother have left lifelong impressions. Batool Khattab provided much friendship and conversation over my last year and a half in Egypt and then later at Williams, where she became a visiting professor. Her careful review of my translations and our endless discussions on language and the fullness of the Egyptian dialect enhanced this work in so many ways. In addition I have benefited from the warmth and support of my colleagues at Williams College. Finally, a special thank you is reserved for Brit, Ingrid, and Nikki. My editors at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull, Joanna Roberts, and Richard Bellis, have been most patient and encouraging through every step of this process. I am grateful to the Lehnert & Landrock Bookstore as well as the Dar al-Hilal Archives in Cairo for helping me procure many of the images in this work from the early twentieth century. In addition, it is an honor to be able to reprint here the dramatic black-and-white photograph of Tal‘at Harb Square taken in 1986 by the photographer Zbigniew Kosc. The three maps I refer to have been used with the kind permission of New Left Review, Études et Cartographie, Editions Fayard, Harvard University Press, and Harpocrates Publishing. I am appreciative to have such humble, open, and caring people as my family; in particular, Elaine and Frank Knox, Allyson, Mark, Sheryl, Katie, Madeline, Brennan, and Reid. There is no way to return all the warmth and love they have shown me. My late maternal grandmother, Raina Kazanji Namen, was, I imagine, an important catalyst in my search for origins. Once a gifted

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storyteller, she shared with me on our walks in the suburbs of Detroit tales from her childhood in Mosul, memories of Baghdad, and all the family history. I am also grateful for my Iraqi and Iraqi American aunts, uncles, and cousins who have made me feel so loved and cared for over the years. This book in many ways belongs to my mother. Her commitment to the creative life—to making art daily despite the obstacles and the roar of the world outside—has shaped who I am and why I work on what I do. She built for me a home out of barely anything, painted murals on the walls, played a lot of rock and roll, and taught me to dream. There was hardship, but much laughter and hope. She remains for me my ever-unpredictable muse. Finally, there is my husband Alex, to whom I owe so much. He is my true mentor, faithful editor, and lifelong confidant. His belief in the power of art and the dignity of hard work has given me the two anchors by which I live. May we go forth fearless.

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Note from the Editor The Islamic world is home to a vast body of literary production in multiple languages over the last 1,400 years. To be sure, long before the advent of Islam, multiple sites of significant literary and cultural productions existed from India to Iran to the Fertile Crescent to North Africa. After the advent of Islam in the mid-seventh century CE, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish authors in particular produced some of the most glorious manifestations of world literature. From prose to poetry, modern to medieval, elitist to popular, oral to literary, this body of literature is in much need of a wide range of renewed scholarly investigation and lucid presentation. The purpose of this series is to take advantage of the most recent advances in literary studies, textual hermeneutics, critical theory, feminism, postcolonialism, and comparative literature to bring the spectrum of literatures and cultures of the Islamic world to a wider audience and appreciation. Usually the study of these literatures and cultures is divided between classical and modern periods. A central objective of this series is to cross over this artificial and inapplicable bifurcation and abandon the anxiety of periodization altogether. Much of what we understand today from this rich body of literary and cultural production is still under the influence of old-fashioned orientalism or post–World War II area studies perspectives. Our hope is to bring together a body of scholarship that connects the vast arena of literary and cultural production in the Islamic world without the prejudices of outmoded perspectives. Toward this end, we are committed to pathbreaking strategies of reading that collectively renew our awareness of the literary cosmopolitanism and cultural criticism in which these works of creative imagination were conceived in the first place. —Hamid Dabashi

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Preface Space is not neutral. The recent debacle concerning the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero in Manhattan was a reminder that space—urban or rural, private or public—is something we infuse with meaning. Spaces become symbolic based on our relationship to them and the extent to which we view them as central to our identity and our way of seeing the world around us. Urban spaces, in particular, may be vessels for memory, sites of entertainment, sites of labor, or receptacles for our utopian fantasies of community. The controversy surrounding the community center reminds us of the extent to which our identities as national subjects are intimately linked to our identification with certain public spaces. In the summer of 2010, the idea of building a space of Muslim congregation and community-building within the vicinity of Ground Zero, and the site of what was then known as the Freedom Tower, set off a national debate over the sacred nature of the building site and its symbolism for Americans. It also exposed the deep-seated Islamophobia latent in Americans across multiple demographics, many of whom were unashamed to protest the building of the Islamic center on the grounds that it was a magnet for terrorism and that its construction would defame a site of mourning. Newt Gingrich, for example, has called the building of the center “an assertion of Islamist triumphalism . . . designed to destroy our civilization.”1 And yet, despite the fervor unleashed on various media platforms regarding the controversial nature of this space for many Americans, this debate echoed a less emotional, but no less public controversy concerning the design of the space at Ground Zero, and ultimately the design of the Freedom Tower (now less sentimentally referred to as 1 World Trade Center), in the aftermath of 9/11. Even before the final plans for the site were presented in 2003, architectural critics, urban planners, business owners, and politicians took issue with how to erect the right structure on this hallowed ground. Clearly, delinking the site from the competing memories and stakes many Americans have in the space is impossible. The architectural critic Philip Nobel, writing in The Nation magazine at the time, declared that in many ways the whole idea of finding an “inventive spatial solution” for Ground Zero was flawed; one design will never be able to

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aptly respond to the multiple (if often unconscious) expectations Americans, and specifically New Yorkers, have for a memorial that must serve both as a commercially viable transportation hub and as a business nexus.2 And indeed, once the final plans for the site (a variation on Daniel Liebeskind’s original master plan) were presented by the New York architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, they were criticized by various constituencies. For example, the architecture critic for the New York Times, Nicholai Ouroussoff, critiqued the design for its bombastic, overly imperial qualities, writing in 2005 that the design of the proposed tower “embodies a world shaped by fear . . . [it serves as] an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power.”3 Ultimately, whatever reception the eventual tower and surrounding space will receive by New Yorkers, it is bound to be colored with ambivalence. More important to us, however, is that the ongoing debate around this site serves as a reminder of the (often unacknowledged, but no less universal) centrality of space in our daily lives. This is nowhere more true than in urban environments, where the spaces where we live, work, consume, and recreate become intimately linked to fantasies of communal belonging and, for many, local and national pride. This project takes as its central question the relationship between space, the literary, and the national identity in Egypt in the latter part of the twentieth century. As Samia Mehrez’s edited volume The Literary Atlas of Cairo: One Hundred Years on the Streets of the City (2010) illustrates, Egyptian novels serve as a way of archiving and creatively rendering Cairo’s many urban incarnations: as liberal city during the monarchal period, as socialist city under Gamal Abdel Nasser, and later as a neoliberal space under Anwar al-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.4 Contemporary Egyptian literature serves as an alternative form of historical record and as an archive of the way in which battles over urban space are deeply linked to questions of modernity and the national self. The architectural scholar Yasser Elsheshtawy has written that the typical urban narrative of Middle Eastern cites is one of loss; cities, once great, now stand plundered as a result of colonization, ongoing wars, poor infrastructure, and underdevelopment.5 Reflecting this, Arabic literature has served as a record of these narratives of contest, loss, and regeneration. From the literature of North Africa, the Persian Gulf, as well as the countries in the Levant, contemporary Arab authors have used fiction as a way of responding to crucial, and often traumatic, historical moments (e.g., colonization, Zionism, missionary activity, the discovery of oil, dictatorial regimes, civil war, etc.) where questions of political authority and power are largely enacted through struggles over space. This study explores the relationship between space and national identity in Egypt by way of four contemporary Arabic novels by writers of the 1960s generation. It chronicles the transformations throughout the nineteenth century of the district of downtown Cairo, today referred to by Egyptians as Wust al-Balad

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(the city center). In particular, I hope to show the way in which the notion of the modern Egyptian subject has evolved in direct relationship to the changes manifest in the space of the downtown. The sense of pride, ambivalence, and contest this symbolic space evokes for Egyptians is in every way linked to the project of modernity and its legacy, the Egyptian nationalist movement under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the chapters that follow I argue that the very ambivalence of Egyptians to their recent past and the traces of the contradictory history that Wust al-Balad bears in its very design and architecture are part of what makes this district a space to which Egyptian writers have begun to return in their works. Ultimately I hope to show how the contested nature of the downtown—as a spectacular imitation of European modernity, as Egyptian public sphere, as a site for the staging of a revolution, and as modernist ruin—was and continues to be central to the notion of what it means to be Egyptian. The Introduction aims to provide the theoretical and historical framework for the literary analyses I offer in the subsequent chapters. When I began this project in 2005, there were only a few works treating space as it related to Arabic literature or even contemporary urban studies pertaining to the Middle East. In the last five years, the number of works in the field has grown tremendously. Such proliferation suggests, as Erik Swyngedouw argues, that contemporary political debates in postsocialist and postdemocratic states are being “recentered” to focus increasingly on the urban as the site of political action.6 Anchoring this surge of interest in spatial analyses of Cairo is the work of Diane Singerman and Paul Amar, particularly their work Cairo Cosmopolitan (2004) and Cairo Contested (2009). The first edited volume of articles inaugurates what the authors call the “Cairo School of Urban Studies,” after the work of urban studies scholars from the Los Angeles School of Urbanism (among them Mike Davis, Edward Soja, and Michael Dear), and previously the Chicago School of Sociology and Urbanism (whose leading figures include E. W. Burgess, Robert Park, and Louis Wirth, among others). Contextualizing my work in this intellectual “school” and taking my cue from two leading Egyptian literary scholars, Sabry Hafez and Samia Mehrez, I seek to understand how the space of downtown Cairo is represented and produced through the works of four prominent Egyptian writers of the 1960s generation. The Introduction further explores Sabry Hafez’s recent work on contemporary novels by writers of the “’90s generation” who use Cairo’s liminal spaces (i.e., cities on the periphery) as important locales for these emergent voices. In dialogue with his work, I argue that as much as the periphery is writing back to the center by way of these younger writers, certain novels—particularly newer fiction from writers of the 1960s and 1970s generation—use this same space-based framework, though focusing on Cairo’s city center, to problematize the question of an Egyptian collective identity and national consciousness. To understand this phenomenon, I

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borrow from Timothy Mitchell’s poststructuralist reading of colonial Cairo. In light of his scholarship, I argue that understanding Egyptian identity involves an understanding of how the modern Egyptian subject was initially conceived as an actor in the staged space of European modernity downtown, then later reimagined as an anticolonial nationalist in which the downtown (through demonstrations, political activity, and the fires of January 1952) served as the primary stage of this identitarian contest. In using the work of David Harvey on Paris and that of Janet Abu-Lughod, André Raymond, Max Rodenbeck, and Nancy Reynolds on Cairo, I attempt to show the ways in which the circulation of capital and the spectacle of consumption largely defined from the beginning what it meant to be modern in Egypt. Underlying the four novels around which this study is focused is an economic history of how the downtown, as a space of commerce, serves as an allegory for the greater transformations of Cairo: from the period of colonial modernity, through Nasser’s nationalist–socialist modernization, to Anwar al-Sadat’s open-door (Infitah) policies in the 1970s, through Hosni Mubarak’s “liberalized authoritarian state”7 of the last few decades. It is only through reading these novels as maps of this district or as countercartographies that we are able to trace across time the linkages between this space and a national subjectivity. Chapter 2 examines Radwa ‘Ashur’s Qit‘a min Urubba (A Piece of Europe; 2003) as a rewriting of the history of Wust al-Balad with an attentiveness to this district as a space of social contest. ‘Ashur’s work offers a critical reading of the way in which Khedive Isma‘il envisioned this western quarter as a miniature staging of Paris in Cairo. Her narrator tells the history of the quarter from the colonial occupation, to the rise of the foreign elites, through to the contemporary period of US dominance in the region. Her project is a political one first and foremost. She creates a narrative that effectively writes back to the colonial history of this area, highlighting the rise of spectacular consumption in the downtown and the way in which the fires of January 1952 and the subsequent revolution were symbolic and literal attempts to mar this image of colonial modernity and reclaim the area in the name of the Egyptian subject. Chapter 3 discusses Khayri Shalabi’s Salih Hisa (Saleh Heisa; 2000), where the sha‘bi quarter of Hayy Ma‘ruf (neighboring Wust al-Balad) offers a shadow history of the district from the point of view of a neighborhood ghurza (hashish den). In this café, where popular intellectuals and locals congregate, Shalabi seeks to show the way in which the major historical and political events of the time were experienced and discussed by those on the margins. By effectively narrating the period of the 1960s and 1970s from the point of view of Salih, the half-Nubian ghurzaji,8 and showing the way Wust al-Balad is represented from his point of view and that of the other local intellectuals, Shalabi challenges the notion of an official culture that flourished in the downtown to suggest the way in which certain countersites became the loci for the flourishing of a

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rich, counterculture based around the ’ahawi (cafés).9 The contrast between the official intellectual life of the effendi and upper classes in Wust al-Balad alongside the dynamic cultural spaces of the more sha‘bi (popular) neighborhoods are discussed within the discourse of alternative or improvised practices of the modern in the space of the downtown. In Chapter 4 I analyze the work of the Nubian writer Idris ‘Ali to show how Nubian experiences between the areas of Bulaq and Wust al-Balad from the early twentieth century through to the present constitute an underhistory or counterhistory to mainstream depictions of this area. Idris ‘Ali’s Taht Khatt alFaqr (Under the Poverty Line; 2005, translated by Elliott Colla as Poor, 2007) narrates the migration of a young Nubian following the displacement of his family due to the flooding of their village resulting from construction of the Aswan Dam. Wust al-Balad, where his father works as a doorman (bawwab) in one of the downtown buildings, remains, for the young narrator, the part of the city symbolizing foreign wealth, bourgeois living, and a modern sensibility and work ethic. It is here where the narrator becomes aware of his class, the lines dividing certain quarters of the city, and discrimination toward Nubians. His identification with the overpopulated neighborhood of the poor in Bulaq alongside his fascination with the wealth and modernity of Wust al-Balad come to create a double consciousness in the narrator that finds its fraught articulation in his pointed critiques as an adult against the hypocrisy of the rhetoric of nationalism in the face of the destitute millions in Cairo. Finally, in Chapter 5, I explore Alaa al-Aswany’s immensely popular novel ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan (The Yacoubian Building; 2003), which has since been made into a large-budget film and television serial. Although the work was considered controversial because of its frank narration of taboo social issues (e.g., drug use, homosexuality, prostitution, political bribery), sales of the book—already more than ten printings—and the success of the film suggest that the novel hit a nerve for Egyptians. In light of this popularity, the pulp-like quality of the work and its use of a media-inflected colloquial generated a wave of divergent opinions among Arab literary critics about the value of the novel from a literary standpoint. In examining the various critical responses to the novel, I attempt to understand what it was that made this novel so successful and how this success may be tied in part to our associations with the space of Wust al-Balad, in which the narrative unfolds. In brief, the work tells the retrospective history of the downtown through the stories of multiple residents living in one of its historic buildings during the 1990s. I read Aswany’s work as a partial response to the antinationalist socialist critique of Idris ‘Ali’s Taht Khatt al-Faqr. The district of Wust al-Balad functions nostalgically in Aswany’s writing (echoing Radwa ‘Ashur’s novel), symbolizing a space that once reflected the liberal Belle Époque in Cairo and now functions in the manner of what Beatriz Jaguaribe

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has called a “modernist ruin.”10 Aswany’s Wust al-Balad is a theater in which all the corruption, scandal, and desperation of the various classes in Egypt are played out. He seeks to unearth the abject side of Cairo, using his characters to expose the frustrated, self-interested tactics that many Egyptians resort to in order to survive in a neocapitalist environment. Here the downtown is a socially heterogeneous site where the lives of Cairo’s old aristocratic classes, the nouveau riche, and the enterprising lower classes intersect in both personal and business capacities. And yet the downtown is not an entirely dystopian site. Rather Aswany points repeatedly both to Wust al-Balad as an idealized space of Cairo’s cosmopolitan and once liberal past and—via the romantic relationship of two characters from divergent social classes—to the potential for a notion of Egyptianness to transcend class boundaries. I argue, in contrast to the commonly held idea that ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan serves as a critique of nationalism, that largely what has made this novel popular is its recovery of a nationalist portrait of Egypt; that is, the way in which Aswany uses the symbolic space of the downtown to point to a collective sense of an Egyptian past and sense of national identity. Ultimately these authors all use the unified form of the novel as a way to examine the metanarrative of the city through the lens of the more local histories that have contributed to Cairo’s formation in our collective imagination. All of these works, in one way or another, take Wust al-Balad and the surrounding neighborhoods as a significant reference point. Through this lens, these texts problematize the manner of the city’s development into an ever more fragmented megacity and consider the human casualties of this course. Another, perhaps more romantic reason why Wust al-Balad emerges as a necessary location to which writers return in their work may be related to the symbolic value it garnered not just as the center of Cairo but as the staging ground for the nationalist struggle. If we read the nationalist movement as the central originating point for the telos of the nation, to return to Wust al-Balad is to consider the way this symbolic space of the nation (as represented by the stories about this district) can house such contradictory impulses: of optimism and tumult, of the promise of western modernity and the human labor caught in capitalism’s undertow, of nationalist euphoria that gathered its momentum on the streets of downtown and the subsequent tactics by the leaders of the July revolution to suppress human rights and free speech. While I do not mean to suggest these stories are allegories for the nation, I argue that one can read the history of Egypt through an examination of the transformation of this quarter. Thus I offer an allegorical reading of a particular space, Wust al-Balad, as standing in for that of the nation. The stories that continue to emerge about this urbanscape help us to piece together the sense of both loss and optimism that characterizes what it means to be Egyptian. The act of imagining the city, at once joyous, violent, and alienating, is in every way an attempt to constitute an imagined “home.” This idea, as echoed

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in the following passage by James Donald, is one of the central themes of this study. The narratives here are each in their own way about a neighborhood that serves as that “home,” and to some limited extent these neighborhoods function as allegorical spaces through which we can read the history of the nation. An understanding of the social forces that radically alter these local spaces and their characters points to the sort of oscillating landscape that is Cairo for these protagonists. It remains a contingent space, marked by traces of the past and spaces of familiarity, but never offering a sense of a secure present. What can we hope for from cities? What, in particular, can we hope for from imagining the city differently? All of us long for a place that is bounded and secure, where the noise stops, and where we are sustained by the love of those we love, or—more desperately—by infantile fantasies of plentitude and security. This urgent desire for home is real enough, and should not be dismissed as hopeless nostalgia. Equally, though, we have to admit that, in the end, no such place exists this side of the grave. That is why Le Corbusier’s Radiant City has the chill of the Necropolis about it, and why the urbane life of café and square can transmogrify so easily into an Expressionist Dance of Death. City life as a normative ideal acknowledges not only the necessary desire for the security of home, but also the inevitability of migration, change and conflict, and so too the ethical need for an openness to unassimilated otherness. The city becomes the symbolic space in which we act out our more or less imaginative answers to the question which defines our ethos: ‘how to be “at home” in a world where our identity is not given, our being-together in question, our destiny contingent or uncertain: the world of the violence of our own self-constitution.11

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INTRODUCTION

The Urban as Theoretical Frame

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his study takes as its central point of examination the transformation of Cairo’s former city center, the space known as “Wust al-Balad,” what once was the French-inspired and later British-occupied heart of “modern” Cairo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To understand the evolution of this space and its symbolism in the Egyptian imagination, we must examine the relationship between colonization and modernization and how this process was deeply linked to ideas of representation and spectacle at the turn of the twentieth century. In choosing to take Wust al-Balad as our focal point, this study is concerned with the extent to which a certain mode of representation—theatrical in impulse and one that internalized the gaze of the West—characterized not only the evolution of this quarter but also, later, the development of large regions of greater Cairo through to the present neoliberal period. The proliferation of recent studies on Cairo, in particular the work of Khaled Adham and Yasser Elsheshtawy, emphasizes the cyclical quality inherent in a certain mode of visuality that has continued to define Cairo as a once bifurcated and now increasingly fragmented urban space. This “mode of visuality”1 replays, in the grand development projects of the late 1990s and early 2000s, not only the idea of partitioning—characteristic of the dual-city model (however problematic the idea)—but that of an even deeper fragmentation through the establishment of gated communities for the wealthy and foreign nationals residing in Cairo.2 The rush to become a global city or to market certain development projects as cosmopolitan and designed for a “global elite”3 (e.g., the establishment of gated communities in New Cairo, the Smart Village Project, Dreamland, and various large-scale shopping malls) suggests a westward, class-specific gaze that directly echoes nineteenth-century planning ideas and hierarchical notions of class entitlement. In a manner reminiscent of the spectacular plans drawn up by Khedive Isma‘il for a “modern” and “Western” city center for Cairo that was meant to impress foreign dignitaries visiting Egypt’s capital for the inauguration

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ceremonies of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the projects designed more recently for the vast desert areas of greater Cairo (many now modeled after similar development projects in Dubai) suggest the privileging of the visual and the spectacular over more pressing concerns regarding infrastructure or social welfare issues. Gwendolyn Wright’s excellent work on French colonial design makes clear the precedent long established by colonial regimes for experimenting with certain aesthetic and social planning ideas in the colonies.4 For example, this emphasis for developers and urban geographers on designing for the gaze of the tourist or the demands of an elite class over more practical forms of development was altogether common in the colonial urban planning schemas in Vietnam, Madagascar, Morocco, and Algeria. That said, it is still startling to witness a similar distortion of priorities on the part of land developers, sanctioned by the Mubarak regime, desperately striving to “market” and “brand” new residential and commercial projects in Cairo in light of the increasingly dire needs of the poor in the many densely populated slum areas within and around the margins of the city. In thinking about a method for understanding Cairo’s social phenomena and thinking about campaigns against social injustice being waged among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), intellectuals, activists, and artists in the recent past in Egypt, it is no surprise that space becomes a most compelling lens for examining a number of pressing issues in Cairo (e.g., the right to housing; access to health care; freedom of speech; freedom of religion; the right to congregate and to demonstrate; the imperative to protect the rights of women, children, refugees, and homosexuals; etc.). Spatial analyses are also necessarily interdisciplinary and capitalize on the creative work of scholars from a range of disciplines—urban planning, sociology, political science, literature, history, economics, visual art, and so on. Urbanism has always been, as declared by the early nineteenth-century group Societé Francaise des Urbanistes, the true place of intersection between both science and art.5 Thus it is not surprising that, more than any other form of critique over the last ten years, scholarly works that focus on understanding the Middle East by way of the urban dominate the field’s English-language scholarship. Among the foundational works grounding this study are the two edited volumes of essays on Cairo, Cairo Cosmopolitan and Cairo Contested. In the introduction to the first volume, Diane Singerman and Paul Amar declare the collection of essays as inaugurating a new academic movement they call the “Cairo School of Urban Studies.” The articles, they suggest, represent a move away from formal theory and “method-driven” study toward work that is more “problem driven” and specifically attentive to the complex intersections of space, identity, and flows of capital.6 Catalyzed by the emergence of diverse opposition groups, grassroots organizing, street rallies, and radical changes within the urban sphere of Cairo, their work seeks to “present evidence of vernacular, bottom-up cosmopolitanisms


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of enhanced agency and claims-making practices” by both individuals and collectives within the city.7 The idea underlying the set of practices advocated in the volume hinges on the idea of a “critical cosmopolitanism,”8 where categories of the local and global are eschewed for a kind of work that explores the “ambivalent forces” underlying political, social, and cultural phenomena today. In other words, the contributors recognize the importance of presenting work that is grounded in real spaces, and they use Cairo as the primary point of intersection for discussing a diverse range of phenomena. To this end, these scholars highlight the unique way in which the space of the urban can serve as an alternate frame for housing and understanding the contradictory forces that influence the everyday lives of Egyptians. Thus these practitioners align themselves with other scholars in the field of cultural studies in moving away from the dichotomous partitioning of cultures, languages, and institutions. Instead, they advocate a form of “border-thinking” that recognizes the ways in which there is a natural and perhaps necessary process of integration that can result from cultural encounters (be they artistic, commercial, or touristic in impulse). By exploring how the residents of Cairo actively produce the city (and are reciprocally produced by it), these essays highlight the agency manifest in the communities of disenfranchised Egyptians in the face of Mubarak’s autocratic regime, which increasingly cracks down on overt forms of public dissent. The two volumes are, in many respects, an attempt to follow up on the comprehensive work done by Janet Abu-Lughod on Cairo in the late 1960s and early 1970s.9 Where Abu-Lughod masterfully narrated the story of Cairo in a more or less linear fashion, integrating the history of the city into the development of its urban spaces, the scholars in these more recent works choose specific sites and events to tell the story of the city. By focusing on these unique locations, their works detail the complex array of forces that have made these sites, and the city more broadly, what it is today. By using the frame of the urban, the work of the Cairo School does not depend on certain universalist theoretical paradigms to explain social phenomena on the ground. Instead, it uses physical space to form the natural boundaries of its project. Thus the Singerman and Amar volume might take as its methodological predecessor the work of Timothy Mitchell, who has argued vigorously against the use of “enframing narratives” to tell the story of contemporary Egypt. For him, modernity, capitalism, nationalism, and globalization are the sorts of totalizing theoretical frames that have wrongly governed our perception of historical transformation. These narratives, he argues, not only have been presented as homogeneous global forces but are how we, across cultures, have learned to tell the history of the city in the last century. In all three of his works, Colonising Egypt (1991), Questions of Modernity (2000), and Rule of Experts (2002), Mitchell critiques the manner in which such narratives have been used to flatten and simplify the complexity of historical experiences and


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conflict in local spaces. By examining the ways in which these ideas have been used hegemonically to justify oppression, violence, and the implementation of widespread policy, Mitchell argues for an attentiveness to the ways conflict and change are experienced in local spaces in an effort to challenge our reliance on these master narratives. That is to say, he shows us across his work that these totalizing ideas do not have an “internal logic of their own;” rather they are actively produced and asserted merely as a means to “frame” or contain very complex and often contradictory historical phenomena. His project largely is an attempt to show how these events or “global forces” are authored. To this end he actively reinserts the “author” writing these acts in an effort to reveal the constructed nature of such ideas, which are often made to seem, post facto, universal. In critiquing the perception that such currents are historical inevitabilities, Mitchell cautions us to be attentive to the “residual violences” that such acts of enframing repeatedly “silence.” Mitchell’s work and the emergence of the work of the Cairo School contributors could not be more significant in terms of signaling the way in which space has become central to literary, cultural, and social science studies of the Middle East. Specifically this project is an attempt to show how Egyptian writers for the past 25 years have been sensitive in their novels to the extent to which the city and its changing spaces have altered Egyptian identity and concepts of social belonging. In this regard, my work is inspired by the tradition of cartographic scholarship in Chicano/a urban studies that use literary texts as a way to engage and understand issues related to the contestation of space. This is true not just in works that have used the “border” as a potent metaphor for liminality10 but also in more recent works of criticism linking the battle over urban space in the city of Los Angeles to Chicano/a identity transformations.11 Furthermore, my work should also be situated within the trajectory of scholarship by Samia Mehrez (particularly her recent anthology of translated excerpts from novels depicting Cairo, appropriately titled The Literary Atlas of Cairo) and that of Sabry Hafez in his efforts to understand the 1990s generation of writers in the context of the marginal spaces of the city.12 To this end, this project has two primary objectives: first, to show how an understanding of the historical transformation of the city and a reading of the urban social environment is instructive in reading these four novels; and second, to demonstrate how these literary works function as subaltern histories of the city, memorializing and contesting the space of downtown Cairo as a primary symbol of the project of nationalism. By strategically retelling the history of this space, these novels suggest a link between this district and the production of a collective sense of Egyptian identity. And as Raymond Williams so suggestively has shown, novels have always served as maps of a sort, reflecting and critiquing the social world in significant ways.13


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With this, I would like to turn to the realm of the literary to which this project is centrally committed. To read contemporary Egyptian literature (or at least the works produced since the Nahda14) is an act of immersion into narratives that often depict the types of residual violence that Timothy Mitchell has sought to unearth. From Muhammad al-Muwaylihi and Taha Husayn to ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, Tawfıq al-Hakim, Yahya Haqqi, and Naguib Mahfuz, the prominent writers of the first half of the twentieth century used the novel or the autobiographical form as a forum for bearing witness to the specific ways in which colonization, modernization, and nationalism intersected with their local realities (be it the city or the countryside) and transformed the culture and social order of these local spaces. Since the 1950s, and particularly in the period following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule, Egyptian authors became bolder not just in criticizing the hegemony of foreign rule and the puppet monarchy but also in writing against the way in which the “nation” or the discourse of “nationalism” sought to produce a body of compliant, noncritical, homogeneous subjects. Writers such as Naguib Mahfuz, Sonallah Ibrahim, Latifa al-Zayyat, Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abd Allah, Ibrahim Aslan, Khayri Shalabi, Nawal al-Sadawi, and Salwa Bakr used their novels as a means of critiquing the totalizing nationalist platforms and repressive tactics used by the regimes of Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat. More recently, authors such as Radwa ‘Ashur, Sonallah Ibrahim, Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Majid, Alaa al-Aswany, Khalid Isma‘il, and Idris ‘Ali not only have turned their criticism to Mubarak’s repressive social policies and maintenance of the status quo but have depicted the ways in which global capital, forced migration, and rapid urban development have affected the everyday lives of Egyptians and intensified the issue of urban poverty afflicting more than half of the city’s population.15 This project will take a selection of novels, all of which have been published in the last 25 years, as the starting point for understanding the way in which the specter of the city, in all its complexity and diffuseness, functions centrally in the imaginations of these authors. I argue that the city is not merely a location in these works, but in many respects has produced them. In particular I will focus on representations of the downtown (Wust al-Balad) and the way a number of newer literary works aim to historically revise and recall the symbolic value of this area for Egyptians today. In this regard I will seek to show a causal relationship between the transformations in the city and the reoccurring themes taken up by many of these authors. Echoing the work of Sabry Hafez, Dina Heshmat, Samia Mehrez, and Husayn Hammuda,16 I show how the works of these writers, as products of this rapidly changing space, reflect the way the city has served as the lens for negotiating or coming to terms with how such universal enframing narratives have and continue to shape the lives of Egyptians. Thus we might argue, in the spirit of Sabry Hafez’s work, that the radical changes in the city have produced a new attentiveness among Egyptian


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writers to the role of space and location in the production of identity. Identity, as explored in the works presented here, is inscribed spatially. The characters in these novels are drawn as extensions of the neighborhoods, districts, and buildings they inhabit. In an effort to come to terms with the self, they must first come to terms with the space around them, both historically and in the present moment. In so doing, they effectively map these spaces, literally tracing the history of colonial and social violence across certain iconic locations in the city through to the present moment. The specifics of this will be discussed further, but it is necessary to recognize these cartographic gestures as types of counter cartographies, that is, acts of “creative revisionism” that facilitate the ongoing process of challenging the colonizer as mapmaker and reauthoring the map as part of the ongoing process of decolonization.17 Sabry Hafez’s “Children of the Third City” Before proceeding, I would like to take a moment to summarize Sabry Hafez’s influence on my work and to clarify the extent to which I am both drawing on his ideas and also departing from them in significant ways. In his work “Jamaliyyat al-riwaya al-jadida al-qati‘a al-ma‘rifiyya wa-l-naz‘a al-mudadda li-lghina’iyya” (Aesthetics of the New Novel: Epistemological Rupture and Literary Space), Hafez outlines the features of what he calls the “new novel” in Egypt and the way in which the new novel is a product of the changing urban geography of the city. Drawing on the work of Nasr Abu Zayd Rajih,18 he divides Cairo into three “cities.”19 The first city, which he refers to as “al-Qahira al-Mu‘iziya,” stretches from Gamaliyya to al-Sayyida Zaynab and from Ibn Tulun to al-Qala’ (the Citadel). This is the space of the old city that Naguib Mahfuz historicized in his Trilogy (1956–57) through his vivid descriptions of the Gamaliyya quarter.20 This historically was the area that once was the heart of Fatimid Cairo, but it suffered from neglect as the city gradually expanded westward. Today it remains home to many of Cairo’s poorest communities. The second city encompasses the areas that were added on during Cairo’s expansion toward the Nile in the nineteenth century. This spans the area of al-‘Ataba through to Wust al-Balad and Garden City. It also includes Zamalik (and although he does not mention it, I would assume the more recently developed districts of Muhandisin and Duqqi). This region encompasses the districts that were modernized by Khedive Isma‘il, particularly Wust al-Balad. This district, whose architecture and grand boulevards are reminiscent of Haussmann’s nineteenth-century vision for Paris, was built in the spirit of, what Hafez terms, the “impulse of progress.” It was these French Enlightenment notions of “progress, modernity, and reason” that governed the thinking of the dominant secular reformers and writers of the time (i.e., Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Muhammad Husayn


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Haykal, Taha Husayn, Naguib Mahfouz, and others) and were reflected in the types of French-inspired architectural and urban planning developments that were changing the terrain of the city.21 The third city, and the area he is most interested in in terms of its representation in certain literary works, is characterized by its randomness and location on the margins of the city.22 Referred to as the ‘ashwa’iyyat (haphazard or randomly organized housing), these districts form a belt around the city and are home to most of Cairo’s informal housing settlements. For Hafez, these areas reflect the manifest “process of blocking enlightened, organized Reason whose various fruits are still present in Wust al-Balad.”23 The state, he reminds us, has no control over these areas and thus the regions are primarily ruled by the leaders of the local mosque or by youth gangs. These districts include, among others, the areas lining the western curve—Imbaba, al-Munira, Nahiyya, Bulaq al-Dakrur, al-Haram, and al-Qasbiji—and those on the eastern curve—Dar al-Salaam, Istibal ‘Antar, alDuwiyja, and Manshiyyat Nasr. According to Abu Zayd Rajih, the third city grew like a “cancer” in less than a century. During the 1970s, when the crisis in housing began to look particularly dire, the government proved ineffectual in responding to the demands of the increasing number of residents within the urban belt of the city. Thus, with no recourse, the poor and rural migrants to the city began to appropriate certain residences, making them their own despite the government’s lack of provisions. Over the last thirty years, three types of housing settlements have grown that Rajih considers characteristic of the third city: the ‘ashwa’iyyat on the periphery, the marginal housing in the heart of the old city, and the residents of the cemeteries (whose areas became more populated during the Infitah period in the 1970s).24 Unfortunately, as Rajih points out, today these unplanned settlements have become the rule, not the exception, such that during the period of the 1990s, as many as half the residents of Cairo lived in one or another of these areas.25 To return to the literary, at the core of Hafez’s argument lies the idea that certain textual transformations evident in the novels of the 1990s generation are directly the result of social and economic changes that have taken place in the city since the 1970s. It is at this point, he argues, that the project of literary modernism was abandoned as a consequence of the abortion of the project of modernity, which for him reached its pinnacle during the period of Gamal Abdel Nasser and collapsed during the period of Anwar Sadat.26 The effects of Sadat’s privatization schemes and the influence of foreign organizations promoting these investments brought about a number of social consequences that had a profound effect on the nation’s youth: among them, the widening of the income gap and an economy unable to sustain jobs for its five million college graduates.27 These new authors of the 1990s that he focuses on are what he calls “children of the third city,” and their novels possess an aesthetic that he argues


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shows certain corollaries to the new urban geography. Hafez aptly notes that the accumulation of these three aforementioned types of informal housing forcibly “changed the nature of the relationship of people with place.”28 To illustrate some of these corollaries, he discusses various formal dimensions of these texts. First, by way of example, he suggests the new novels are fairly short, resembling something closer to a novella than a novel. He attributes this to the fact that the constriction of space in these areas does not allow the author to sit for long periods of time over several years (for instance, he says many of these novels are not even the length of half of Naguib Mahfouz’s medium-length works). Instead, the work must be completed in short spurts, episodically, and thus the narrator in these works, like the authors themselves, reflect what Hafez calls a “shortness of breath” indicative of the confined living conditions and lack of breathing room in such cramped locations. Second, many of these authors often borrow certain techniques from the tradition of le nouveau roman. For example, they elaborate with great precision on the details of their surroundings and blur the line between the outside place and the space of the interior, the writing of body and the writing of place, such that there is never a complete recovery of meaning for the reader. Third, Hafez likens the unplanned nature of the ‘ashwa’iyyat housing (their unpredictability and chaos) to the fragmented, unpredictable development of the narration in these novels, where there are not necessarily any causal links. The macabre nature of the graveyard housing he links to the preoccupation in many of these works with death, rats, corpses, and skeletons. He is quick to point out that this is not to say that the novels do not have a structure. Many of them are structured more like a textual maze, with no obvious sign of design, much like the labyrinthine quality of many of the informal housing communities, “born out of a situation in which the immediate supersedes—indeed, negates—the strategic and long-term. Hence the irrationality of the ‘third city,’ full of impasses and dead ends.”29 Lastly, he discusses the way in which the density of these areas results in a “compression of space” that is translated in these novel as a contracting of time whereby the characters are not aware of an established past that extends to the present and into the future. In these works the youth tell their stories as if “trapped in the present” with no sense of prior tradition to give the present any hope. As he puts it, “The present . . . no longer has the capacity to form possible expectations of the future to bridge from the dream to anything outside of the present moment.”30 In constructing this poetics of space, Hafez convincingly shows how these novels are products of a social environment in constant flux. He reminds us that the locations these novels are based on cannot be considered necessarily part of the city or necessarily part of the countryside, although many of the residents have migrated from more rural areas, nor are they “inside the city or outside it,” rather these novels are direct products of the types of shantytown housing on


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the urban perimeter that people have resorted to in greater numbers for sheer lack of having anything else.31 What Sabry Hafez establishes is how necessary it is for readers of these new novels of liminality to understand the spatial politics underwriting these works. Without an accurate understanding of this “new urban geography” and the centrality of the geographic margins, it is impossible to contextualize the social references, despair, and urgency in much of this writing. That being said, in my reading of a cross section of novels from the last 25 years,32 I have discovered that in as much as there is an emphasis on works revolving around these densely populated peripheral areas in many of these newer novels, there is also an equally strong tendency (particularly in newer works by writers of the 1960s and 1970s generation) to return to the center of the city—namely, Wust al-Balad and the immediate surrounding areas (Hayy Ma‘ruf and Bab al-Luq). It is as if, in the presence of an urban space ever more diffuse, and a social space ever more characterized, in the words of Arjun Appadurai, by global disjunctures and flows, many authors are returning to explore the extent to which the center of the city might help elucidate the memory of a collective past marked by the heady aims of modernity and the euphoria of the anticolonial and nationalist struggles. This focus on Wust al-Balad in many of these novels was, indeed, unexpected and thus will be the focus of this book. This is also where this study departs from that of Hafez. For example, how might we understand the symbolism of the former downtown for a city that today functions around multiple centers? What might this area of Cairo have to do with these “narratives of enframing” that traditionally have served as the cornerstones of our historical ordering of the present? That is, how will an examination of this space help us to revise our understanding of the reproduction of colonial modernity? In short, what can fictional representations of Wust al-Balad tell us about the city of Cairo and, conversely, how might a reading of the city help us to better understand the spatial subtext of these novels?


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CHAPTER 1

Specter of Paris The Staging of Cairo’s Modern City Center

The modern occurs only by performing the distinction between the modern and the non-modern, the West and the non-West, each performance opening the possibility of what is figured as non-modern contaminating the modern, displacing it, or disrupting its authority. —Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity”1

Introduction

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o explore the relationship between Wust al-Balad and contemporary Egyptian literature treating this district requires us to consider the way in which ideas of the modern impact urban space and the construction of modern Egyptian identity. By analyzing the interaction of these two narrative acts—the urban–architectural and the textual—I hope to reemphasize from a literary standpoint what Timothy Mitchell and Farha Ghannam have shown through their anthropological and theoretical studies—namely, that the battle for the modern subject was and continues to be waged in space.2 Evidence of the relationship between space and subjectivity is emergent in a number of contemporary novels. These works depict the struggle to negotiate a modern sense of Egyptian identity as the process of mapping local identity in space. In other words, situating the self within the changing urban geography of the city becomes a vehicle for coming into one’s selfhood. An understanding of the spatial logic internal to these new novels gives us, as Franco Moretti puts it, a “diagram of forces” from which we can deduce the way the social forces of the city have “produced” these novels.3 In a reciprocal turn, we can also get a sense of the way in which these novels continue to “produce the city for readers,” rendering the city as “legible” and providing a site in which space, specifically

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urban space, is made coherent through narration.4 Echoing this idea, Mary Pat Brady writes in the context of Chicana literary production, “Literature thrives on the intersections between the shaping powers of language and the productive powers of space . . . it uses space and spatial processes metaphorically to suggest emotions, insights, concepts, characters. It also shapes the way spaces are perceived, understood, and ultimately produced.”5 At the core of Colonising Egypt and his later essay “The Stage of Modernity,” Timothy Mitchell suggests that the emergence of modernity—as an idea, fixed in time and European space—is critically linked to the way reality came to be conceived and rendered as an “exhibit” or representation. This act of representation—“the replication of the real”—and its link to both French and British colonial projects, is, as he later extrapolates, intimately tied to the act of reproduction and the commodification of goods. Mitchell’s fundamental point, based on the work of Guy Debord, is predicated on the idea that with the emergence of capitalism in Egypt, Egyptians became mere spectators in the staging of their own modernity, no longer participants. Here the image (or the spectacle) takes the place of real experience and human interaction. This idea, also echoed with some variation in the work of Nancy Reynolds and Gwendolyn Wright, suggests that the commodification of goods—and as Reynolds points out, the important introduction of glass for stores—comes to define the Egyptian experience of colonial modernity.6 Just as the new department stores and arcades in Paris and London created “mechanical worlds-in-miniature” (a result of changes in the way cotton was harvested and the growth of the textile industry),7 with displays of their goods in an orderly fashion for the consumer, so too did the exhibit become a form of representing the world of the “Other” as a commodifiable cultural object. The exhibition, as Mitchell reminds us, served as the most concrete staging of what many Arabs observed upon their visits to Europe: “Characteristic of the way Europeans seemed to live is their preoccupation with what the same Egyptian author described as intizam al-manzar, the organisation of the view. The Europe one reads about in Arabic accounts was a place of discipline and visual arrangement, of silent gazes and strange simulations, of the organisation of everything and everything organised to represent, to recall like the exhibition some larger meaning. Outside the world exhibition it follows paradoxically, one encountered not the world but only further models and representations of the real.”8 Mitchell argues that it is not only the possibility for replicating a certain representation of reality that lies at the core of modern selfhood but also the notion that there is, behind this replica, an original (people or nation) “prior to” this (re)presentation. The idea that a static homogeneous body exists apart and removed from the messiness of difference and disorder is what such “exhibiting” and replication achieves. It effectively creates the myth of the “original”


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and the excitement of its possible reproduction or imitation for an objective modern spectator. This subject is the person for whom this serializable order is designed—the subject, as Mitchell puts it, “for whom the social world seems to exist as a view to be observed, an experience to be had, a set of meanings to be interpreted or a code to be followed or deciphered.”9 Implicitly it would seem that this is the same “national subject” that Benedict Anderson referred to as participating in the collective imaginary of the nation by conceiving of a homogeneous horizontal time and place. It is this modernity—linked to an original West in an orderly, well-designed city of commodities, with an enlightened national subject—that becomes the “modernity” replicatable in country after country. He continues to emphasize that the knowledge of such modernity was not enough; it existed most powerfully in its replicated form, as something that was “staged” again and again. And yet, what is immediately apparent in this staging, as Mitchell convincingly shows us, is that the very act of performing or imitating the modern is a declaration of the nonoriginality of the thing. Thus the gap or the delay between the “original” and the replicated version of modernity allows for a contamination or a disruption in the act of staging. This is how Mitchell understands the condition of colonial modernity—namely, that the non-West in staging the same becomes a site that hybridizes (here he borrows from Bhabha) or “mutates” the modern. Ironically this very act is what allows the West (as a fixed, albeit fictional, referent) to come into being as the site of a singular, homogeneous modernity. Mitchell writes that “modernity, like capitalism, is defined by its claim to universality, to uniqueness, unity and universality that represent the end (in every sense) of history. Yet this always remains an impossible unity, an incomplete universal. Each staging of the modern must be arranged to produce the unified, global history of modernity, yet each requires those forms of difference that introduce the possibility of discrepancy, that return to undermine its unity and identity. Modernity then becomes the unsuitable yet unavoidable name for all these discrepant histories.”10 Mitchell refutes the universality of a western modernity and powerfully suggests that the very act of delineation between the modern and the nonmodern or the West and the non-West is the space in which modernity is born. Thus there is a doublestaging at work. Not only is there the space between the modern and its other, nonmodern counterpart where we might locate modernity, but there is also the distance between what is “real” and the “representation” of the real. It is here where Mitchell argues for the critical role of space in understanding the social: What will appear especially real is the modern production of the social as a spatial object. Just as medical practice produces the modern difference between the body as physical object and its meanings, other social practices of modernity establish what appears as the difference between physical space and its representation. The


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closed, imaginary space of the modern nation-state is produced through forms of mapping, boundary making, border control, and the management of cultural forms and economic flows that create what Thongchai Winichakul calls the “geobody” of the nation. Like the medical body, the geo-body appears as a physical object that preexists its social constitution, rather than as the effect of a process of difference.11

In other words, as Benedict Anderson has also shown, the use of certain modern tools for representation (namely, cartography, the census, land surveying, and urban planning) effectively produces the geo-body of the nation as an a priori spatial object. This brings us back to the central aim of Mitchell’s work and why it is so crucial to what I hope to argue here vis-à-vis Cairo as the site for the contest over the modern subject. What Mitchell has done is to show how the project of modernity was a spatial project. Not only did colonization occur, first and foremost, spatially, but it was effective, at least in the case of Egypt, because colonial authority became synonymous with a particular type of modern space: the staging of a miniature Paris in Wust al-Balad. The juxtaposition of this modern district—as staged exhibit of a European modernity—to the older quarters in Cairo to the east, and the dual consciousness that emerged as a result, is where we might begin to understand the experience of modernity in Cairo. Yet the notion that there existed alternative forms of modernity in space, or that there was an active and creative reconciling of these two worlds (represented as exhibits of the modern and the premodern) is also central to our understanding of downtown Cairo. The work of Dilip Gaonkar, Leo Ou-fan Lee, and Dilip Chakrabarty has shown us the way in which certain so-called modern spaces were conceived, used, and integrated by non-Europeans.12 These essays suggest the extent to which modernity was not merely performance but also a process, or, as Jonathan Shannon put it, “co-produced.” In rethinking the ideas of Timothy Mitchell alongside theorists who espouse the notion of alternative modernities (Gaonkar, Chakrabarty, etc.), Shannon, in his work as an ethnomusicologist (Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Syria, 2006), offers the metaphor of improvisation as a compelling framework for reconsidering the coproduction of modernity in its various forms in both European and non-European locations: “modernity is an act of composition (of selves, of nations, of economies and polities) in specific historical moments and specific spaces. Each ‘alternative’ that we identify—South Asian, Arab, Melanesian, North American—refers back to a basic set of struggles, contradictions and indeterminacies. National communities compose modern subjectivities through the selection of common, standard traits infused with culturally specific sets of meanings . . . Each can be thought of as an improvisation—a composition in the historical moment—that has recognizable relations to other


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performances as well as unique traits.”13 In other words, while we can perhaps trace many of the similarities between national communities to a model that is represented as Western or European, the way these communities “orient” themselves vis-à-vis these new structures might be likened to an ongoing process of improvisation necessarily creating a unique or “alternative” version of what the modern means in each location. Shannon clarifies further: This is not simply a matter of “theme and variation,” with Europe setting the theme and other nations providing colorful local variations; such an approach would merely reiterate in musical terms the idea that European modernity is a standard upon which other, alternative modernities are based. European modernity is not the main theme upon which other nations improvise in their quest for alternative modernities. Rather, the improvisation metaphor suggests that all varieties and experiences of modernity, including Europe’s, are improvisations on a related set of principles, representational practices, and political economic processes. Europe’s differential power historically has meant that the texture and pitch of the European variation are echoed though never wholly reproduced in those of other nations. The reverse is certainly true, and we can hear elements of other nations’ modern experiences in European improvisations: Orientalism in European literature, for example, is one result of this echoing (Said, 1978, 1994).14

Shannon cogently argues, in what I read as a crucial addendum to Mitchell’s work, that while we may agree that there is no homogeneous, fixed Europe, and thus no notion of what has come to be recognized as a European model of modernity, the differential in power that Europe has historically enjoyed over a vast number of territories (the result of colonial conquests and the continued extraction of resources through the early twentieth century) is largely why the European “variation” of modernity predominates in site after site outside of Europe (i.e., the cities of Shanghai, Saigon, St. Petersburg, Algiers, Casablanca, and Beirut are suggestive examples). Wust al-Balad, while historically a space of contest, may also be read as a site through which Egyptians negotiated their own forms of improvised modernities. For instance, the Egyptian effendiyya15 class might have initially been thought of as mimicking or aping European dress, habits, and beliefs in the European project of modernity, but it was this class that would eventually become the most ardent proponents of the anticolonial nationalist movement, thus using their modern education and knowledge of the colonial administration to critique and eventually bring about its demise. Similarly the popular coffee shops and hashish cafés of the intellectual scene downtown during the 1950s and 1960s became spaces through which the modern was debated, mocked, and selectively drawn upon (Chapter 3 discusses this point in more detail). The underclasses, as is evident specifically in the work of Khayri Shalabi and Idris ‘Ali, reflect and


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participate in modern life, but in ways that are often unexpected and unique. In short, while the downtown was the most important visual symbol for this staged replication of a European modernity, in practice, modernity, as it was produced and contested on the ground, was much more an act of improvisation between different classes, Egyptian nationals, and European expatriates. So why is there a resurgence of interest in this former city center in contemporary Egyptian literature? Why this area in particular? As I alluded to earlier, it is my contention that in the act of staging and requiring the performance of modernity in the space of the spectacularly rendered French design of the “downtown,” the area became a contested space. The battle over the ownership and function of this space was, in effect, a debate over what it meant be modern. Nowhere is this contestation more apparent than in the mass riots and fires in 1952 that left many Western establishments burned and looted. The permanent destruction of these buildings may be read as a way of responding to the question, whose modernity was it? Clearly the modernity of a foreign Western elite was no longer acceptable to the masses, who were largely excluded from the spectacle of upper-class consumption habits anyway. Rather, it would be the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser that would define the trajectory of the project of modernity in Egypt from that point forward. The Making of Downtown Cairo as Modern Stage There is a spectre haunting social theory and that spectre is nineteenth century Paris . . . If modernity meant the urbanization of the mind (Schlor 1998) it often implied a specifically urban experience, whereby Paris came to be a metonym for both urban life, urbanity, and modernity. —Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, Thinking Space16

To study downtown Cairo as a social process involving contest is to understand how the various phases of modernization, colonial rule, the nationalist movement, and modernity as a social and aesthetic experience have intersected and left their imprint in one unique urban space. Wust al-Balad in Cairo is the palimpsest of those multiple histories and the novels that tell the story of this space unearth the traces of these movements as they have altered the city center across two centuries. In reexamining the history of this space through a number of fictional works, it becomes clear the extent to which Janet Abu-Lughod’s embrace of the idea of Cairo as a “dual city” in her expansive work on Cairo (where the downtown functions at one extreme as the modern, wealthy Gold Coast and the old districts, for example, Fatimid Cairo, exist on the other) is limited in that it fails to describe the way in which the downtown was used, consumed (Michel de Certeau)17 and produced (Henri Lefebvre),18 albeit often through contest, by multiple classes throughout the twentieth century. Nancy


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Reynolds, in her work on commodity culture in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century, also critiques the depiction of Cairo during the liberal period as genuinely bifurcated (socially, geographically, and commercially) by arguing that modernity was not simply “grafted” on to one part of town apart from old Islamic Cairo, but rather involved a give-and-take between the existing spheres of commercial culture and the newer sites of commerce and recreation. In her reading, not only were there baladi stores intermixed between the more modern stores in the new city center, but al-Muski Street (running from the area of old Islamic Cairo through to al-‘Ataba Square) and al-‘Ataba Square become compelling zones of such mixing.19 This will become further evident as we look at the work of Radwa ‘Ashur, Kharyi Shalabi, Idris ‘Ali, and Alaa al-Aswany, whose portraits of Egyptian effendis, migrants, and members of the lower and upper classes remind us of the presence of multiple invisible groups in the downtown district. Far from depicting an isolated enclave of foreign-owned businesses and a Western way of life, their research offers a more tenuous portrait of the downtown as a spectacular exhibition space where Egyptians of all classes as well as foreigners struggled to make this newly emerging modern stage their own. More broadly, we will examine the process through which the downtown was progressively transformed at the hands of Khedive Isma‘il, then under the British, and eventually by the throngs of people who set fire to the city. The people’s response to this space—the practices of their daily lives, their consumption, the demonstrations, and their physical acts to mar the space—will be read as improvised negotiations of modernity as well as acts of contest. This vacillation between repulsion and attraction to the modern and the Western will be considered as paradigmatic of what has come to constitute modern Egyptian life.20 To further this point, it is important to explore the fetishizing of Paris as the model of the modern city par excellence in the eyes of the Khedive. The works of David Harvey on Paris (2006), Gwendolyn Wright (1991) on French colonial design more generally, Jean-Luc Arnaud (1998), Janet Abu-Lughod (1971), André Raymond (2000), Jamal Hamdan (1967), and Max Rodenbeck (1999) are instructive in this regard, especially with respect to how Paris as urban ideal influenced the urbanization of Cairo. Revisiting the History of Cairo’s Downtown: Echoes of Paris To organize a new country is essentially to invent—to invent the future. —Algred de Tarde, a lieutenant in General Hubert Lyautey’s army in Morocco21

To read about the transformation of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70) under Georges-Eugène Haussmann, one cannot help but see the connections between the types of utopian fantasies, expansion projects, and social concerns plaguing that city and their corollary in the changes taking place in Cairo. While


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Khedive Isma‘il’s plans for Cairo were, like his predecessors (namely, Muhammad ‘Ali and Sa‘id Pasha), similarly inspired by French modernization schemes, it would ultimately be the grandiosity and excessive borrowing required to subsidize his vision that would bankrupt Egypt and facilitate the forty-year British occupation of the country. In 1867, when Isma‘il traveled to Paris for the Exposition Universelle (the World’s Fair), it was his fascination with Haussmann’s urban-planning models that inspired him to use Paris as the prototype on which his new modern district in Cairo would be based. Where the stimulation of the French economy by the mass production of textiles and the circulation of capital in Paris (across the classes of financiers, bankers, and merchants) facilitated the financing of many of the development projects, in Cairo—by contrast— Khedive Isma‘il primarily used new revenue generated by the cotton boom as well as credit he was granted from European lenders and European investors in the city to enable him to create his “piece of Europe” in the flooding grounds alongside the Nile, west of the old city (today referred to as Islamic Cairo).22 Thus where Haussmann was ultimately interested in a totalizing project that would reshape the whole of Paris,23 Khedive Isma‘il’s production of European modernity in Cairo was very much compartmentalized in one district, the area that was to be called “Isma‘iliyya,” in order to prepare for the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the host of dignitaries that were planning to visit from abroad. While both development schemes in Paris and Cairo were based on the spectacle of consumption and imperial pageantry made possible by wide boulevards, public gardens, and the large department stores and cafés that lined these areas, the evolution of this space in Paris and Cairo would, in the long run, depend more on the classes and neighborhoods circulating around them rather than on those wealthy enough to participate in the performance of the modern for which these spaces were designed. I will return to the connection between Paris and Cairo later in my discussion of Wust al-Balad. For now, let us turn to the early strides that were taken from 1798 onward to modernize the city before the dramatic redevelopment plans ushered in by Khedive Isma‘il. The process of modernizing Cairo, according to most accounts, is thought to have been initiated by Napoleon’s brief occupation of Egypt in 1798 (a vainglorious attempt to push back against British imperial power in India) and continued through the implementation of various projects through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. Yet according to André Raymond’s comprehensive work Cairo (2000), the French occupation made only small gains in the matter of urban development, although some of their attentiveness to the particularities of Cairo (i.e., the small winding streets and alleyways) laid the groundwork for future modernization projects. In much the same way that Haussmann in Paris was alerted to the connection between public hygiene and mass epidemics (and therefore sought to reform the system of potable water and sewage), so too did the French seek to implement a certain number of sanitary measures in Cairo


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during their short occupation, although these only met with partial success in their early stages.24 Among them, the French required the installation of street lamps to light the dim alleys in front of residential buildings and storefronts. Owners were required to sweep and clean the streets and ensure that garbage was kept out of the way. The gates dividing quarters were demolished and the benches outside of shops were forbidden so they could not be used as barricades in the event of a riot. Furthermore, ordinances were devised forbidding the burial of the dead in cemeteries within the city and the tombs at the Azbakiyya cemetery were demolished, all in an effort to make the city more hygienic and orderly.25 With the ousting of the French and the emergence of the Albanian Muhammad Ali (circa 1769–1848) as the Ottoman viceroy in Egypt (helped along by the British), immediate measures were taken to seize control of the lands occupied by the religious institutions in the city. After a legendary duping of the Mamluk officials in the Citadel and the subsequent execution of the remaining three thousand Mamluks in the city, Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha was in the rare position of being able to take over the lands owned by the religious authorities and assume complete control over the city’s public works. Once the land of al-Azhar and the numerous other mosques of the city fell under his control, he was able to proceed unchallenged with his modernization plans for the country. After consultation with the French, ‘Ali Pasha invested in large-scale planting of cotton in an effort to stimulate the economy and bring in revenue. The establishment of a number of canals also helped make more land fertile for cultivation. The revenues from these new harvests, according to Max Rodenbeck, made Egypt “rich” and “thrust the country into the gears of global trade and finance.”26 Over the next seventy years, the heirs to Muhammad ‘Ali’s throne would use this wealth to establish a quasi-empire that would become home to thousands of foreigners from all across Europe. In addition to his stimulation of the economy, ‘Ali Pasha reorganized the government offices and established a draft to man his new army. Furthermore, he encouraged foreigners to come to Cairo to train Egyptian teachers, geographers, doctors, and engineers in secular forms of education and public works administration. With this new foreign influence in education, a new class of effendis (or the effendiyya) was created, and with their new bureaucratic titles came a new set of class customs as well as forms of identification that were largely alien to native Egyptians. Lucie Ryzova writes that the term “effendi” should be thought of not merely in terms of a class situation, but more as “a cultural term, and one that is related to social mobility [and] . . . to passages from non-modernity to modernity in its many forms.”27 She argues that in order to understand the effendis as “an emerging social group” (however heterogeneous), it is necessary to look at their consumption practices, their Western-influenced forms of socialization (dress, manners, etc.), as well as their identification away from the more traditional modes of thought and behavior that characterized the generation of their parents.28 What


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Ryzova is right to point out in her article is that as the cultural and socioeconomic environment in Egypt changed over the nineteenth century, so did the role and definition of the effendi class. By the turn of the twentieth century, this class that had formerly been an extension of state bureaucracy, was gradually more and more characterized by their nationalist views and the identification of themselves as “‘Egyptians’ in national terms.”29 Interestingly, their allegiance well into the interwar period to a European form of modernity—based on the idea of progress, social mobility, and the desires of this class to participate through their cultural practices and consumption habits in a modern Cairo— laid the necessary groundwork for a broad-based nationalist platform built on the promise of modernization. With respect to Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha’s urban development, modernization projects were initiated, but not with Cairo specifically as the focus. In fact ‘Ali Pasha concentrated more on the expansion and development of Alexandria as a port city (for the exportation of heavy raw materials, such as cotton and sugar cane) to connect Egypt’s commerce with that of the rest of Europe. Thus he is credited with having reformed the political and administrative system, as well as restructuring the army and the economy; however, in the matter of Cairo, the city was said to have “changed little in appearance” during his reign.30 To his credit he did take it upon himself to initiate a number of roads that would serve as primary arteries connecting various parts of the city. As the story goes, ‘Ali Pasha was given the gift of a carriage by the French government (Chateaubriand specifically) in 1824, and with the proliferation of carriages among the ruling class in Cairo to more than thirty by 1840, it became evident that if these new transportation devices were to circulate, they would need roads as an alternative to the winding streets of the city. Thus began a plan to initiate the building of two new streets: the first, al-Sikka al-Jadida, or the “New Road” (now al-Muski Street) was created, extending through the old city from west to east connecting the al-Muski quarter to al-Azhar (to open up the old city to European merchants from the Azbakiyya area, and the second, Muhammad ‘Ali Boulevard, which was designed to run from Azbakiyya to the Citadel. The project was begun in 1845, but was finished during the reign of Khedive Isma‘il. Raymond notes that many of the changes after 1830 that would prepare the city for the eventual urban development under Isma‘il were undertaken by Muhammad ‘Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha, who assumed rule after his father’s death in 1848. These include the leveling of debris surrounding the city and the filling in of certain lowland areas that were vulnerable to the annual flooding of the Nile. In fact, the draining of the Azbakiyya pond made way for the development of the Azbakiyya gardens, a European-style garden modeled by Pierre Grand and Barillet-Deschamps after the Parc Monceau in Paris.31 In time, a number of hotels (including Shepheard’s) and a palace were built to overlook the gardens.32 Other so-called modernization measures occurred that more dramatically added to the new aesthetic that was shaping the city. Many of


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these were initiated by the fast-growing class of foreigners (Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Armenians) who continued to pressure the viceroy for changes that spoke to their tastes and customs. For example, a law was passed forbidding the building of the traditional mashrabiyya,33 supposedly for safety reasons. In their place, glass windows and balconies were installed in many of the new apartment buildings. In 1847 Cairo’s houses received numbers, which was part of the overall attempt by Muhammad ‘Ali to systematize the organization of the city. In addition, the Bulaq district grew tremendously as the site of new industries, including textile factories and printing works. As this area grew and was increasingly viewed as the center of industry, a system of transport was needed to connect the factories established here to the shipping port of Alexandria. Thus between 1848 and 1854, under the rule of ‘Abbas Pasha, a railway was developed that would connect Cairo from the Bab al-Hadid station (the neighboring district of Bulaq on the eastern bank of the Nile) to Alexandria. The emergence of this transportation system would reposition Cairo as the center of Egypt’s new commercial activity. A second significant development that would forever change the role of Egypt as a key source of raw goods for the European empires was the treaty that was signed in 1854 between Ferdinand de Lesseps (the French consul to Egypt at the time) and Sa‘id Pasha (‘Abbas Pasha’s son). The signing of this agreement established the Suez Canal as one of the most important shipping routes in colonial history, connecting the raw materials of the East to the centers of industry in Europe.34 It is necessary to briefly return to Mitchell’s thesis on modernity to see if we might better understand the effect of Khedive Isma‘il’s plan on the social organization of Cairo. To recap, Mitchell argues that the exportation of modernity to Egypt required the staging of this modernity as representation. According to Mitchell, it was this fascination with the act of representation, the worldas-picture, that best captures what the exportation of colonial modernity was all about. And this fascination with the picture, image, or model thus elicits an equal fascination with the idea of the real or the original. In this case, the real became the notion of a fixed, spatially located modernity thought to exist in Europe. As Mitchell puts it, The significance of this world-as-picture for understanding the colonialmodern lies in the fact that representation always makes a double claim. On the one hand, something set up as a representation denies its own reality. The representational text, image, model, game, structure, or project, however realistic, always asserts that it is only a text, a mere picture, a copy, a play, a scheme, a framework, an abstraction, a projection, not something real. It defines itself by what it lacks, its missing originality, its immateriality, its want of immediate presence, by the gap in time, space and substance that separates it from the real thing. On the other hand, in asserting its own lack, a representation claims that the world it replicates, projects, reorganizes, enacts, or endows with meaning and structure must be, by contrast, original, material, immediately


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Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature The shaded area marks the territory of Cairo’s old city.

The street grid marks Khedive Isma‘il’s proposed area of development.

Figure 1.1 Isma‘il’s Cairo (1869–70), after Abu-Lughod (map originally published in André Raymond’s Le Caire and reproduced by permission from Études & Cartographie, Librarie Arthème Fayard, and Harvard University Press)

present, complete in itself, without lack, undelayed, filling out its own time and space—in a word (what we imagine as) real. Colonial European modernity stages the endless set-up that pictures and promises us this complete, unmediated, self-present, immediate reality.35

So the idea of a modern Europe is thus born out of what it is not, that is, its Other—the premodern, non-Western, Oriental world. Or to put another way, to echo Edward Said, it is only in the creation of the “Other” that the European modern subject is born. Interestingly, Khedive Isma‘il was captivated by the representation of Egypt at the Exposition Universelle in 1867 and, in fact, willingly performed the role of the Egyptian royal in the Parisian display.


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At the same exposition, however, he was taken with the models showcasing Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s new Paris. It was this newly designed capital that he would take as the ideal image for the new center of Cairo. But to do so in time for the inauguration of the Suez Canal would require him to erect it in miniature and to do so on previously unused land. The decision to use virgin land enabled him to avoid the complications that surely would have arisen had he tried to integrate the older quarters of Cairo with his new European aesthetic. In addition, he needed investors who would be willing to start businesses and residences in the area that would add to the overall spectacle of wealth and consumption. He found them among the wealthy foreign families in Cairo and among the Egyptian aristocracy. Of course, in the long run, the Khedive’s complete indifference to the older districts of Cairo (in terms of their architectural and infrastructural neglect) would prove a mistake, resulting in a series of acts protesting the elitism and colonial stronghold that this new area came to represent (namely, the ‘Urabi rebellion of 1881–82, the revolution of 1919, the workers protest in 1946, and the fires and subsequent revolution in July 1952). But despite Isma‘il’s admiration of Haussmann’s Paris, he did not create, except on a superficial level, Paris in Cairo. According to Jean-Luc Arnaud,

Figure 1.2 The Shepheard’s Hotel (photograph from Lehnert & Landrock, Cairo, Egypt)


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Figure 1.3


Ramsis Railway Station (postcard)

many of the fundamentals of Haussmann’s plans—a complex sewage network to reduce disease and improve the quality of drinking water, a transportation system that would link the poorer suburbs to the center—were ignored for more aesthetic goals. If the Khedive desired to render Cairo comparable to Paris, he did not equip himself with the same means. The image that he retained was one of appearances: of straight streets fixed and bordered by well-aligned buildings, certain spaces with geometric forms and public monuments, which had no specific position nor status in an urban space. He had not understood that what was more important to the transformation of Paris concerned the underground network. Ismail was well-equipped with the resources as well as the personnel who, on the subject of the general organization of services, were well aware of his incomprehension of the Parisian model. Moreover, Haussmann had some worries concerning the cheapness of Cairene work. The Khedive had to remain the uncontested master of the reforms of the city; he had to have all of the control and this exercise of power is incompatible with a hierarchical administration, of the sort that belonged to Haussmann.36

While Isma‘il was intent on creating a capital to rival those he had seen in Europe, he also, according to Arnaud, was pragmatic about the best way to proceed to achieve his ends in the shortest possible time. Following the inauguration of the Suez Canal in November 1869, the plans for the downtown


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changed at least two more times (in 1871 and again in 1874) and certain zones that Isma‘il intended to develop were abandoned for lack of time and increasing indebtedness to foreign lenders. The project from the start was expensive and ambitious and to get it under way he solicited the help of the French engineer Pierre Grand (who prepared the majority of maps, specifically the map from 1874) and the Egyptian engineer ‘Ali Pasha Mubarak. It was Mubarak who understood how this Western quarter would fit into the greater schema of the city and he set about establishing a new system of urban administration that would officially map the Eastern older quarters, with the industrial area of Bulaq, and connect those to the new European downtown. In addition, he was charged with supervising education in Cairo, and thus established a number of schools designed after secular British and French models in the center of the city.37 On the creation of Isma‘iliyya, Raymond writes, The new plan was directly inspired by the Haussmannian model: a network of straightened, widened thoroughfares would connect a dozen squares (maydans), and New Street would be extended to the desert east of Cairo. But owing to lack of time and money, construction was limited chiefly to a vacant zone northwest of the old city between the road to Bulaq, Bab al-Luq, the road to Old Cairo (present day Qasr al-Ayni Street), and the bank of the Nile, comprising an area of some 250 hectares. This sector would give the city a facade of urban respectability, while the old city remained largely unaltered . . . By the end of Isma‘il’s reign, only a few hundred buildings had yet been erected, but the structure of the district had been laid out, and the maps of the day (Pierre Grand’s in particular) show the location of the great arteries of the future: Qasr al-Nil, Sulayman Pasha, and Qasr al-Ayni Streets.38

To accentuate this modern space in the city thus meant a casting out or a demarcation of the urban spaces that were considered—in their aesthetic, logic, and the social practices they elicited—premodern (i.e., the old city). Thus the situating of the opera house in the district of Azbekiyya, neighboring the old city, exemplifies quite well Mitchell’s idea of a modern consciousness emergent only in the interstices. Here lay one of the starkest contrasts imaginable: the juxtaposition of the European-fashioned gardens (equipped with a tobacco stand and shooting gallery) and European opera house next to the heart of Fatimid Cairo. It was as if the spectator were in the Exposition Universelle itself, privy to observe the spectacle of modernity ever more brought into relief alongside the spectacle of Islamic Cairo as a premodern Orient.39 The new Cairo was modeled in every respect after an exhibition and the inaugural ceremonies for the opening of the Suez Canal ensured an audience of foreign spectators. In fact, the Khedive responded in kind to the French reconstruction of “Egypt” in the Paris Exposition of 1867 by creating a palace on the Nile after the model of the buildings lining the Tuileries. The rooms within were designed as copied


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renditions of those of the Empress Eugénie’s (the wife of Napoleon III) apartment in Paris. With the construction of the new European district and these other likenesses to the French capital, the Khedive suggested that he too could authorize something of a cultural staging. Here the idea of an original “Europe” was performed back to the Europeans in the heart of Oriental Egypt. Aside from the opera house and gardens, the Isma‘iliyya quarter, in its architecture, its streets, and its emphasis on places of consumption, is the clearest example of the fascinating way in which modernity was staged in Cairo. Khedive Isma‘il had turned to the community of foreigners to find investors for the new structures he wished to erect. Not only did he find willing investors who lined his new boulevards with cafés, department stores, and restaurants, but in so doing he attracted members of this community to patronize these establishments as well as those Egyptian effendiyya who had begun cultivating certain Western tastes and habits. Thus, as many scholars have suggested, two separate cultural communities emerged.40 This distinction is summed up by Janet Abu-Lughod and quoted also in Edward Said’s essay on Aida: “Thus by the end of the nineteenth century Cairo consisted of two distinct physical communities, divided one from the other by barriers much broader than the little single street that marked their borders. The discontinuity between Egypt’s past and future, which appeared as a small crack in the early nineteenth century had widened into a gaping fissure by the end of that century. The city’s

Figure 1.4


Opera Square (photograph from Lehnert & Landrock, Cairo, Egypt)

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physical duality was but a manifestation of the cultural cleavage . . . In short, on all critical points the two cities, despite their physical contiguity, were miles apart socially and centuries apart technologically.”41 While the construction of a seemingly two-tiered city, one for foreigners and one for “natives,” is a common phenomenon in the history of many of the former European colonies (take, for example, Rio de Janeiro, San Juan, Algiers), what is interesting here is that much of this segregation and partitioning occurred before the occupation of the British in 1882. In light of the fact that the district was originally conceived under a Turko-Circassion khedive and upper-class strata, according to Galila El Kadi and Dalila Elkerdany (and also borrowing from the work of Arnaud), Cairo’s downtown has never been exclusively identified with the British colonial administration. Rather it has historically been associated with “the agency, presence, and identification of Egyptian elites, middle classes and popular classes, before, during, and after the colonial period.”42 That said, it must not be ignored that the influx of new capital into Egypt from the mid- to late nineteenth century was the result of a quasi-colonial system of commercial activity perpetuated as much by this elite class as by the interests of the British and the French. Both countries extracted vast amounts of resources from Egypt, which added to the prospering and proliferation of their industries at home. The extent to which Isma‘il Pasha was duped by the overtures of the foreign statesmen is vividly described by Laila Shukry El-Hamamsy in two passages by Lord Milner and Lacouture: The foreigners took advantage of Isma‘il’s extravagance and gullibility at every turn. Their looting of Egypt was described by Lord Milner as follows: “It is hard to imagine the complete unscrupulousness with which diplomatic agents used their influence to make a weak Egypt yield to their most extravagant demands. At the same time, the purpose behind obtaining a concession was not to carry out some project, but to invent some complaint which would allow the contract to be broken and then turn to the government for compensation.” Lacouture, using even stronger words, refers to the behavior of the Europeans during Isma‘il’s period as “this whirl of intrigues, this solemn ballet of tricksters, this auctioning of Egypt by a Europe whose thieves were disguised as diplomats, and the diplomats as thieves.”43

Thus while the Egyptian Khedive was compensated for the exportation of raw goods, his extravagant spending in redesigning Cairo and courting the royals ultimately left the country bankrupt and the Suez Canal in British hands. The European banks that had gladly extended him loans, jettisoned Isma‘il into a debt that reached more than £100 million.44 His inability to pay them resulted in his deposition by the Ottoman sultan. He went into exile in 1879 and left the country to his son Tawfiq, whose weak rule forced the British to take control out of fear that the country might fall into the hands of the fiery nationalist


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Ahmad ‘Urabi. By 1882 the British occupied Egypt and had taken control of Cairo, using the area just south of the Egyptian National Museum as the barracks for British troops. But the “staging of modernity” in Isma‘iliyya was about much more than just the addition of a European edifice to a district in the city. The idea that progress was related to the circulation of capital and the new public displays of consumption was central to what modernity came to represent in the imagination of Europeans and Egyptians alike. As Susan Buck-Morss puts it in her work on Walter Benjamin and the Arcades project, “Progress became a religion in the nineteenth century, world expositions its holy shrines, commodities its cult objects, and Haussmann’s ‘new’ Paris its Vatican City.”45 To take the religious analogy a step further: it was through the act of consumption, whether eating or drinking in public, buying goods, or admiring the display of commodities at the Universal Expositions, that people signaled their faith in a capitalist modernity. Echoing this, on Paris as the modern city par excellence, Buck-Morss writes, Urban brilliance and luxury were not new in history, but secular, public access to them was. The splendor of the modern city could be experienced by everyone who strolled its boulevards and parks, or visited its department stores, museums, art galleries, and national monuments. Paris, a “looking-glass city,” dazzled the crowd, but at the same time deceived it. The City of Light, it erased night’s darkness—first with gas lanterns, then with electricity, then with neon lights—in the space of a century. The City of Mirrors—in which the crowd itself became a spectacle—it reflected the image of people as consumers rather than producers, keeping the class relations of production virtually invisible on the looking glass’ other side.46

Haussmann’s new ordering of the capital city represented one thing to both Parisians and foreign visitors: the celebration of the commodity fetish. This involved the excitement generated by the new goods and technologies on display at the Exposition Universelle, as well as the flagrant displays of wealth and consumption along the boulevards. As David Harvey puts it in his work Paris, Capital of Modernity, “Haussmann wanted to make Paris a modern capital worthy of France, if not of western civilization. In the end he simply helped make it a city in which the circulation of capital became the real imperial power.”47 It was not the boom in industry that accounted for the influx of capital, and thus more spending, rather it was the new way in which Haussmann’s large streets and glass storefronts made the act of buying into something performative where the consumers become part of the spectacle. On the commodity as spectacle Harvey writes, The increasing power of the commodity itself as spectacle was nowhere better expressed than in the new department stores. The Bon Marché, opening in 1852,


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was the pioneer: it was followed by the Louvre in 1855 . . . Such high turnover stores needed a large clientele drawn from all over the city, and the new boulevards facilitated such movement. The shop windows were organized as an enticement to stop and gaze. The commodities visibly piled high inside the department stores became a spectacle in their own right. The stores were open to the street and encouraged entry to the public without obligation to buy.48

As Buck-Morss and Harvey both point out, it was the new public access to these entertainments that became emblematic of a shift in social practice and consciousness in Paris during the Second Empire. Many of these department stores and cafés “spilled out onto the sidewalks of the new boulevard, [making] the boundary between public and private spaces porous.”49 Furthermore the proliferation of concert houses, popular operas, theaters, as well as public parks and squares encouraged a new kind of sociality that largely revolved around certain forms of commercial activity. This was true as much in Paris as it was in Cairo, where, as Mitchell points out, “the new facades of the city, like the display of commodities at the exhibition, could be taken as a series of signs or representations . . . of the larger economic changes ‘underneath’.”50 These facades, as exhibits or representations of an “external reality” that was modern Europe, were the most manifest example of the way in which the global trade of cotton had forever changed the relationship between Egypt and imperial Europe. To reiterate, this new Egyptian modernity was thus a representation or a hybridized form of the imagined “real modernity” existing in Europe. Thus, on the one hand, these facades stood as a testament to the new wealth that benefited Egypt for close to a century while simultaneously hiding the labor involved in the creation of this wealth, while on the other hand, to echo Sabry Hafez, on a social level, this simulated Europe reflected the hegemony of the European project of modernity and progress, which the Khedive had willingly bought into. Implicit in the carving out of this new “modern space” was the idea that new “modern subjects” would emerge as actors in this modernity. Eventually, with the British occupation, these subjects would ideally act in accordance with the new colonial state to help bring about the necessary political and social transformations required to usher Egypt into the twentieth century. Following their official takeover in 1882, the British chose this new downtown as the center of their administrative and residential life. In addition to building the British barracks on the site that is today the Nile Hilton in Tahrir Square, they established a residential neighborhood in the area that came to be called “Garden City” for its numerous trees (inspired by Sir Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City Movement,” popular in the United Kingdom and parts of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century). Again


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modeled after a European neighborhood, colonial apartment buildings and large villas were built for the ruling British classes. Zamalik was created as a chic neighborhood of villas when the Swiss Baehler company bought land in the northern section of al-Gezira (one of the large islands surrounded by the Nile River). In 1905 Baron Empain, a Belgian businessman taken with Egypt, bought a huge tract of land on the ancient site of the city of Heliopolis (or Misr al-Gadida as it was called) with the intention of turning it into a new suburb away from the capital. He also got permission to construct a tramway that would run from this suburb on the far northeastern edge of the city into the center of town and by 1909 the tramway was up and running. This would eventually grow to be the track on which the contemporary subway in Cairo runs today.51 With foreign money flowing into the city, Wust al-Balad bustled with new shops and department stores catering to the tastes of foreigners and effendiyya. Max Rodenbeck captures the aura: With money gushing in from the postwar boom, the native and foreign elites began to mingle more freely . . . As Egyptians took up tennis and golf, poker and bridge, even the Gezira Sporting Club began to admit a token few smart-set natives . . . Department stores like Cicurel, Hannaux, Orosdi-Back and Sednaoui catered to the new tastes with the latest fashions from Paris and the catalogues of Christophle, Louis Vuitton and Mappin & Webb. Even middle-class Egyptians now sported jackets and ties. . . . The streets of the city centre, with their rusticated and cupolaed apartment houses, traffic lights and café awnings, recreated the life of European boulevards down to the last detail. A stroll down ‘Imad al-Din Street would take one past such establishments as Tonazakis’ Patisserie, Claridge’s Restaurant-Bar . . . and Joseph Glaser, frame-maker, next to the Empire Cinema.52

Arjun Appadurai reminds us in his discussion on the production of ethnoscapes that any act of creating a neighborhood means one is also creating a frame or a context for social action to occur in a meaningful way. With this, he writes, “the production of a neighborhood is inherently colonizing, in the sense that it involves the assertion of socially (often ritually) organized power over places and settings that are viewed as potentially chaotic or rebellious.”53 Thus it is important to understand the production of this neighborhood, Isma‘iliyya or Wust al-Balad, as the constructing of a frame for producing meaning and, in terms of the goals of the British administration, for producing a functioning modern subject. To understand the connection between space and its role in the production of modern subjectivity, it might be useful here to turn to a comparative example that underscores the link between the Project of Enlightenment and the transformation of colonial urban space.54 Joseph Slaughter, in his reading of


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the master plans of colonial Nairobi against Marjorie Macgoye’s novel Coming to Birth, is one such example. In his analysis of their project he writes that the plan’s drafters valorize the role of town planning and urban development in the civilizing process, and they take very seriously the notion that spatial organization can encourage or hinder the development of a civil subject . . . [They] similarly argue for the capacity of urban spatial development to create the necessary social, political, and economic conditions that will produce a new civic subject liberated from physical disease and moral degeneracy by the atmospheric action of proper urbanization. Part of their forward-looking goal is the preparation of the African subject for civic participation and civil responsibility . . . The plan begs the question about the type of African it hopes to produce through the organization of space . . . , but it becomes clear throughout the report that this urban African is expected to be a tinged copy of the urban Englishman, and the drafters keep a civic faith that he can be produced through the modernist arrangement of space.55

In the case of Nairobi, the colonial administrators attempted to “modernize” on the level of the neighborhood by adapting the “relational logic of the ‘tribe’” into a capitalist ethic that was meant to encourage the desire for social mobility. The hope was that the African native, if situated in the right “European-type town,” would be transformed from a rural communitarian to a modern, urban individualist. In the case of Cairo, the battle for the modern subject is no more apparent than in the changing allegiances of the effendiyya class. Initially, at least in the late nineteenth century, we might think of the effendi in terms of the sort of “civic slab” 56 of which Slaughter speaks; that is, someone who served as a vessel for the discourse of modernity and as a model actor in his attempts to embody the ideals of progress as put forth by the state. Ultimately the effendi who were members of the lower or middle classes hoped their education and participation in any one of a number of professions in colonial Egypt (as civil servants, teachers, clerks, merchants, and technical workers) would make them more socially mobile. However, as Lucie Ryzova’s work demonstrates, and part of what makes this group elusive, is that the effendiyya class believed in the power of social mobility to be transformative. As we cited earlier, the effendis, from Ryzova’s research, “are always in the process of becoming something else.”57 The concept itself, she argues, is necessarily linked to the passage from nonmodernity to modernity. According to Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, a common thread shared by this cultural group was exposure to a Western style of education, giving students access to many of the secular ideas that would later be used in their anticolonial campaigns and nationalist struggle. In this respect, as Gershoni and Jankowski point out, “The effendi cohort was the embodiment


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of modern Egypt: those social formations thrown up by the massive changes of the recent past, and correspondingly most representative of what the nation was in the process of becoming.”58 And while the “tarboosh wearers,” as the effendiyya were called, fraternized with foreigners through the turn of the century, it soon became clear that the British had no interest in allowing them to penetrate their ranks of power and thus kept subverting their attempts to be a genuine force in the country. As a result of this discrimination, more and more the urban Egyptian elite began to see their interests no longer aligned with those of the British colonial regime. The Ahmad ‘Urabi rebellion of 1882 and the Sa‘d Zaghlul revolution of 1919 were only the first signs of Egyptian opposition to this colonial modernity. As the effendi class grew more clear in their aims, and more nativist in their assertions of Egyptian authenticity and the right to an independent nation, the primacy of the class of foreigners, with their wealthy enclaves and displays of modern consumption, increasingly became symbols of a colonial hegemony that fell more and more under attack. Furthermore, the divisions that had marked the city almost a century before, with the reforms of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, had only gotten worse. Following World War I, a decline in agricultural production brought a mass wave of immigration into the city center. In 1882 the population of Cairo was 374,000, but by 1937 it had quadrupled to a reported 1,312,000 residents, many of whom had left their rural villages because of overpopulation and poverty.59 Meanwhile the population of foreign-born residents increased significantly during British rule, such that by 1927 there were more than 76,000 foreigners in Cairo.60 These included British, French, Italians, Greeks, Levantine Arabs, Armenians, and Maltese. And by the end of World War II the physical divide between the community of foreigners and native Egyptians could not have been more stark. The old quarters of the city (Gamaliyya, Bab al-Sha‘riyya, al-Muski, and Darb al-Ahmar) that had long been neglected by Isma‘il and the colonial administration were further burdened with housing the influx of new migrants to the city (from 1882 to 1927 the population in these areas increased by 112 percent). This was also true in the areas of and around Bulaq, which were now shouldering an increase in residents of more than 120 percent, and those around Old Cairo, which witnessed nearly the same increase during this period.61 Indeed, this downtown quarter of Isma‘iliyya, or Wust al-Balad as it is referred to now, is the area of Cairo that spatially best reflects the colonial encounter and its lasting imprint on the city. Yet it is also the same area where, fifty years later, anticolonial protests would be staged and where, on the eve of the nationalist revolution, in January 1952, numerous foreign-owned buildings would go up in flames. Thus the symbolic value of the area is layered and diverse. The area stands as a testament to the nineteenth century utopian aspirations to modernize, the violence of the colonial encounter via the establishment of the British barracks in the early twentieth century, the euphoria of the nationalist demonstrations and


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subsequent revolution, and the political debates and aspirations of the secular intellectuals and artists who, from the 1930s and 1940s onward, used the bars and cafés for heated discussions and organizing. It is, to borrow from Mitchell once more, the site par excellence of those many “discrepant histories” that fill in the meaning of modernity as it was enacted and serialized in Egypt. A Literary Sociology: Maps as Method While I will return to the role of representation and its relationship to Wust alBalad in the next chapter, I would like to digress briefly to say a few words about mapmaking and the relationship of narrative to maps. In what ways is the map still largely part of a colonial legacy and in what ways might maps function as part of the psychic process of decolonization? Can the act of mapping a space function as an act of reappropriating the space for the cartographer? It hardly needs mentioning that the historical role of maps is largely associated with the colonial paternalism of the former European colonies, serving as one of a host of masterly acts we now recognize as an important tool for colonial governance and necessarily critique. Reminding us of this history, Mitchell writes, In recent years the production of maps has often been taken to epitomize the character of colonial power, and by extension the power of the modern state. The map signifies the massive production of knowledge, the accuracy of calculation, and the entire politics based upon a knowledge of population and territory that Foucault characterizes as governmentality, the characteristic power of the modern state. The map can also be said to prefigure the work of twentieth-century economics, defining a contained geographical space to be organized later as a national-economy and addressing issues of statistical information that were to play a central role.62

Here Mitchell not only illustrates, in the tradition of Benedict Anderson, how the map-as-image became a way for the colonizer to conceive of the modern nation-state as a visual space but also goes one step further to suggest that it even served as one of the first diagrams that would be used to control information for the purpose of the nascent national economy. In contrast to this position, Graham Huggan, in his consideration of the function of maps in postcolonial Canadian and Australian literature (borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), suggests instances in which the map can function as a far more open and flexible space, accommodating difference and diverse positionalities to capture the “shifting ground” of social space instead of attempting to capture “literal truth.” In this formulation, the act of mapping functions as a form of “creative revisionism,” which subverts the act of containment to instead unearth “new territories” previously “outlawed or neglected by dominant discourses.”63 Here maps take on an organic quality.


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Defining and controlling space is not the goal. Rather, each map is reflective of a stage in one’s seeing. Similarly Huggan argues for a form of cartography that undermines the stability of that which is calculable and measurable. In this he points to the more liberatory possibilities of the act of mapping: the role of cartography . . . in post-colonial writing . . . cannot be solely envisaged as the reworking of a particular spatial paradigm, but consists rather in the implementation of a series of creative revisions which register the transition from a colonial framework within which the writer is compelled to recreate and reflect upon the restrictions of colonial space to a post-colonial one within which he or she acquires the freedom to engage in a series of “territorial disputes” which implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the relativity of modes of spatial (and, by extension, cultural) perception. So while the map continues to feature in one sense as a paradigm of colonial discourse, its deconstruction and/or revisualization permits a “disidentification” from the procedures of colonialism (and other hegemonic discourses) and a (re)engagement in the ongoing process of cultural decolonization.64

The Egyptian novels that will be examined here may be considered cartographies of (re)engagement to the extent to which they offer a critical depiction of the district of Wust al-Balad either through the point of view of a subaltern narrator or by juxtaposing the symbolism of one milieu to the extreme living conditions in other parts of the city. The narrators in these novels refocus our gaze on the shadow spaces or underworlds occupied by the underclasses to document the existence of these marginal communities. But the “creative revisionism” of these cartographic novels is not just in the marginal classes that many of them depict; it is compounded by the way in which these novels critically revisit the colonial encounter and the subsequent nationalist fervor in a manner attentive to the spatial politics at work in the area of Wust al-Balad. By reconsidering the site in which colonial modernity was performed, these novels illuminate the extent to which the battle for and over space is central to the production of Egyptian identity in the contemporary moment. Mitchell discusses maps in the context of Egypt’s history as instruments of colonial control, and Huggan refers to mapping in literature as a metaphor for narrative acts of cultural decolonization, while Franco Moretti discusses the possibilities for maps to act as “analytic tools” for understanding space as a dimension of literature. For him, “maps bring to light the internal logic of narrative: the semiotic domain around which a plot coalesces and self-organizes.”65 It is with this impulse that he seeks, in his Atlas of the European Novel (1998), to visually map the plot movement of various nineteenth-century European novels in an effort to see from his literary map, what he later calls in Graphs, Maps and Trees (2005), the “diagram of forces” at work in the novel. Here Moretti shows, through an analysis of spatial patterns, how the social world produces specific forms of


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literature and even whole genres. In his literary maps he reveals the “almost tangible relationship between social conflict and literary form.”66 It is within this tradition of literary sociology that I would like to situate this study in the hopes that a consideration of the relationship between the urban space of Wust al-Balad and the narratives that emerge from and about this neighborhood will facilitate an understanding of how space and narrative produce each other. On this last point, the film scholar James Donald has suggested that works of fiction (or film) are “actively constitutive of the city”; in other words, they have “a role in producing the city for a reading public.”67 He extends this logic to the discipline of architecture, which he regards as embodying fictional elements, for, as he puts it, the act of envisioning a building requires that one necessarily “attempt to imagine social relations taking place.”68 This is why Donald reciprocally advocates the importance of fiction to the discipline of architecture and urban planning: “at their best, novels imagine the sort of living city that Jane Jacobs says is so difficult to rebuild; difficult because the city exists in that complex living, not just in their architecture or design. Novels are speech acts in that they help to construct that living symbolic city.”69 It is an engagement with this “complex living” that creates the “symbolic city” and with it the narratives we require to make sense (and transcend) the space around us. It is only when there is a coming to terms with the city as a living, organic space that the act of reenvisioning its future can then begin: “Sadly, I agree with Kevin Robins that, in both the traditionalists and the cosmopolitans, ‘there is an imaginative deficit in the claimed “re-imagination” of urban culture’. What is missing, Robins suggests, is any real sense of the city not only as the space of community or pleasurable encounters or self-creation, but also as the site of aggression, violence, and paranoia. That is why I have insisted that imagining the city in a way that can encompass such forces should be prior to any attempts to rebuild actually existing cities.”70 The novels in this study are an attempt to do precisely that. They attempt to “write the city” by rendering it legible in the form of a narrative. Further, they engage with the mythology of particular sites and in their narration, whether nostalgic or irreverent, they subvert or heighten the symbolic value of many of these iconic locations. Thus the urbanscape of the city is highlighted in a manner that is at times dark and oppressive, and at other times romantic and idealized. Yet this contrast throughout the works is what makes the representation one that is suggestive of the “complex living” that epitomizes contemporary urban life.


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CHAPTER 2

Reconstructing a National Past Radwa ‘Ashur’s Revisionist History of the Downtown

It was a dangerous event . . . and horrific. Suddenly, and in the middle of the afternoon, and right in front of the police, a fire was lit deliberately. In al-Opera Square, in one of the most famous casinos of Egypt: Casino Badia. And the fire fighters rushed in with their cars and hoses, but when they tried to put out the fire, some people prevented them from doing so and ripped apart the hoses and consequently the flaming of the fire increased. And some thought, among them, the security guards, that it was merely an accident, and when they were able to put out the fire in the casino they breathed a sigh of relief and reported to their bosses: “Everything is okay effendum. It is over. The situation couldn’t be ‘better’.” But while a message of reassurance was reported to the interior minister, a fire was breaking out in Cinema Rivoli, then it was set in a third place, then a fourth, then a fifth, then a tenth, then a hundred . . . then seven hundred! It was something terrifying; what was between the hours of twelve thirty and just about seven thirty, the fire devoured 700 shops. Among them the biggest stores in Egypt and the largest hotels, and the most splendid cinemas and places of entertainment. The fire ate the heart of Cairo. The country lost tens of millions of Egyptian pounds. And scores were killed and injured.1

Introduction

O

n January 25, 1952, the mass killing of fifty Egyptian policemen and the wounding of one hundred others at the hands of the British at the barracks of Isma‘iliyya near the Suez Canal set off a flurry of events in the capital. Workers’ unions in Cairo boycotted British establishments, the airport was brought to a standstill, a strike began in the barracks of Bulaq in Cairo, which eventually turned into a demonstration where three hundred men


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walked toward Cairo University in Giza (the starting point for a number of demonstrations in the past). There the mass of demonstrators joined a number of other groups (Wafdists, Muslim Brothers, Socialists, and Communists) who had convened a meeting in light of what was being called a “massacre” in Isma‘iliyya. The police who were sent to quell the unrest, instead of breaking up the group, joined them. They marched alongside the other demonstrators to the cabinet offices to demand the right to fight the British at the site of the canal. The group started marching by eight in the morning. In another part of town, a number of demonstrators marched from al-Azhar Square in the heart of old Cairo through the downtown toward ‘Abdin Palace. Once there, they veered toward the opera house, where they were met by more demonstrators.

Figure 2.1 Fire at the Rivoli Cinema, Fu’ad Street, January 1952 (photograph from the Dar al-Hilal Archives, Cairo, Egypt)


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As the demonstrators marched and chanted, the mood shifted. By 12:30 p.m. the Badia Casino, located on Opera Square, was in flames. Sometime later, the Rivoli Cinema was torched, and after that the Metro Cinema downtown. At 2:30 p.m. Shepheard’s Hotel was on fire, as was Barclay’s Bank and dozens of establishments throughout the downtown area. By 4:00 p.m. the crowd began looting and pillaging numerous establishments, particularly foreign-owned and Jewish shops, and a number of department stores. The mayhem went on through the night, despite attempts by the police and the army (who were brought in fairly late) to bring the city under control. By morning the army had regained control of the city, but the failure of the king and the Wafdist parliament to act effectively brought an end to the Wafd (their leader, Mustafa Nahas Pasha resigned) and six months later King Faruq was deposed at the hands of the army. The burning of downtown Cairo in January 1952 elicited a variety of responses. After Gamal Abdel Nasser took control, he referred to it as “the first sign of the social revolution against the corrupt institutions.”2 Gamal al-Sharqawi, in his well-known work Hariq al-Qahira (The Fire of Cairo; 1976), attempts to establish that the fires and destruction were the result of a British conspiracy to bring down the Wafd.3 Jean and Simonne Lacouture, in their study of Egypt, suggest that the leader of the Socialist Party, Ahmad Husayn, was most likely the person responsible for instigating the fires.4 Husayn was brought up on charges, but he was later acquitted (under Nasser) on grounds that the demonstrations, fires, and subsequent riots and looting were a “political crime.”5 Anne-Claire Kerboeuf analyzes the Cairo fires as an instance in which social mobilization became possible as the result of the interests of multiple groups coalescing around one event. In her view, the fires were an act that occurred at the hands of the lower and middle classes in Cairo who sought to deny the legitimacy of the urban elite, whose interests, she argues, were to a large extent aligned with the rural landowning elite as well as the British.6 She concludes her study by suggesting that any dismissal of the event as an enigmatic happening in Egypt’s history discredits the complex social and political circumstances leading up to the fires and the toppling of the regime.7 In other words, to merely focus on the instigators as the cause of the fires is but a way of ignoring the social issues that gave rise to this mass outrage, that is, it turns a blind eye to the many Egyptians who collectively felt compelled to participate in the demonstrations, the fires, and the pillaging. Their reasons for doing so, whether due to the British massacre in Isma‘iliyya or the dominance of the urban and foreign elite, are, in her estimation, much more interesting and important. Radwa ‘Ashur’s novel Qit‘a min Urubba (A Piece of Europe) inserts itself into this controversy. The work seeks to understand the significance of the Cairo fires in the history of Egypt and in the broader history of modernity, colonialism, and U.S. neo-imperialism in the region. A sprawling work that takes as


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its central character Cairo’s downtown, ‘Ashur rewrites the city’s history using Wust al-Balad as her frame and the fires as the climactic event that the narrator keeps returning to in his memory as he tries to understand the connections between Isma‘il Pasha’s project to modernize Egypt and how the city, and the downtown in particular, was ultimately transformed following the fires (Egyptianized under Nasser, Americanized under Sadat and Mubarak). Her agenda is unabashedly anticolonial, anti-imperial, and fervently nationalist. She is meticulous in documenting the way in which Egypt’s resources were squandered at the hands of the Isma‘il Pasha to the benefit of foreign elites, and extends her critique to the role of the United States in their support of Israel (against the interests of the Arab countries) throughout the last half of the twentieth century. The novel is also fundamentally a work that problematizes what it means to write history. How is the personal intertwined in broader historical events? How does the act of remembering shed light on certain historical patterns and convergences that might not have been evident previously? How does the instability of the narrator throw into question the reliability of the chronicling of history? While fictional to a point, Qit‘a min Urubba (in the tradition of her Thulathiyyat Gharnata [The Granada Trilogy; 1994–1995])8 clearly sets out to offer a revisionist history of the downtown by chronicling the stories of the Khedive alongside the wealthy foreign (and often Jewish) families who invested in this district. She intersperses stories of the lives and rise of these elite power brokers in Cairo (Giacomo Groppi, Yaqub and Maurice (Moise) Qatawi, Samaan Sidnawi) with the personal travails of the nameless narrator whose own life, as either an active participant or a spectator, intersects many of the critical events that transformed the face of the city center. To further blur the lines between the writing of history and fiction, she references a number of historical works, documents, and eyewitness accounts that help her piece together the details of Cairo’s transformation from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Her male narrator self-reflexively questions his own act of writing—should the work be viewed as a historical chronicle, novel, or memoir? In using ‘Ashur’s text as a fictionalized history of this area, this chapter seeks to answer three questions fundamental to our overall project: (1) To what extent is ‘Ashur’s novel an exploration of the experience of both aesthetic and social modernity in Cairo? (2) How do the riots, demonstrations, and fires that broke out on numerous occasions during the twentieth century suggest acts that challenge the existence of Western modernity as it was staged, producing Wust al-Balad as a contested space? (3) How does ‘Ashur’s tracing of iconic spaces (buildings, businesses, boulevards, and squares) in the downtown celebrate this history of contestation as critical to recovering a sense of collective Egyptian national consciousness? In what follows, I argue that ‘Ashur’s novel highlights the curious interplay of two dimensions central to Cairo’s history and Egyptian


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national identity, that is, the transformation of the downtown into a modern stage and the experience of social contest as a counterplay occurring in this space. In short, I will read her novel as a textual reclaiming of the downtown for purposes of recovering the nationalist project as the natural inheritor of the project of modernity. Qit‘a min Urubba: Playing on the Gaze As a useful point of departure, recall Arjun Appadurai’s idea that the production of a neighborhood is also the act of creating a frame within which social action occurs. It is also, as he notes, an inherently colonizing act, as it requires the assertion of power over “potentially chaotic” or “rebellious” spaces.9 Using this geographic frame as the primary historical lens in the novel, Radwa ‘Ashur’s male narrator vacillates between a sense of nostalgia for the downtown during his childhood in Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s and a sense that the space, conceived by Isma‘il Pasha as the emblem of a modern Egypt and owned by a class of foreign, urban elite, was always (at least until it was Egyptianized by Nasser in the 1950s), an “occupied” space that never reflected the interests of the varied classes in Egypt. The principal protagonist through which the history of this area is filtered introduces himself as the “looker” or the “gazer” (al-nazir),10 who we learn comes of age during the demonstrations in the years leading up to the revolution. Playing on the identity of the author and narrator as both actors and spectators in Wust al-Balad’s history, the narrator states, “In this novel I am the Gazer (al-nazir). This name is not what my parents chose for me and it is not my nickname by which people call me. I am the “gazer” because my concern is to “gaze.” I impart across my novel what I’ve viewed with my own eyes and my heart, that is what I’ve seen and what I’ve come to understand through insight.”11 The Gazer in her novel recalls Timothy Mitchell’s objective modern spectator—the subject for whom Western modernity-as-exhibit was designed. This spectator, for ‘Ashur, is the Egyptian middle-class subject, and it is through his personal memories that ‘Ashur is then able to integrate the lesser-told stories of wealth accumulation among Cairo’s foreign elite and their collaboration with the aristocratic classes that would largely come to decide Cairo’s course of development. The idea of the narrator as “gazer” also plays on the idea of the colonial gaze. Here ‘Ashur reverses the notion of the colonizer as the one authorized to “gaze” and uses her narrator as the native Egyptian gazing back, reclaiming and reinserting the Egyptian experience under colonial occupation. Yet the narrator also questions the authority of the gaze by suggesting that the novel is not meant to be a historical chronicle presenting documented facts, but rather it is a subjective, personal account of one man’s relationship to this neighborhood. Later in the work, as the narrator reflects on what he has tried


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to do in piecing together the history of the downtown and the numerous players that have contributed to its development, he questions again the form his work has taken and the impulse compelling him to write. His only real frame, he concludes, has been that of Wust al-Balad (or Roman Cairo as many referred to the Western quarter) and his own story as part of the history of this district: Novels, to my knowledge, do not impart their ideas in a reported manner . . . Rather, they incorporate the life of their characters, their comings and goings, their living and dying. The course of the characters life and fate embodies the details of a [particular] thought and perspective. It is not my concern to explain [all] the details and patterns, analyzing how and why Roman Cairo inherited what it did. I want to tell of the place where I was born. I don’t have any experience in writing novels. I am not writing a novel. Rather I look to Wust al-Balad where my story is. I contemplate the old and what of its features have been made new. This is my intention.12

The passage suggests the instability and somewhat ambivalent position of the narrator. On the one hand, he suggests that it is only through the lives of the characters in a novel that one can understand and identify with a particular point of view. On the other hand, he rejects the idea that he is writing a novel and claims that the space of Wust al-Balad itself, what it was in the past and what it has become, has been the central protagonist. Thus the space of downtown becomes a character here, with a “course” and a “fate,” a life and a death. While playing the role of the spectator to the spatial play unfolding before him, the narrator is also, in certain chapters (as we will see), the actor, participating in the demonstrations and not merely watching. Amina Elbendary referred to ‘Ashur’s approach in this novel as postmodern.13 She cites, for example, her use of pastiche—using, on occasion, archival material, footnoting certain facts—and her play with the voice of the narrator—moving between a first-person narrative and a detached, third-person chronicling of certain events, rendering the narrator as unstable, yet having him intimately confide in his readers—as well as the montage-like quality in which her narrative moves between periods. Yet, to approach this work as “postmodern” is, I would argue after Marshall Berman, to neuter the powerful critique this novel seems to offer about the project of modernity as well as the line of continuity it draws with modern Cairo today. In other words, the novel is not beyond or past what we might call modern, rather it engages with the notion of modernity from the context of its beginnings in Egypt in the nineteenth century. The challenges for Egyptians to negotiate with modernity (in the context of British colonial hegemony) in the early part of the twentieth century are not so radically different from the challenges Egyptians face in coming to terms with modern Cairo from the 1970s onward (in the context of American neocolonial hegemony). ‘Ashur,


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as I will discuss later, clearly makes this link. Thus, while the novel surely sets out to deconstruct the grand narrative of the downtown as the liberal dream of Egypt, to expose the economic bricklaying that the community of foreigners put in place in an effort to ensure they would have a district reflecting their own elite tastes and interests, it covers this ground in an effort to show parallels with the modernisms of today’s elite neighborhoods in Cairo—Muhandisin, Misr al-Gadida, Ma‘adi, and so on. In this vein Berman writes, Post-modernists maintain that the horizon of modernity is closed, its energies exhausted—in effect, that modernity is passé. Post-modernist social thought pours scorn on all the collective hopes for moral and social progress, for personal freedom and public happiness, that were bequeathed to us by the modernists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. These hopes, post-moderns say, have been shown to be bankrupt, at best vain and futile fantasies, at worst engines of domination and monstrous enslavement. Post-modernists claim to see through the “grand narratives” of modern culture, especially “the narrative of humanity as the hero of liberty.” It is the mark of post-modern sophistication to have “lost even nostalgia for the lost narrative.”14

Berman’s criticism of the postmodern position arises out of his desire to suggest why the questions once posed in the wake of modernity are still prescient for us today. He characterizes the contemporary age as having lost touch with the “roots of its own modernity” such that we have become a fragmented modern public speaking “numerous private languages.”15 He suggests the need for us to collectively reconsider certain humanist universals as the way in which we once sought to “be at home” and navigate our way through the modern world. Thus, while we might recognize certain formal aspects of ‘Ashur’s novel as a series of writing strategies employed in an effort to recast some of the questions that have been asked in prior novels, I would argue, in contrast to Elbendary, that the thrust of ‘Ashur’s novel returns us to the essential question of modernism as posed by Berman: “Have we really outgrown the dilemmas that arise when ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ of the dream of a life in which ‘the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all’?” I do not think so.”16 Berman calls for us to not be deceived by the idea of postmodernism as a heralding of the end of the questions and challenges posed by the modern age. Rather, he urges us to look to the impulses and failures underwriting the modernisms of the past in an effort to understand what we face in our continuously modern and rapidly changing present. ‘Ashur’s book takes up his challenge full force. The opening chapters of the novel begin by juxtaposing two stories: that of Khedive Isma‘il as a young man in Vienna and then Paris, enchanted by all that he sees before him (an enchantment that would ultimately lead him to want to reproduce it in Egypt), and simultaneously as the story of an unnamed


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character she calls the Gazer. That the young Isma‘il was sent to Vienna to undergo an operation to improve his eyesight is, of course, ironic. In light of his unwavering commitment to his plan to erect a “modern” Cairo, it is noteworthy, on a figurative level, that he was sent to Europe to improve his impaired eyesight. ‘Ashur plays on this irony. In referring to our narrator as the Gazer, she suggests perhaps that it is he, as the spectator, who is able to see what perhaps Isma‘il, with his impaired then rehabilitated vision could not. The idea of the gaze is echoed throughout the novel. The theme emerges as early as the opening scene of ‘Ashur’s prologue, where she frames the novel by using the 1943 visit of Prime Minister Winston Churchill of England and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States to the Sphinx. The scene opens with Churchill commenting that the Sphinx’s gaze does not elicit fear or savagery, as other Europeans had portrayed it (e.g., Gustave Flaubert and William Butler Yeats) in the nineteenth century, but rather it reminded him of the ancient Greek Sphinx that was a woman-headed lion posing difficult riddles to her subjects, only to kill those who failed to provide a correct answer. ‘Ashur also recalls alMaqrizi’s rendering from the fifteenth century that the Sphinx was a “talisman of sand” guarding Egypt from the tyranny of the desert surrounding it.17 From this opening, the idea of the gaze—where the Sphinx appears to stare back at travelers in Egypt who are staring at it—emerges as a central motif in the work, echoing the role her narrator plays as the “gazer” looking at the theater of events in downtown Cairo.18 Historical and Geographic Intersections: The Emergence of Wust al-Balad The first chapter begins with the Gazer writing in his notebooks of the young Khedive’s first trip to Europe. He attempts to personalize the image of the Khedive as a young man and a dreamer who could not have foreseen the radical consequences of his transformation of Wust al-Balad. His travels abroad—to Vienna, Paris, London, and Istanbul—served as the inspiration for the “architectural revolution” that he would begin in the area west of the old city. The history of our narrator is then woven into that of Isma‘il’s modern downtown. During his trip in which he visited Paris, then London, then Paris another time, then Istanbul, the Ottoman Caliph bestowed on him the grand title of Egyptian Khedive. So he returned to the capital of his kingdom carrying with him the new resonant title, with wild dreams of destruction and construction . . . . . . It was in this new area, now known as Wust al-Balad, then called “Hayy Isma‘iliyya” (the neighborhood of Isma‘iliyya), where I was born. And in this same quarter, in a building neighboring the building in which I was born, I sit now to write after more than a century has passed since the death of Isma‘il,


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who had once ordered its establishment, and the death of the minister of works, ‘Ali Mubarak, and his assistant, Mahmud al-Falaki, who supervised planning of the city. This new neighborhood, al-Qahira al-Rumiyya as it was called by some historians, left behind it Islamic Cairo, and left it haunted by its past, contented in it, immersed in it. The downtown was looking toward a new world that would draw the city to it, with all its state institutions, rulers palaces, and centers of commerce, moving westward—no metaphor here—I mean the geographical west where the Cairo of Isma‘il stretched from ‘Abdin Square and al-‘Ataba Square to the Nile westward and from the bank of the Nile to the island west of it. . . . The quarter of Isma‘iliyya was but one part of the immense architectural achievement of Ismail, who bought, in a number of years, 450 bridges, one thousand miles of posts for the railway and postal wire. He established schools and institutions and theaters and museums of antiquities and publishers of books, and established palaces, and gardens summoning to them European engineers, most of whose names he could not remember or pronounce correctly. He generated the money necessary for this by selling Egyptian cotton on the world market.19

Isma‘il’s grand plan is presented with the heady optimism of the project of Cairo’s modernization. Beyond mere architectural achievements, the narrator notes, transforming Cairo into a modern city center meant altering its infrastructure completely: the railway, postal service, bridges, schools, national museums and cultural institutions. And yet, ultimately, the selling of Egyptian cotton to support the European textile industry would not be enough to keep the Khedive from going bankrupt and ultimately losing control of both the Suez Canal and the country itself (the British took control of both in 1882). Shadowing these developments in the late 1860s and early 1870s is the reality that the Khedive was financing this project by effectively offering downtown buildings for sale to foreign investors, block by block. By 1936, when the narrator is born on Qasr al-Nil Street, the British have taken full control of Egypt and the downtown is no longer emblematic of Egyptian sophistication and cosmopolitanism, but rather British economic, cultural, and military domination over the city.20 Elizabeth Wilson, in her work on nostalgia and the city, suggests, in line with Gwendolyn Wright and Joseph Slaughter, that underwriting urban planners’ “thirst for the modern” was the belief that “large-scale plans would create wonderful new environments . . . [that would] solve social problems, ushering in a new era of leisure and consumerism.”21 In other words, although Isma‘il ignored the blight and complications of renovating any of the areas of the old city, the vision he had for the downtown, however grandiose it may have been, was, at its core, a belief in the promise of modernity; that modern space (aesthetic modernity) would usher in a modern way of life for Egyptians (social modernity). It was this modern Egypt that he


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wanted to display for the foreign elite at the opening of the Suez Canal. But by the end of the novel, in the context of the revolution and subsequent wars and increasing class stratification, the facades of the downtown suggest only a kind of cosmetic modernity. The narrator describes the city as having “turned into one which possessed two sections, typical of other colonial cities: one of them resembles an exhibit of modern Europe that catches your eye, and the other old, decrepit, unable to rise from its slumber or its death.”22 Noting the irony (and echoing Timothy Mitchell and Edward Said), the narrator writes, “strange irony: the popular quarter was moved to France and put on view, as for the exhibition, the bright facade which was absent from the popular neighborhood was moved to Egypt.”23 In this confession, the narrator’s own attachment and identification with the downtown is complicated by his recognition of the artifice involved in its conception. That is, if Egypt’s modernization (both aesthetic and social) was never meant to be complete, then where does the downtown fit in the broader frame of Cairo’s social history? ‘Ashur’s way of responding to this question, in part, is to start by describing one’s point of view from the ground. While the introductory chapter begins with a broad-stroked rendering of Isma‘il’s plans and the changes he brought to the city from a top-down perspective, it is not until we enter the space from the point of view of the narrator speaking of his own life growing up in the area that we understand the way al-Qahira al-Rumiyya (Wust al-Balad) was experienced and used by its residents. He begins with the day King Faruq was deposed, writing as if he is inserting himself in the past: When the ship “al-Mahrusah” carrying King Faruq sailed from a port in Alexandria in July of 1952, we were in Cairo. We live in a building with four floors on Qasr al-Nil Street. The building is still there. I pass by it sometimes. I raise my head to reflect on its balconies: the small curved balcony which surrounds it like a garland with large windows, and the rectangular balconies, the tallest and the widest. Each balcony is bordered by a fence made of iron, with well-defined bars, departed and united, that come together in different botanical patterns. I cross the street to allow myself a complete view of the building. I cross it again to stealthily gaze upon the entrance. I recall standing there alone or with my mother or father or sisters on the balcony. In front of us the Baehler passage and the arches of the arcades alongside it. On our right stretches Qasr al-Nil Street in the direction of Mustafa Kamil Square. And on our left is Sulayman Pasha Square, where we can see part of the circular square, the bronze statue in its center, two of its four intersections, and the Groppi building where, above the entranceway of the shop, is the logo “Groppi, 1924” and a large sign carrying its name written in Latin letters. Following it is the phrase: “La Maison Royale de Confisserie.”24

The building, like others in the city, triggers for the narrator memories of the downtown during his childhood. He reflects with a sense of awe and admiration on its architecture, its balconies the entranceway. The building is also centrally


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located between two of the most historic squares in Cairo: Mustafa Kamil and Sulayman Pasha (presently Tal‘at Harb). And then, as if to suggest the importance of the gaze once more, we imagine what it might have been like for the narrator, as a child to look out his balcony and see, not completely, part of Sulayman Pasha Square, the bronze statue, and the beacon of the Italian patisserie and café, Groppi. The partial obfuscation of the narrator’s gaze from his balcony looking over Sulayman Pasha Square reemphasizes the figurative limitations of the narrator’s point of view vis-à-vis the events that he is narrating. The pointing to the limits of the narrator’s perspective necessarily generates certain questions for the reader: How reliable is our narrator? How clearly can he recall the past? From what bias does his chronicle emerge?25 Furthermore, the setting or the frame for the novel is condensed to an even smaller area. However introspective, ‘Ashur’s narration suggests a cinematic quality that emphasizes the visual movement of our narrator’s gaze from his balcony to the buildings surrounding Sulayman Pasha Square. It becomes clear that ‘Ashur’s spatial choices have a narrative logic of their own. The intersection of Sulayman Pasha Square and Qasr al-Nil Street will emerge as central to the novel and the history that the Gazer chronicles. The Three Triangles Before returning to Sulayman Pasha Square as it is described in the novel, it is important to note from a demographic perspective why ‘Ashur has chosen to use this square in particular as her central point. Jean-Luc Arnaud, in his study of the transformation of Cairo’s downtown, maps the distribution of the Egyptian elite and foreigners populating this downtown. Sulayman Pasha Square sits at the crossroads of quarters where one would find, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, enclaves of foreigners (to the north, primarily British, Italian, French, Armenians, and Levantine Arabs) and where one would find the majority of the Egyptian aristocracy and effendis residing (to the south, civil servants, engineers, beys, pashas, and royal family members). Arnaud shows us that this square (midan) serves as the obvious commercial place of convergence for these groups, and thus it is on this roundabout that ‘Ashur’s protagonist peers out of his balcony and begins to reflect on how it came into being. He poses the question to himself, I had wanted to speak about three triangles . . . No, I don’t mean the pyramids of Giza. Rather three triangles from the ground that do not exceed an area of more than a few thousand meters. Their tips come together at Sulayman Pasha Square. What do these few thousand meters mean in a broad and vast city as Cairo? In a country as Egypt that has height, breadth, and depth, two seas and a river, rural and urban areas—a million kilometers transformed miraculously into a drawing on a map, a story of a book, and a box we carry on our backs, and as tiny as a pupil in the eye? What is the value of these triangles?26


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What is the value of these triangles? For ‘Ashur these “triangles” represent not only the aesthetic heart of colonial Cairo but also the most obvious signs of foreign economic hegemony in the district. In posing this question, the narrator recasts the experience of colonial occupation from the point of view of Cairo’s economic history; that is, how do the histories of these buildings offer us a deeper understanding of the relationship between foreign capital and colonial domination? ‘Ashur chooses to use this square as her port of entry for discussing the link between Cairo’s economic history during the first half of the twentieth century and the events that would lead up to the demonstrations of 1952 and the subsequent revolution. In this regard, Sulayman Pasha Square and the buildings that surround it function like a refrain for the narrator. In his effort to tell his own history, he finds himself not only returning to the buildings themselves but also tracing the personal histories of those that commissioned and owned them. The logic of the narrative is associative, and thus the narrator digresses repeatedly then attempts to find his original train of thought. For example, early in the novel he recalls that, on his fifth birthday, his father gave him an Egyptian pound as a gift. His father asks him to read what is printed on it and he reads, “National Bank of Egypt.” He stands in awe of the gift and associates it with the importance of his father’s position at the bank, where, he assumes, he is in charge of giving money to people.27 He notes, rather ruefully, that his father did not tell him that the money that the bank issued was printed in Britain by a

Figure 2.2 The triangles of Sulayman Pasha Square, 1949 (photograph from the Dar al-Hilal Archives, Cairo, Egypt)


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Mustafa Kamil Square (photograph from Lehnert & Landrock, Cairo, Egypt)

British company. Nor did he reveal to his son that the bank was actually owned by someone else, namely, someone by the name of Sir Ernest Cassell, who represented the British share in “al-Bank al-Ahli,” while the Egyptian half was owned and represented by two Jewish entrepreneurs and a Greek businessman, the Brothers Sawaris and Constantine Salvagos. (For a true and scholarly economic history of Egypt’s early forays into capitalism and an excellent discussion of the Sawaris Group, see the work of Robert Vitalis.28) When the young narrator is given the honor of accompanying his father to work at the bank, it is only then that he realizes the true nature of his father’s position as a lowly civil servant.29 The trip to his father’s place of work and his subsequent realization that he is no more than a white-collar worker devastates the young boy. The episode serves as a rite of passage for him and lays the groundwork for his later participation in the nationalist demonstrations and his desire to understand and unearth in his writing how Egypt’s power came to lie in the hands of a circle of mostly foreign businessmen. The bitterness of the young boy, which later emerges as a deep-rooted nationalism, moves the narrator to dissect the class of elite Jewish landowners and their companies. He mentions the numerous banks, railways, department stores, and sugar cane refineries run by these prominent Jewish families (specifically he cites the Sawaris brothers and the Cicurel, Qatawi,


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Mosseri, Rolom, Levy, and Mizrahi families).30 The role of these well-known Jewish families in establishing businesses (department stores, residential buildings, cafés) in downtown Cairo becomes part of the narrator’s eventual attempt to draw a more obvious link between the outrage in Egypt over the Zionist movement, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent fires in the downtown in 1952. And while he does briefly suggest such a connection (going so far as to even link the anger underlying the attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York to more than a century’s worth of resentment, demonstrations, and acts of protest in the Arab world against Israel), his primary preoccupation returns him repeatedly to the street and the stories residing in the buildings of downtown. In describing the life of one of the most influential Jewish families—the Qatawi family—the narrator reminds the reader that his digression into the history of the Qatawi family is an effort to contextualize the three triangles in Sulayman Pasha Square: I digress in talking about the Qatawi family. I had intended to speak of something else, not the Qatawis, but an aspect of them . . . The head of the first triangle is located in Midan Sulayman Pasha (now Midan Tal‘at Harb). One of its sides is on Qasr al-Nil Street and the other side is on Sulayman Pasha. A building occupies it, extending four floors up. It is a big hotel, offices of English companies reside there and people who occupy the place, like the lawyer Baron Alexander. The beginning of the building overlooks the square resembling a tower, forming a cone as it faces the square, on its top a hat bearing the words, “Savoy Hotel.” In the First World War, the English used the building as the headquarters for the leaders of their troops. (It was suitable because it was close to the army barracks located on the banks of the Nile. It didn’t take more than ten minutes for a carrier bearing correspondence to walk the few hundred meters to cross the square.) A few years after the end of the war, a Swiss businessman who had proved his proficiency in establishing hotels and running them from the time of his arrival in Egypt in 1889 bought the Savoy. Unexpectedly, however, the businessman tore down the hotel and subdivided the land and established on it a large building stretching the length of the old Savoy. A small part of it was separated from the rest of the building by a passageway defined by arches for the arcades which linked the streets of Qasr al-Nil and Sulayman Pasha. The building became a commercial and residential complex whose upper floors were used for offices and apartments while the ground floor was occupied by scores of department stores distributed along the corridor leading to the two streets. Mr. Charles Baehler, a Swiss man who spoke French, made a significant change to that triangle so that it would become a replica of Le Rue de Rivoli in Paris, replacing the sturdy building of the Savoy . . . whose story had often been told time and again in the novels and books of English travelers. . . . The second triangle faces the first. We cross the square so as to move from Baehler to Groppi, another Swiss man who arrived in Egypt in the eighties of the


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nineteenth century. Unlike Charles Baehler, this Swiss businessman came from the Italian region of Switzerland, as is clear from his name, Giacomo Groppi. Groppi established a restaurant and confectionary that stretched into a backyard garden . . . the sentence is not quite right—there is more to be said . . . The facade of Groppi’s café reflected the blurred features of the past and the present. Groppi, in its day, was not merely a restaurant and a Parisian coffeehouse offering the best food and new foreign types of desserts and soft drinks, rather it was a cultural project defining taste and tradition. It gave the new city a radiant center among the centers of modernity. Balls were held there, music groups were invited, films were shown. Groppi produced chocolates and concentrated juices, jams and cheeses, different delicacies to which his clients were introduced with a mixture of pioneers surprise, awe, and pleasure . . . . . . We don’t know whether Groppi painfully sighed or smiled contentedly at the idea of the triangle facing his new shop passing through a different stage. This triangle, stretching between Sabri Abu ‘Alam and Qasr al-Nil Streets, was owned by Ya‘qub Qatawi. It was occupied by his palace and the large garden surrounding it. Then . . . [he] died in 1924, and not more than a few years later, the inheritors sold the palace and the gardens surrounding it. Groppi watched the process of destruction and construction in the neighboring triangle. The building of Sidnawi’s shop occurred on the other side of the square along with the residential buildings, the metropolitan hotel, the stock market, the Shell Petroleum Building, al-Bank al-Ahli, and others. All of this on the land of the triangle that was gathered, separated, and interposed by four small streets horizontally, connecting Sabri Abu ‘Alam and Qasr al-Nil, and three which cut it vertically with curved or straight paths, two of which reach the base of the triangle where al-Bank al-Ahli and Sharif Street are located.31

Our narrator highlights the historic and economic symbolism of this site where these three “triangles” come together. Not only does the architecture physically serve as a testament to the ambitions of these four businessmen, but it also serves as a site where their vision for Cairo converged. The Savoy Hotel, which occupied the northeastern triangle on the square (flanked by the streets Sulayman Pasha and Qasr al-Nil), eventually made way for the long residential building of Charles Baehler in 1930. Baehler envisioned a replica of Le Rue de Rivoli of Paris on this block and thus tore down the Savoy Hotel (frequented by British soldiers during World War I) to make way for his Haussmann-inspired vision, replete with arched pavilions for his commercial arcades. Giacomo Groppi aimed to refine the taste and culture of the downtown with his SwissItalian pastry shop that was built on the northwestern triangle (wedged between Mahmud Bisyuni—formerly Antikkhana—and Qasr al-Nil Streets). Samaan Sidnawi, echoing Baehler, saw the square as a geographical meeting point for the primary arteries of the downtown (Sulayman Pasha, Qasr al-Nil, Sabri Abu ‘Alam), and thus as a logical site for commerce. He established his furniture


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Site of the three triangles.

Figure 2.4 Map of downtown Cairo showing the site of Sulayman Pasha/Tal‘at Harb Square as well as other historic buildings (map after Samir W. Raafat and reprinted with permission from Harpocrates Publishing, Alexandria, Egypt)

store where Maurice (Moise) Qatawi’s palace and gardens once stood (on the northeastern wedge). Thus, by the early 1930s, the square emerges as a most formidable example of modern architecture and commercial investment. For the narrator growing up on Qasr al-Nil, the three titans of business— Qatawi, Baehler, and Groppi—are likened to Olympic gods in a Greek tragedy where they determine the course of events without actually appearing on stage.32 Their presence, he writes, was “constant” and the neighborhood whose buildings and streets bore their names seemed to embody them. In fact, he admits to the frequency with which he used to invoke Groppi or the Baehler passageway as a way to indicate to others where he lived. While these names inhabited his daily life as a young man, it is only in reflecting on this district and its history from an economic perspective that he is able to grasp the significance of these proprietors. ‘Ashur focuses on this site in an effort to point out how the aspirations of these three foreign businessmen seemed to converge around a certain uniform vision of both architectural and social modernity, a vision that this square embodies. Like


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Khedive Isma‘il, they saw the space as a stage on which they hoped to construct the spectacle of modern life and commerce. Borrowing from Haussmann, they embraced the idea that for Cairo, like Paris, the staging of modernity meant linking, in a pleasing way, commerce and the new urban aesthetic—an aesthetic that was, in many respects, imperial. David Harvey clearly makes this connection in his work on Paris and Haussmann’s conception of modernity: “One of the myths of modernity is that it constitutes a radical break with the past. The break is supposedly of such an order as to make it possible to see the world as a tabula rasa upon which the new can be inscribed without reference to the past—or, if the past gets in the way, through its obliteration. Modernity is, therefore, always about ‘creative destruction,’ be it of the gentle or the democratic or the revolutionary, traumatic, and authoritarian kind.”33 Haussmann, as Harvey suggests, used this myth of a “radical break” in conceiving the sort of architecture that would best reflect a new Paris. This was particularly crucial after the revolution of 1848 in which King Louis-Philippe was deposed and France was turned into a Republic under Napoleon. The sort of “creative destruction” that was necessary to cultivate this sense of newness, while still celebrating the importance of empire, is what Harvey calls the “founding myth” of France’s new regime: “He [Haussmann] needed to build a myth of a radical break around himself and the Emperor—a myth that has survived to the present day—because he needed to show that what went before was irrelevant; that neither he nor Louis Napoleon was in any way beholden to the thinking and practices of the immediate past. This denial did a double duty. It created a founding myth (essential to any new regime) and helped secure the idea that there was no alternative to the benevolent authoritarianism of Empire.”34 The aesthetic that his new Paris embodied was intended to rival the city of Rome in its echoing of imperium, while at the same time catalyzing the circulation of capital, which became, as Harvey notes, the “real imperial power.”35 We have shown how Khedive Isma‘il was also similarly inspired by the idea of a founding myth on which to base his rule. His radical break, however, was not intended to echo Egypt’s past; rather, it laid the groundwork, aesthetically and economically, for colonial imperium. Similarly the buildings that line Sulayman Pasha Square, as discussed in ‘Ashur’s passage, while echoing Haussmann, visually connote in their sheer size, with grand facades and decorative cupolas, the aesthetic and economic imperium of the colonial project. Clearly these entrepreneurs—Baehler, Groppi, Sidnawi, and Qatawi—saw the appeal in Haussmannization, which based itself around a “new concept of commercial urbanism.”36 This new concept, according to Harvey, was to devote an entire district (e.g., in the case of Paris, Les Halles) to a single function—namely, that of consumption. This, we might argue, would become perhaps the most


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serializable aspect of Haussmann’s modernity—the creation of a new spectacle that solely revolved around the pleasure of commerce and public consumption. In lengthy passages, the narrator traces the origins of the wealth of these families and the extent to which their money was made through the extraction of Egyptian resources. For example, he details the story of Giacomo Groppi, whose wealth was not exclusively earned as a chocolatier. He notes that he also owned more than a hundred feddans of land in the region of Dahab on the Sinai Peninsula. There he had farms, factories, and livestock, and was in charge of numerous laborers who produced for his company different types of fruits, vegetables, juices, milk, and various dairy products. To buttress his income he owned other cafés in addition to Groppi on Sulayman Pasha Square. Among them were the two well-known branches of “al-Americain,” one at al-Opera Square and the other at the intersection of Fu’ad Street (later the 26th of July) and ‘Imad al-Din. These cafés offered the novelty of “American” types of concessions to their consumers. The narrator suggests how Groppi’s name began to connote more than merely pastries and Italian-style coffee. His establishments were part of a “cultural project” to line the new boulevards and squares with

Figure 2.5 Café Americain pictured at the intersection of Fu’ad (now 26th of July Street) and ‘Imad al-Din Streets (photograph from Lehnert & Landrock, Cairo, Egypt)


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shops whose function was largely to promote practices that were consonant with the type of modernity signaled by the architecture, a modernity largely predicated on the display of affluence and Western practices among the elite classes, many of whom were foreign. For ‘Ashur, the story of the establishment of the three triangles is the key to understanding how the economic architecture of the colonial project was interwoven with the project of Cairo’s modernization. The Janus-faced nature of this transformation, as both spectacular and tragic, is what the narrator unearths in his studied attempt to read past the facades of these buildings and reconstruct their history from their original financing at the hands of foreign businessmen through to their emergence in the early part of the twentieth century as icons of modernity. The narrator mines the details of the foreign families who invested in this area (their family connections to British and Egyptian royalty and elites) for clues as to how they managed to amass so much wealth and to so radically alter (as Olympic gods) the physical face of Cairo. In his telling of these stories, the narrator reveals the inner workings and general conviviality between members of this elite subset comprised of British dignitaries and royals, Egyptian royals and members of the aristocracy, and foreign (often Jewish) immigrants and investors. Through his chronicle, the narrator shows how their hegemonic presence over the city from 1882 onward ushered in an era in which the spectacle of modernity in the downtown became increasingly viewed by Egyptians as tantamount to unabashed foreign dominance and oppression. The Gazer as Flâneur Marshall Berman has asserted that the street, from Georges-Eugène Haussmann to Charles Baudelaire, is the ultimate symbol of modern life.37 It is then, for Michel de Certeau, the act of walking—of using the street—that symbolizes a form of pedestrian enunciation. He has asserted that “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”38 In the work of de Certeau, the practice of walking is likened to the way one uses language, so the way one walks functions as an act of composition in itself. He compares, for example, one’s turns and detours to “turns of phrase” in language. “There is,” he writes, a “rhetoric of walking.”39 Thus we might liken the paths ‘Ashur’s narrator takes to a readable form of enunciation. He shifts throughout the text between writing and walking. The two acts seem virtually interchangeable, for when the narrator is unable to write or finds himself in a rut in his thinking he takes to the streets and begins walking. Interwoven throughout the story, the narrator reflects on his own personal life and his marriage to a woman named Shahrazad, who eventually leaves him with their two daughters on the


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grounds that he is not sane. We learn that she takes him to court, charging that his perpetual musings on the past and his belief in an apparition in the form of his dead brother have rendered him unfit to care for their daughters. Traumatized by this separation, he returns repeatedly to reflect on his own sanity. Thus, as an old man, in the course of piecing together the history of the downtown, he also attempts to piece together the fragments of his own broken past. He uses certain locations throughout the city to facilitate these reflections. For instance, he recalls learning of his daughter’s impending marriage. He admits to feeling a certain sense of despair at the thought of losing her, so he takes to the streets late one night to reflect. Once more, in an effort to destabilize the narrative voice, ‘Ashur shifts in her writing between the third- and first-person perspective: He put on his coat and left the house. There were no crowds now and the lights were not hard on the eyes. The shops were all closed. The evening shows at the cinema had finished. Quiet enveloped noisy streets from the early morning until the first hours of dawn. It was possible to walk without tripping over the passers-by or bumping into them or stumbling suddenly because of a hole in the street that he didn’t notice because of the numerous people around him. He walked from Tal‘at Harb Square to al-Tahrir Square. The daughters were grown. Was the matter so difficult? He circled, returning to Tal‘at Harb and stopped at the intersection. I will speak of my daughter’s wedding. No, I won’t. He stopped to cut across the square to Qasr al-Nil Street. What will I speak of? The drumming, the flute, and the celebration as I’m handing over my daughter to a strange man? I return to the house.40

The course of his walking marks, in an act of mapping, the same streets that he walked as a young man in the demonstrations. Now he refers to Sulayman Pasha Square by its postrevolution name, Tal‘at Harb. Isma‘iliyya Square is now referred to as al-Tahrir Square.41 It is between these two squares and his own building on Qasr al-Nil Street that he walks just as he did in 1952 in the demonstrations following the massacre at Isma‘iliyya. His pedestrian enunciation here is an act of mining his own geographic history for a sense of continuity with the present. Despite the changes in the city, the streets, like the buildings, retain their history and give the narrator a physical and visual way to connect with the past. ‘Ashur’s narrator recalls in his constant walking through the spaces of downtown, the character of the flâneur, but not the heroic flâneur of Baudelaire’s poems who was, for Walter Benjamin, the lyric poet of urban modernity, domesticating the space of the city with his gaze.42 Rather, ‘Ashur’s narrator is pensive and hesitant in his writing. It is through his act of walking that our narrator finds himself reflecting on certain spaces, and it is these spaces that trigger certain events in his memory. To transpose the rhetoric of his walking on a plane is to attempt


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to decipher the way in which the narrator’s path traces a particular history and literally maps the downtown. Here ‘Ashur’s novel seems an apt example of the sort of postcolonial cartographic novel Graham Huggan refers to in his work on the uses of mapmaking. To recall, he argues that mapping in postcolonial novels serves as an “act of creative revision” where the “revisualization” of the map (the paradigmatic of the colonizer) “permits a disidentification from the procedure of colonialism and a (re)engagement in the ongoing process of cultural decolonization.”43 Thus the narrator’s path-making, if understood in the context of his attempt to reflect on the linkages between space, the colonial project, and the project of modernity, becomes a cartographic act. For example, as early as the first chapter he describes his own reaction as a teenager to the massacre of fifty Egyptian troops at Isma‘iliyya in January 1952. He details the events of that day leading up to the demonstration that then led to the fires. He recalls, for instance, the minister of education (who was, at that time, the well-known writer Taha Husayn) declaring to the people over the radio on the following day that they should “remain calm” and “preserve the system.” Despite his father’s orders to stay in the house with his mother and sisters, the young narrator is compelled to run outside and join the demonstration in the streets. He does so blindly, only to find himself thrust into the middle of the scene at the Casino al-Badia44 where the fires are being lit. In remembering the day, he maps the path the demonstration took through the city, a path he has walked often as an old man: The sound began as the whispering of the wave of a sea in the night when we were the distance of two or three streets from the shore. I went out of the house. I ran in the direction of Midan Isma‘iliyya, then I returned to run in the opposite direction. The sound was clear now, rising and guiding me to the place. I passed Midan Mustafa Kamil and I went in the direction of Midan al-Opera. I saw the crowd and went toward it in regular steps as if I was going to school. They had occupied one side of the square. They raised on their shoulders a number of men from the “blockat al-nizam” with their official black uniforms and helmets on their heads. I walked with them and cheered. Some of the demonstrators entered the Casino and threw the furniture from balconies then set it on fire. When the firemen approached and tried to use water hoses, we stepped on the hoses and some of us cut the hoses with pocketknives . . . We left the Casino behind us then returned to Midan Mustafa Kamil and from there we went to Midan Isma‘iliyya. There we met another large demonstration approaching from Midan Qasr alNil. I heard the people say, “university students.” We walked on Qasr al-‘Ayni Street, then we turned left and the demonstration stopped in front of a large palace that I didn’t recognize except when I asked. They said, “this is the Cabinet of Ministers.” Then a person appeared on one of the balconies on the first floor with a loudspeaker in his hand [saying], “our chests before your chests and our necks before your necks, with which we will defend the canal and Egypt.” The demonstrators interrupted him. Some of them spoke and they demanded that the


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Cabinet of Ministers hold a meeting and they promised them they would. Then we headed toward ‘Abdin.45

The path of the 15-year-old narrator through the downtown is a path he traverses repeatedly throughout the novel at different points in his life. From his first demonstration in February 1946 (to protest the British presence and to demand higher wages)46 to his participation in the demonstration and fires in January 1952, to his walking the streets as an older man, each act of mapping the district becomes a way for him to revisualize the map of downtown as a space of collective uprising and zeal for the nationalist cause. The course he describes here moves from his building on Qasr al-Nil Street presumably down Tal‘at Harb/Sulayman Pasha Street toward Midan Isma‘iliyya (now Tahrir Square). He then backtracks to ascertain the exact location of the demonstrators and finds himself retracing his steps, running northeast on Qasr al-Nil, past Midan Mustafa al-Kamil, toward the direction of Midan al-Opera. It is here where the people have congregated and where the initial fire was set at Casino al-Badia. From this square the demonstration marches back toward Midan Mustafa Kamil (along Qasr al-Nil) moving westward, then north, presumably on Tal‘at Harb, toward Midan Isma‘iliyya, where our narrator had initially headed. From Midan Isma‘iliyya the demonstration moves south down Qasr al-‘Ayni and eventually finds its way to ‘Abdin, in front of King Faruq’s towering palace. When examining the path on a map, the course explicitly maps the most iconic locations of Isma‘il’s Wust al-Balad, using the four squares—Midan Isma‘iliyya (or Tahrir), ‘Abdin Square (now Midan al-Jumhuriyya), Midan al-Opera, and Midan Sulayman Pasha (now Midan Tal‘at Harb)—as rough boundaries for the district. These four squares were symbolic for Egypt during the period of colonial and monarchal rule and were reclaimed (and later renamed) by the nationalist movement during the demonstrations and fires as historic spaces of liberation. These sites of congregation and marching are memorialized by the narrator’s cartographic journal entries both as part of a process of cultural decolonization and as a way to recall, from his perspective in 2002, the unity that this movement (in this space) engendered among Egyptians. By marking this territory, so to speak, ‘Ashur reclaims this district and these streets as a unique space of converging social forces where the colonial project served to perpetuate the staging of Western modernity in the downtown and where the nationalist movement then set about to interrupt this project in an effort to reclaim these spaces in the name of an independent, soon to be socially modernized Egypt. Here, perhaps, it is useful to recall the work of Franco Moretti, who has argued that when reading texts in this vein, it is clear that a “diagram of forces” emerges as underlying the narrative structure (he borrows this phrase from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson). Thus the form that a novel takes—that is, the maps it


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produces—reveals the external social forces underlying the novel. He writes after Thompson, “The form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces,’ in the sense, at least, that from it we can . . . deduce the forces that . . . have acted upon it.”47 To map Isma‘il’s construction street by street, the course of the 1952 demonstrations, and the pedestrian acts of ‘Ashur’s narrator is to reveal the way in which the novel is, to echo David Harvey, once more an act of “creative destruction”—a fictional remembering of the city. Here the construction, destruction, and rebuilding of Cairo is chronicled in detail, although not in a linear fashion, by the narrator. The narrative, contained within a few square blocks, jumps forward and backward in time as if encircling the downtown in an effort to reconcile its changes from the point of view of the present. The very circularity of the narrative—its literary form—reflects the social forces at work in the novel, that is, the way the city serves as a visual receptacle, a palimpsest, bearing the marks of the various social conflicts that have taken place across its streets, squares, and buildings. Unmaking the Modern: Social Contest and the Fires of Cairo In the first chapter the narrator sweeps through the history of Isma‘il’s transformation of the downtown and the way in which his own life and the building in which he grew up was located in the heart of this city center. The chapter closes with his participation at the age of 15 in the demonstrations and fires of 1952 and includes the “outside testimony” of a policeman on duty who witnessed the escalation of the fires on January 26, 1952. The narrator justifies the inclusion of this outside testimony because he writes that he is unable to guarantee the impartiality of his own narration, given that he was involved in the events at the time.48 He describes his participation in the demonstrations and fires as having been caught up in a wave of collective momentum where the crowd seemed to govern his actions. Thus the novel begins with the fire and ends with an attempt to understand this event yet again from the narrator’s point of view as an elderly man in 2002. The fires, like a refrain the narrator returns to repeatedly, are renarrated in numerous scenes throughout the novel. ‘Ashur uses this event as a way to pose one of the central questions of her work: To what extent did the downtown function as a contested space, where the battle over what it meant to be modern was played out between various social strata in the space of Wust al-Balad? The notion of the modern subject, as we discussed previously, is, for ‘Ashur, very much tied to the issue of nationalism. Thus, as we shall see, in repeatedly narrating the events of January 26, 1952, and considering the reasons for such a violent backlash against the city and then the disbelief by people after the fires, the narrator seeks to understand to what extent the downtown was both a source of pride for Egyptians and a source of bitterness and revulsion. Representative of these modern Egyptian subjects—the effendi—in the


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late nineteenth century may have bought into the notion of modernization as an extension of British colonial rule, but by the early twentieth century, many effendis had become ardent nationalists and no longer believed in a modern Egypt with a foreign ruling class. Thus the “new effendiya,” as they were called, eventually reappropriated the idea of the “modern subject” and used their Western education, knowledge of English or French, and familiarity with the workings of the colonial system to arm themselves against the British, recasting the idea of the modern subject in nationalist terms.49 They redefined the notion of the modern as a social platform of modernization (and by extension Egyptianization) that Nasser’s Socialist revolution attempted to bring about. In ‘Ashur’s novel the narrator returns to the day of the demonstrations and the fires repeatedly in an attempt to gain clarity about the significance of the event. He recounts the day from his perspective as a young teenager involved in the demonstrations, then again from his family’s apartment the next day, where his father was convinced, along with many radio broadcasters, that the fires were deliberately set as part of a conspiracy on behalf of the British to bring down the Wafd. While the narrator disagrees with his father, having felt the zeal and conviction of the crowd and remembering the destruction of so much foreign property, he still cannot help but question whether he had participated in a conspiracy without having realized it.50 He later describes the fear that the burning of the city elicits from the foreign neighbors in his building—Adele, Francesca, and Denise—all of whom are forced to leave Egypt eventually after Nasser comes to power. Toward the end of the novel, in trying to locate his anger as an older man and to make certain linkages, he returns once more to the day that was later referred to as “Black Saturday.” He resumes his description of the day where his earlier description in the first chapter leaves off: I want to know in order to write precisely about myself and about my childhood and about the day of the fire that historians have referred to as “Black Saturday.” I remember now that I am running . . . I raced from ‘Abdin Palace after they fired on us and found myself on ‘Adli Street, in front of the door of Groppi leading to the garden. Why did I enter? I no longer remember. Was I with others who entered and so I entered, or had we entered the garden individually to collect ourselves and drink a cup of water? The fire had not yet been lit in the place. I saw men breaking tables and chairs. One of them raised a table or a chair and threw it violently to the ground, breaking it. He carried one wooden bar from the back of the chair or one of the iron legs of the table (small round tables standing on one iron leg). He turned with it to the glass of the door and the windows. He smashed them. The sound of breaking glass also came from inside where there were glass counters that displayed all types of desserts, to the right of the entrance from ‘Abd al-Khalaq Tharwat Street. Facing them were rounds of cheese and caviar, and cold meats (ham, mortadella, and luncheon). The movement of the men became


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strange and they moved from table to table, from chair to chair, and from glass to glass. Their movement wasn’t chaotic, despite its impulsiveness, but strong, coherent, and very quick, as if they knew their target. I stopped at the side. Maybe I was surprised. I do not understand completely the meaning of what is revolving around me. I take in the details and do not know how to sort it out or define my feelings about it. Most likely that particular anger there at the scene was outside the scope of my experience and my knowledge. My anger, that led me to leave my house and go to the street that day and in the days preceding with my friends from school, was an anger that was nourished with a chant or a demonstration, and maybe, if my anger exceeded the limits, a stone would be thrown from my hands or a careless half smile would be drawn on my face while it follows the lit fire at the Casino. But the men who I saw at Groppi were angry on another level. I knew that the minute I saw them, and I didn’t understand it. In front of me now was a printed copy from a file of pictures that Studio Riyad Shahata had prepared, one of the most well-known photographers in Egypt at that time. He had prepared the file to present it to the King with a special report on what had happened that day; namely, the effect of the fire, and the massive losses that were incurred. In the third folder were pictures of the garden of Groppi ‘Adli that were shot afterwards. There was no anger now, only its traces. In one of the pictures in the folder, the tables were overturned. Some had their iron legs and others were without, merely complete or half round discs thrown on the ground. Some of them were left as they were and others were turned over on their backs. Similar tables appear in the second picture with chairs smashed completely. A rocking chair made of bamboo remained, a chair turned over on its back, an Asyuti chair was settled in its place, though its cushion and some of the wooden bars that supported its back had disappeared. On the left side of the picture was a straw box of the type widely used in transporting fruits and vegetables (maybe it was carrying oranges which would be offered as juice for clients). And on the right side lay a wooden frame of the menu (perhaps it was a menu for food, drinks, and prices). The third picture was of the fence dividing the garden and the locked café. The stone fence was low and in its center were a couple of steps leading to the entrance through the doors with glass panes and wooden frames. The glass was gone, but the wood remained. Alongside the fence and the steps were piles of smashed furniture. Had the men destroyed and then put aside [the furniture] they had destroyed, or had one of the workers at the café done so, imagining that he could restore some order to the place by gathering the furniture together, only to discover the futility of the effort? Also in the picture were ornamental plants in ceramic pots placed on the stone fence (I used a magnifying lens and was able to count seven ceramic pots with plants in them). Giacomo Groppi died five years before the fire and didn’t witness what his four shops endured. There is no way to summarize the destruction on Groppi ‘Adli. The demonstrators destroyed Groppi Sulayman Pasha [as well]. They smashed its glass facades. They threw the furniture in the square and lit it on fire. The scene was repeated at the two branches of the al-Americain (the branch located at the


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intersection of Sulayman Pasha and Fu’ad Street and the other branch located at the intersection of ‘Imad al-Din and Fu’ad Street.51

The narrator describes the scene at Groppi during the fires in vivid detail. This desire to recall exactly what happened that day is once more his attempt to locate the source of anger for the demonstrators. The anger, he writes, was an anger foreign to him, “outside [his] scope of experience.”52 The narrator’s own sense of attraction to and repulsion toward the modern is made apparent here. There is a sense of wistfulness as he reflects on the damage done to the interior, pausing to discern every detail: the tables; the chairs; the glass counters with meats, cheeses, and fish displayed in the fashion of a European deli; the ceramic pots holding plants in the garden. He wonders if someone had piled the chairs on one side to retain a semblance of order in the shop. The ambivalence of this reaction—to leave the space in its ravaged form or to attempt to organize it once more—suggests the disorienting effect of the fires for Egyptian workers and raises the question of loyalty. To whom would the workers be loyal in the aftermath of the fires? Did the fires mark a historic turning point in the balance of power where the fires symbolized a genuine form of collective action on behalf of the people, or was it a day of anarchic violence and looting? While the narrator recalls watching the destruction of Groppi with a sense of horror, and differentiating his anger from the violence of the men wrecking the shop, as an older man he returns to the scene to understand the depths of an anger still plaguing him, writing in the present, “I want to know how long an angry boy carries his anger with him.”53 In the picture of the fire that he is describing, the past is fixed in time, but for the narrator, that day remains something to which he returns in his memory and engages with repeatedly. For him, the past is active and the streets and buildings surrounding him serve as vestiges of that past, carrying him back in time. Like ‘Ashur’s focus on Sulayman Pasha Square, the fire at Groppi resonates on a number of symbolic levels. For if Groppi was the ultimate symbol of foreign hegemony and Western cultural practices in Cairo, then to destroy it, ‘Ashur suggests, was to reject these practices and the visual symbols of this foreign rule. To strike at the heart of Cairo’s “taste-maker” was to signal a bringing down of the curtain, so to speak, on the theater of the modern that was downtown. This is not to suggest that this act of contestation was limited to this event or to this particular theory of causation.54 Rather, ‘Ashur’s references to the demonstrations of November 2, 1945 (p. 178), and February 21, 1946 (p. 17), suggest an increasing level of social dissent leading up to the revolution where the downtown was often used as the stage for protests. However, the singularity of this one event is in its spatial dimension; that is, the fires of 1952 undeniably attest to the spatial element of this contest. While modernity in practice may


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have been a process of improvisation (as we will see more clearly in Chapter 3), physically the architecture, the streets and gardens, and the commercial establishments signaled an importation of foreign and Western tastes and styles that became associated in every way with colonial rule and the dominant role of the elite classes in the city. ‘Ashur’s narrator bypasses the revolution of the Free Officers, which occurred in July of that same year. While he notes that the fires strengthened their position and paved the way for the coup,55 he admits that the revolution itself is not what concerns him as a writer. The fires, in contrast, better reflect for him the sense of social contest that was taking place in the downtown and the collective response on behalf of students, civil servants, industrial workers, and police to the reality of colonial occupation. In piecing the details of the fire together, the narrator, late in the novel, points to a connection between a number of demonstrations that had occurred in Egypt prior to and following the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 (e.g., he cites November 1945, December 1947, as well as January 1952) and the fury behind much of the pillaging in Cairo. While the conclusion is not drawn in any climactic sense, he speculates as to the possibility of some link between the outrage of Egyptians over British support of the establishment of Israel and popular resistance to the British presence in Egypt in the year leading up to the coup.56 While this claim has not been suggested elsewhere, I would be hesitant to trust this leap without further research into the aims and political agendas marking the multiple demonstrations leading up to the fires. Anne-Claire Kerboeuf notes that while the participation of students and industrial workers in the demonstrations and riots on January 26, 1952, were expected, the “elite” were surprised to see the large number of “craftsmen” and “service employees” (the effendi class) among those participating in the fires.57 The narrator’s father, for example, would be considered part of this class; while in the novel he does not participate in the demonstrations, the allegiance of this class of Egyptians to the nationalist cause suggests a shift in the perception of what constituted the modern. Ryzova writes, “Effendification” was about taking on the markers of modernity as a conscious choice of social actors . . . The new effendis were really new in the sense that they represented a generation that grew up under, or was brought up by, the new state. In this respect, the challenge the new effendis posed to the liberal establishment was not an attack on the modernizing project—it was not about whether to be modern—it was an attempt by those who saw themselves as the vanguard of modernity, to redefine modern Egyptian society in terms of “whose society—and state—is this going to be?”58

Thus while the downtown, with its architecture and establishments that catered to the tastes of an affluent and largely foreign clientele, may have represented


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a modernity that liberal effendis sought to join (the narrator’s father as a bank clerk living among foreigners in Wust al-Balad), the generation of the “new effendiyya” of the 1930s and 1940s (to which our narrator belongs) viewed themselves as part of this modernity. As Ryzova points out, they did not seek to reject the “project of modernization,” yet they sought—through their demonstrations, fires, and ultimately the 1952 revolution—to contest its discourse of liberalism and its celebration of the commodity in favor of an anticolonial platform that defined modernity in terms of an independent, socialist Egypt. From Egyptianization to Americanization: The Waning of Wust al-Balad By the end of the novel the fate of the protagonist, the Gazer, seems to parallel that of the downtown itself. While he describes the downtown becoming Egyptianized under Nasser, and Americanized under Sadat, he also witnesses its decline as a commercial center as the upper classes take to shopping in the newer districts surrounding it: Muhandisin, Misr al-Gadida, and Madinat Nasr. Stricken with polio, he is no longer able to stroll freely throughout the streets as he once had. Instead, he laments that he only walks in the blocks in the immediate vicinity of his apartment. At times, writing becomes difficult, and he is not able to make sense of what he is writing or why. He describes the polio as figuratively taking him over, paralyzing both his hands and his mind. Thus the acts of walking, reflecting, and writing as a way of processing the past—a process that the reader is privy to throughout the work—are no longer possible for our narrator. The movement between the interiority of the narrative and the exteriority of the place of the city, a movement that defines the novel, gives way in the final few chapters to inward reflection alone: I sit with my papers then I rise a day, two, or three. I cannot find the way to get to my insides—I mean those thoughts and feelings that I want to express. Then I sit with my papers and I write with an amazing ease and quickly. At that time my hesitance in writing was not an impotence, rather it was an anticipation of what the mysterious recesses of my mind would produce. I said to myself: be patient. Patience is the skill of the hunter. I waited. A month passed, then two, then four. I reread what I had written. I was begging the writing. Then I realized that it did not want to come or that I am not able to go to it. I said: the paralysis has stretched from my legs to my hand to my mind. I began to not know what I wanted. When the story began with a boy stricken with an eye disease [Khedive Isma‘il], it began for me in a clear manner. I wanted to write about the square where I was born and where I lived. But the boundaries of the square, once welldefined by time and place and my knowledge, dissolved. Then I found myself lost in the middle of a plethora of details that were beyond me and beyond any book where I might gather them.59


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The narrator’s own reflections on the writing process refer us to the author’s challenge in attempting to write a work that is at once fictional and historically precise. ‘Ashur, in repeatedly referring to her narrator’s struggle with the writing process, points to the constructed nature of writing both novels and historical narratives. Blurring the lines between the two, she shows, through her narrator’s constant commentary on his own writing, the extent to which one’s perspective on the past is informed by one’s present positionality. The narrator’s constant questioning in his writing of whether he has grasped the past, understood it, and represented it accurately on the page points to his own (and ‘Ashur’s) ambivalence with the notion of authorship. Here the author is not absent, but a specter moving in and out of the text. This play on perspective occurs repeatedly throughout the novel where, through ‘Ashur’s use of enframing, we are constantly reminded as readers that the Gazer is a constructed character. At the same time, ‘Ashur jettisons us into the interior world of the Gazer by using a first-person narrative for most of the narrator’s writing. This shifting between voices (the author’s third-person narration, the narrator’s first-person self-referentiality, the Gazer’s first-person memories of Wust al-Balad, the narrator’s third-person historical chronicling of the lives of Egypt’s power brokers) may be likened to the sort of spatial play she reproduces in her descriptions of the city. For instance, in the first chapter of the novel, we are ushered into the downtown through a description of Khedive Isma‘il’s master plans of the district he hopes to model after Haussmann’s Paris. Following this, we are taken into the heart of the downtown from the point of view of the narrator, describing in the first person what it was like to participate in the demonstrations in January 1952. Finally, his train of thought and writing is interrupted by the narrator in the present questioning and contradicting his own narration of the past.60 So just as ‘Ashur shifts spatial perspectives, from the minute details of the triangles on Sulayman Pasha to the larger frame of Wust al-Balad, and then (toward the end of the novel) to the expansion of Cairo westward across the Nile, so too is this echoed in her act of shifting the perspective of her narration and thus destabilizing the notion of the authorial voice. With the emergence of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the project of liberalism that marked the colonial project of modernity was eschewed for a Socialist vision of modernization. The community of foreigners was purged from the downtown and their real estate was bought by the upper echelons of those in the military who had now taken power. During this period (from the 1950s through the 1960s) the downtown witnessed a process of Egyptianization, or as Abu-Lughod called it, “indigenization.”61 Along with the changing of street names to reflect heroes and martyrs of Egypt’s nationalist movement, the downtown was reimagined as a less exclusionary space where all classes could participate in its commerce and public centers. Playing once more on the shifting of narrative perspectives, ‘Ashur,


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via her narrator, writes of this period, “The Gazer reflected on his idea and the course of his speech: The Free Officers Egyptianized the heart of the city and gave it to the middle class . . . The buildings grew old, eroded by each step. Rats came to live there . . . No longer were the rich the clients of Groppi and al-Americain. The truly rich were no longer patrons of Qasr al-Nil Street.”62 Thus the climactic success of the revolution transformed the area of the downtown from a space (of contest) where lower-class Egyptians had been excluded to a space open to all classes. And yet, the narrator describes the “opening” of this modern space as the beginning of its slow deterioration. The liberation of the city center also meant that the capital that had once made the area so exclusive and prized now was directed toward establishments in the areas of Muhandisin, Madinat Nasr, and Misr al-Gadida (Heliopolis). The zeal with which the narrator once described the protests and the sense of mounting tension in the novel gives way to a sense of despair at the postrevolution transformation of the downtown. Abu-Lughod describes the transformation of the district in detail: With the Revolution and then the aftermath of the Suez Crisis (1956), however, the district [Wust al-Balad] underwent a rapid population succession. In 1957 a high vacancy rate brought about by the departure of significant numbers of foreign nationals permitted the influx of many upwardly mobile technocrats of the new regime . . . As a result, the ethnic composition of the Gold Coast’s population altered radically in the direction of indigenization. By 1960, Egyptian Muslims constituted almost three-fourths of the population of . . . [the downtown], reflecting a new unification between elite and mass and a final extirpation of the most glaring aspects of alienism in the city. Arabic soon supplanted French on the streets and in the stores; even the once exclusive Jazira Sporting Club (island companion to the Turf Club), that had been burned so eagerly in the street uprisings in 1952 along with the old Shepheard’s Hotel, the ultimate foreign citadel, bowed to its inevitable future as a recreational facility for Egyptians. . . . In the shops, as a reflection of the changed nature of the clientele, and often changed ownership as well (some of the major ones sequestered by the government had been owned by prominent French-Jewish families), the alien goods, patterns, and prices that had discouraged the non-aristocracy from venturing into the shops gradually were removed and in their place were substituted items and actions designed to attract a less exclusive, but also more typical class of buyers.63

Ironically, the city center becomes, once more, the ultimate staging ground for the ideology of the new regime. The “unification between elite and mass” that was promised by Nasser is realized spatially in the downtown as shops, merchandise, and residents gradually begin to reflect the more Egyptian demographic. The narrator, however, does not celebrate these changes. Instead, his description of the period, marked by the erosion of buildings and the influx of


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rats, reveals his repulsion for the new “Egyptianized” downtown. This repulsion further brings into relief his ambivalent position vis-à-vis the “golden age” of the district, which he describes, as we have seen in prior passages, with a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness. As Nasser’s efforts to modernize Cairo were directed toward areas outside of the city center, capital began to flow away from the heart of the city. Madinat Nasr and Muhandisin, originally called Madinat al-Dubbat (Officers’ City), were designed to house the new class of military officers and technocrats who had come to power. Rows of rectangular residential buildings designed after Soviet models were built in an effort to reflect the economic efficiency and ideology of utilitarianism epitomized by the new regime.64 The optimism of the nationalist movement and the ideology of Pan-Arabism were reflected in the choice of street names for these new districts (e.g., al-Batal Ahmad ‘Abd al-Aziz, Jami‘at al-Duwal al-Arabiyya, Damascus, Jerusalem, Gaza, Iraq, Tigris, Euphrates, Hijaz, Wadi al-Nil, Aden, and Midan Lubnan). The spatial turn in the 1960s away from Wust al-Balad and toward the areas of the suburbs would mark the course of urban redevelopment in Cairo for the next half century. The American influence in everything from architecture to forms of commerce and culture that would occur under Sadat in the 1970s touched the center of the city (particularly Tahrir Square and the areas along the Nile shore), but the majority of development would occur in the newer districts of Muhandisin, Ma‘adi, and Misr al-Gadida, where the majority of the Egyptian elite had now settled. In describing the “Americanization” of Muhandisin, the narrator writes of those of the next generation who could not conceive of a past untouched by American commerce: None of the future offspring born in the flats and big hospitals of this neighborhood would know anything about Ahmad ‘Abd al-Aziz and Jul Jamal and ‘Abd alMun‘im Riyad. When they grow up a little and become boys and girls or teenagers at the university, they will be drawn to McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken, Mister Donut and Baskin Robbins. All of the franchises are clustered together at the intersection of the two streets of Al-Batal Ahmad ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and Jamiyyat alDuwal. There will be no traces of the Pan-Arab legion in this neighborhood except for the residents of some of the well-off families of the Gulf living in the tallest, most elegant buildings.65

Echoing Isma‘il’s project a century before, ‘Ashur’s narrator notes that with the building of the miniature World Trade Center (after the former World Trade Center Towers in New York) along the west shore of the Nile, “a small piece of America” was erected, surrounding the downtown, which was once meant to serve as a “small piece of Europe.” The miniature World Trade Center was intended to offer the consumer everything from Levi’s jeans to Adidas


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and Motorola phones, as well as a cinema where one could watch American films. While the mall itself was eventually converted to offices and many of the commercial establishments moved to a larger mall that was erected nearby (the Arcadia Mall, also on the Corniche al-Nil), the symbolism of the site as marking the physical dawning of an American neo-imperial presence on the space of Cairo remains apt. Of this shift to an American-inspired spatial turn in Cairo, Sa‘d al-Din Ibrahim writes of Anwar al-Sadat, “His vision was similar to that of Khedive Isma‘il. Sadat wanted to develop Egypt along western lines with western economic aid, western technology and western experts. If Paris and Rome were the favourite models for Isma‘il, Los Angeles and Houston were the favourite models for Sadat.”66 As a result, private developers were brought in to build luxury high-rises, hotels, bridges, and roads. Egyptians working in the Persian Gulf (and benefiting from the oil industry) as well as Americans were courted as investors and residents, providing new demand for certain kinds of properties and services. In addition, an entire population (roughly five thousand residents) from the district of Bulaq (a former industrial center to the immediate north of the downtown) was forced to relocate to the district of al-Zawiyya al-Hamra in a suburb in the far northern section of Cairo. As Farha Ghannam observed, in his plan to build modern Cairo Anwar al-Sadat emphasized (like Isma‘il Pasha a century before) the “visual image of urban space . . . privileging the gaze of tourists and upper-class Egyptians.”67 The result of Sadat’s open-door economic policy (Infitah) was an increase in the price of basic goods and an influx of American-style entertainment (nightclubs and bars) and cultural practices. The backlash to his Western-inspired modernization was, once more, a series of riots in January 1977 (referred to as the Bread Riots) where the most iconic symbols of his modernization efforts (nightclubs along al-Haram Street leading to the pyramids) were set on fire.68 Once more, the battle over the notion of Egypt’s “modern” identity becomes enacted in space. While ‘Ashur does not trace in detail the history of the 1977 uprising, in several scenes the narrator does reflect on the rampant poverty, unemployment, and high prices that plague the city in the present. For example, toward the end of the novel the narrator’s cleaning woman, Umm ‘Abd Allah, at one point chastises him for his preoccupation with the past and the buildings of Wust al-Balad. If you are going to read and to write, why, she wonders, do you not write on “what concerns us”?69 But as Amina Elbendary has pointed out, ‘Ashur is writing about what she believes ought to concern Egyptians;70 that is, she is examining Egypt’s colonial and neocolonial past through its imprint on the space of the city, particularly the space of Wust al-Balad. Her work attempts to show a relationship between the social problems plaguing Egyptians today and the muse that Western modernity has served, beginning a century ago with the Turko-Circassion Khedive, then the British, Nasser, and later Sadat with the support of the United States. In the last pages of the novel, following the


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narrator’s lament at the influx of American capital throughout the city, he concludes, “I had wanted to write on European Cairo which was besieged by two fires on January 26, 1952. It is still searching for a way out. Beset by a poverty chasing it all of the time, Cairo is forced to rise in imposing towers, but that is another story.”71 The closing chapters of the novel mark the decline of the city center and the emergence of the suburbs as receptacles of Americana and enclaves for the Egyptian elite. The story of the present-day downtown is not part of her project, but her narrator points to its decline as if to suggest that the closing of the downtown as modern stage was an inevitability, marked from the start by the misguided belief that a spectacular and often bifurcated notion of modernity based in the city’s core was sustainable. Recovering the Nationalist Project: Wust alBalad Reimagined as Collective Space Yet the challenges facing many nations today are essentially the same as at the beginning of the 19th century: how to become modern or global and to remain faithful to traditional ways; how, as Ricoeur put it, “to get on the road to modernization without necessarily jettisoning the old cultural past which has been the raison d’etre of a nation.” —Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation72

Qit‘a min Urubba is an ambitious project. Radwa ‘Ashur’s central aim is to understand the way in which space can be used as a frame for examining history and for offering a revisionist version of Egypt’s history over the last century and a half. At times her narrator’s chronicle echoes what has been historically documented, and she points to this with a series of footnotes at the end of the text. In other instances, it departs and seems to draw out different historical corollaries and convergences.73 ‘Ashur experiments with narrative perspective by shifting constantly between a third-person voiced narration and a first-person narration from the point of view of the Gazer. This preoccupation with both perspective and the idea of the gaze adds a further layer of theoretical play to her spatial history where the notion of the gaze of the modern European subject was critical to the Khedive’s architectural vision from the start. The narrator, in trying to unearth the history of Wust al-Balad via his own memories, admits repeatedly to the discursiveness of his own project and the subjective nature of historical chronicles. By calling into question the reliability of our narrator (through his own self-questioning, through his wife’s claim that he is insane, and through the criticisms of his cleaning woman, Umm ‘Abd Allah) we, as readers, are not allowed to trust the account entirely and must accept it, finally, as fiction. The two dominant refrains throughout the work are the narrator’s participation and recounting of a number of demonstrations against foreign hegemony


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(1946, 1952, and 1991—the first Gulf War) and the symbolism of the downtown as a stage on which the battle for the modern is enacted through successive regimes. ‘Ashur’s narrator returns to the fires on January 26, 1952, in an effort to consider the relationship of the nationalist movement and the idea of the modern as embodied by the establishments of the British and other foreign elite. The marring of this space, and the looting and pillaging that continued throughout the night, suggests a collective desire on behalf of the people to bring down the most iconic symbols of Western modernity and along with it the regime of the elites who used this space as the stage for their performance of the modern. ‘Ashur’s narrator describes the demonstrations throughout the novel with a sense of euphoria and conviction. It is in these moments that the narrator is one with the collective, and it is in these moments that he seems to write the most deliberately, in contrast to his more interior moments when he uses his writing to express the ambivalence and doubts that plague him. During the demonstrations he is surrounded by other Egyptians and the crowd speaks for him.74 It is this spirit of collectivity and national identity that ‘Ashur seeks to recall in her mapping of these marches through the downtown. In celebrating the zeal and sense of collective vision that nationalist demonstrations engendered in Egyptians, she actively reappropriates this zeal through her act of mapping the downtown in the name of the nationalist cause. Yet ‘Ashur, after revisiting the demonstrations and fires of 1952, repeatedly stops short of describing the coup itself as a victorious moment. In fact, the revolution and the subsequent coming to power of Nasser are given relatively little attention in the novel. In describing the “Egyptianization” of the downtown, we recall it was characterized by the influx of rats to the district. In sum, we might suggest that ‘Ashur’s project aims to memorialize the site of Wust al-Balad as a historical coming together of both the project of modernity and the project of nationalism. In bringing into vivid relief the potential and sense of possibility that the days of the anticolonial struggle evoked, she celebrates, in what was once the center of the city, the genuine sense of collective identity and purpose that marked the nationalist movement. Qit‘a min Urubba is her attempt to recover this spirit and to do so in the district that bears the traces of this struggle. She does so in a time when the stratification between classes in Cairo is as dramatically inscribed in space as it was then. Her studied contemplation of the buildings of Wust al-Balad and the transformation of this quarter over the course of a century reminds us, after the work of Marshall Berman, of the importance of revisiting past notions of the modern in an effort to understand the discomfort and challenges of being “modern” in our world today. ‘Ashur’s novel revisits Wust al-Balad in an effort to use its dramatic past as a way to reframe the social problems facing Egypt today. By gesturing to a period of collective national spirit and spatial contest, she attempts to reimagine a moment when an Egyptian collective identity might mean once more in the present.


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CHAPTER 3

The Indigenous Modernism of Khayri Shalabi Popular Intellectuals and the Neighborhood Ghurza

Introduction

I

n the previous chapters I have attempted to establish the site of Wust alBalad as a historically contested space. The staging of colonial modernity in this space, as we have seen, was a project that was intended to give rise to the modern Egyptian subject. The demonstrations on the eve of the 1952 revolution, as detailed in our discussion of Radwa ‘Ashur’s Qit‘a min Urubba, symbolized an important attempt on the part of Cairenes to mar this facade of modernity and decry the increasing presence of foreign capital and consumption in prominent Western locations of the city. Similarly the use of these iconic Western spaces by Egyptian nationalists as key sites for the staging of anticolonial protests and rallies suggests the way these spaces were then reappropriated for the Egyptian nationalist project. To further these ends, the changing of street names in the area of downtown signals not only an obliteration of an undesirable past but an act of “taking back” Wust al-Balad as territory of the Egyptian nation. This chapter explores Khayri Shalabi’s novel Salih Hisa (2000) in an effort to show how this work posits the neighborhood of Ma‘ruf and the 1960s hashish café as spaces where the Egyptian underclasses negotiate alternative forms of modernity. In the context of Janet Abu-Lughod’s urban ethnographic projects and, in many respects, Timothy Mitchell’s sociotheoretical work, Hayy Ma‘ruf might initially be understood as a premodern space. Set in the immediate


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periphery of the downtown center, we could argue that this traditional neighborhood brings into relief the articulation of the modern in the Europeanized center. As Mitchell writes, “the modern occurs only by performing the distinction between the modern and the non-modern, the West and the non-West, each performance opening the possibility of what is figured as non-modern contaminating the modern, displacing it, or disrupting its authority.”1 Mitchell refutes the universality of a Western modernity and powerfully suggests that the very act of delineation between the modern and the nonmodern is the space in which modernity is born. Where the adjoining neighborhood of Ma‘ruf might be read by Mitchell as the requisite premodern space whereby the Parisianinspired boulevards of downtown achieve their modern status, I hope to argue that a close reading of the way of life in the popular quarter of Ma‘ruf, as presented in Shalabi’s Salih Hisa, suggests a different way of experiencing the modern that lends itself less readily to the dichotomous notion of the dual city.2 With respect to Hayy Ma‘ruf specifically, the community of lower-class Egyptians and urban migrants appropriated these buildings after World War II in an act that may be read as a parallel “taking back” of the territory for the people, yet on a scale far less heroic and historic than what was enacted in Wust al-Balad proper. Shalabi’s novel depicts the lives of these modern migrants (Egyptian fallahin, Nubians, and Sa‘idis) who, in the early part of the twentieth century, claimed these streets and buildings for their own needs and livelihood. This novel serves as an exploration of this shadow community prior to and during the Infitah and attests to the way in which this neighborhood functions as an alternative site of modernity, challenging in its iconoclastic characters the official, established spaces of café culture in downtown Cairo. While perhaps lesser known to Western readers of the Arabic novel, Khayri Shalabi has enjoyed late in his career a significant amount of “official” recognition for his works. In addition to various awards given out by the state, in 2003 he won the Naguib Mahfuz Medal for Literature for his novel Wakalat ‘Atiyya (Atiyya’s Caravanserai), translated by Faruq ‘Abd al-Wahab as The Lodging House (2006). Despite his prolific output (more than 15 novels, several short story collections, and screen plays), he is a writer that for most of his career has not received the same international recognition as other well-known Egyptian novelists (e.g., Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Magid, Radwa ‘Ashur, Gamal al-Ghitani, Sonallah Ibrahim, Salwa Bakr, and Ibrahim Aslan). The literary critic Gabir ‘Usfur, in his critical text Zaman al-Riwaya (The Age of the Novel; 1999), ends his work with a discussion and celebration of the work of Shalabi. He attributes the ambivalent reception of his work among Arab literary critics to the fact that he writes about marginal quarters and the characters that emerge from these liminal spaces. Whether they be locales within the center of the city, as in the case of Hayy Ma‘ruf in Salih Hisa, or the cemeteries on the periphery, as in Manamat ‘Amm Ahmad al-Sammak, his novels are inhabited by characters who,


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The Indigenous Modernism of Khayri Shalabi

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according to ‘Usfur, do not have the same concerns as those occupying the “center” and often, in their quiet rebelliousness, actively undermine the authority of the “state.”3 His novels of these urban underworlds populated by antiheroic characters—beggars, thieves, local merchants, grave diggers, popular poets, students, swindlers, and local intellectuals—do not mirror the concerns or preoccupations of those in the “literary establishment” and resist, in their style, conventional literary classifications (i.e., social realist, historical, postmodern). As a result of his commitment to the periphery, and the very local forms of colloquial he employs, ‘Usfur writes that Shalabi’s works remain limited in their ability to garner a wide audience, particularly among critics outside of Egypt.4 While ‘Usfur’s position is valuable in considering the complicated issue of reception, I would argue that it is imperative that we consider Shalabi within the context of other writers who have historically depicted in their novels representations of folk culture as an extension of a nationalist agenda (e.g., Gamal ‘Attiya Ibrahim, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, Yahya Haqqi). While the scope of this chapter does not permit such a broad comparative analysis, suffice it to say that Shalabi’s choice of locales and narrative aesthetic has deep sociopolitical implications that resonate to a lesser degree in the works of other Egyptian writers. For our purposes here, I hope to read Shalabi’s work as part of a project of heritage recovery far different from the work of Naguib Mahfuz and Yusuf Idris and perhaps more similar to the contributions of Ibrahim Aslan and Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Majid. Furthermore, I will conclude this chapter by suggesting the importance of contextualizing this work as a ghetto pastoral, that is, part of what I read as a “class war in literature,”5 a movement that has found its most recent expression in the 1990s generation of Egyptian writers. Yasir ‘Abd al-Latif, whose novel I will discuss briefly in the Conclusion, belongs to this generation. Although his work is hardly as mature in its style as the novels of Shalabi, many of his generation share a subaltern or proletarian consciousness that, reminiscent of Shalabi’s project, is deeply attentive to the world of the margins, and similarly draws on folk and colloquial traditions. Tracing Hayy Ma‘ruf: A Brief History of the Neighborhood In her magnum opus on Cairo, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious,6 Janet Abu-Lughod suggests that colonial urbanism in Cairo (as in other cities) was epitomized by the bifurcation of the city into two parts, one modern and one medieval or traditional. Shalabi’s choice of Hayy Ma‘ruf is distinctive in that the neighborhood historically was considered an appendage to Cairo’s “Gold Coast” (Isma‘iliyya). In fact, according to Jean-Luc Arnaud, the three hectares that span the neighborhood of Hayy Ma‘ruf and are contiguous to the proposed canal area were originally intended in Khedive Isma‘il’s second plan of 1869 to house a prominent street, “La Rue Wabur al-Miyah,” for strolling along the Nile. Three


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large plots of land were reserved for water basins, as designated by the “Society of Water.” Arnaud notes that the “archives are mute on the subject” concerning the neighborhood’s intended use. He later reveals that the plan for developing this area was never realized, and was in fact abandoned for further development on property near the southern area (given the boundaries at that time) of the city in Bab al-Luq. As Arnaud puts it, “it was of little importance to Isma‘il that the development of Ma‘ruf was not realized along the Wabur al-Miyah Street, since he never had the occasion to pass by there.”7 Thus the area of Ma‘ruf was literally a casualty of Isma‘il’s inability to realize the full extent of his original plan for the city. Inscribed in the history of the neighborhood—its square plots of land and their Western grid-like organization—is the physically abandoned district of Isma‘il’s own “project of modernity.” It was, of course, this small village that would eventually expand informally to accommodate the many rural migrants who were drawn to the downtown as a prime business district with opportunities for work. As time passed, the influx of rural migrants to this area increased, and it was eventually transformed from a relatively empty area, containing a few villas and municipal buildings alongside the “cabins” of the “village of Ma‘ruf” to an area that was predominately sha‘bi (popular), consisting of informal housing and shops. This suggests that the Khedive’s master plan not only was abandoned but was, in time, completely undermined by the more immediate needs of the city’s new migrants. Their gradual usurpation of this land and the local production of this space may be read as one contest in a long series of struggles over the class coding of popular neighborhoods in the city.8 As Abu-Lughod notes, the increased demand for housing in the city center can largely be attributed to the wartime economy of the 1940s and poverty and overcrowding in the rural areas of Upper Egypt and the Nile Delta.9 Gamal Hamdan, in his well-known, albeit dated, work Shakhsiyyat Misr: dirasa fi ‘abqariyyat al-makan (The Personality of Egypt: Reflections on the Genius of a Place; 1967),10 goes so far as to suggest that Cairo during this period functioned imperially in relation to the provinces, where the villages in Upper Egypt suffered greatly from the hegemony of the urban center. The siphoning off of resources from the provinces, the lack of attention to development in the rural areas, the general overpopulation and the loss of residents due to migration all contributed to the sharp increase in rural poverty. He argues that the poverty of the Upper Egyptian villages may be read as directly proportional relative to the expansion of Cairo and attributes the migratory patterns toward the urban center to be the result of the dire circumstances of many villages. According to Abu-Lughod, migration from rural areas during the 1940s and 1950s was most intense in the belt surrounding the central business district (from Wust al-Balad to ‘Abdin) and in certain, what Abu-Lughod terms, “urban-fringe areas” (i.e., Shubra al-Khayma, ‘Aguza, Imbaba, and the northern cemeteries).


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The area of Ma‘ruf running north toward Rud al-Farag and Bulaq was a primary site of migration for Upper Egyptians, while many of the other areas were more popular among migrants from the region of the Nile Delta. Most migrants tended to flock toward communities where they knew someone or had a relative (similar to the ethnic immigrants in the United States), eventually finding a residence in the area, often in some form of informal housing arrangement.11 The abandoned, somewhat empty plots of land in Ma‘ruf were thus often taken over by Sa‘idi and Nubian migrants to the city who usually worked in some form of domestic or commercial service in the urban center and wanted to live in close proximity within a familiar ethnic enclave.12 In this regard, Hayy Ma‘ruf would not be classified as a traditional urban neighborhood comparable to the quarters surrounding al-Azhar (i.e., characterized by narrow, winding streets, Fatimid architecture, and a demographic of urban residents that have a long history in the region). Rather, Ma‘ruf is one of many “in-between” zones between Abu-Lughod’s two polarized cities. The coexistence of modern apartment buildings and informal housing that emerged in the first part of the twentieth century as a response to the needs of the underclasses evolved, from the 1940s onward, into a neighborhood modeled after the specific requirements of that community.13 Shalabi’s Salih Hisa reflects this history and seems to foreshadow a phenomenon that would come to define Cairo in the latter part of the century with the continued influx of migrants to the belt of informal settlements on the city’s periphery. Although his novel portrays the community of downtown residents during the 1960s, the social fact of migration and the challenge of securing housing and public services for this population may be understood as one of the most urgent social issues facing Cairo today. Shalabi is a meticulous social geographer. The novel opens with a description of the neighborhood during the 1960s. From the first page, the narrator, the curious voice marveling at the world of the ghurza (hashish den) and a regular member of the local clique (or shilla) at Hakim’s, positions himself through his reflections to the reader on the world of Ma‘ruf ’s locals. In order to describe the location of the hashish house, for instance, he begins in the center of Wust al-Balad, which gradually emerges as the “other” center in relation to Hakim’s ghurza; it is the site of the “other modernity” in reference to the way of life the regulars at the ghurza embrace. Ghurza Hakim was distinctively located around, what was known among us, as a complex of ghurzas in the Ma‘ruf district directly behind Tal‘at Harb Street— formerly Sulayman Pasha. The principle street there, Ma‘ruf, runs parallel to Tal‘at Harb from behind; it begins from Tahrir Square, intersects Antikkhana, known nowadays as Mahmud Bisyuni, where there used to exist a library of art adjoining the Museum of Modern Art and where we used to spend our carefree


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afternoons listening to music, reading precious books, and looking at paintings. At 26th of July Street, Ma‘ruf ends, intersecting with Tharwat Street . . . Ma‘ruf is the complete contradiction of Tal‘at Harb, although the distance between them is a few steps. From Café Riche on the corner of Tal‘at Harb—the prime assembly place of the intellectuals, the socially prominent, and the elite among the tourists—to the complex of ghurzas in Hayy Ma‘ruf is more than a shortcut, which wouldn’t take one longer than three minutes. After that you feel—as if spellbound—you have moved into another life, in another city, of other people. The whole street is teeming with all types of people and things to which there is no end: donkey carts pulled by donkeys, horses, or human hands, vegetables, fruit, fish, plastic and aluminum containers of different sizes laid out, small wares, coolers for soft drinks, small shops on each side, grocers, ful and ta‘miyya, kushari, spare car parts, car bodywork shops, mechanics, bicycle rental shops, electronic shops, cafés, and peddlers carrying [on their carts] window displays showing pieces of this and that, not to mention the hole-in-the-wall shops to repair locks, car doors, hand-stoves (bowabir), shoe shiners specializing in mending worn-out shoes and polishing their leather. . . . The group of residents downtown purchase all the things they need from this marketplace, which is bustling with movement night and day to the extent that those walking there don’t feel the crowdedness of it, as if the ground itself is moving them. Despite that, the street is pleasurable at all hours of the day and night. [In fact], the cost of living is so cheap that lunch on Tal‘at Harb would cost you a whole months salary if you were a lowly employee, whereas on Ma‘ruf you can fill your stomach for two piasters or maybe one, which would buy you a half pocket of bread stuffed with ful and ta‘miyya and salad or a handful of hot and filling sweet potatoes.14

From these initial pages it is clear that Cairo’s downtown (Wust al-Balad) functions as the dominant external reference in Salih Hisa. It is the other “modern” space that points to a Cairo that is outside of the insulated world of Hayy Ma‘ruf and Hakim’s ghurza. The interplay between these two spaces sets up a unique dynamic, which also becomes one of the novel’s central themes. While there are other references to wealthy districts and upper-class spaces (e.g., Muhandisin, Zamalik, the American University in Cairo) throughout the novel, the proximity of the downtown in particular, and its contrasting European facades, storefront windows, and grand boulevards, particularly accentuates the otherness of the sha‘bi neighborhood of Ma‘ruf with its small shops and numerous popular cafés (’ahawi). The juxtaposition of the two sites—Wust al-Balad and Hayy Ma‘ruf—is central to Shalabi’s commentary in this novel. For although he focuses on the popular district, its characters, and Hakim’s ghurza, his critique is directed toward those occupying the official spaces of the intelligentsia next door in the cafés of Wust al-Balad and those consuming in the commercial spaces of postrevolution “modern” Egypt. The portrait of the neighborhood that emerges is one where those from Upper Egypt and


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the countryside participate in their own parallel pronationalist project of heritage recovery—a relishing of indigenous folk traditions, language, and idle chat within the realm of the ghurza. From the outset, Shalabi’s narrator takes his reader down the main arteries of downtown to emphasize the extent to which Ma‘ruf is in the middle of everything, yet still hidden from view. He uses Tal‘at Harb Street as the familiar thoroughfare in relation to Wust al-Balad. For example, he notes that Ma‘ruf Street runs “from behind” and is the principle street that runs parallel to Tal‘at Harb. Orienting his reader in this manner, he immediately sets up a relationship between the two sites, suggesting that there is a standard orientation from which one should approach the neighborhood. The narrator describes Wust alBalad and Hayy Ma‘ruf as two neighborhoods mirroring each other, designated by both their main streets and their bustling commercial activity. To emphasize the accessibility of the neighborhood from Tal‘at Harb Square he begins each of his early chapters by describing several alternative routes, all beginning off of streets associated with the grandeur of Wust al-Balad in a former era: Tal‘at Harb Street (formerly Sulayman Pasha), Champollion, Mahmud al-Bisyuni (formerly Antikkhana), and so on. By drawing attention to the street names prior to and after the revolution, he gestures to the dual history of this area. At the same time, by mapping these routes to the ghurza in detail, he seems to suggest the centrality of Ma‘ruf (to the class of insiders) despite its hidden and deeply local quality. He notes that to make the trip from Wust al-Balad to Ma‘ruf takes a mere three minutes. And yet, a bit later, he alludes to the fact that the distance, symbolically, is much greater, owing to the fact that one is actually entering a vastly different world. The sense of this bewitching quality of the area is clear in the narrator’s description of the magical crossing over from one district to the next: “you moved into another life in another city of other people . . . The street is teeming with all types of people and things.” Shalabi makes further use of this stark contrast between the two areas by accentuating that Wust al-Balad was once the site of the “library of the museum of modern art,” where books, records, and paintings, that is, where modern-as-Western forms of art, could be enjoyed. He specifically names the Europeanized cafés of the official cultural establishment on Tal‘at Harb Street, Café Riche and Groppi,15 where the tourists and elite intellectuals fraternize, as points of obvious contrast to the far more local ghurza that he is about to describe. He highlights the difference in the cost of living between the two spaces, noting that no one would pay a whole month’s wages for lunch in Wust al-Balad proper when one could fill one’s stomach for a couple of piasters in Hayy Ma‘ruf. In describing the street of Ma‘ruf (the shadow thoroughfare), he anthropomorphizes it, likening the movement of the masses of people buying and selling to the undulation of an organism. Implicit in Shalabi’s narration is the sense that he is speaking to two audiences. On the one hand, he is describing Ma‘ruf to an audience of


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outsiders who would think it hard to find; on the other hand, it is clear from his description that once you get there, everyone (that is, everyone among those in the community) knows where it is. His reference to the crowded streets suggests that the inaccessibility of the place is only for the reader and elite outsiders. In a point I will take up later, he describes the handcart peddlers, with their own vatarins or window displays showcasing all manner of goods. Here he draws a parallel between the storefronts downtown (the title of one of his later chapters) and the peddlers mimicking these displays on their handcarts with, what seems to be, an anachronistic modern window displaying their various wares to catch the attention of those passing on the street. He later details the multiple hashish cafés in the neighborhood, the kiosks where people buy their cigarettes, and the hum of market activity in the neighborhood to reinforce the centrality of this street as a prime site of exchange, daily work, and social activity. Timothy Mitchell’s definition of modernity—a staging emergent from the demarcation of the zones of the modern and the premodern—seems initially applicable once more. In the previous description, each neighborhood achieves its particular aura and is brought into relief through its respective oppositionality to the other. The comparison of these two locales seems to further distance them from each other. And yet Shalabi flips the focus of this picture. He is not interested in memorializing Cairo’s former colonial center as the pinnacle and promise of Egypt’s modern trajectory (where Hayy Ma‘ruf effectively becomes the premodern space and Wust al-Balad the clearly modern). Rather, Shalabi uses his novel to examine the forms of modernity that emerge in the neglected, “in-between” spaces of the city, and more particularly, within the context of the ghurza. He challenges us to consider, if Hayy Ma‘ruf is not the shadowy premodern space as cast in the light of the European cafés of Wust al-Balad, then what sort of space is it? In what follows, it is this question to which I hope to respond. I will begin with a close reading of the novel, followed by a discussion of Shalabi’s use of the vernacular. I will then discuss how this work may be read as a critique of one particular notion of the modern and how this critique fits into Shalabi’s overall social and literary project. Before I begin, it is important to understand the extent to which the neighborhood of Ma‘ruf became a refuge for migrants and thus may be read as a contested space. Shalabi’s chronicling of the government’s negligence of this area, in conjunction with the population increase as a result of rural poverty and migration during and after World War II, is exemplary of larger trends in Cairo’s overall urban development. (Among these trends are the influx of migrants to the beltway areas surrounding the center of the city, the emergence of informal housing, and the relative abandonment of these areas by the government for other investment projects in suburban districts.) In pointing to a set of social issues that have yet to be resolved, Shalabi’s depiction of Hayy Ma‘ruf is both lyrically nostalgic and deeply critical.16 In the following passage, the


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narrator briefly tells the history of this neighborhood of urban migrants and the process by which they came to call the village of Ma‘ruf home. He does so in the context of his description of the ghurza belonging to Mu‘allim Jallal, Hakim’s rival in the neighborhood: The ghurza [of Mu‘allim Jallal] consists of a café built out of wood and reeds in the middle of ruins in a large open space. The houses around it—stretching from Ma‘ruf and Ramsis Street together—were on the verge of collapse officially, according to the government books. The heyday of the buildings had passed about half a century ago, and strict decrees had been issued to evacuate all of them, although they had not lost, despite their age, the architectural beauty of their marvelous facades . . . The residents could not find an alternative [to these ruins], so they stayed in the buildings at their own risk and the houses were recorded in the government books as merely wreckage, empty of residents. That was the case, despite the actual repeated falling of the buildings on their occupants in front of everyone. What’s more, the new residents came and usurped the wreckage, pulling off its metal and its wood. They erected [with these materials] in the empty spaces [of the neighborhood] shacks in which to live and small stores for selling and buying, and dens for smoking hashish, and auto body shops, key shops, and metalwork shops. The forerunner among them in this was Mu‘allim Jallal, the owner of the most famous ghurza in downtown, if not throughout all of the city as well as the suburbs. He was renown as such given the strange passion Egyptian people have for cruel, despotic outlaws, to the extent that many would take great pleasure in obeying his orders and submitting to his control. Not only this, but they would compete among themselves to win him over, maybe to avoid his wrath, and maybe to feel empowered by him in one matter or another.17

It is within the first few pages that the provisional quality of this neighborhood is established. The narrator repeatedly mentions the historic streets that cut across this district, and the fact that it is a commercial center in its own right, while stressing the illegality of the squatters taking up residence there and the extent to which they had appropriated the dilapidated historic spaces and produced from them spaces to suit their own needs. There is a manifest tension in the narration between the desire to historicize this space and infuse it with a mythic, lawless quality, and the reality of its neglect and disrepair. While the streets are teeming with life, it is the life of a virtually underworld space, outside the purview of the repeatedly mentioned “government books,” and thus officially nonexistent. This is emphasized again in the narrator’s assertion that the “Egyptian people” have a “strange passion” for leaders who lie outside of the law. Mu‘allim Jallal is not just an outlaw hero of the people; he is romanticized as a despotic leader who commands respect for wielding absolute authority in the local confines of his neighborhood. In other words, the rule of law that might apply elsewhere in the city appears, at the start of the novel, as ineffectual in the back streets of Hayy Ma‘ruf, where instead it is the local tyrant whose word rules.


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Shalabi’s reference to the appropriation of these buildings points to the extent to which we may understand Hayy Ma‘ruf during this period as a contested space. Farha Ghannam, for instance, in her study of relocated residents from traditionally popular areas, describes how tricking the government or members of the upper classes to procure certain needs is highly regarded by Egyptians as a legitimate means of survival: “People strongly believe that the rich, who have more money and better connections, enjoy more protection and secure access to various urban resources. In this context the ability to manipulate state officials is highly regarded. ‘Fooling’ government officials, for instance, is viewed positively. It is part of a larger moral economy that legitimizes and respects the ability to trick the powerful, outsmart them, and get what one views as his or her right. It is a mixture of improvisation and utilization of available cultural elements to subvert and turn a challenging situation to one’s advantage.”18 This further echoes what Asef Bayat terms the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” in his reference to the ‘ashwa’iyyat housing in Cairo, and the residents’ procurement of certain public and private services (electricity, water, cable TV) to which they feel entitled. A similar situation is described here in Shalabi’s work, albeit in reference to the period following World War II, when many of the spaces that were being appropriated were condemned buildings in the center of the city. Lying between the British barracks and the old urban area of Bulaq, the “taking back” of Hayy Ma‘ruf in the name of the Egyptians, as narrated in the excerpted passage, may be read as a parallel silent revolt from below or a form of what Bayat classifies as collective action,19 mirroring the 1952 revolution and the purging of foreigners from the space of downtown. The novel’s concern with the preservation of certain countercultural hashish cafés and the ultimate depiction of the police shutting many of these houses down is also, in every way, a call for the preservation of informal spaces as the entitlement of the people. Here the ghurza not only represents a space sanctioned for illicit activities; in the context of this work, it serves as a metaphor for those contingent spaces deemed “illegal” by the government. Hakim’s Ghurza and the Story of Salih Hisa Hakim’s ghurza serves as the central meeting place for the clique of intellectuals and artists who make up the primary characters in the novel. A country house within the skeleton of a dilapidated urban apartment building immediately points to the oft-repeated theme of the interplay between the urban and the rural. The ghurza is the rural community that anchors the band of urban migrants who frequent the site, reminiscent of the cafés at the center of Aslan’s Malik Hazin (The Heron; 1983) or Mahfuz’s Zuqaq al-Midaq (Midaq Alley; 1947).20 In contrast to the ghurza of Mu‘allim Jallal, Hakim’s is described as being built much like a Sa‘idi house, out of adobe and clay.21 Like the rest of the neighborhood, the


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government had long since given up responsibility for the residents of the building, as it was believed to be on the verge of collapse. The hashish café, situated in the remnants of one of these rundown buildings, is described as consisting of two adjoining rooms with a wide corridor between them where the light of the sun falls from a hole in the roof—a roof made out of the wood from abandoned doors, bookshelves, and the rooftops of old cars. Chickens, ducks, geese, and rabbits run about, tended by Hakim’s wife from the adjoining room where the two of them live. The room of the ghurza is filled with old chairs with protruding nails that catch on the pant legs of those who sit there, along with turned-over wooden boxes, which serve as makeshift chairs for the young boys serving the customers. The courtyard outside the ghurza is described as being particularly frenzied, especially during certain hours of the night, with different cliques sitting in different places observing one another. The narrator describes his clique as a mix of writers, poets, artists, painters, journalists, and some university students. Their preference, he writes, was to sit outside beneath the two windows of the ghurza in the glow of the evening, smoking hashish and watching the other customers as if they were all “actors on a stage.”22 Thus a popular idyll is drawn and the ghurza serves as the central point of community bringing together the narrator’s band of cohorts. The narrator pulls us into this world where we are introduced to various types of marginal figures who use the space of the ghurza for idle chat and debates on culture and politics, as well as a space for smoking hashish and wiling away the hours. We are offered curiously little of the narrator despite the confidence with which he takes in his readers as he muses on the various characters, and Salih in particular. His selfreferential asides to the reader signal his own recognition of the extent to which his narrative is an act of imperfect representation from a liminal character who is inside this world, yet keeps a writerly distance. Like the other characters, he describes himself as coming from the countryside (an area known as Fu’adiyya) and indicates through various details that he is a writer of rising stature. In addition, we are introduced to Tal‘at al-Imbaba, an Egyptian of peasant origins and a tutor at the American University in Cairo who is married to an Italian Marxist, Matilda. There is also Qamar al-Mahruqi, who claims he is an engineer (and everyone believes him), but he actually works at a ceramics factory. He is better known among those in the neighborhood for his research on colloquial and folk expressions as part of his work on a comprehensive English dictionary of the Egyptian dialect. Hayat al-Bari is the only female regular at the ghurza. Beloved by the group, she is treated like a princess by those in the neighborhood who come to know her. Thrice married and divorced, she works as part of the administration of the American University in Cairo and translates articles from English to Arabic. Another character is Ibrahim al-Qamah, who is illiterate, but is respected among the group for his refined taste and passion for language and the cinema. Sabir al-‘Asal is the second ghurzaji (hashish attendant) alongside


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Salih, who migrated from the same village in Upper Egypt, Asyut, as Hakim and was thus practically raised by him from the time he was a boy. Others include Faruq al-Jamal, the residential colloquial poet; Zaki Hamid, an aspiring actor whose name is, incidentally, a play on the famous Egyptian actor Ahmad Zaki; and Wajdi al-Wakil, well known for his skill in the art of selling shoes to women in Cairo’s downtown shopping district. It is only with the proceeding chapters that the complexity of these characters becomes apparent. The mixture of melancholy and joy that underwrites the novel is best captured by the narrator’s description of Salih Hisa, the resident ghurzaji of Hakim’s ghurza. Despite the narrator’s preoccupation with Salih (he often confides this to the reader), he remains part of, and yet differentiated from, the clique (shilla). Salih is described as a “saqit al-qayd,” that is, a person who has no birth certificate and thus has never been documented by the government as a person.23 This status exemplifies the extent to which he belongs to the world of the margins and is “unofficial.”24 And yet, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his marginality, he is described by the narrator as being an almost divine character. He is likened to a “priest descended from the sky,” with his skin bronze like “the color of fallen figs.” Despite his white hair and his face long “like a lantern,” his body suggested a great strength and comeliness. His clothes tattered from his toil, filled with dirt and sweat, are described as “another layer of skin.”25 His renunciation of material goods and his seeming lack of attachment to anyone or anything, save occasional hashish and spirto (a dangerously strong type of alcohol), makes him a fascination for the narrator and his friends. Yet despite his status as a “folk hero” and our initial sense that Hayy Ma‘ruf is a popular Eden in which Salih is its shepherd, the novel unravels his personal story, which turns out to be something of a tragic migrant’s tale. The son of a Nubian father, Salih is described as having grown up poor in the neighborhood of Hayy Ma‘ruf in the 1930s. His mother, in an effort to support the family due to his father’s negligence, takes a job cleaning the apartment of a lawyer and member of the Wafd who comes to serve as Salih’s first mentor, teacher, and surrogate father. This lawyer introduces Salih to the importance of education, and as Shalabi writes, “planted in him an awareness, a knowledge, and a set of morals and traits he would not have known even if he had attended university . . . He inspired in him the realization that he was a human being.”26 His father, ‘Amm ‘Abd al-Bar Salih, is described as working as an officer for the camel corps (al-hajanna) for the occupying British army, and thus is seldom around, leaving his mother to support the family. When he is around, he is characterized by episodes of abuse and violence toward Salih. On one such occasion, when his father attempts to beat him with a camel whip (al-karbaj), Salih goes after him with a knife. Salih is unsuccessful, but his father, sensing his son’s physical prowess and rage, never comes near him again. Salih is eventually drafted and


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forced to serve in the Anglo-Egyptian army. He is transferred to the area known as Shalatin, on the border of northern Sudan and Egypt (at that time the entire area was under Anglo-Egyptian control). In the course of his service he learns to box and enjoys brief acclaim as a boxer. However, so as not to feel beholden to his coach, and in an effort to preserve the freedom he holds dear, he decides to leave the boxing circuit and the security it brings with it. It is also during this period that he meets, falls in love with, and mistakenly marries a young woman, Wahiba, only to later learn that they are related and she is officially his aunt. Out of despair and heartbreak, the marriage is annulled and he returns to Cairo to seek work. He finds employment with a government minister as a garçon at the buffet in his office. But after seeing the minister’s treatment of women and after an incident in which the minister raises his hand to hit him, Salih decides to leave the job in order to preserve his integrity. After a number of odd jobs, he returns to the neighborhood of Hayy Ma‘ruf and realizes that only as a ghurzaji at Hakim’s ghurza is he able to work without having to ingratiate himself. Thus it is there he stays. The notion of hisa, to which the book owes its title, is an essential component of Salih’s character and the freedom he embraces. The word hisa literally means “noise” in colloquial Egyptian, but it connotes multiple meanings. It may refer to a celebratory event one engages in, like that of a carnival or wedding (as in the colloquial phrase “‘ayzin nafrah wa n‘amal hisa”). It may also refer to an ecstatic or carnivalesque state, while in other passages in the book it refers to a kind of political mischief-making or coup. In one of Salih’s later passages he exhorts, “God created the world as a hisa. And created its people as hisa . . . Everyone is in a state of hisa! One makes hisa, in order to join in the hisa, and one might join it or one might not . . . They are all downtrodden . . . but each one is downtrodden in their own way! And me . . . I am the king of the downtrodden, because I am downtrodden in every way.”27 Like a sort of Egyptian Teiresias, taken by some for mad, but known by his friends for being a kind of poet and soothsayer, Salih’s embrace of hisa is the giving over to the ecstatic state. In the bounded space of the ghurza, and facilitated by the hashish he serves, the various cliques of artists and intellectuals come together to seek out the euphoria, stimulation, laughter, and wildness that peaks in these moments of hisa. This linking of the idea of hisa or freedom to the plight of the underclasses is a device Shalabi also uses in his novel Wakalat ‘Atiyya. Salih’s legacy for the neighborhood is the legacy of the libratory potential in folk culture. The space of the ghurza is the people’s “second life,” appropriately understood in the Bakhtinian sense. It is a space outside officialdom,28 of “folk humor,” where, as Bakhtin puts it, “laughter overcomes fear,”29 and where a “second world of folk culture is . . . constructed.”30 The space of the hashish den thus becomes something approximating an allegorical Eden, a second, utopian space of the nation, where Salih is its za‘im (leader).31 In one particularly telling passage, the narrator


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notes that Salih had come to seem like the embodiment of everyone: “In him there was something of each one of us . . . and often he would act as if he were us, collectively, and often we would act as if we were him.”32 Yet despite this sense of loyalty and allegiance, Salih remains at a distance throughout the book, the object of the narrator’s gaze and wonderment. The end of the novel, like Shalabi’s Wakalat ‘Atiyya, is bleak. Salih disappears from the ghurza and does not return. We eventually learn that he has been beaten and carted off by the police, who, under Sadat in the 1970s, began to shut down numerous hashish houses. A casualty of this era, his friends find him lying dead and propped up against the wall of his makeshift home in between the dilapidated buildings. They consider bringing a case against the police, but decide against it, and instead cart his body through the streets of Hayy Ma‘ruf, the neighborhood where he was an icon, to the cemetery. Following the funeral, the clique returns to Hakim’s ghurza and feasts and smokes in memory of Salih. In the last pages of the book we learn that this was the last meeting of the clique, as Hakim’s ghurza is shut down by the government. This was only the beginning of what the narrator then characterizes as loss after loss for Egyptians in the decades that followed: the signing of the Camp David Accords, the assassination of Sadat, the fall of the Marxists, the Gulf War, America’s occupation of Iraq (twice), the increasing influx of private and foreign capital in Egypt, and, as he puts it, “the fading of the last candle in the hands of our generation: Arab Nationalism.”33 The final image of the novel is that of the narrator jumping out of a taxi onto the bridge at Martyrs’ Square where he thinks he has seen Salih Hisa walking. He follows the image into the crowd only to find it is not him at all, but one of the old members of their clique, Zaki Hamid, who had become a popular actor in the years since frequenting the ghurza. Upon seeing the narrator, he raises his voice on the bridge to invoke Salih’s memory, as though he were part of a Greek chorus: “God created the world as hisa and we must make a hisa . . . for we are all downtrodden.” Prior to this we learn from the narrator that Salih had inspired a generation of young comedic actors who made their livelihood acting the role of the simple-minded Sa‘idi waiter. There is a certain irony in Zaki Hamid having become successful as a comic in aping the mannerisms and speech of Salih yet ultimately not understanding the wisdom in his character. In singing the song of the dispossessed he invokes Salih’s mantra, but it is an invocation delivered only as nostalgic comic drivel. Salih’s legacy is embodied in this caricature of the “folk,” yet it is only the narrator that seems to understand what has been lost. Reclaiming the Vernacular in the Service of Nationalism Before returning to the issue of the modern, I would like to consider how Salih Hisa may be understood within Shalabi’s dialectic of a deeply nationalist project


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of heritage recovery and at the same time as part of an antiestablishment, literary class war that has found its most recent expression in many of the novels written by the 1990s generation. Shalabi’s resuscitation of Egypt’s “folk heritage” within the context of this novel and others, as I alluded to earlier in my discussion of ‘Ashur, should be read as an extension of the traditional nationalist desire to return to the “vernacular” as a way to assert a form of unique cultural indigeniety. To this end, I will also contextualize Salih Hisa within the genre Michael Denning has termed the “ghetto pastoral,” a tradition of proletarian writing that narrates the cultural richness of American lower-class (often immigrant) areas while also rendering them as tragic spaces of social and economic disenfranchisement. Gregory Jusdanis, in his work The Necessary Nation, argues that programs of cultural resuscitation or heritage recovery often share similar attributes and are commonly employed by many cultural nationalist movements. According to Jusdanis, one of the most widely used schemas for such platforms involves a combination of drawing on indigenous tradition and moving away from high literary forms to those of the vernacular, which are thought to be more accessible and somehow more “authentic.”34 This is similarly true in the case of Arabic in the context of Egypt, where the use of the colloquial as a political tool emerged in the early stages of the nationalist movement. Marilyn Booth’s work on the satirical writings of the “folk hero” Bayram al-Tunisi in early twentieth-century Egypt and Samah Selim’s work on the village or peasant novel both consider how the “folk” or the use of the Egyptian “vernacular” has long been employed in the service of Egyptian nationalism. For example, Booth writes that part of the decision for al-Tunisi, Ya‘qub Sannu, and ‘Abd Allah Nadim to write using the colloquial occurred because of their efforts “to search for a wider audience” so as to disseminate and draw allegiance to their nationalist platform.35 Al-Tunisi’s critique against traditional high literature and the elites that perpetuated it went one step further in his employment of the al-Baladi character in his colloquial newspaper column (the columns were actually a form of prose poems) where he would, as Booth puts it, “portray human figures [as] the satiric reversal of ideal social types,” thus critiquing the Western colonial construction of the modern subject and the Egyptian effendiyya class that bought into these notions of the modern.36 Samah Selim, in her work on the village novel, writes of later literary incarnations that may be understood as emerging from the same impulse. Specifically she argues that many Egyptian novels set in rural villages can be differentiated in their aesthetic form from those novels set in an urban milieu, as the latter authors tend to be more exposed to and influenced by nineteenth-century European novels. Instead, the use of antiheroic characters, native intellectuals, and explorations of the tension between the collective and individuated subject reflects a “turath inspired modernism” (after Idwar al-Kharrat), or what Samah Selim calls an “indigenous modernism.”37 By drawing on popular oral storytelling techniques and folk heritage, these works, written in a linguistic register


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close to colloquial, articulate a form of “subaltern narrativity,” where the act of narrating in an indigenous mode becomes a form of psychic decolonization.38 In addition, Muhsin al-Musawi’s work on the postcolonial novel also looks to fiction that takes place outside the realm of the urban—in desert or mountainous locations—as examples of narratives that use “indigenous storytelling techniques,”39 “magical realist forms,”40 or nonideal character types (such as beggars, Sufi sheikhs, rebels, or rogues)41 to challenge the modern or the repressive tactics of the state. For a discussion of a similar notion as it pertains to contemporary Egyptian visual art, Jessica Winegar’s exploration of the ideas underlying the asala perspective (the emphasis on gaining “artistic inspiration from a specific set of indigenous sources”) is similarly relevant.42 Thus we might conclude that these terms, “subaltern narrativity,” “indigenous modernism,” or “folk narrativity,” refer to something quite similar— namely, the recovery of folk heritage in literature through the use of the vernacular. Further, it would seem that the use of this mode and the centrality of proletarian characters or nonideal character types in much of this writing may be read two ways: first, as a way of demonstrating cultural uniqueness or authenticity, which implicitly works within the trajectory of nationalist writing; and second, as a form of class consciousness, that is, a way of writing back to the center or the elite establishment in an effort to demonstrate the “agency” and “subversiveness” inherent in folk culture (be it urban or rural). Indeed, as Hilary Kilpatrick, J. Brugman, Pierre Cachia, Elliott Colla, Israel Gershoni, and James Jankowski have shown, the movement to create a national literature in Egypt (by drawing on pharaonic mythology or by idealizing the fallahin, for example) during the 1920s and 1930s was clearly an extension of this cultural nationalist platform.43 Selim’s work shows, for example, how a rendering of folk culture in the context of the village came to epitomize the peasant struggle against forces of modernity and occupation. This narrative, in which the folk (read as synonymous with Egyptian essence) is attacked or made vulnerable by external forces, became one of the dominant metaphors in literature for the nationalist struggle. While often portraying the lives of rural migrant workers in his fiction, Khayri Shalabi has focused several of his novels on the worlds of the urban underclasses as well. These should be read within this style of indigenous modernism. Yet, unlike other deeply nationalist fictions invested in the folk, there is an ambivalence toward the nation underwriting Shalabi’s work. On the one hand, his commitment to unearthing the worlds of the popular classes suggests a clear appropriation of the folk in the service of an Egyptian cultural nationalist project (perhaps unconsciously with a foreign readership in mind). On the other hand, his exploration of marginal urban spaces, the subversive cultural activity in these locales, and the endings of his novels, which usually involve a sweep of


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repressive actions on behalf of the government, serve as a means of critiquing the state and reclaiming agency for the subaltern classes. Of course, Shalabi is not alone in this project. Writers such as Ibrahim Aslan, Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abd Allah, and Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Majid use similar devices of folk recovery and equally situate their writing in the sha‘bi or popular quarters (in ‘Abd Allah’s case, often in the countryside44). Some critics, including Muhsin alMusawi, have argued that many of Naguib Mahfuz’s novels also seek to “reclaim the indigenous” in their commitment to exploring the popular and folkloric aspects of Egyptian urban culture.45 And while I will not dispute this point, I would argue that Shalabi’s investment in the use of the colloquial, spatial attentiveness to the worlds of the poor, and self-reflexive commentary on his own integration of deeply local expressions in his novels is quite different from the style of Mahfuz’s narratives, written primarily in fusha (classical Arabic) with the colloquial used for sections of dialogue (e.g., see Pierre Cachia on the language of modern Arabic literature and Mahfuz’s particular view of the role of the colloquial).46 Although Mahfuz captures the rhythms and environs of the popular quarters in what is known as Cairo’s old city, the effect is altogether different. His emphasis seems to fall less on the politics of space and the pleasure of linguistic play and more on the psychological dimensions of his characters. I would also suggest that the investigation of ethnic identity formation in many newer novels (the 1990s generation in Egypt as one such example), the recent proliferation of works written in the vernacular, and the increasing debate over the role and popularity of colloquial poetry in Egypt should also be understood as part of the trajectory of cultural production operating within this dialectic of national heritage recovery and class consciousness.47 In the context of Salih Hisa specifically, language—and particularly the use of the vernacular—functions as a tool for critiquing the establishment and mocking certain symbols of the modern. By commenting on the richness of this linguistic register, Shalabi reflexively points to his own project of claiming the vernacular as a high literary form. For example, in one instance in the novel, while sitting at Hakim’s café, the narrator describes the clique’s idolization of Salih and the ends to which they go to imitate his actions and patterns of speech: All his behavior—his way of speaking and acting—that we laughed at and considered a strike of absolute madness, we quickly discovered after a while that we were intoxicated by it because in it was some of what we hoped to do and say. Anyway, we had become impassioned by repeating his exploits, often consisting of pearls of a living heritage, which we quoted in our discussions about all matters of life. And we would take from [his speech] newly coined phrases that we would then apply to theories of art and literature, and we would find that there was a deep eloquence and intuitive wisdom to the extent that it seemed to us sometimes as if Salih Hisa had studied art and literature and had, effec-


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tively, contributed to their movements but that, like so many other things, was silenced in history.48

Shalabi seeks to unearth the folk vernacular that has been “silenced in history.” The intellectuals who frequent the café, including the narrator, realize the value in the “pearls of living heritage” and go so far as to want to assimilate them into their speech and actions. This urge to become Salih, to imitate and be him, that the narrator witnesses in the members of his clique and in himself throughout the novel may be read as the latent nationalist desire to recover an essential Egyptianness, that is, to become finally authentic and, echoing the idea of hisa, be free. Furthermore, there is a recognition that Salih’s influence on the art and literature of the establishment (read as the influence of the folk on contemporary culture) is a contribution that has been “silenced.” To achieve the sort of folk subjectivity that Salih embodies in the modern nation-state suggests his rare ability to be both Egyptian and, as Marshall Berman and Dipesh Chakrabarty have remarked, “at home in modernity.”49 Another self-reflexive commentary on the part of Shalabi on the value of the heritage recovery project is evident in the story of Qamar al-Mahruqi’s part-time job as a researcher for the colloquial dictionary project for the American University in Cairo. Qamar is assigned the task of assisting a team of researchers, under Professor Mustafa ‘Asam,50 in gathering popular vocabulary from the street to be included in the dictionary. Recognizing Salih as one of his most important sources of popular vocabulary and local expressions, Qamar brings Salih to the office at the American University in Cairo to record their conversation. However, once they are there, the other workers refuse to allow Qamar to record Salih’s speech because of his appearance as a beggar and because he does not have an identity card. Qamar, angry that the workers refuse to record his friend’s speech, decides to quit the job, and throws his contract away without yet having signed it. He tells the other employees and Professor Mustafa ‘Asam that there was always something “suspect” or “fishy” (mashbuh) about the dictionary project, and it was most likely a conspiracy (he uses the word hisa here) on the part of the American government to occupy Egypt by first learning the vocabulary of the Egyptian street so they would then have the tools to rule. He tells the employees in anger that “it is not possible for me to continue with you in this crime. Ten pounds for honest work is better than this hisa (scheme) of yours!”51 The scene resonates on a number of levels. First, it suggests quite explicitly the way in which language in Shalabi’s text functions as a vehicle for characterization (enabling subjectivity), as well as an object (or marker of culture) on which he comments. Language is thus “performing” the space of this popular neighborhood in downtown as well as something that is objectified by Shalabi.52 Furthermore, the idea of the vernacular as something to be archived and valued by an elite


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institution, and an American one no less, suggests the way in which Shalabi’s work is in concert with a more global project of linguistic preservation and observant of some of the demands of what some have called the “heritage industry.”53 In addition, he positions his folk worlds, the area of Hayy Ma‘ruf and its characters, not as those cut off from the market forces of a cosmopolitan center, but rather as marginal characters brushing alongside these forces and intersecting with them from time to time. While Salih is recognized by Qamar and by Professor Mustafa ‘Asam as being a valuable resource for the mining of tradition, at the same time his “unofficial” status as a saqit al-qayd renders him outside the “official” requirements of the institution. We might find this an ironic commentary on the project itself, where the very act of documenting or codifying the vernacular tradition is left in a state of suspension, rendered incomplete because of a lack of documented “official status” of those bearers of tradition. Shalabi’s literary aesthetic and the role of the vernacular throughout all levels of the novel’s prose is a political as much an aesthetic choice. For example, most of Salih’s story is told by the narrator in a descriptive mix of literary Arabic and Egyptian colloquial. For the most part the novel does not take place in real time through dialogue, yet the music of the language is clearly felt through even the monologic passages of narration. The following scene demonstrates a typical passage of dialogue in the novel. Here Tal‘at al-Imbaba invites Salih to join him at his house as a guest:


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[Tal‘at: I’m in the mood to invite Salih to my house for two or three days, a week or two, as he likes. Salih: What’s the occasion? Tal‘at: Without an occasion. Qamar: Will you go Saleh? Salih: Oh Professor Qamar, I am much honored, but . . . He completed the phrase with a glance toward Hakim. Hakim began to look at him stealthily, with focus, suspense, and apprehension. Then he looked toward Qamar. Hakim: So, I will take his job then? Tal‘at: No big deal, I’ll give him his daily wages as if he were working. Hakim in perplexity: This means he won’t work or he will? Tal‘at: What work? There he’ll be like a Pasha. He’ll eat with us, drink with us, and sleep on a clean bed, and take his pocket money too, and his hashish, his cigarettes, and his alcohol. All of it will be on us!]54

While Shalabi’s linguistic register is not evident in the English translation, it is clear from the Arabic that the passage is all in a deeply local Egyptian vernacular. Not only does Shalabi use colloquial vocabulary for the dialogue, but often the syntax of his sentences incorporates colloquial expressions. In this passage, for example, his use of the phrase “wa akul ‘ayshu,” literally meaning “I eat his bread,” is one such instance. While the literal meaning of the phrase conveys little, idiomatically it means “to make a living or to take his living (bread).” The use of idiomatic expressions, colloquial verb tenses, and phonetic spelling conveys the extent to which Shalabi’s linguistic register is far different from that of other writers who often replicate dialogue but do not integrate idiomatic speech (i.e., Sonallah Ibrahim, Naguib Mahfuz, Radwa ‘Ashur). The dialogue and narration here has a raw, organic quality that might be comparable to what Zora Neale Hurston achieved in capturing the spoken dialect of African Americans in the Deep South in her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and her autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road (1942).55 Like Hurston and Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abd Allah, language serves as the vehicle for inhabiting these provincial worlds, offering a more true-to-life evocation of the cadences and local speech patterns of the residents. A Space in Between: Salih Hisa as a Comment on Modernity The extent to which Salih Hisa functions as a critique of the project of modernity (in its pre- and post-1952 revolution incarnations) is evident in a number of passages. Here I will focus on two scenes in particular, and discuss more broadly the function of the ghurza as a space for mediating between modern and traditional modes. Shalabi’s attentiveness to space and the way in which space constitutes a frame for representation is evident beyond just his description of


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the city and the neighborhood of Ma‘ruf. Shalabi’s novel, again recalling Mitchell, satirizes the fixation with representation that is emblematic of narratives of modernity. Take for example his chapter titled “al-Vatarina” [window displays]. In this chapter we are introduced to the ghurza regular Ibrahim al-Qamah. The narrator confesses that no one was really certain what Ibrahim’s profession was—some surmised engineer, others thought he had a background in the fine arts. One day they ask his opinion on a poem written by Faruq al-Jamal (the resident colloquial poet), published in the magazine Sabah al-Khayr. It is then he admits to his friends that he does not know how to read. Mustafa Lam‘a: “Then what kind of work do you do, Ibrahim?” We turned our attention collectively to him with eagerness and apprehension. Then he smiled saying with the joy of someone who is proud of his work: “I organize window displays” “Organize what?” Faruq Jamal asked him. We volunteered the answer with emphasis and a sense of admiration: “Window displays.” “What does that mean?” “It is a work that is not well known, but it has been around for a while. There used to be many types of jobs in life no one ever heard of, even though those who did them took doctoral degrees in the field!” Qamar al-Mahruqi: “Why are you guys surprised? The job is clear from its name.” I turned to Ibrahim al-Qamah: “But not very clear.” “Okay, why don’t you clarify it for us.” Ibrahim looked to Faruq Jamal with gratitude for the invitation, then he turned his gaze to us: “By the way, organizing window displays is an art and a form of geometry— not a form of posturing. Not just anyone can organize such displays, even if he were an interior designer!” In an implicitly sarcastic tone, the actor Zaki Hamid said: “What window displays do you mean?” Ibrahim: “Window displays generally. Window displays of shops! Fabric, shoes, small wares, ready-made clothes, stationary, toiletries, anything you exhibit for selling! Displays are the face of the store. In short, they must be arranged in a studied manner that is scientific and artistic. It is necessary for any passer-by to stop, despite himself, and look at them. My concern with this is more than the owner’s concern himself. The customer is already there in front of the shop. So what does he look at? The types of things the store sells: new models for instance, how do we exhibit them in a manner that attracts the customer and encourages him to enter the store and buy them? How do we display the mannequins to wear shirts, or blouses, dresses or suits? And how do we place them in a specific corner that showcases the chicness of the suit? How do we display a pair of shoes to appear like a bride in the window display? There are two factors of prime impor-


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tance: first is exquisiteness in the manner of the display so as to invite and attract the eye. The second factor is that the displays must accommodate many different types! To tell you the truth, sometimes their merchandise is fake, but the chicness in exhibiting it makes it appear as if it is first-rate.” It was clear from the faces of Tal‘at, Qamar, Mustafa, Zaki, and Faruq that he had convinced them. And it was an acquiescence accompanied by plenty of admiration and high-esteem. Qamar then said and his eyes fell in embarrassment: “It’s impossible! The world has so many things that we don’t yet know about, although they are right before our eyes.” Mustafa Lam‘a: “By the way, this is a science they study in Europe. The art of the exhibition.” Tal‘at al-Imbaba: “Do you think this profession is lucrative Ibrahim?” “All the window displays downtown I arranged myself. Don’t forget that there are only a few of us—not more than five or six in the whole city. Not just any owner of a shop knows how to arrange his window display!”56

His friends’ surprise at his profession suggests the extent to which these characters appear unfazed by this next-door modernity. What interests them is the craft behind Ibrahim’s work and the “science” involved in getting people to consume—that is, the science of commodifying an object. If we understand the representation of commodifiable goods to be one of the cornerstones of serializable modernity,57 then here the scene is satirical, in that it suggests that such displays must be “translated” to Ibrahim’s friends from Hayy Ma‘ruf. Here, representation as a mechanism of capitalism is alien to them. The obviousness of the function of storefronts—to elicit the desire to buy (conspicuous consumption as a performance of the modern)—is, at least initially, lost on them. As Mahruqi remarks in what can be read as Shalabi’s ironic commentary here, “so much is right before us, yet we don’t even know it.” Furthermore, the seriousness with which Ibrahim al-Qamah takes his job suggests the extent to which he sees himself as a crucial actor in setting the stage that will catalyze the consumptive performance by those on the street. Shalabi, in a further act of satire, hints at this very staging when Mustafa Lam‘a, an art school graduate of the early 1960s, reminds everyone that the real study of the science of the exhibit originated in Europe. While intended as a mere observation, Shalabi’s commentary is clear: the representation of the commodity is a Western science that, in the space of Wust al-Balad, has been imported and dubbed as modern. In other words, the exhibition here is not the real thing—the real modernity. The authentic commodity displayed truly “scientifically” can only be found, as Mitchell has argued, in the fixed, homogeneous space of Europe.


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Another amusing play on the idolatry surrounding the “engineer” in Nasser’s Egypt occurs when the narrator describes the lengths to which Qamar alMahruqi goes to play the part of the engineer at the ghurza, even though he is actually a skilled worker in a ceramics factory. For Mahruqi, the necessary prop of the engineer is the leather “handbag”: The tenor of his life changed quickly as a result of this [engineering] work. He began carrying a “handbag” [spelled out phonetically in Arabic] made of topquality leather with numerous pockets, which he used to carry all manner of things . . . In his handbag there were pockets which he would never open except in the rarest of moments for fear of being embarrassed by the contents, which varied from wraps of food from the market, to shirts, socks, and underwear. As for the rest of the pockets, they bulged with sheets of paper for drawing, transparencies, rulers, protractors, and pens of all types and colors.58

Here Shalabi mocks Nasser’s reverence for the science of engineering as the key to modernization and industrialization by creating in the character of Qamar the caricature of the engineer. His constant “drawing of maps” and charts flouts the government’s obsession with engineering as a modern form of knowledge production and as essential to the development of the modern nation-state. The fact that Qamar is not actually an engineer and yet chooses this as his “respectable profession” and then performs the role of the engineer as he imagines it (with obvious admiration) speaks to how everyday Egyptians internalized the face of the new regime, that is, a corps of technocrats, high-ranking military officials, and engineers who came to symbolize the emerging elite in postrevolution Egypt. Finally, the significance of the handbag as a modern accoutrement is satirized by the collection of odds and ends Qamar stuffs in it. The bag becomes the modern commodity fetish that externally signals his modern “profession” and yet is reconfigured to serve his actual needs as an everyday worker painting ceramics in a factory. In a minor postscript to both of the previous scenes, Qamar al-Mahruqi, toward the end of the novel, stops coming to the ghurza, and on the rare occasions when he does, he leaves behind small items of pottery that he has hand painted. Among these are cups with pharaonic hieroglyphs and plates with verses from the Qur’an. He also leaves a well-finished ceramic bowl fashioned as a handheld water pipe, which he indicates is intended for one of Ibrahim al-Qamah’s window displays.59 Shalabi’s comment here is both ironic and slightly tragic. While the displays in Wust al-Balad are designed for the most “modern” styles, Qamar produces his well-crafted water pipe as a rival commodity that might entice a shopper. Yet the handmade water pipe itself is such an obvious throwback to a former era and exemplifies one of the rituals of sha‘bi culture that its presence in a window would only serve to mock the whole “modern” display itself. And yet we cannot read the object as wholly anachronistic, as it is still used today, only in


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other parts of town in popular (sha‘bi) locations. Thus it makes sense that Qamar would assume its value would circulate. The irony that Shalabi suggests with this scene lies in the fact that the window displays in establishing the setting for Western modernity are designed for prototypical Western items—aesthetic symbols that signal the move away from traditional forms of life and dress. To craft a water pipe and finish it so it shines in the display (like something modern and new) would only upset the stagecraft involved in the selling of appropriate symbols of Western modernity to Egyptians strolling through downtown. Café Culture and the Role of the Ghurza The role of the café, or in this case the hashish house, as a site for negotiating between modern and traditional or rural forms of pleasure is significant to the novel and to Shalabi’s overall critique. Hayy Ma‘ruf (as the idyll), contrary to how it may appear initially, is not, in my reading, entirely premodern or rural in its formation. Rather, the ghurza in this historical context functions as a space of improvised countermodernity in juxtaposition to the “staged” modernity in the nearby downtown. The ghurza is a space whose function is merely that of congregation, talk, and for some, intoxication. It might, as Abu-Lughod notes, be compared to the function of the pub in Europe, where the latest news or gossip is often circulated. More important, it is a second stage for the characters in which they can reform or “become” the artists and intellectuals they aspire to be. To this end, it is perhaps useful to compare the space of Hakim’s ghurza as similar to the sites of adda (pronounced “uddah”), as discussed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his essay “Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity.”60 While Chakrabarty points out that the practice of adda was long considered something unique to Bengali character and the Bengali culture, the institution or practice seems to capture something of the ethos of Hakim’s ghurza: “The word adda . . . is translated . . . as ‘a place’ for ‘careless talk with boon companions’ or ‘the chats of intimate friends’ . . . Roughly speaking, it is the practice of friends getting together for long, informal, and unrigorous conversations.”61 The term, of course, has a more complicated history, and he goes on to discuss the debates over the meaning, connotations, and nostalgia of addas in Calcutta. In particular, he points out that addas could take place anywhere, they were at one point associated with “laziness” or “idleness,” and in some incarnations were linked to dens where opium or ganja was consumed. According to Chakrabarty, addas were made “respectable in the twentieth century” because of their “association with the spaces for the production of a modern Bengali reading public,”62 as they became opportunities for literary and political discussions often set in cafés in half-imitation of a European modernity. On the other hand, Chakrabarty cautions, that the


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telos of such forms of adda was criticized for running counter to the spirit of the practice: That there should be tension between the ideas of the adda and those of the modern civil society is understandable. They are mutually antithetical organizations of time and place. The civil society, in its ideal construction, builds into the very idea of human activity the telos of a result—a product and a purpose—and structures its use of time and place on that developmentalist and utilitarian logic (even when that logic is not simply linear). Conversations in an adda, on the other hand, are by definition opposed to the idea of achieving any definite outcome. To enjoy an adda is to enjoy a sense of time and space that is not subject to the gravitational pull of any explicit purpose. The introduction of a purpose that could make the conversation “instrumental” to the achievement of some object other than the social life of adda itself kills, it is claimed, the very spirit and the principle of adda.63

Thus the integration of political-party planning or literary readings suggests the way in which the practice became necessarily hybridized (i.e., something between a literary salon and a café) in the context of the rapidly changing city of Calcutta. What is relevant for us in considering adda is that the practice encompassed a range of activities and spanned multiple classes (he notes that in some instances it was considered a plebian practice, in others a more middle-class activity), however, it provided an essential way of being both Bengali and modern, namely, a way of “dwelling in modernity.” On this he writes, “there is enough evidence to suggest that in Bengali modernity, adda provided for many a site for self-presentation, of cultivating a certain style of being in the eyes of others. To be good at adda was also a cultural value.”64 To apply Chakrabarty’s analysis of adda to that of the ghurza is not a dilution of the cultural and historical specificity of the practice. Rather, it is difficult to deny how certain aspects of Chakrabarty’s reading of adda during the 1920s and 1930s in Calcutta clearly overlap with the sort of middle space occupied by Hakim’s ghurza and embodied by the character of Salih. As we shall see in a moment, the group’s urge to be Salih, to imitate him, and to be around him signals a longing for essence, that is, for the space of the adda that he conjures in his peculiar folk qualities. In the context of pre- and postrevolution Egypt, the role of the ghurza, like the café, fulfills a unique function. Richard Jacquemond, in Entre Scribes et Écrivains: Le Champ Littéraire dans L’Égypt Contemporaine (2003),65 discusses the relationship between the literary “field” (le champ) and the café. The café is, for many writers, an important space for cultivating an environment that facilitates the emergence of artistic groups or cliques. Jacquemond specifically refers to certain well-known cafés in Wust al-Balad over the last half of the twentieth century (Café Riche, Isevitch, Zaharat al-Bustan, Maqha al-Huriyya, Odeon, Le Grillion) as the primary sites for such literary exchanges, noting that “the


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cafés change, the events also, but the institutions reside.”66 As he suggests, the café is the “beating heart” (al-qalb al-nabid) of the Cairo Republic of Letters. It is the cafés, publishing houses, galleries, and bookstores of a small area in the “center of the city” where Cairo’s dynamic art scene flourishes.67 On the historic role of the café in Cairo he writes, Cairo’s literary cafés, writes the poet Muhammad ‘Afifi Matar, “resemble gatherings of craftsmen or people who work in the same trade. They are a place where one can exchange news and rumors and give oneself over to the pleasures of gossip, scandal, or squabbling. They play the social and psychological role of lifting repression, achieving catharsis, and affirming one’s sense of belonging to a community . . . The cafés are small, free parliaments in which the kinds of things that cause problems for the fraudulently [elected] parliaments take place. Intellectuals find an alternative in them to the cultural institutions and to all the nonsense that goes on in them—the colloquia and debates on the same tired old themes, in which the same speakers repeat the same things over and over again before the same audiences.”68

Interestingly, Matar likens the institution of the café as an alternative cultural space to that of parliament, where intellectuals also hold court and have debates, albeit, according to him, in a manner less vapid and rehearsed. Literary groups, or “intermediate states” as Jacquemond calls them, use the café as their place of assemblage. Within these groups or “cliques,” it is the mutual support they receive for their artistic endeavors and the form of “intergenerational support” that is recognized as fundamental to the emergence and dissemination of new voices. In this respect, the formation of these cliques is intimately linked to the role of the café in Egyptian society. On the nature of these literary cliques Jacquemond writes, “Shilaliya expresses something of the importance ascribed to the relationships of assistance and friendship that operate within small groups of peers formed on the basis of differing social, political, and aesthetic affinities within the literary milieu as much as within other milieux. It also expresses a type of necessity that is proper to artistic and cultural circles. However, within these coteries one also finds expressions of the hierarchical character of social relations in general, and the writers within them rarely enjoy complete equality. As an Egyptian proverb states, ‘older by a day, wiser by a year.’”69 Jacquemond cites, by way of example, the literary review Galerie 68 (published between 1968 and 1971) as one of the first attempts by the writers of the 1970s to overtly express their socioaesthetic agenda. For the 1990s generation, he cites the review al-Kitaba al-Ukhra (The Other Writing), which emerged in 1991, as a similar organ of collective artistic vision. In contrast to journals of generations past, he indicates that this journal revealed a commitment to representing a more expansive cross section of voices. In other words, while the newer authors defined themselves against previous generations of writers, they


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still professed an open commitment to not excluding writers on the basis of their style or their themes. Shalabi’s depiction of Hakim’s ghurza may be read alongside both Chakrabarty’s contextualization of the practice of adda and Jaquemond’s discussion of the historical link between literary production and café culture. Understanding Hakim’s ghurza within these two readings returns us to the more central question of how this work portrays the ghurza as an alternative site of modernity. Recall that the ghurza is physically described as a Sa‘idi house. It is built of adobe and clay and consists of two rooms, one where people gather and the other where Hakim lives with his wife. Sun streams in through a skylight and chickens, ducks, and other animals roam freely. From this early description, the ghurza is seen as a rural, traditional space, where not only the owner is Sa‘idi but also many of the intellectuals who frequent the place have origins in Upper Egypt. Thus three minutes from downtown we enter a bucolic space that draws a collection of urban migrants who are attracted to Hakim’s Sa‘idi disposition (he is described as cultivating a certain degree of trust and comradery among those in the ghurza), seeking refuge in the familiar rural feel of the space, and attracted to the character of Salih. The suspension of the modern urban reality outside—by the smoking of hashish—is usually followed by meandering conversations about art, politics, and the lives and artistic aspirations of the members of the narrator’s clique. Shalabi re-creates the literary milieu that Jacquemond refers to, yet he does so by also capturing that sense of time suspended, as in the practice of adda. Chakrabarty writes that “to enjoy an adda is to enjoy a sense of time and space that is not subject to the gravitational pull of any explicit purpose.”70 It is exactly this, the sense of talk for talk’s sake, that Shalabi captures in the conversations he portrays at Hakim’s ghurza. However (as witnessed by the changing role of café culture in Calcutta as well), the ghurza also becomes a place for the discussion of politics (particularly the waning influence of the Socialist and Communist parties), as well as Faruq Jamal’s poems, the narrator’s stories, Zaki Hamid’s acting, and the rich folk culture manifest in the Egyptian vernacular. For these characters to be “at home in modernity” means that they must be able to find a way to be both unshackled by the norms of modern urban culture and participate in it via debates and discussions within the ghurza. Among this community of urban migrants, the ghurza becomes both their link to the official cultural sites of modernity in Wust al-Balad and their retreat from the foreign urbanity of downtown.71 Furthermore, the narrator emphasizes on numerous occasions the extent to which Salih serves as a draw for customers to Hakim’s ghurza and admits his own obsession with wanting to be around him in order to understand him.72 What is it about Salih’s character that makes him so compelling? Further, how might this be related to the other characters’ search for a way to “dwell” in modernity? As was noted earlier, part of what seems to draw characters to Salih


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is his uncompromising will to be free. Freedom, according to Salih, is summed up as follows: It’s my lot in life that those who rule me are numerous. Wherever I walk I encounter those who want to rule over me. For every single step there are two or three of them who want to give me orders: I must get their signatures, I must give them a military salute, I must get their permission to enter a restroom, to eat, to drink to sleep!! You guys, I’m fed up with this . . . this won’t work anymore. I must be the master of myself. Is there anything wrong with that? I do not want to remain subservient to anyone. Is it not my right? I’m free to choose to work or not. I’m free to play or not. It’s not anyone’s business!73

Salih’s confidence that he can live as he chooses and value what he wants is part of the key to why people seem to gravitate toward him. His ability to create a hisa and to offer that boundless freedom to others, if only in a fixed time and space through the ritualistic act of smoking hashish, serves as a challenge to the work ethic inscribed in industrial modernity. His freedom is the freedom of the su‘luk (the outlaw), who forsakes the protection of the group for his right to retain his individuality. And yet Salih, as the narrator often reminds us, is the locus of the group despite himself. The customers at the ghurza do not just want to be in his company; they want to become him. In fact, the narrator describes toward the end of the novel occasions when there were competitions among the members of the clique to see who could best impersonate Salih, including Hayat al-Bari, who was apparently quite good at such impersonations.74 On one occasion, on observing Qamar al-Mahruqi, the narrator asks himself if Qamar was truly cut from the “same cloth” as Salih, or was he just deeply influenced by him?75 Later he claims that it was not just Qamar al-Mahruqi who had been influenced by Salih, but it was an entire generation of comedic actors who came to play the “simple-minded” (‘abit), or those who were considered “simpleminded,” drawing their character sketches from Salih’s personality.76 The desire to want to become Salih suggests, as I briefly alluded to earlier, a nostalgia (as in the case with adda) for a kind of indigeneity threatened by the modern urban space. Salih appears to the clique as “authentic” and unchanged by the city around him. He appears to be a Nubian ghurzaji whose speech, humor, and folkways are exactly as they might have been were he in a village in Upper Egypt or Nuba. And this is, of course, what the migrant customers at Hakim’s desire—to see the countryside reflected back to them in the character of Salih so as to feel they are back home in familiar territory. Yet Salih was born in the heart of Cairo, in Hayy Ma‘ruf, and has no village to return to in Upper Egypt. With this construction, Salih is what we might call an “alternative modern.” Born in a neighborhood that marks the “in-between” zones of the city, he has chosen to retain his folk humor, deep vernacular, and simple ways so as to preserve his personal notion of dignity and selfhood in an environment marked by


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increased consumption and Westernization (during the 1930s and 1940s) and later militarization and repression (under Nasser). While he symbolizes to the others a notion of authentic Egyptianness, they also realize he is cognizant of having made a choice—that he is what he is of his choosing (having had the option to live differently)—and thus he is someone who has configured modern living on his own terms. Salih’s rejection of the attempts made by the narrator and others to get close to him suggest the extent to which he denies the reader (via the narrator) access to some private, inner subjectivity that marks the modern character.77 For while we are privy to certain aspects of Salih’s character, he remains elusive and enigmatic to readers and to his friends from the ghurza. Denning’s “Ghetto Pastoral”: Locational Nostalgia as Class Consciousness Now I would like to turn to a discussion of the literary genre Michael Denning terms the American “ghetto pastoral” in his work The Cultural Front (1997).78 In suggesting certain linkages between national identity, class consciousness, and literary form, Denning’s model is suggestive for our own consideration of how Shalabi’s Salih Hisa may be contextualized within a larger project of spatially inscribed Egyptian class consciousness. American writers working within this form might be traditionally classified as early twentieth-century naturalist writers, whose themes included newly industrialized cities and the plight of the ethnic and lower classes living in the surrounding tenements and slums. However, Denning’s reading of these works (despite their emphasis on the laboring classes and the downtrodden) suggests they possess an idyllic quality, comparable to the genre of American Westerns. As he explains it, these works became early allegories for a genre of ethnic or immigrant literature that eventually would come to epitomize the American national tale. Writers working within this form include Mike Gold, Tillie Olsen, Henry Roth, Richard Wright, Nelsen Algren, Daniel Fuchs, Pietro di Donato, Jerre Mangione, H. T. Tsiang, and Carlos Bulosan, among others. Denning describes the genre as follows: Ghetto Pastorals were tales of growing up in Little Italy, the Lower East Side, Bronzeville, and Chinatown, written by plebeian men and women of these ethnic working-class neighborhoods. They were a new kind of city novel, indebted to but significantly different from earlier forms. Unlike the nineteenth-century “mysteries of the city,” they found city streets and neighborhoods ordinary, filled with children, and they rarely imagined the inner chambers of the city’s wealthy elites. Unlike the muckraking fiction of Upton Sinclair and his heirs, they were rarely based on the cover stories of class-conflict, strikes, and trials . . . And unlike the turn-of-the century “naturalism” to which they were often assimilated, they were not explorations of how the other half lives. Rather, they were tales of how our half lives. They were the flip side of the slumming stories that ran from Ste-


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phen Crane to Dos Passos himself: not a proletarian sublime but a proletarian pastoral. These ghetto pastorals constituted a subaltern modernism and became the central literary form of the Popular Front.79

Denning points out that common to these works, which could loosely be classified as “tenement novels” or “ghetto pastorals,” were three factors: (1) a proletarian outlook on the part of the authors (informed either by leftist literature or in some cases Communist affiliations); (2) a shared historical situation (not necessarily a shared ethnicity or race, but a common experience of having spent their youth in the ghetto, or an experience of having migrated either from a rural area or another country); and (3) the experience of having their proletarian sensibility formed in their childhood. (The fact is that most of these writers were not working-class adults writing of their adult experiences as factory workers; rather, they were emerging writers who felt compelled to tell the story of their proletarian childhood.) As a result, Denning concludes that many of these works were autofictions: novels that bordered between autobiography and fiction. He describes their works as stylistically something we might call a “subaltern modernism.” They were subaltern in that they were writers emerging from a common class formation, and they were modernist in that there were echoes of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and William Carlos Williams in their drawing on local vernaculars and eschewing of a formal plot. In fact, he notes that many of these works offered sketches of tenement life and the people in these neighborhoods strung together without a unifying narrative other than that of place. To this end the works were largely closed worlds, where there was seldom, as he puts it, “border crossing” and where “the world beyond the ghetto remained a shadowy land” (Richard Wright’s Native Son [Harper & Brothers, 1940] being one of the exceptions). As a result, the novels expressed a kind of wish fulfillment for “magical renewal and refiguration,” although they were not centrally about that type of transformation, on the level of character or place.80 The racial or ethnic dimension of these novels is also worth mentioning. Denning notes that for Richard Wright, Carlos Bulosan, and H. T. Tsiang, their common proletarian outlook was expressed through narratives grounded in racial and ethnic experiences of difference: Ethnicity and race had become the modality through which working class peoples experienced their lives and mapped their communities. The symbolic structures of ethnicity and race were the products of slavery and migrant labor, segregated labor markets, legal codes of exclusion and restriction, as well as the institutions of community culture and self-defense. Though the forms—the rituals and emblems—of ethnic cultures differed, the content had much in common: it was the content of working class tenements, sweatshops and factory labor, and cheap


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mass entertainments. The invention of ethnicity was a central form of class consciousness in the United States.81

Although many might take issue with Denning’s use of class as a foundational category encompassing that of race and ethnicity, his point is well taken and is particularly relevant in terms of the way in which ethnicity is drawn upon in Shalabi’s writing. The Sa‘idi and the Nubian populate his narratives because they are characters associated with a certain class within the city and a specific historical experience of migration from Upper Egypt or Nuba to Cairo. One could just as easily read Salih Hisa as a story of migration or an exploration into Nubian identity (as Salih’s father is Nubian), and yet, instead, the project seems larger than this reading, such that the neighborhood emerges as the more dominant character in this work and Salih’s identity as a half-Nubian in Cairo or Hakim’s identity as the Sa‘idi owner of the ghurza seem but dimensions of a larger story grounded in place.82 Thus if we read these novels historically alongside each other and concur that we might use space, particularly that of the ghetto or the tenement, as the overarching framing device that unites them, then ethnicity and race in these works become, as Denning rightly notes, a “modality” through which class and place is experienced.83 Despite Denning’s contextualization of the “ghetto pastoral” within the social formation of American proletarian literature, he reads these novels as an aesthetic move away from the social realist, didactic fiction that proceeded them (e.g., that of Upton Sinclair and Dos Passos). These writers actively sought to resist the “pessimistic realism” of the naturalist “other half ” narratives that “debased” the poor. And yet they were equally careful not to “elevate” or “ennoble the simple” either. Instead, their novels might be understood as a hybrid of these two forms; as Denning puts it, these authors were “caught in [the] dialectic of degradation and elevation, the grotesque and the simple.”84 While Denning ultimately admits the failure of the proletarian literary movement to bring about a sense of collective class consciousness, he reminds us that the migrant narrative and the immigrant’s tale became part of the American popular national imagination because of the early contributions of these writers. Their efforts to contextualize and understand the allegorical value of workingclass milieus for the broader American national narrative is their legacy. To consider Shalabi’s work within the context of an Egyptian proletarian tradition may seem odd, particularly since many Egyptian writers have long taken as their objects the worlds of the marginalized, the oppressed, and the disenfranchised. Also, and even Denning points this out, how does one tell a story about laboring when “work itself,” by virtue of its very tedium, “resists representation”? After all, he notes, do not “stories . . . come from travels, adventures, romances, holidays, events: interruptions of the daily grind?”85 Salih Hisa


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is not a tale of “laboring” in this sense. While it offers the story of Salih as the attendant at the hashish den and describes his talent and the rigor with which he does his job, Salih’s relationship to work is more complicated than that of the average laborer who toils at a thankless job. After all, he has chosen this form of work and is committed to it because it affords him certain freedoms (namely, the freedom to be himself ). Similarly work is central to the lives of the other characters, and there are discussions about their various jobs (e.g., Qamar al-Mahruqi and the dictionary, Wajdi al-Wakil selling shoes, and Ibrahim alQamah’s job organizing window displays in downtown), but Shalabi does not convey an overt sense of their collective consciousness as workers. Instead, the extent to which the novel is suggestive of a proletarian spirit is twofold: first, in its spatial delimiting of the neighborhood as a lower-class district to which the characters feel a degree of belonging, and second, in the characters’ minor stature in their own respective professions and their idealization of certain kinds of work and institutions as those occupied by members of a class that is not theirs. For example, Tal‘at Imbaba is not a professor at the American University in Cairo, rather he is a tutor. Zaki Hamid is a rising actor,86 just as Sabir ‘Asal is an aspiring novelist.87 Qamar al-Mahruqi is more concerned with feigning the part of an engineer, and carries a leather briefcase to suggest as much (even though it is all an act for his friends so as to not let on that he works in a factory). Thus the characters express a desire to participate in sectors of society into which they are relatively unable to penetrate. This collective sense of their common marginality is clearly felt, and reaches a pinnacle with their own helplessness in the face of Salih’s unjust death at the hands of the police and their lack of recourse when Hakim’s ghurza is shut down. In as much as the events at the end of the novel are meant to signal a shift in the political climate, the loss of the ghurza is the loss of community for these characters, and with it the sense of collective potential that the community engendered in each of these particular “artists.” While Shalabi’s allegiance to this marginal world is evident (and comes from lived experience), his socioaesthetic project is distinct from that of the social realists of the 1930s and 1940s, or even many of his contemporaries of the 1960s generation (e.g., Gamal al-Ghitani, Sonallah Ibrahim, Radwa ‘Ashur, Ibrahim Aslan, Salwa Bakr, and Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Majid). Denning’s delineation of the ghetto pastoral seems a more appropriate framework for comparative analysis in that it describes a corpus of work that has historically functioned as a literary response by members of the underclasses to the injustices brought about by migration, ethnic difference, and rapid urban transformation. In the aftermath of World War I, and in the midst of the Great Depression, American writers who had grown up in tenements, shantytowns, or working in factories saw the act of writing as a means of recovering something of those culturally rich, albeit difficult, urban worlds of their childhood. They understood the potential for fiction to serve as a way to document an experience that was being increasingly


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more politicized by the Popular Front literature (e.g., Denning cites the proliferation in many major cities of small magazines, pamphlets, and writers guilds motivated by leftist politics). Their works served as central chronicles of the social experiences of the margins and made evident the need for widespread attention to the conditions in urban areas and the plight of the underclasses. At the same time, many of these authors did not want to be reduced to being merely conduits for particular political ideas: witness James Farrell’s comment that his work, Studs Lonigan, was more than just a novel that lends itself to a sociological study, but was more an attempt to reveal the “concrete effects of spiritual poverty.”88 While Shalabi’s rendering of Egyptian folk culture seems to hardly recall the “spiritual poverty” to which Farrell speaks, the idea of his novels as mere political proselytizing or ennobling portraits of the underclasses is far from an apt rendering of his project. Instead, I would argue that by situating his works in these liminal spaces, and by masterfully re-creating neighborhoods as the lens through which he chronicles the effects of government repression, privatization, mass displacement, and negligence on the part of the state, Shalabi effectively recovers these marginal urban landscapes and reminds us of their centrality—as something more than shadow histories—to the multiple narratives of the Egyptian nation. Conclusion In choosing the neighborhood of Hayy Ma‘ruf as the setting of his “ghetto pastoral,” Shalabi highlights a phenomenon that has come to mark the trajectory of Cairo’s divergent development—namely, the emergence of informal settlements and the endurance of popular quarters within the center of the city alongside areas demarcated for the elite and the community of foreigners and tourists. Shalabi’s novel attests to the reality of this bifurcation, and the dimensions in which these neighborhoods both mirror and are contradictions of one another. Isma‘il’s “Gold Coast,” in Hayy Ma‘ruf ’s reflection, is seen as that which belongs to another class, the majority of whom the characters merely serve (as waiters, tutors, salesmen). Yet the modern spaces in which this “other class” aligns itself is also represented as a site that is lacking. The community of Hakim’s ghurza is reminiscent of an Egyptian way of life that is not present in the modern downtown. Shalabi celebrates the tight social network of urban migrants in the “village of Ma‘ruf ” and notes the characters who come from other neighborhoods to take part in the culture of the ghurza and to act the part of the local ghurzaji, Salih. The form of communitarian identification is, however, not absolutely idealized, as each character aspires to “arrive”—as an individual (i.e., as an artist, writer, intellectual)—in a social arena outside of the quarter. In this regard, these subjects embrace an alternative way of “dwelling in modernity;” they require the familiarity of the Sa‘idi-styled ghurza and its


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Nubian ghurzaji, but they envision a form of legitimacy and arrival that can only be achieved in the official institutions of the Westernized upper classes. This way of experiencing modernity, as the novel reminds us repeatedly, is not necessarily presented as a contradiction. Rather, it is better thought of as a way of being that involves the performance of contrasting roles as required by different spaces. The “lack” that is presumed to color the official artistic and intellectual establishment in Wust al-Balad is Shalabi’s point of departure in his sketch of the parallel sha‘bi version of intellectual life in Hayy Ma‘ruf. By using the rich, organic quality of the local vernacular and through a detailed evocation of the ghurza and the everyday trials and tribulations of its characters, Shalabi points to an Egyptian heritage that he clearly feels has been written out of the official history of this period and these spaces. His project is an attempt to recover this heritage and to do so by highlighting the challenges of the lower classes and by celebrating a popular form of urban modernity that is inflected by the unique traditions, rituals, and ways of life common to the villages of Upper Egypt. In the end, where Shalabi seems to suggest the American University in Cairo failed in its attempts to truly archive the Egyptian vernacular through their dictionary project, Salih Hisa and the remaining corpus of Shalabi’s work is a return to these neighborhoods and a documenting of the stories of those “unofficial” national subjects. In this regard, his work symbolically supplants the dictionary as an alternate compendium for such a project of heritage preservation where the utopian impulse underwriting the “folk” is reconfigured as a literary vernacular.


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CHAPTER 4

The Proletarian Revolution That Never Was Idris ‘Ali’s Nubian Perspective

“Habibak ili tihibuh wa law kan ‘abd Nubi.” Your true love is the one you’d love even if he were a Nubian slave. —Egyptian Proverb National unity and the temporary effacement of difference were essential in the struggle against colonialism. In the aftermath of independence both are a matter of decision, of unforced volition . . . The husk of nationalism withers, but what it reveals is not Fanon’s “social consciousness” bountifully emerging “on the day that independence is proclaimed”, but rather, a polity disfigured and traumatized. —Robert Spencer, “‘The Zone of Occult Instability’”1

Introduction

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o recap briefly, Chapter 1 established how the project of modernity (under Khedive Isma‘il and later under the British) was inscribed in the space of downtown as an act of staging the modern. The intended spectator and subject of this staging was the Egyptian class of effendis, an upwardly mobile segment of the population who initially served as a kind of comprador middle class for the British. Chapter 2 mapped the way in which the Egyptian and foreign elite controlled this modern space only to have it destroyed (at least partially) in the fires of 1952 and later appropriated and Egyptianized under Gamal Abdel Nasser. In ‘Ashur’s novel, the space of the downtown becomes the primary site of social contest, exemplified by the fires and the anticolonial


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demonstrations in the 1950s. Later this same district would bear the traces of an American neoimperial presence in the city. Her return to this space, I argue, is an attempt to retrace the violence of Egypt’s colonial past and recover the collective sense of optimism Egyptians felt with the promise of the nationalist movement. Through a reading of Khayri Shalabi’s Salih Hisa, Chapter 3 suggests the way in which the popular district of Ma‘ruf served as the site of an alternative and parallel modernity alongside that of the official cultural establishment in Wust al-Balad. Shalabi’s novel critiques the notion of an official definition of the modern to suggest ways in which the rich cadences of the vernacular and particular long-standing traditions of Egypt’s urban underclasses offer us indigenous forms of the modern well worthy of examination. This chapter examines the novel Taht Khatt al-Faqr (Under the Poverty Line; 2005) by the Nubian writer, Idris ‘Ali (translated into English by Elliott Colla as Poor, 2007).2 One of the most severe attacks on the nationalist project, this novel describes the barbaric underside of Cairo during roughly the same period in which Radwa ‘Ashur’s novel takes place. Unlike her narrator, who lives in the city center, Idris ‘Ali’s protagonist (his fictional double) migrates to the city following the flooding of his village after the construction of the Aswan High Dam. He lives with his father in the popular neighborhood of Bulaq and finds odd jobs in Wust al-Balad. The downtown here comes to represent all that is denied those of the underclasses, most of whom live in poor neighborhoods on the fringes of the city center. In this regard, we may read this novel as a direct response to Shalabi’s celebration of the life of the underclasses in Hayy Ma‘ruf. Unlike Salih, whose way of life stands as a corrective to the bourgeois values of the liberal intelligentsia, here, Idris ‘Ali outrightly criticizes the liberal establishment following the 1952 revolution not only for denying the mass displacement of thousands of Nubians but also for not decrying the conditions under which the popular classes live. If indeed the nationalist movement took up the banner of the project of modernity and promised another form of utopian social modernity, for ‘Ali’s protagonist, postrevolution Cairo ended the tyranny of one ruling class only to replace it with the tyranny of another. Nasser’s populist platform fails to radically alter ‘Ali’s life, and in fact, the completion of the Aswan High Dam—the ultimate symbol of Nasser’s modernization program— brings about the flooding and complete obliteration of the villages of Nubia. Here, Cairo comes to represent a world where social hierarchy is in every way inscribed in space. The neighborhood of Bulaq is not presented as a comforting site of nostalgia (recall Denning’s ghetto pastoral) or the site of an alternatively modern, yet rural way of life, with a unique local culture, but rather it is described as a wretched space of squalor, crowdedness, and desperation. In contrast, downtown for the Nubian migrant represents a space of arrival—a space of promise, and most of all, a space of work and wages. The reality of life


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in Bulaq, in juxtaposition to the unattainable wealth and sophistication in Wust al-Balad, shatters for our Nubian migrant the mythology of the city (in contrast to his village) as a space of opportunity and mobility. His lack of recourse in the face of injustice and corruption leaves him, by the close of the novel, feeling lost and embittered. In considering the way Taht Khatt al-Faqr serves as an observant meditation on the failure of the nationalist movement to bring about social change, it is useful to borrow from the work of Robert Spencer on postcolonial African novels. In writing on Tayyib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), he specifically considers the way each of these texts gesture to the contradictions underwriting the nationalist program, particularly the fact of social and cultural difference, which was strategically deemphasized by the slogans of a unified platform of national liberation. Despite his naming of nationalism as the “only credible political challenge to imperialism,”3 Spencer recalls Frantz Fanon’s own recognition of the weaknesses in its program: “the predicament that Fanon sees nationalism facing at independence [is] the contradiction between nationalism as a rhetorical alibi for the comprador middle class and as the unforced social and international consciousness of the free people.”4 Fanon’s point—that nationalism following independence was at risk of morphing into merely another pretext for power by the new elite as opposed to being a broad-based movement for change—cuts to the heart of what Idris ‘Ali attempts to speak to in his novel. ‘Ali revisits the sense of hope invested in the revolution by the average worker, only to watch a more militarized state emerge that was equally as corrupt. In this, his critique is aimed at not only the “men in tanks,” as he calls the Free Officers who rose to power under Nasser, but also the intelligentsia for not decrying the hypocrisy underwriting the movement (specifically for ‘Ali, the plight of the Nubians, the purging of foreigners, the arrests of those involved in the Communist Party in Egypt, and the ongoing poverty). The violence inflicted in the name of nationalism and for the purpose of the postcolonial state are what Idris ‘Ali unearths here. He does so by setting his novel in the juxtaposed spaces of Bulaq and Wust al-Balad to suggest the Janus-faced nature of Egypt’s development. The narrator (from his position writing in the present) maps the iconic spaces of the city center as he wanders the downtown in a state of presuicidal despair: Sulayman Pasha Square, Champollion Street, the Immobilia Building, the Qasr al-Nil Bridge. No longer testaments to Egypt’s modernity, these sites, in his confused wandering, become monuments to the contradictions of the state. Or put another way, the narrative sketched by these iconic public spaces is one of regress, discordant with the reality of the state’s public. Here, to quote Spencer, “nationalism, that magnificent song, increasingly sounds off-key . . . [and] is beginning to drown out the new rhythm of the nation’s progress.”5


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The echoing of Salih’s Season of Migration in Taht Khatt al-Faqr is unmistakable. The same sense of existential crisis the narrator feels prior to his decision to enter the river (between, as Spencer notes, art and life, his role as intellectual and as one of the people, between his identification with the “North” and his disavowal of it) resonates in multiple ways with ‘Ali’s protagonist as he too contemplates throwing himself into the Nile. Although Salih’s narrator, while caught in the Nile’s undertow between the northern and the southern banks, chooses life, we are not certain of his ultimate fate. In the last lines of the novel he yells for help to keep from drowning. In contrast, the suicide attempt of Idris ‘Ali’s narrator occurs at the beginning of the novel (roughly 35 pages in). As if picking up from the end of Season of Migration, ‘Ali’s narrator also finds himself caught between succumbing to and fighting the river.6 For him, his will to live is stronger than his will to die. He is pulled to safety by two fishermen who, as if in some dark comedy, note the daily occurrence of Egyptians throwing themselves off the bridge into the river. Echoing the desperate river scene in Salih’s novel, our narrator describes his attempt as follows: Your head heavy with drink and acute depression, you slice through the crowds. You quickly vault the railings and throw yourself off. You plunge into the Nile, screaming like a kamikaze . . . You’re a goner. This is the death you sought, and it’s not such a simple thing after all. Black death. You fight off the cruel hand that grips your neck. In vain, you fight the water. With all of your strength you struggle. You struggle with your hands and feet. But you struggle with no compass to guide you. Are you plunging down or floating up? This torture must end quickly—whether in death or in rescue. This awful moment lasts forever. How long do you fumble in the river’s depths before floating back to the river’s surface? You’ll never know. You never imagined death was so vicious. You never thought that this river, whose surface features are so calm, contained such nasty depths. How happy you are to finally rise to the surface. How beautiful the light seems, how sweet the air! My God— life is glorious, despite its crap! You breathe deeply and blink your eyes. You reach out your hand searching for help. You shout with all your strength, “Help! Help!” You focus all your strength to stay floating for as long as possible. You can’t believe you’re still alive. Where were you? Where are you now?7

In his first few moments of rescue ‘Ali’s narrator motions for a cigarette. As if to recall once more the narrator of Season of Migration, it is his unexpected craving for a cigarette in the river that propels him out of his state of confusion and despair. For Salih’s narrator, the thought of the cigarette is what connects him to the material world, reminding him of the simple pleasures of an ordinary life and sparking in him his will to live. Here, ‘Ali’s narrator emerges from the river and is rewarded by the fisherman with that cigarette. He has not just chosen life; he has survived and will, figuratively, continue where Tayyib Salih’s story


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left off. ‘Ali’s narrator is left to live, and it is in his postsuicidal state, suspended between life and death, that he begins to recount his story to the specter of his childhood love, Dina Tantawi. She appears to him in his imagination and asks him, “What are you angry about my love?”8 His response to her is the remainder of the novel. The chronology of the novel thus begins in the 1990s with the narrator— Idris ‘Ali—as an intellectual plagued with doubt and anger. The framing of his own story, following his suicide attempt, begins in the 1940s in a village in Nubia and suggests the aftermath of a story of migration far different from that of Mustafa Sa‘id’s or even the narrator of Season of Migration. ‘Ali’s story is also that of a migrant seeking the North, but his North is only as far as Cairo, and his “whites” are the Egyptians he encounters in the city. In this regard, the “Other” in his tale is not the British occupier. Instead, the Other here are the members of the Egyptian elite and those “heroes” of the nationalist struggle who lord over him in Wust al-Balad. Postliberation Sudan and its challenges are only vaguely sketched in Salih’s novel. The poignancy of his critique lies in its ability to articulate the psychological disorientation that comes with colonization and the sense of lifelong inferiority it breeds. In this regard, the postcolonial predicament in Tayyib Salih’s work is experienced by his characters as primarily identitarian and existential in nature. In contrast, the British and the foreigners are barely visible or remarked on in ‘Ali’s postliberation Egypt. His critique is primarily materialist in thrust, where the poverty and the fear that are left in the wake of the revolution become a form of violence and ongoing trauma inflicted on the Egyptian people equal in its effects to the injustices perpetrated on behalf of the British. But Idris ‘Ali’s narrator (also known as ‘Ali) does not seek to take revenge on the elite with the single-mindedness of Mustafa Sa‘id. His tale of migration is not one of murder, sexual exploitation, and cunning. Rather it is more or less a Bildungsroman of nonarrival. In other words, the promise of Cairo, of the revolution, and of his education does not prove to be transformative. His poverty and constant thoughts of suicide plague him. After an unsuccessful attempt as a young man to take his life (by taking a bottle of aspirin), he resigns himself to volunteering for the Egyptian resistance against the Israelis in the Sinai in 1956. It is an empty gesture. He does so out of defeat, having lost all faith in the promise of Egypt to deliver him or anyone else. Where Mustafa Sa‘id’s migration was one in which he transforms himself from a boy in the Sudanese countryside into a well-known economist and intellectual in London, ‘Ali, in Taht Khatt al-Faqr, moves from one menial job to another (servant in a home, assistant to his father as a bawwab [doorman], restaurant worker). There is no getting ahead for the young migrant. Even his success as a writer (alluded to in the early chapters) barely consoles him, as he suggests it still has not managed to deliver him from poverty. The awareness his education has brought him is an awareness of constant struggle and injustice.


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His desire for death comes in his realization that there is no unified struggle that will deliver the people. His is not an internal battle of the sort through which Mustafa Sa‘id or, ultimately, the narrator of Season of Migration struggle. Instead it is a rage aimed at the perpetrators of nationalist propaganda, those who, for him, robbed the people of a real populist turning-over of the system. Idris ‘Ali’s chronicling of the 1952 revolution and its aftermath from the point of view of the son of a Nubian bawwab shuttling between Bulaq and Wust al-Balad offers, in contrast to ‘Ashur’s and Shalabi’s work, the way in which the boundary between the popular districts and the modern downtown was not traversed easily by everyone. For ‘Ashur’s protagonist, the demonstrations and fires of 1952 were an act of denunciation against the British and foreign elite. In ‘Ali’s novel the fires symbolize a taking back of the city by the lower classes from the hands of the elite. The destruction of the downtown serves as a testament to a class struggle inscribed in space. Here it is the subaltern Nubian who is writing the national narrative, and doing so as a revision to the primarily urban, pronationalist and postcolonial fictions, where the notion of an essential (or unproblematized) “Egyptian people” is left unquestioned (here I am thinking of Ihsan ‘Abd al-Qaddus’ Fi Baytina Rajul, Naguib Mahfuz’s Thulathiyya and Miramar, Sonallah Ibrahim’s Tilka Ra‘iha and Dhat, Radwa ‘Ashur’s Qit‘a min Urubba, and Latifa al-Zayyat’s al-Bab al-Maftuh).9 Viewing Egypt as a site of difference across ethnic, geographic, religious, class, and gender lines necessarily means calling into question the entire rhetorical architecture of the nationalist movement, which is predicated on unity and the eliding of difference. In considering the spatial implications of this argument in postindependence Egypt, the downtown then ceases to represent for ‘Ali a core or the space of a collective Egyptian consciousness. Rather it becomes a space for the negotiation of difference, where the act of social contest takes place between those of different classes. The downtown as modern stage is transformed into a spatial parody of a unified Egypt. It is portrayed by ‘Ali as the market for the contest of greater and lesser thieves. From the owners of sha‘bi food carts who sell spoiled meat to Egyptian-owned companies, virtually everyone in this portrait becomes a self-interested opportunist striving to survive or get ahead. (The image of Cairo as a capitalist dystopia is even more pronounced in Alaa al-Aswany’s ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan, which will be examined in detail in the next chapter.) In short, Wust al-Balad, in the eyes of a young Nubian, is the urban space in which the tyranny of racial and social difference is most acutely felt. The staging of the modern in Wust al-Balad becomes in this novel merely the false image of a unified Egypt. In this chapter I will offer a brief discussion of Idris ‘Ali’s novel in the context of other Nubian literary works. In turning to the novel itself, I will read the work as a subaltern narrative of the space of the downtown, where the hypocrisy of the nationalist movement is manifest in the spatial segregation of the city and the constant erasure of difference. A poignant piece of proletariat literature, the


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work is at once a story of displacement, poverty, and the misguided belief in the city as a place of deliverance. While not overtly didactic, it clearly may be read as a lament for a popular revolution that never was. Toward a Nubian Literature? Taht Khatt al-Faqr in Context It is interesting to note that the first critical work solely devoted to Nubian writing, Udaba Nubiyun wa Nuqqad Unsuriyun (Nubian Writers and Racist Critics; 2006), was published not by one of the large publishing houses or by one of the smaller, alternative publishers in Cairo, but rather by the Center for the Study of Human Rights. The author of the work, Haggag Hasan Uddul, himself a well-respected (if not controversial) Nubian writer and activist, discusses the reason for his choice in the book’s Introduction. In it he attacks Egypt’s community of intellectuals for their ostracization of the few existing Nubian writers and their deeply ingrained commitment to what he views as a racist national ideal. While he mentions the collective amnesia on behalf of intellectuals to the tragic flooding of Nubian villages in the early 1960s and the subsequent displacement of thousands to uncultivatable land or to poor neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria, he focuses more specifically on what he controversially considers the race-based exclusion of Nubian artists, writers, and intellectuals as part of the corpus of Egyptian literature. On the emergence of Nubian literature and the response it received from critics, he writes, With the proliferation of Nubian titles, the Nubian issue appeared in these works in both positive and negative ways. While these works received minor interest from some critics, writers, and readers, their response was horrible and strange. Accusations were piled on Nubian writers claiming that they were separatists, imperialists or even Zionists! From the tabloids who wanted to set off some sparks in an effort to merely sell [their papers], to the mean-spirited writers afflicted with envy over their long-standing failures. Sadly, well-known, vocal writers participated in this attack, voicing their concerns over this emergent Nubian literary current. When read well their literary propaganda will be revealed and it will become clear that the map of literature in Egypt is merely a lie, a fabrication. They shout their accusations on Nubian writers and Nubian organizations, some of them advocates of freedom and plurality and the importance of understanding the Other both within and outside [Egypt]. It is known that they will use any means if someone is against them; they all at once raise their daggers . . . accusing this Other of turning against them . . . Nubian literature has become the issue on which they want to gang up. The writers of Nubia, who do not number more than the fingers on one hand . . . have become a target for enflamed envy. [These critics] lobby together with those antagonistic toward Nubia on the basis of race. For Egypt, like any country in the world contains a racial strata that scorns those of another, focusing their racism on blacks. Is it not for each of us to ask himself . . . does he ever see a black male or female broadcaster on any of the Egyptian television stations? We might see black broadcasters on


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the televisions stations of those in white countries like Sweden, but on Egyptian screens—no. The appearance of blacks on our screen would maybe force some of the naïve and those ready to slander to say that Egypt is actually African? . . . For this reason I was compelled to leave pure literary writing and have written a number of books about Nubia, among them this one.10

Uddul is considered one of the most radical Nubian voices in Egypt. His claims of racism are not universally accepted by all Nubians, let alone most Egyptians. However, he is by far the most vocal proponent of the Nubian cause and cultural production. His position, and the abundance of his writing, however angry or extreme it may appear, has served to spark what he considers a long-overdue debate about racial identity and the plight of the Nubians in Egypt.11 Uddul’s assertion that Nubian literature has struck a nerve among Egyptians and prompted accusations of “separatism, imperialism, and even Zionism” suggests just how threatening an individuated racial or ethnic identity within Egypt still is to many liberal Egyptian intellectuals. In fact, as if to signal the two sides of this debate, the publisher included in the Preface to the book an essay framing Uddul’s work by the well-regarded Egyptian poet Ahmad ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti Higazi. Higazi, a common contributor to the state-sponsored paper alAhram and a poet embraced by the official cultural establishment, acknowledges in his preface the importance of Uddul’s work and Nubian cultural contributions more generally, but makes a point of disagreeing with Uddul’s claim that Nubian artists have been neglected for reasons of racism. In fact, he refutes the notion that Egyptians are racist to any degree.12 Thus the framing of this book, the inclusion of Higazi’s preface as a rebuttal to Uddul’s accusations of racism, suggests the extent to which the publisher felt the need to include a more mainstream position on the Nubian issue (and perhaps wanted some distance from Uddul’s views), or at the very least, wanted to offer a counterperspective on the sensitive issue of race in Egypt.13 Of course, the issue of Nubian identity is far more complex than mere discrimination on the basis of color. There is, as Robert Fernea and Aleya Rouchdy point out in their ethnographic work on the Nubians, the issue of whether to consider the community a culturally distinctive group within Egypt or whether they clearly are ethnically differentiated. Race, in their determination, like other physical characteristics, is “important ethnically only to the degree that [it is] culturally significant” as a “boundary marker” in the social context of Egypt. They conclude that Nubians are, indeed, an ethnically differentiated group, and will continue to be so long as their identity remains a positive force in contributing to their sense of livelihood and well-being.14 Beyond this, there is the issue of how Egypt’s progress and modernization (by way of the Aswan Dam) are framed in terms of the necessary “sacrifice” that Nubians had to make by abandoning their villages and


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resettling for the sake of the nation. The erasure of this event from Egyptian collective memory and the lack of appropriate compensation or reparations made to the Nubians is part of what contributes to the sense of betrayal Uddul and others describe.15 In addition, there is the issue of the geographic location of the Nubian villages and people, spanning both southern Egypt and northern Sudan. As Uddul aptly notes, to embrace blackness as an essential part of Egyptianness requires acknowledgement that Egypt is a part of Africa and not just the Middle East or, as was claimed in the first half of the twentieth century, the countries of the Mediterranean. This sense of allegiance to an African cultural and historical context, Uddul claims, is deliberately absent from Egyptian public discourse.16 Thus Uddul’s accusation of racism within Egypt seems to speak to more than just the issue of color; rather it is an attempt to bring into the realm of public discourse what he regards as the requisite blindness and amnesia vis-à-vis difference perpetuated in the name of the Egyptian nationalist platform. In fact, Uddul’s very use of the term “Nubian literature” is controversial for similar reasons and points to some of the issues that surfaced during the 1920s and 1930s in Egypt surrounding the creation of a national Egyptian literature. The very classification of Nubian literature as a body of work united on the basis of the ethnicity of the authors is problematic from Higazi’s point of view. Uddul argues that there are numerous literatures written in English (British, American, Australian, Indian), and each of them has different features that speak to different national experiences. Higazi concedes this point but also responds to it by noting that literature written in Arabic during the eighth through twelfth centuries, whether written by a Persian or by an Arab, was considered part of the corpus of classical Arabic literature. Higazi writes that literature derives its origins and traditions first and foremost from the language that it is written in. While a body of literature may take on distinctive features specific to the society in which it emerges, a literary tradition is an extension of the language it is written in and the works in that language to which it is writing back. According to Higazi, Nubian literature, as written narrative, has only had half a century to develop, and thus it is still too early to say whether it can be considered a unified body of work equal to that of other national traditions (Syrian, Yemeni, Lebanese, etc.). For Higazi, the Nubian literary tradition is still too young to be considered independent of that of Egypt.17 For Uddul, on the other hand, employing the term “Nubian literature” is a political strategy as much as it is an attempt to define a literary genre within the larger body of contemporary Arabic literature. He poses this question in his book and states that the very ambivalence Egyptian critics have toward the term is evidence of the racial bias underwriting their ideas on art and identity. He argues that in Egyptian society “it is not possible for there to exist strong characteristics [of another culture] within it, and [there is] a refusal to recognize


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that any [other] civilization had an influence on the whole of the Egyptian civilization.”18 For Uddul, the term Nubian literature must be employed because Nubian literature shares certain similar stylistic qualities and themes19 and because its constant use reifies and reminds us of the very existence of Nubians in Egypt.20 He writes that the term came into use around 1990. Its use created a stir and caused resentment among Egyptian critics, who claimed that using it was detrimental to Egypt because it encouraged the notion of separatism and the cultivation of an identity distinctive from that of the Egyptian people.21 The irony in these accusations of course is that the very notion of a collective Egyptian identity and a national literature that expresses that identity is, in itself, a construction, the product of early Egyptian nationalists such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, Mustafa Kamil, Ahmad Sayf, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Ibrahim al-Misri, nationalists who sought to unify Egyptians on the basis of their common history, culture, and relationship to the land.22 Uddul, in defending his own program against these attacks, writes that Egypt has always been a place where diversity has flourished. Instead of stifling the notion of Egypt’s people being multiple and varied, he wants to celebrate the idea, and in so doing, celebrate the unique contributions of the Nubians to Egypt’s greater historical narrative. With respect to the issue of language, he refutes Higazi’s idea that Nubian literature should be analyzed only for its literary contribution to the body of Arabic literature more broadly. The extent to which Nubian literature serves as an alternative form of historical record for documenting the collective experience and culture of a people virtually obliterated by the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the subsequent flooding is paramount for Uddul. In this regard, the importance of Nubian literature is as much cultural and political as it is literary. In his final comment on why he advocates using the term “Nubian literature,” he writes, “the term ‘Nubian literature’ will remain so long as there exists a need for it, a real need. And with the same objectivity I say that it, like any term, will vanish if the need for it becomes artificial or accidental.”23 In considering the span of Nubian (written) literary production, Uddul argues that there are three discernable “waves” of writing. The first wave in his schema begins with the first Nubian collection of poems published by ‘Abd al-Rahman Idris in 1948, Zilal al-Nakhil (The Shadows of the Palms). The second wave begins twenty years later, in 1968, with the publication of the epic novel al-Shamandurah (The Buoy) by Muhammad Khalil Qasim. Uddul argues that it was Qasim’s novel that came to be the primary inspiration for his own work and that of Nubian writers of successive generations who draw on the traditions, superstitions, and mythologies of Nubian people. The writers of this second wave (e.g., Zaki Murad, Muhammad Khalil Qasim, Mahmud Shindi, and the brothers Khalil and ‘Ali Kulfat) were deeply influenced by the literature of social realism, which was the dominant trend


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in Egypt in the 1960s. As Uddul notes, Nubia at that point had not been completely submerged by the floods, so the idea of their homeland as a lost paradise had yet to emerge. Instead, many of them wrote with, as Uddul puts it, a “great deal of humanity” for Nubian life and culture. The third wave begins for Uddul in 1989 with the publication of a collection of short stories by Ibrahim Fahmi, al-Qamar Buba (1990), written in a highly lyrical, magical realist mode, and then with Uddul’s own collection of stories, Layali al-Misk al-‘Atiqiya (The Ancient Nights of Musk), also in 1990. Uddul characterizes the works of the third wave as crystallizing and defining the narrative style and dimensions of Nubian literature more than any other generation. He writes that the generation of writers who formed the second wave were more committed to the political situation in Egypt (i.e., the struggle for liberation) rather than the issue of Nubia, and thus they did not feel compelled to speak out in their works about their displacement.24 In contrast, the writings of the third generation have been more radical in their condemnation of the state, the erasure of their way of life and culture, and the acute poverty plaguing many of the resettled Nubian communities. In writing on displacement and exile they have drawn heavily on their rich mythological inheritance and the centrality of the Nile to their way of life and customs. Uddul situates the work of Idris ‘Ali within the context of this third wave. Among these more recent writers he includes himself, the late Ibrahim Fahmi, Yahya Mukhtar, Hasan Nur, Yasir ‘Abd al-Latif, and others. Where many have drawn on the mythically inflected work of Muhammad Khalil Qasim’s Shamandurah, Uddul notes that ‘Ali’s work, particularly Dunqula, draws more from Tayyib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Salih’s ability to express the exile’s sense of existential despair: “Even Idris ‘Ali’s novel, Dunqula, which sparked debate and brought on accusations, is in reality a novel of despair for Nubia.”25 In both Dunqula and Taht Khatt al-Faqr, by positioning the Nubian experience in dialogue with Tayyib Salih’s chronicle of the psychological violence colonialism enacted on the native population, ‘Ali forces his readers to consider the parallel between colonial and postliberation intranational forms of violence. Here he requires his readers to think outside the preoccupation in many postcolonial novels with the imperial specter of the West or the uneven power differential between West and East. In so doing, he displaces the colonial experience as the most lasting and significant form of injustice experienced by a people to point to the traumas and contradictions the legacy of “liberation” left behind. For ‘Ali, like Uddul, the disavowal on behalf of the Egyptian government for the plight of an entire ethnic population within Egypt is one such trauma worthy of its own narrative.26 Uddul’s work declares Nubian literature as an emergent literature in the context of the larger field of Arabic literary production and as a subgenre within the


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body of contemporary Egyptian literature. Idris ‘Ali’s output, until the time of his death in 2010 (six novels and three short story collections), makes him one of the most prolific Nubian novelists. Unlike many of his contemporaries who mine the rich mythological past of the Nubians in their works, Idris ‘Ali’s work is grounded in the social realist tradition, though he creates his own kind of mythological canvas. Many of the characters in his novels echo one another, which makes it appear as if he is telling the same story but from different vantage points. His themes of displacement, exile, poverty, the oppressiveness of patriarchal traditions, and injustice emerge in each of his works and one senses that his protagonists, while multiple, are but one character grappling repeatedly with the trauma of losing a homeland and the social inequities in Egyptian society. His references in Taht Khatt al-Faqr to the popular Nubian intellectual and short story writer Ibrahim Fahmi, Maxim Gorky, and his outright references to Tayyib Salih in Dunqula are gestures to his literary forefathers and the tradition in which he writes. Beyond that, his anguished message comfortably places him within the community of Nubian writers whose imprint on Egyptian literature and the contemporary cultural sphere, however long-standing, is only now beginning to be recognized. Looking Northward: The Specter of Cairo in Taht Khatt al-Faqr [There] are lives, in Egypt, for which there are real limits placed, for economic, political, and social reasons, on the possibility of achieving certain ideals and becoming the subjects of national pedagogy. For those who don’t have access to the education that marks the good upright citizen or the emancipated woman; for those whose livelihoods are so precarious that they cannot dream of the comforts that allow art, beauty, and modernity to become the terms of value; for those whose experiences of the nation-state have tended to be more through police violence, official corruption, security surveillance, or the maltreatment of conscription than through the privileges of office, income, and social standing, one needs to ask how the messages of developmentalism and good citizenship are assimilated. How “available,” to use Daniel’s term, is the nation to these groups? —Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt27

The image of Cairo as a salvatory space looms large in the imagination of ‘Ali, the young protagonist in Taht Khatt al-Faqr. His story begins in 1948 in the Nubian village of his boyhood and, in the stylistic tradition of Gorky’s Childhood (1954) and later Muhammad Shukri’s al-Khubz al-Hafi (For Bread Alone; 1973), captures the earnest voice of a young, precocious boy thrust into poverty and desperate circumstances.28 With the flooding of the Nile valley (this would have been the result of the original High Dam built by the British from 1892–1902), his family and the other villagers are forced to flee with little or no compensation


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from the government. In a few pages we learn that ‘Ali’s father has left the family and moved to Cairo. He leaves the family destitute, and is rumored to have taken up with another woman. ‘Ali attends the local village school where he receives his one guaranteed meal a day. It is there that he first encounters the racist characterization of Nubians. For example, ‘Ali describes his loathing for the teacher, who the village regards as a “prophet” but who enters the classroom with a handkerchief over his nose to ward off the smell. His foreign ways and condescending treatment of the Nubian students enrages ‘Ali. When an inspector from the ministry comes to ask about the quality of the teacher’s performance, ‘Ali tells him that the teacher refers to the Nubian students as “barabra”29 (a derogatory word roughly the equivalent to barbarians) and that he is unaware of their traditions and honorable past. In addition, he tells the inspector that the teacher steals part of their daily meals. These accusations against the teacher thereafter make ‘Ali’s life at school impossible, so he decides to leave to earn money for his family. He seeks out a well-known farmer in the village who agrees to give him breakfast and lunch in exchange for building a fence and running small errands. The tiresome work and ‘Ali’s growing sense of desperation leads him to conclude that he must run away to Cairo to save himself and his family from starvation. In asking one of his relatives visiting from Cairo for advice on the matter, the relative cautions him on the perils of the big city for Nubians: Cairo is a big flesh-eating demon. It swallows people without mercy. To live there with your honor intact, you need to arm yourself with an education. Enough education so that you enjoy the title of effendi or ustaz. If you go there in your present condition, you’ll fall in the hell of Cairo’s service jobs and come to hate the day you were born. An entire generation of Nubians struggles valiantly in night schools just to find the lowest place among the people of the North. My boy, Cairo has lots of well-paying jobs and wonderful opportunities. But it also has shitty jobs, the worst of which swallow up the likes of us. The place also has jails and prisons and laws and heartless cops. Every police officer is a despotic pharaoh who spares no one who falls in his grasp. You’re here, among your people—and that’s worth something. Here, you’re a somebody who’s the son of a somebody in a clan that’s known. There, you’re a zero among zeros. Listen to my advice and carry on with your studies. After that, decide what you want.’30

This passage is significant and somewhat prophetic, as ‘Ali does not take his relative’s advice and ventures forth to the city with the hope of locating his father in Bulaq. Cairo, like the representative from the government who came to explain the flooding to the Nubians, and like the village teacher, is both idealized and feared as part of the unknown North. In other Egyptian works of village life (such as ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s al-Ard, Yahya Haqqi’s Sabah al-Khayr, and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Yawmiyyat Na’ib fi-l-Aryaf ), the city comes to


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represent the contradictions of modernization, that is, an imposition on tradition and the potential loss of a way of life and thus an identity. In contrast, from the point of view of the Nubian relative, the city is not celebrated, but rather is demonized as a place of unending struggle and strict social hierarchy. To work to become middle class or to achieve the rank of effendi alongside other Egyptians is, he suggests, a life’s work for which the Nubian must struggle twice as hard as any northerner. To move to the city is to become the prey of the state, and Cairo—with its laws, prisons, and corrupt officers—is no place for an uneducated, unknown Nubian. Looking back on this scene as an adult, he admits to his stubbornness and his inability to grasp the importance of his relative’s advice. After a harrowing passage from Aswan by train (in which he describes having to act “the Nubian” for a group of officers who took an interest in him), he arrives in Cairo. The shock of seeing Cairo unmasked before him is narrated in a two-page chapter he ironically titles “al-wasul ila umm al-dunya” (Arriving to Cairo [the mother of the world]).31 The severe contradictions embodied by the city (contradictions that will preoccupy him for the remainder of the book) are everywhere apparent as he steps off the train at Bab al-Hadid, the area surrounding Cairo’s train station: After real hardship, you arrive in Cairo: ‘Mother of the World.’ If Cairo is a mother, what are her children like? You’re not one of them—they do not go around like barefoot vagrants. The scene in front of you isn’t pretty. Crowds so thick, everyone jostling one another. Some move with incredible speed, while a few dawdle and block their pace. What gets your attention is the sheer number of beautiful women—white-skinned, gorgeous, chic. Are they the daughters of Cairo, or the daughters of houris? Ever after, you will continue to fall for them, to chase them, and to be tortured by them. Look at how many poor people there are! You Nubians are not alone in your starvation. Cairo is a train straining under the weight of so many miserable people. Poverty. Wretched poverty. You’re stunned by the glaring disparities of wealth. One is a richly dressed dandy, the next is dirty, with oozing wounds, walking like the dead. Are they born of the same mother? Unlikely. Maybe the sergeant decided to punish you by casting you off at the wrong city. How could this be the Cairo you dreamt of and struggled so hard to reach? In your bewilderment, you ask a pedestrian, “Where are we Amm?” “Iron Gate. Where do you want to go?” “Cairo!” “All this is Cairo.” “Is there another Cairo besides this one?” “There are other neighborhoods. Where’d you come from?” “Nubia.” “You mean Sudan. It’s clear you’ve been drinking your moonshine.”


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He walks away, shaking his head at you. You feel lost and confused. You walk into a side street and are astonished to see a neat row of handcarts filled with stacked fruit. What abundance and variety! You know the names of some from textbooks. “Souad eats the orange . . . The monkey peels the banana.” This country is strange. All these riches, while the starving crowds fill the square!32

Unlike the young Mustafa Sa‘id’s arrival in Cairo, where the city, like a large European woman, embraces him, here the women are untouchable and gazed at by the narrator from a distance. He is enamored of their white skin (which he equates with beauty), but they remain, like the fruit piled high on the carts before him, beyond his reach. The dystopic images of the poor and the children begging force him to doubt that this is the same Cairo he had heard of and imagined. After drawing out the analogy of Cairo as mother figure, as towering center, he wonders how all these contradictions, this “abundance and this hunger,” the wealthy and the poor, can all be part of one city. Where Cairo for Mustafa Sa‘id is embodied by the warm figure of Mrs. Robinson, who awakens in him his adolescent sexual yearnings and introduces him to the music of Bach and the writings of John Keats and Mark Twain, ‘Ali’s arrival is marked by a contrasting sense of the mother’s rejection. The city is no bosom, rather it is a space marked by poverty, callousness, and despair. Here ‘Ali echoes other American and European novels that render the city using similar dystopic imagery. Recalling the early nineteenth- and twentiethcentury novels of Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Victor Hugo, and Honoré de Balzac, ‘Ali’s Cairo is one where the barbaric side of modernity is the modern world for the poor. In fact, initially it is the only Cairo ‘Ali comes to know. For example, upon arriving to Bulaq, the popular district neighboring the downtown where his father is supposed to live, he describes the quarter with a similar sense of indignation: From the absolute poverty of Nubia to the relative poverty of Bulaq. From the post-dam scarcity of food to the abundance of it here, at least for those who can afford it. From the healthy climate there, where the sun is strong, the air is pure, and the houses are roomy and clean, to here, where the alleys are narrow and the rooms suffocating, inhabited with humans packed in like beasts. Here, where the miserable inhabitants fight over the single bathroom and struggle for use of the sink to wash and perform ablutions. The orphan sink where spit and phlegm mingle with bits of food washed from dishes and discarded tea leaves. In one room, people sleep and cook and bathe themselves in buckets. It is a disgusting life, one that makes you want to throw up. This is the Bulaq into whose depths your travels have thrown you. Shit and garbage and flies that travel from garbage to human faces, and discarded wash water splattering the streets. Your father’s address? Off Sharkas al-Wustani Street—Atiya Alley. The lowest spot you’ve ever


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seen in your life. You are shocked by this neighborhood of Cairo, this dominion of the Mother of the World. There is no way she could be the legitimate mother—real mothers don’t neglect their children like this. Perhaps she adopted them so they could beg for her in the streets? You don’t believe it. Is this Cairo? How can that be? Rotting putrescence all around as women sit on the doorsteps of apartment buildings trading vulgarities for hours. Why don’t they get up and get rid of the piles of garbage in front of their homes? They are not like those beauties you saw at the station. These must be house girls and slaves who serve the daughters of the Mother of the World.33

Again, ‘Ali invokes in his description of Bulaq the sense that Cairo-as-mother could not be the actual mother, for no real mother would forsake her children as Bulaq’s residents have been forsaken. Instead, this quarter, crammed with residents, garbage, and flies, conjures up a way of life less humane than the one he had known in his village in Nubia. Here it is not just the objective circumstances in which the people live that bothers the young narrator; it is their seeming disregard for the squalor around them and their acceptance of it that seems incomprehensible to him. He can only reconcile this disparity by rationalizing that these women must serve the beautiful elegant women he saw passing by him near the train station. Those women, he rationalizes, belong to another Cairo—the real umm al-dunya. In contemporary Egyptian fiction, for example, Luwis ‘Awad’s al-Anqa aw Tarikh Hasan Muftah (The Phoenix or the History of Hasan Muftah; 1946– 47), Gamil ‘Attiya Ibrahim’s al-Nuzul ila al-Bahr (Down to the Sea; 1986), and Yusuf Idris’s Qa‘ al-Madina (City Dregs; 1959), the neglected districts of the city are described in a similarly dystopic fashion. While these authors take us into these worlds, their narrators’ descriptions tend to otherize the poor (although Gamil ‘Attiya Ibrahim’s work may be an exception to some degree). The poverty they describe appears perverse and repulsive. While their works are clearly social commentaries, they are not written in the testimonial style in which ‘Ali writes, where his deep sense of intimacy and empathy for those living in the popular quarters fuels the rage that underwrites his narrative.34 In Yusuf Idris’s novella Qa‘ al-Madina, for example, Idris tells the story of an upper-class judge who, after sexually taking advantage of a young cleaning woman in his house, accuses her of stealing his watch. We later learn she has indeed taken the watch, and the judge’s search for it leads him to her neighborhood in the densely populated district of Gamaliyya behind al-Azhar in the old city. The narrator describes his descent, beginning with his well-ordered neighborhood in Zamalik, with streets and sidewalks, and then his increasing horror as he descends further into this poor district: Deeper they advance. The alleys and pathways are convoluted and lead into a place without identity, where everything merges into everything else. The mounds


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make up successive generations of filth and dust merge into buildings that have collapsed, weighted down by heaps of rubble and an accumulation of life-spans; the color of the roadway with all its mud merges into the color of the walls with all their dust; clothes into the rags scattered about the road; the smell of people into the smell of the earth into the smell of the houses; staccato mutterings into the barking of dogs and into the creaking of great doors as they are pushed open; the slow morbid movement of humans into the crawl of vermin; low, dusty dwellings into the tombs that lie within sight.35

This “descent,” as Idris calls it, may be read alongside ‘Ali’s description of Bulaq, yet the tone of the descriptions is radically different. In Idris’s work, the passage from Gabaliyya Street in Zamalik to the popular quarters surrounding al-Azhar, conveys a kind of horrific crossing over to a world of violent poverty unfamiliar to the naïve judge. And while the story is, in many respects, about the judge’s realization of his own privilege and contempt for his feelings of powerlessness in the face of women (in this case a servant woman who comes to work for him), the point of view, however sympathetic, is one aligned with the (presumably) bourgeois reader. It is, for all intents and purposes, a story about how one comes to see how the other half lives—albeit from a distance.36 ‘Ali’s description, on the other hand, offers a counterhistory of the city from the intimate point of view of these underclasses. Unlike Shalabi, who largely celebrates the lives and culture of this strata in Hayy Ma‘ruf, here ‘Ali renounces this reality as that of one fraught with unending struggle and despair. His writing not only declares these histories as part of the larger narrative of the city but forces us to see them as the barbaric underside—the consequence—of the blindness perpetuated by those occupying the modern and wealthy downtown. ‘Ali’s decision to use Bulaq as the primary port of entry for his narrator’s urban initiation may be for two reasons. First, unlike Naguib Mahfuz’s Gamaliyya district (in his Trilogy), Shalabi’s Hayy Ma‘ruf (in Salih Hisa), or the cemeteries fictionalized in Gamil ‘Attiya Ibrahim’s al-Nuzul ila al-Bahr, Bulaq is, as Janet Abu-Lughod has written, basically “a slum . . . [possessing] little of historic interest or antiquarian charm.”37 In other words, for Abu-Lughod as much as for ‘Ali, the district offers little that can be idealized (or celebrated) apart from the cold reality of its difficult conditions and poverty. Formerly the major port of Cairo during the Ottoman period and the center of the textile industry in the nineteenth century, Janet Abu-Lughod likens Bulaq of the 1960s to the old Fatimid quarters of Cairo without, as she puts it, “the venerable patina of the medieval city.”38 She considers Bulaq a “baladi slum” (at once urban and rural) marked as such by its population density (in 1960 it housed more than 350,000 people in a 4.5-square-kilometer area), maintenance of a rural way of life, and high rate of illiteracy relative to other areas.39 As with other areas in the belt surrounding the downtown, the major influx of migrants came during and immediately after


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World War II (as was the case with our young narrator). ‘Ali’s description of the neighborhood is equally as critical as Abu-Lughod’s. The relations between the narrator, his father, his father’s mistress Sharbat, and even the adolescent boys in the neighborhood are hardly characterized by warmth and community. Instead, the drive to survive and to do so by any means seems to predominate over ‘Ali’s sense of belonging to a community of the sort he had known in his village in Nubia.40 Second, and perhaps more important, Bulaq, according to the work of Peter Geiser on Nubian resettlement to Cairo, was one of the primary regions to which Nubians traditionally migrated (the other two being ‘Abdin, directly east of Wust al-Balad, and Bab al-Sha‘riyya, in the far northeast behind the Fatimid district of al-Gamaliyya). Like other immigrants from the Sa‘id or the provinces in the Nile Delta, most Nubians migrated to Bulaq because of the presence of a preexisting community and its proximity to jobs, either within the district itself or in areas adjacent to it.41 In these areas they were able, as we have discussed in reference to Hayy Ma‘ruf, to preserve their rural way of life and cultural traditions. Thus the social history of the space of Bulaq necessarily comes to bear on our reading of the downtown as we begin to consider the lives of the Nubian workers of Wust al-Balad, Bulaq, and the city center. Crossing Over: From Bulaq to the Doorways of Downtown The starkness of Cairo’s bifurcation is all the more apparent when ‘Ali travels with his father to Wust al-Balad, where he works as a bawwab (doorman) for a large Egyptian company whose building looks out onto Sulayman Pasha Square. This crossing over from his father’s small single room in Bulaq where he resides with his mistress (who lives in the adjoining room of the apartment) to the sense of awe that overcomes him upon his first visit to the city center becomes yet one more rite of passage marking ‘Ali’s growing sense of class consciousness. He describes his passage from the popular districts to the city center: You leave the confines of Bulaq and Ma‘ruf, cross Champollion Street, and then reach Suleiman Pasha Street, where the tasty smells perk you up. Here, perfume wafts from the pedestrians and there are no flies and no garbage. Here, the men are exquisitely dressed and the women more gorgeous than those you saw at Cairo Station. Here, the street is swept and washed, and the buildings tower with beautiful facades and broad entrances. Here, you realize that Cairo isn’t one dimensional. When you arrive at your father’s work, you grasp also that people are not equal to one another in Cairo. There are classes and categories. The people in Bulaq are not the same as those here. Your father, who seems so important to you, appears here to be insignificant, worthless. He’s worth about as much as the bench he sits on in front of the company headquarters. He leaps up to give an exaggerated salute whenever someone passes by. It doesn’t matter whether they’re


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younger or older than he. You’re shocked, because in your country, the younger people always show respect by standing up when their elders pass by. “Older than you by a day, wiser than you by a year,” as they say. You’re upset, and unable to bear the stupidity of this situation turned upside down. “Don’t do that, Father.” “Don’t do what?” “Don’t stand up to salute those who are junior to you.” “You’re in Cairo now, Son.” “I know that.” “No, you don’t know anything yet. People aren’t respected here for their age, but for their jobs, their money and their status.” “How?” “It is the effendis, the beys, and the pashas who rule here, along with the rich, the officers, and the ministers.” “What about all the rest?” “They’re nothing. The doormen, the janitors, the drivers, the gardeners, peasants, construction workers, conscripts, and traveling salesmen. All of them might as well just be servants.” “How does a person become important?” “Education.” “Then teach me.” “I will.”42

Here ‘Ali’s sense of outrage at his father’s deference before the young company employees echoes the narrator of Qit‘a min Urubba when he recalls his realization that his father was a mere office assistant in the bank and not someone of authority. The difference, however, is that ‘Ali’s rage, unlike the narrator of Ashur’s novel, does not find its release in the anticolonial, pronationalist demonstrations. Instead, it festers in him as a deep and lingering sense of inferiority and subjugation at the hands of the upper classes—the pashas, beys, ministers, and officers. His realization that the city is not only divided but that a person’s rank determines the space they inhabit and to which they have access awakens in him once more his own awareness of his station and the reality of social hierarchies everywhere encoded in the space of the city. When the narrator finds himself loitering in the streets of downtown during the day while his father works, he is drawn to the window displays, gelato shops, and restaurants. The allure of these public sites of consumption diminishes and is replaced with a sense of inward depravity as he realizes that such pleasures are denied to those of his position: “You spend your time loafing around in the nearby streets, looking at the beautiful girls and the storefronts. You stand for a long time in front of the foreign-owned ice cream shop underneath the Immobilia Building, watching yourself drool. Your wanderings take you to


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more distant streets and you stand in front of the Hati Kebab Restaurant where you see the people walking out, picking the grilled meat from their teeth. You loiter there until one of the restaurant workers drives you off. No one in your father’s situation would be able to eat at such a place.”43 The image of others eating meat behind glass restaurant windows or eating the cooked livers sold on street carts recurs throughout the novel, invoking in him at first a sense of envy and later an eventual repulsion. The meat in the downtown restaurants becomes synonymous with the gluttony of a particular class, whereas the meat he sees on the street carts or in the sha‘bi eateries brings to mind images of garbage and bacteria.44 The sense of the downtown as a Janus-faced, utopic–dystopic space greets him at every turn. Thus Wust alBalad becomes not only a space demarcated for the wealthy but a space whose very celebration of an Egyptian “public,” with its large squares and boulevards, allows the lower classes to witness, but not participate, in the luxurious displays and public acts of consumption. In walking these spaces—from his father’s stoop as a bawwab at a building overlooking Sulayman Pasha Square to the foreign gelato shop at the Immobilia Building at the intersection of Qasr al-Nil and Sharif Streets, he is made repeatedly aware of his marginality and the hypocrisy underwriting the notion of an Egypt for all Egyptians. It is in Bulaq, the other life to which he belongs, where he comes to learn Egyptian colloquial and comes to know the street children who spend most of their time quarreling, drinking spirits, and gossiping. His distrust for these youths, who never go to school, leads him to befriend a young Nubian boy, also of the neighborhood. This boy teaches him the pleasure to be found in “a story” and from there, ‘Ali writes, “he puts you on a long, dark road. Your future becomes clearly defined after that: reading.”45 The young Nubian shares with him his Arsène Lupin detective novels, which ‘Ali begins reading along the Corniche al-Nil during the day. Extending from Bulaq to Wust al-Balad, the street of the Corniche al-Nil becomes for our narrator the welcome space in between, that is, the place where he can escape without having to belong entirely to one neighborhood or to feel cast out by the other. At the hands of his father, the narrator learns what it means to be subordinate and the value in showing deference to those of higher rank. However, his father’s acceptance of his own lowly status and his preoccupation with and coddling of his mistress in light of his neglect of his wife and grandmother struggling in their village in the south frustrates the young ‘Ali. After coaxing his father, via Sharbat, to send money and medical items back to the village, his father takes his revenge on his son’s scheming and sends him to work for Fu’ad al-Shami, one of the feared petty bourgeois guards for whom his father works. In describing Fu’ad al-Shami, ‘Ali observes in him the qualities of a small-time tyrant who makes it a point to oppress those beneath him. Men like him, he writes, are the “real cause behind the failure of those who rise up against the


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despot. The masters’ eyes. Traitors. You hate them and will continue to hate them until your last gasp.”46 What begins as a mere awareness of class difference for ‘Ali becomes, as embodied by Fu’ad al-Shami, an irreversible hatred of the petty bourgeois, who, from his point of view, take even a small degree of authority as a license for the oppression of others and a means of self-aggrandizement. Ironically it is during his work in this middle-class Coptic household (for one Egyptian pound a month) that he is able to progress with his education. It is here he first happens upon Gorky’s My Childhood and stays up all night reading it. The wife of Fu’ad al-Shami notices ‘Ali’s appetite for reading and promises that if he finishes his household duties, he can continue to borrow the books on their shelves. His exposure to Gorky is a critical turning point for the young ‘Ali, for it is the first time he realizes that the misery he had known in his village of Nubia, and now in Bulaq, is everywhere.47 In the mistress of the house he finds a surrogate mother and teacher. She gives him his first lesson on Marx, tells him that he must read Capital, and stresses the value of a proper education. In Gorky’s My Childhood he hears the voice of a boy whose experience resonates with his own difficult youth. It is this voice that helps him eventually find his own and further solidifies his sense of allegiance to the working classes. Gorky’s own belief in the “humanism of revolutionary struggle” and its ability to “emancipate [man] from within and without” is marked as a central refrain juxtaposed to the actual revolution that does take place in 1952; a revolution that for ‘Ali bears neither the humanist markers of a revolutionary struggle nor the signs of the people’s emancipation.48 Nevertheless, it is in Gorky’s works that he learns to see outside of his narrow world of indentured servitude, Bulaq, and his father’s humble position downtown and strives to continue his education. The Fires: Whose Revolution Was It? ‘Ali describes the fires in January 1952 with a similar sense of confusion and disorientation that recalls the ambivalence and fear we witnessed with ‘Ashur’s narrator in Qit‘a min Urubba. Here however, ‘Ali’s description is devoid of any sense of revolutionary zeal. The scene instead becomes one of looting, an opportunity for the youth and men of Bulaq, who suddenly have access to goods from the downtown shops and thus find themselves hoarding the gourmet items. Despite ‘Ali’s general sense of alienation toward the downtown, in watching the scene, fear overwhelms him: “Why do they burn their city down? You’re terrorized by the sight of revolutionaries throwing one of the looters into the fire along with what he’d stolen. The instigator directs his speech to the arsonists, ‘We’re revolutionaries, not thieves!’ Another warns, ‘Whoever steals, burns!’”49 Here again ‘Ali senses the petty tyrants rising in his midst, when the lighting of fires is deemed “revolutionary” but the stealing of goods by the poor is somehow viewed with


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moral indignation. After returning home to his father and Sharbat, he finds them in their own small world, cut off and unaware of the fire. When Sharbat sees the smoke rising she realizes that her son has gone missing and sets out to look for him. She returns with a bit of stolen wool fabric. Her son arrives minutes later with a stolen box of chocolates, which they decide they will sell for a profit instead of eating them. In seeing the booty, ‘Ali’s father accuses them of being thieves, but Sharbat pays him no mind. That evening ‘Ali returns to the downtown to go with his father to work. He describes the scene: Looting, fires, and chaos. At night, you and your father go as usual to where he works. At Suleiman Pasha Street and on some of the shops on Champollion, you see signs of devastation, but the pandemonium has spared Bulaq and Ma‘ruf. Most of the shops in the Immobilia Building have been torched. Even though you don’t eat your ice cream there, but at the granita cart, and even though your clothes don’t come from these shops, but the sidewalk markets of al-Muski and Wikalat al-Balah, it upsets you to see this. These are not your streets, nor are these your shops—despite that, you are disturbed. “What a loss,” you murmur. With a tinge of pleasure, your father answers, “They were bound to go up in flames.” “Bewildered, you ask, “Are you really happy about it?” “They really did go too far.” “Who’re they?” “The Pashas.” “You must really despise them.” “Them and others.” “But they’ve torched everything.” “It’s because of the anger.” “What are they so angry about?” “Being poor. People don’t have enough to eat.” “Will these fires help feed them?” “It lets off steam.” ... “Is it true they lit the fires so they could loot?” “These shops and businesses are all foreign-owned.” “And the Egyptians? Don’t they own anything?” “They have their anger.” “Are you angry too father?” “Do you think I’m content with my crappy job?”50

Despite ‘Ali’s sense that the downtown was part of “their city,” and the fire was destroying “their streets” and “their shops,” he still cannot shake his sense of loss at the ruin before him. For his father, the fires are tantamount to a class war. He does not describe the uprising as a turn against the colonial establishment,


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but rather notes that the fires signaled that the people needed to eat, and that with this turning over the “pashas,” who had long pushed the limits with the extent of their exploitation of the people, were finally through. For the first time he witnesses his father’s own buried sense of class allegiance and the bitterness he still feels at having been forced to leave his farm in Nubia to come to Cairo to take debasing work. And while he goes on to reassure ‘Ali that his livelihood is not in danger because the company for which he works is Egyptian owned, minutes later he sees the mob approaching their building after coming from the old Barclays Bank of Egypt. He screams out to defend the establishment where he works, “It’s Egyptian owned! Egyptian.”51 His own ambivalent loyalties, to both the company and what he perceives as a popular uprising, are here made clear. In the end, for as much as he might want to see the elites toppled, he does not have the heart to risk his own job as part of the effort. While the company’s Egyptian ownership is meant to safeguard it from ruin, it only does so after the president of the company begs the mob to let it alone. His scorn for the demonstrators and inability to understand their reasons for starting the fires speaks to his own position as one cut off from the reality of lower-class life. After being called “agents of colonialism,” the president of the company questions whether one has to burn the country to be patriotic: “Do these louts think that patriotism consists of burning and looting and vandalizing? I’ve been in this town for a quarter of a century and I still don’t understand these people at all.”52 The president’s son then consoles him, telling him that Egypt is neither this mob, nor the king, but rather Sa‘d Zaghlul, Mustafa Kamil, Tal‘at Harb, Taha Husayn, and Umm Kulthum. The scene is well crafted. Idris ‘Ali shifts in the narrative from the Nubian father’s sense of feeling both joy and fear at the sight of the burning of the downtown to a parallel conversation between the president of the company and his son. He accentuates the way in which their interests (toward the company) become aligned in this rare moment, but shows a few lines later the deep gulf between them. For ‘Ali’s father, the uprising signals a form of protest by real Egyptians in demanding food and the overthrow of the elites. In contrast, the son of the company’s president reassures his father that the mob does not represent Egypt, nor the king. Rather, Egypt lives on in the heroic nationalist figures of Sa‘d Zaghlul, Mustafa Kamil, Tal‘at Harb, and so on. In this scene ‘Ali points to why Egypt, for so many Egyptians, must remain an idealized construction; that is, because the reality of an Egypt for all Egyptians, embodied by the angry masses burning and defacing the downtown, is unbearable. Here the figures of the nationalists invoked by the president’s son serve as a reminder of the empty promises in the nationalist refrain of an Egypt unified under the Socialist slogans of equality and brotherhood. While the narrator of Qit‘a min Urubba described the fires in downtown as an act of contest against the space of the modern as staged primarily by foreign elites, here ‘Ali suggests that the demonstrations, fires, and looting signal


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a popular rebellion against the Egyptian aristocracy waged on the space of the downtown. Here he describes the opportunity and potential that the fires embody for those living on the fringes of downtown in the popular neighborhoods of Bulaq and Ma‘ruf (which, he notes, were spared). In this rendering, the classes who know and experience only the underside of modernity are portrayed as rising up to contest the colossal symbols of wealth in the downtown. In this portrait, Wust al-Balad is destroyed because it most grotesquely exemplifies the social stratification of the city. It is not merely its modern veneer that is under attack, rather it is the fact that this veneer and these images of luxury and excess mock the circumstances of Cairo’s disenfranchised living on the fringes of the city center. Where in ‘Ashur’s portrait the demonstrations prior to the fires are rendered as a prelude to the July revolution, here the sense of disconnect between the two events is accentuated. In Poor, the fires are represented as a genuine expression of popular discontent, while the revolution in the subsequent months arises far from our young narrator as a movement separate and apart. This is particularly clear from his conversation with a Socialist bookseller who ‘Ali befriends in Azbakiyya. With him he resumes his study of Gorky’s work and confesses his desire to be part of a greater Socialist uprising by the people. Of this movement he asks the bookseller: “When will I meet the comrades?” “Don’t be in such a rush.” “Are they all poor?” “Some have fathers who are pashas and army officers.” “Did they have a hand in the fires?” “What gave you that strange idea?” “I once heard you talking about a revolution that was about to come.” “I said that to you?” “Don’t you remember?” “Maybe I was fed up one day . . .” “I want to lead a revolution some day.” “A child leading a revolution? How?” “I won’t always be a child.” “You mean someday in the future? That’s possible.” He smiles and you dream. But the revolution starts, and when it does, you and the comrades and the arsonists are nowhere nearby.53

In the aftermath of the fires, ‘Ali’s desire to be part of a genuine people’s uprising appears more acute. But despite his idealism and the plans alluded to by his bookseller friend, the revolution ushered in by the Free Officers is, for ‘Ali, an event that eclipses this dream. The revolution of July 1952 belongs to someone other than him and, from his vantage point, rises far from the classes on whose interests it was predicated.


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Power All the Same? The Nationalist Revolution of the Free Officers and Its Legacy Not so long ago, in the historical context of decolonization, there seemed little reason to doubt the liberationist credentials of at least some anti-colonial nationalist movements. To speak during those years of Vietnam or Cuba or Algeria or Guinea-Bissau—to evoke the names of such figures as Che, Fidel, Ho, Amilcar Cabral, no matter how fetishistically—was to conjure up the specter of national liberation, that is, of a revolutionary decolonization capable, in Frantz Fanon’s memorable phrase, of “chang[ing] the order of the world.” Today things are very different. It is not so much that the setbacks and defeats that have had to be endured throughout Africa and Asia and the Americas have been bitter and severe, though this is certainly true. Rather, contemporary theorists seem increasingly given to suggesting that the national liberation movements never were what they were—that is, that they were always more concerned with the consolidation of elite power than with the empowering of the powerless, with the extension of privilege rather than with its overthrow and so on. —Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World 54

In his analysis of revolutionary and bourgeois forms of nationalism, Neil Lazarus discusses the extent to which many anticolonial movements that began as calls for popular liberation became, on the ground, bourgeois nationalist movements that were ultimately “more concerned with the consolidation of elite power” and thus, in Fanon’s words, “good for nothing.”55 He recalls for us Fanon’s own characterization of such movements as those propelled by an “ideology aimed at the (re)attainment of nationhood through means of capture and subsequent ‘occupation’ of the colonial state . . . quite simply . . . [transferring] into native hands . . . those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period.”56 In his work, Lazarus criticizes contemporary theorists (principally Eric Hobsbawm) for not revisiting in their studies of nationalism the progressive potential many of these early movements had to galvanize the energy of the working classes. Instead, he considers many of the dominant scholarly works on the subject as offering a similarly reductive reading whereby all nationalist movements are represented as “chauvinistic” and destructive.57 In contrast, Lazarus wants to reclaim the anti-imperialist, liberationist potential in the anticolonial nationalist struggles that, he argues, served for many as a productive and important threat to the prevailing social orders of the time. Taking up Lazarus’s position vis-à-vis Idris ‘Ali’s novel is a useful way to consider the potency and complexity of ‘Ali’s message. Here I argue that Taht Khatt al-Faqr echoes in the character of ‘Ali-as-broken-intellectual the thrust of Lazarus’s point: namely, that it is crucial to differentiate between the genuine populist zeal for what could have come under the banner of nationalism and what actually did. This novel, as a kind of proletariat call to arms, is ‘Ali’s own


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attempt to, like Lazarus, reclaim the sense of vision and libratory potential in the idea of decolonization. ‘Ali’s awareness of the disparity between what could have been and what actually emerged under the guise of nationalism is the only way we as readers can reconcile the depths of his character’s presuicidal despair at the beginning of the work in light of the fact that he does eventually become a recognized writer and intellectual. While he openly illustrates the extent to which the revolution of the Free Officers never was what it seemed (offering a scathing portrait of the Egyptian nationalist movement), his personal education in the teachings of Marx, his commitment to the writings of Gorky, and his empathic position vis-à-vis the people of the lower classes suggest the extent to which Socialism and its early integration in the rhetoric of nationalism retained a salvational dimension for the young ‘Ali. When his role in this movement is eclipsed, the sense of existential loss and bitterness for what could have been is acute and eventually becomes, for him, unbearable. The 1952 revolution under the Free Officers as chronicled in Taht Khatt alFaqr never serves as an extension of the volk in any real sense. Rather, the nationalist movement is described as appropriating the language of populism and then, once in power, reinstituting a familiar form of elite dominance. Here, for ‘Ali, the Free Officers merely replace one form of bourgeois tyranny with another. Instead of coming from below, ‘Ali describes the tanks rolling into the streets as another form of occupation from above. He illustrates his sense of disorientation and confusion: “The same tanks that filled the streets during the January fires amass again to occupy strategic sites, including the royal palace in Abdin Square where you used to play, back when the crown prince Ahmad Fouad was born. Like the fires, another puzzle. They call them the ‘Free Officers.’ The ‘Blessed Revolution.’ You’ve been curious ever since the bookseller told you about the Russian Revolution and how it came about and who led it. Here, the revolution springs up while everyone is fast asleep.”58 By initially drawing out the link between the military tanks that served at the will of the king against the people demonstrating and setting fires in January 1952 and the same tanks that now entered the city six months later on behalf of the people, ‘Ali suggests, in a critique of power that echoes Michel Foucault, that the means by which the Egyptian nationalists consolidated and maintained power, while maybe differing in rhetoric, was merely an exercise in exerting dominance over the people all the same. Despite acknowledging his own initial willingness to cheer along with the others for General Muhammad Naguib (the initial leader and president before Nasser), the revolution that he had imagined as being a great surging forth of the people as part of an international Socialist movement comes instead at the hands of a small cadre of military officers while, as he puts it, the people were “fast asleep.” While the bookseller declares with zeal, “It’s happened, boy!” His excitement is greeted by ‘Ali’s skeptical rejoinder, “Is this the revolution?” From the point of view of his daily life,


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nothing changes. To emphasize his point he describes the mix of reactions to this turning over from the point of view of the Egyptian working classes. From his father’s place of work in Wust al-Balad, where talk of the revolution is generally supportive (with the exception of the company owner), to the sha‘bi coffee shop facing his father’s building, where the lower classes listen to the radio and reflect on the changes taking place in the city, there is an attempt by Egyptians to process the meaning of the revolutionary coup. Despite the initial euphoria, ‘Ali illustrates the undercurrent of ambivalence and uncertainty people began to feel toward the officers. For example, in one instance he describes a story involving an insubordinate sheikh told to the locals in the café by “‘Abduh the hashish smoker.”59 ‘Abduh describes the sheikh of the mosque as questioning both the authority and the identity of the “men in tanks.” When the sheikh asks him for his identity, the officer gestures to the tanks. The meaning of the gesture is clear: those who have control of the military (or in this case are the military) have the authority. While the officer’s insulting response to the sheikh’s second question, “What are you going to offer us?”, invites laughter from the café clients, the mood changes when the story is told in full and the listeners learn that the sheikh was then run over by one of these “men in tanks” and killed. For the lower classes in this local café, the sense of threat echoing through ‘Abduh’s story is clear. The seizure of power and the reckless abuse of such power introduces another kind of tyranny into the lives of the underclasses. When ‘Ali goes once more to ask the bookseller, his revolutionary mentor, about the meaning of what he’s heard and seen, he finds the bookstand locked and the bookseller gone. He is warned by a neighboring grocer to break off his ties with him or else he too will find himself on the same path, that is, he too will be thrown in prison or “purged” as an enemy of the new Egyptian state. In a chapter titled “al-suqut al-kabir” (1953: The Big Fall), ‘Ali describes what did noticeably change for him in his life under the new government. Members from the upper echelons of the military began to take over the apartments in the buildings of downtown now left empty by the many foreign families who were forced to leave Cairo.60 When he goes to work for an upscale grocery neighboring the old Ahram Building (on al-Gala’ Street in the downtown) to help pay for his schooling, he is sent to many of these buildings to deliver groceries and various goods. To his dismay, the bawwabs forbid him to use the elevators to get to the apartments on the upper floors. On one occasion he recalls, after having walked up nine floors with an armful of heavy items, the Madame of the apartment asks him to return and get her a few more things. ‘Ali, weary from climbing, asks her if she might call to the bawwab to allow him to use the elevator. She refuses him with scorn saying, “Idiot. Don’t you know who we are?” ‘Ali reflects on her response: “This sentence has become popular since the revolution. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ It was not in circulation before.”61


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Before the revolution ‘Ali learned from his father deference toward the Egyptian pashas and beys moving in and out of the company building in downtown. This exchange with one of the relatives of the Free Officers becomes a rite of passage for him as he learns that it is now the officers of the military and their families who are the new elite to whom he must ingratiate himself. The phrase “don’t you know who I am?” comes to embody for the young narrator the tyranny of the new class of officers who eventually become, as will be seen in the next chapter, the nouveau riche of Cairo. ‘Ali illustrates the overwhelming sense of fear that pervaded the lower classes with the rise of the new “revolutionary” regime—a regime that becomes synonymous with absolute authority and submission of its subjects. In the context of the new Egyptian state, the narrator recalls his hopes for the revolution with a mix of nostalgia for what could have been and bitterness for what actually rises bearing its name. He leaves the issue of his own oppositional role vis-à-vis the “men in tanks” open, wondering if he too would become an enemy of the state and disappear.62 The end of the novel echoes the beginning. ‘Ali eventually decides to enter al-Azhar, believing that an Islamic education will provide him with the tools to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. Eventually his own frustration with the dogmatic approach of the shaykhs causes him to become delinquent, and by his third year he is turned out. He returns to help his father cleaning stairs at the company building in Wust al-Balad. Seeing only menial work before him and feeling a sense of desperation in the face of an unrequited love for a young girl in Bulaq, Dina Tahtawi—with whom he began the novel—he attempts to commit suicide with a bottle of aspirin. Although his attempt fails, it breaks his spirit and he resigns himself, with Dina’s encouragement, to volunteer for the resistance to defend the Suez Canal in the Sinai in 1956. His volunteering is symbolic. Similar to Salih in Shalabi’s novel, ‘Ali has no identity card and thus is not even considered a citizen of the state until he enlists. Lost and uncertain, he joins the droves of other children in Bulaq and Hayy Ma‘ruf and signs up. But unlike them, he does not trust the Czech rifles slung over their shoulders and their nationalist slogans. He knows that once again the war has more to do with power, where the rights of the people serve merely as rhetorical justification.63 In the end, not wanting to be a martyr in what he believes is a resistance led by a false revolutionary government (and not wanting to give his father the satisfaction of honoring his son as a martyr), he gives the officers a fake name. Up until the last minute he considers fleeing, but in the end he submits and falls into line, marching to the repetitive drone of the army sergeant. His enlistment not only is a testament to his submission to the state but is his ultimate act of betrayal against himself. In giving himself over to the “men in tanks,” he admits to his defeat and joins the masses in fighting a resistance for a false notion of nationhood in whose leaders he sees only hypocrisy. Thus, ironically, it is only


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in becoming a soldier that he is able to become an Egyptian. For the poor, in the rhetoric of postrevolution Egypt, it is only in submitting and becoming part of the stagecraft of nationalism—as a soldier—that he is able to finally be recognized as an Egyptian. Let us consider once more Lazarus’s position vis-à-vis the resolution of the novel. In his argument for a reconsideration of the progressive potential in early nationalist thought, Lazarus reexamines Fanon’s notion of decolonization. He posits that Fanon conceived of nationalism as a broad movement aligned with a more international vision of class liberation (for him embodied by the Algerian FLN, Front de la Libération Nationale): “For Fanon, in short, the process of decolonization brings the future of capitalism radically into question . . . The national project . . . has the capacity to become the vehicle—the means of articulation—of a social(ist) demand which extends beyond decolonization in the merely technical sense, and which calls for a fundamental transformation rather than a mere restructuring of the prevailing social order.”64 Anti-imperialist nationalism for Lazarus (by way of Fanon’s work) becomes the most potent vehicle for offering a critique of capitalism and for realizing the liberation of the laboring classes. Yet, what both Lazarus and ‘Ali seem to ask is what becomes of the libratory energies of nationalism once the movement is appropriated, rises, and falls without a social reordering? What potential, if any, does the present hold for the embrace of a radical Socialist critique? For ‘Ali, the space of the present is one of apathy and decay. Cairo, like Bulaq of his childhood, is a dystopic space that plagues him as an adult and pushes him repeatedly toward despair. Not only has poverty proliferated and social conditions grown worse, but those around him bear no signs of imagining an alternative. For him, everyone is reduced to different forms of thievery as the only means of survival. For example, he describes early in the novel, before his suicide attempt, sitting in a half-drunken state on the steps of the Eastern Insurance Building at one of the corners of what is now Tal‘at Harb Square (formerly Sulayman Pasha Square). ‘Ali, desperate to make others see the hypocrisy surrounding them, lashes out at the traffic guard on the square, accusing him of being a small-time thief exploited by the wealthy. Later, ashamed at having humiliated this man in the face of what amounts to a mere means of getting by, he breaks down. The senselessness of his own preying on one from the same class, as equally as helpless as he before the state, destroys him. Moments later a stranger approaches and, thinking he is a beggar sitting in the square, recites a few verses of the Qur’an then gives him five Egyptian pounds. The fact that the stranger takes him for homeless startles ‘Ali. Later, when a police officer tells him to leave the premises, he imagines how scandalous it would be if some journalist were to capture the scene of one of Egypt’s writers being mistaken for a vagrant.65 And yet, the association is clear enough. In


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Egypt, from his perspective, there is little difference between the beggar and the writer. Both are equally disenfranchised. Half a decade after the failure of the nationalist movement, in a city that bears the signs of an advanced capitalist dystopia, Idris ‘Ali’s novel imagines a space for what Neil Lazarus ultimately calls a “counternarrative of liberation.” Lazarus calls for the “pressing” need for such a narrative as part of a “new kind of humanism.” In his view such a movement, while building on the foundations of “bourgeois humanism” and “metropolitan nationalism,” would not necessarily have to be limited by such “European projections.”66 Instead, we might imagine a more emancipatory form of decolonization, of the sort to which Idris ‘Ali’s novel gestures. In this respect, I propose that ‘Ali’s work writing back to the idea of a national Egyptian literature (as a libratory impulse toward the reification and crystallization of Egyptian identity) motions toward a literary formation that recalls Michael Denning’s idea of “proletariat literature.”67 In such a framework, the Nubian narrative serves more as a symbol for the collective experience of disenfranchisement experienced by the Egyptian underclasses than as the articulation of a unique experience of ethnic or racial marginalization. In this regard, Idris ‘Ali’s work offers a critical rethinking of the social function of literature as a means through which one might envision a more emancipated (and inclusive) understanding of what Egypt or being Egyptian means postindependence. In such a vision, rethinking the nation necessarily requires a reexamining of the experience of the underclasses and the potential for a radical Socialist critique to resonate once more in the present. Conclusion The space of Wust al-Balad from the point of view of the subaltern Nubian migrant is both a site of promise and a space whose modern veneer mocks the notion of a genuinely modernized Cairo, that is, a form of social modernity from which all Egyptians might benefit. In this regard, Taht Khatt alFaqr functions as a direct response to the work of Radwa ‘Ashur and Khayri Shalabi. By using the movement between Bulaq and Wust al-Balad as his primary spatial frame, Idris ‘Ali demythologizes both the space of downtown as modern stage and the fetishizing of the popular districts as offering a parallel modernity of organic intellectuals and indigenous folk culture. Instead, ‘Ali’s use of space offers a rigorous materialist critique on the failure of the nationalist movement to correct the spatial (and social) partitioning brought about by Isma‘il’s European-inspired downtown and further intensified during the colonial administration in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to the flanerie of ‘Ashur’s narrator, and to some extent Shalabi’s, ‘Ali, as our bereft adult, stumbles through the city in a drunken state of despair. His path hardly


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renders the city legible, but proclaims in its confusion a sense that the city itself is lost and beyond his comprehension. In so doing, he writes, on the one hand, against the interiority of ‘Ashur’s flâneur, whose narrator vacillates between lyrical nostalgia for a transcendent downtown and a postcolonial skepticism of its very establishment, and, on the other hand, against Shalabi’s closed world where Hayy Ma‘ruf serves as a vestige of a space rich in Egyptian cultural indigeneity and the improvised modern rituals of its migrants. In his open condemnation of the poverty of Bulaq and the corruption and excesses of downtown, he resists the flâneur’s aestheticization of either space. Speaking to the drawbacks of the heroic attitude of the flâneur, James Donald writes, “Detecting the poetic in the everyday, or the eternal in the transitory is, in the end, a way of domesticating the city, turning its public spaces into your interior world. It avoids the stubborn reality of difference and the opacity of others. The problem is not just how to live in the city, but how to live together.”68 From the point of view of Idris ‘Ali, this issue of living among and alongside difference in the space of the city is one of the central questions of the novel and the reason why space—whose analysis offers us a way to map or visualize social stratification—is such an appropriate framework through which he takes up such an issue. The question of difference is accentuated in this novel through the Nubian narrator’s realization of his own racial and cultural otherness vis-à-vis the Egyptians of the north. However, this sense of alienation as a migrant outsider in the city is soon eclipsed by his deeper sense of identification with members of the working classes with whom he lives and works in Cairo. The “Egyptianization” or “indigenization” that takes place in the downtown center after July 1952 is, from ‘Ali’s perspective (in line with Lazarus), little more than a reshuffling of the population and ultimately a recasting of colonial authority under another name. Thus decolonization, in the deep libratory sense, never actually takes place. Like Shalabi’s characters, ‘Ali’s underclasses prior to the July revolution are the unseen, shadow migrants of the city center. The fires of January 1952 serve as the one event where an entire segment of the lower classes seems to rise up and make themselves known and visible. For ‘Ali’s father, this setting fire to the downtown and looting of its establishments is a declaration of the existence and frustration of this marginalized majority. The movement that then pronounces itself the voice of these classes, from ‘Ali’s perspective, is ultimately a fraud. For him, the 1952 revolution’s rearrangement of the social hierarchy merely serves to supplant the old aristocratic classes with a new strata of military elite. And while our young narrator realizes upon his initial arrival in the city that neither Cairo nor its people are “one”—and this sense of social bifurcation continues long after the coup—his movement between these spaces of difference is also a way of connecting these two worlds. Like Gamil ‘Attiya Ibrahim’s al-Nuzul


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ila al-Bahr (where he does something similar in having Doctor Sabir, who is one of his protagonists, move between the squalor of the northern cemeteries where he runs a clinic and Cairo’s downtown), here ‘Ali’s portrait is one that introduces the discomfort of juxtaposing these two disparate worlds from the point of view of a character moving through both. In so doing, he requires us to consider within our spatial and social frame the world of Bulaq and its class of servants and doormen as not merely the abject underside of the modern city center, but a direct consequence of its bourgeois disavowal. Here ‘Ali’s comment on modernity is twofold. The aesthetic modernity of the urban city center emerges in images of foreign gelato, people eating behind glass restaurant windows, and the coming and going of expensive cars whose owners supplement ‘Ali’s father’s income by offering him tips for parking their cars. In contrast, the notion of social modernity—the idea of change as social emancipation embodied for him in the writings of Gorky and Marx—retain for ‘Ali the promise that true modernity, the people’s modernity, will be ushered in via the underclasses through a popular revolution. The tanks that he describes creeping into Wust al-Balad for him proclaim a false revolution in the name of a false Socialism. Wust al-Balad is thus a space whose majestic facades, monumental squares, and luxurious shops come to stand not for the promise of social mobility and Cairo’s progress, but merely as a contradiction or mockery of the populist rhetoric of Nasser and the nationalist movement. The military officers who take over the apartments of downtown, and for whom ‘Ali delivers groceries, do so in the name of Socialism, but in practice they reiterate the same classbased forms of oppression as exercised by previous ruling classes. When, as an adult, ‘Ali finds himself in Café Hurriya (off of Midan al-Falaki) after wandering the downtown, he recalls a conversation with the Nubian intellectual and writer Ibrahim Fahmi. A frequenter of the café, Fahmi is described as a “a bohemian creature [ka’in ‘ashwa’i], who eats, sleeps, and drinks on the café seats, fleeing from his run-down place of lodging.”69 ‘Ali confesses to him his plans to commit suicide by throwing himself off of the Mugamma‘ building (the central organ of Egyptian bureaucracy, located at one corner of Tahrir Square). The exchange unfolds as follows: Sometimes when you wondered about him you’d ask, “What do you want from this world, man?” He’d answer you with an idiotic laugh and discomfiting words, “Nothing. Look here. I’ve got ful to eat. I’ve drunk a quarter of rum and three beers. And I still have a pound left over. I’m content.” “That’s all you want?” “What do you want? A car, a villa, and a foreign bank account? Others are smarter than you. Come by tomorrow, wise guy! Those guys will already have


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divided it all up among themselves. And God bless them too, they’ve left us some ful sandwich carts, some dirty local cafes, some stuff to read, and the Gianaclis Company. Give thanks and praise good citizen!” That’s how he lived. Simple, content, playing dumb. Never ceasing to borrow, even from the poor garçons of coffeehouses. Yet you feel nothing but love and sympathy toward him. And you shared your pennies and worries, your food and dreams with him, because he was a humble, kind and simple man. And when you presented him with the plan of a double suicide—from the roof of the Mugamma‘ Building!—he objected vociferously, “This world is beautiful, man!” Asking him for proof, he adds with a limitless confidence, “Beautiful white girls, whiskey, kebab!” Dreaming liar! The woman he was with in his last days was as black as he was. He ate nothing but fava products his entire life. And he drank nothing but the worst kinds of alcohol. But he’d continue to lie, “This country is beauty itself. You just aren’t paying attention.” “Beautiful, yes. But for whom?”70

The conversation between the two writers echoes similar conversations between Salih and the regulars at Hakim’s ghurza. Here again, the notion of hisa—the idea that one can find freedom by letting go of material needs and giving over to a state of ecstatic release—resonates in Fahmi’s position. He, like Salih, asks of ‘Ali, what more might one want of this world than money enough to eat and drink and rum to give you a bit of pleasure? But ‘Ali, unlike Shalabi’s narrator, finds nothing profound or libratory in this position. Instead, he interprets Fahmi’s response as a sign of resignation and submission. Fahmi, from ‘Ali’s point of view, has been forced to rationalize that the embrace of poverty is the only way to bear it. For ‘Ali, this is a lie that Ibrahim Fahmi, like other popular intellectuals, tells himself to stay sane. He, in contrast, dares to want more, and in so doing, finds himself on the edge of insanity, ready to end it all. Where Shalabi’s Salih Hisa and Wakalat ‘Attiya are what we have termed “ghetto pastorals” (after Michael Denning), here too ‘Ali, in a very different style in this novel, gestures to the potential for his work to serve as part of a proletarian literary formation. As for the possibility of literature to speak to poverty, the impulse underlying Idris ‘Ali’s novel recalls the poignant words of Mike Gold, one of the prominent leaders of the movement during the 1920s to form a proletariat literature: I was born in a tenement. That tall, somber mass, holding its freight of obscure human destinies, is the pattern in which my being has been cast. It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars . . . When I think it is the tenement thinking. When I hope it is the tenement hoping. I am not an individual; I am all that the tenement group poured into me during those early years of my spiritual travail.


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Why should we artists born in tenements go beyond them for our expression? Can we go beyond them? . . . Art is the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitive and articulate sons and daughters.71

While Idris ‘Ali’s work offers a scathing critique of nationalism through the Nubian experience, it is, as with Gold’s declaration, a bold cry for something more for the majority of the underclasses that drives his writing. Ultimately Taht Khatt al-Faqr dares to challenge its readers to, like our narrator ‘Ali, want more, that is, to see the culture of the Egyptian underclasses not as one of agency, communitarianism, and resourcefulness, but rather as a demythologized culture of poverty and abjection. With this radical materialist critique he points, by way of his literary work, to the potential for a movement of social liberation to remain in our midst.


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CHAPTER 5

The Nation Recast through a National Bestseller Alaa al-Aswany’s Ode to Downtown Cairo

Our past history, imagined or otherwise, is an important source in our conception of selfhood . . . We often forget that for man, as for no other creature, to lose his past—to lose his memory—is to lose himself, to lose his identity. —Samir Khalaf, Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj1 The transformation of the modern metropolis has stimulated a distinctive subdiscourse that is concerned not so much with what is emerging but with what is being lost in this expansive restructuring of urban form. In its most acerbic scholarly expressions, it elicits an urban nostalgia, a longing for what is called the “historical city,” a once more clearly definable urbanism that is believed to have been civilized, urbane, and richly creative. —Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies in Cities and Regions2

Introduction

I

n comparison to the three novels we have thus far examined, Alaa alAswany’s ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan (The Yacoubian Building; 2003)3 offers the most contemporary reading of the space of Wust al-Balad. Unlike the other writers who belong, more or less, to the 1960s generation, Aswany emerged on the Egyptian literary scene later in his life. And while he was trained as a dentist, he wrote political articles for various newspapers for many years. With its release in 2002, The Yacoubian Building became an immediate sensation in Cairo. It has since been made into a major film with record-breaking box


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office sales and a serialized television adaptation of the novel was aired during Ramadan in the fall of 2007. In light of this astronomical success, many critics during the early 2000s sought to understand the cultural phenomenon that The Yacoubian Building (in all of its incarnations) became. For the most part the novel was hailed as an astute portrait of the social and economic problems plaguing Egypt. It was both celebrated for its candor (Gamal al-Ghitani4) and criticized for its sensationalism (Sabry Hafez5 and Joseph Massad6). Still, what remains undeniable is not only that the novel made a substantial impact within the literary community but that it sold more than one hundred thousand copies by 2006,7 suggesting that it garnered the attention of a public well beyond the select minority who make up Egypt’s community of readers. A more sustained examination of the novel as a cultural phenomenon will be taken up later in this chapter. For now, however, I would like to focus on the extent to which Aswany historicizes Wust al-Balad in an effort to highlight the deeply rooted nostalgia his novel conveys not just for this particular space in the city but for a particular time when the downtown functioned very differently for the community of liberal elites and Egyptian expatriates. It is my contention here that the mass appeal of the novel has to do not so much with its sensational dimensions (the sex and violence that are undeniably there) or with the “deviance” displayed by many of the characters (as referred to by Massad), but rather it is Aswany’s choice of Wust al-Balad as the central frame for his multiple stories that transforms this novel into something of what I will call the literary version of a cultural heritization project.8 It is my contention that the commercial success of The Yacoubian Building should not to be attributed to the text’s scandalous dimensions, nor its candid descriptions of homosexuality (which flouted the censors), nor its critique of a hypercapitalist Egyptian society and corrupt Egyptian state. Rather, as I hope to show, the novel manages, through its perspective on the space of downtown and its cross-class storylines, to construct a master narrative that speaks to a collective Egyptian past, reifying, despite difference, the idea of Egyptianness, collectivity, and a national experience. The conjuring up of an identifiable historical city, a central district grounded in local relations (not sprawl, satellite districts, or life abroad), and an identifiable sense of that national experience (no matter how bleak and dystopic) taking place downtown evokes not only a sense of civic pride for the reader but, as I conclude, a feeling of relief that there is (as there always was) still something universal about the Egyptian experience. Thus, ironically, despite the novel being labeled as a critique of nationalism and the state (as in the work of Sabry Hafez and Joseph Massad)—which in many ways it is—Aswany’s story, at a more basic level, is familiar and consequently appealing in its conventionality. Not only does it offer a deeply nationalist framing of Egyptian selfhood and past, but it


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also attempts to resuscitate, or at the very least pay tribute to, the optimism of an old liberal order. In terms of a spatial perspective, it is apt to compare The Yacoubian Building to the Trilogy of Naguib Mahfuz. What the old district of Gamaliyya was for Naguib Mahfuz, and the Hara (the alley) specifically, here Aswany offers us an epic tale of the new, modern, urban family (i.e., disparate residents living together in a run-down Beaux Arts building) whose fictional lives revolve around the city center at the intersection of Sulayman Pasha (Tal‘at-Harb) and Qasr al-Nil Streets specifically. Just as Mahfuz’s Trilogy shifted spatial lenses from the interior spaces of al-Sayyid ‘Abd al-Jawwad’s home and the interrelationships of his family to the outside world of the neighborhood and its vendors and characters, so too does Aswany shift between the interior world of the residents of the building and the outside market activity revolving around the downtown shops and Tal‘at Harb Square. While the building serves as the primary pivot, linking the diverse characters in the novel, it is the neighborhood itself (e.g., Cairo Bar in Tawfiqiyya Square, the Chez Nous pub, Maxim’s French restaurant, the Automobile Club, etc.) that links the experiences of these characters to the larger frame of an Egyptian collective experience. On an allegorical level, where Mahfuz’s national epic chronicled the story of Egypt’s growing pains from British colonial rule through to the nationalist struggle, here Aswany offers a tale of a neoliberal society where Machiavellian impulses have become not only the national creed but the only way to survive. In lieu of a lengthy description of the numerous and interwoven threads of the narrative, I begin by briefly sketching the plot to offer the reader a sense of the novel’s leading characters and themes. Following this I highlight the way in which Aswany memorializes the space of the downtown, re-creating the “historical city” as part of his project of cultural heritization. Here the Yacoubian Building, like the restaurant Maxim’s, serves as an anachronistic symbol of a lost space and time. My discussion of the characters in the novel will focus primarily on the relationship between Zaki Bey el-Dessouki and Busayna el-Sayed, a romance that I interpret as crucial to understanding the nationalist thrust underpinning Aswany’s work. The overwhelmingly nostalgic perspective of the novel, I argue, forces us to consider the question of an Egyptian modernity in a post-Infitah Mubarak era. As Svetlana Boym has rightly argued in her work on nostalgia, “urban nostalgia inevitably turns back on the question of what is modern and what kind of modernity and modernization is to be developed for the future.”9 Her idea of recovering the modern through an urban nostalgic lens neatly intersects with Beatriz Jaguaribe’s work on the national narratives suggestive in once-modern buildings now in decline. She argues that the specter of such buildings in states of ruin emphasizes the “fragility” of former utopian projects of modernity and the projection of a future (in the past) that has now


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been “outmoded.”10 Aswany’s meditation on these sites echoes Jaguaribe’s reading of physical and architectural space as sites that continually produce their own forms of national allegory. Naturally, such a reading begs the question, if downtown Cairo is the state of modern Egypt, what might this tell us about contemporary Cairo and the trajectory of the nation? Aswany’s work seems to point to the disintegration of the liberal past as a crucial place to begin to answer such a question. In his novel, the representation of the downtown as relic and ruin serves as a melancholy reminder of the failure of the project of modernity—and its heir, the nationalist project—to realize their aims of modernization and collective enfranchisement. In the final section of this chapter, I close with a discussion of the cultural and commercial phenomenon that The Yacoubian Building became in Egypt. One of the central questions I hope to explore through the course of this chapter is the extent to which Aswany’s work uses the space of the downtown as a meditation on Egyptian identity in the present moment and in so doing suggests that Wust al-Balad, as part of his heritage recovery project, is as crucial now as it has always been to Egyptian notions of selfhood, space, and collectivity. Sketching the Story The plot of The Yacoubian Building revolves around roughly ten primary characters, many of whom live or work in or around the building and thus whose fortunes—be they wealthy or poor—are, in many cases, interlinked. Zaki Bey el-Dessouki and Hatim Rasheed are among the wealthy owners of flats in the building. Zaki, we learn, is a member of what once was the landed aristocracy in Egypt. He shares an apartment with his sister Dawlat in a nearby building and keeps an office for his engineering business (for which he no longer has much energy or interest) in the Yacoubian Building itself. Both he and his sister are French-educated and have lived abroad. He is described as a beloved character among the various neighborhood merchants, but is also known for his excessive lifestyle, sexual philandering, and deep nostalgia for a Cairo of the past. Hatim Rasheed, who is younger and more intellectual than Zaki (he is said to speak multiple languages well), is the homosexual editor-in-chief of the Cairo-based French newspaper Le Caire. Early in the novel he falls in love with a young Sa‘idi security officer, Abd Rabbuh, and they rapidly enter into a passionate love affair. Like Zaki, Hatim too has a penchant for excess, and tries to placate Abd Rabbuh’s doubts about the relationship with gifts and the promise of financial security for his wife and child. Ultimately it is this intense relationship with Abd Rabbuh and the uneven power relations that drive him to his end. Another character, Hagg Azzam, while not a resident of the Yacoubian Building, keeps one of his businesses on its ground floor and represents the new moneyed class


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in Egypt. Originally a poor Sa‘idi migrant, he began his life in Cairo as a shoe shiner on the street. Through cunning and resourcefulness he is said to have worked his way up, making himself into a hugely successful, albeit corrupt, businessman. Despite this success, he finds himself experiencing something of a midlife crisis and thus decides to take another, younger wife through a secret ‘urfi (common law) marriage.11 He ultimately marries Souad Gaber, a secretary from Alexandria who is forced to leave her son behind as part of a marriage contract that guarantees her financial security as Azzam’s wife, but little else. The relationship takes its course, she becomes pregnant, and Hagg Azzam tries to force her to abort the child so his political future will not be ruined. Ultimately it is this scandal and the extent to which he goes to secure his position in the People’s Assembly that provides the central crisis of this narrative thread. As for the members of the community living on top of the Yacoubian Building, we are introduced early on to the Coptic brothers Abaskharon and Malak. Abaskharon is lame, but quite able, and works as the ever-discreet assistant to Zaki el-Dessouki. Both he and his brother are ambitious and want to improve their lot. After much planning and saving, they strategize to buy a room on the roof of the Yacoubian Building from which they intend to run a tailoring business. In the context of the novel they represent the lengths to which characters of the lower classes must go to even minimally improve their circumstances. In addition to these brothers, we meet two characters emblematic of the younger generation, Busayna el-Sayed and Taha al-Shazli. Early on, both are presented as downtrodden, but not yet psychologically defeated by their circumstances. They retain a small amount of optimism about their potential to move out of their informal community on the roof. However, through a series of misfortunes, they both gradually lose their innocence and their young love seems to fade with it. When Taha is rejected by the police academy because of his father’s lowly position as the building’s bawwab, he is traumatized by the rigidity of an unjust system that rewards social status over merit. He eventually enters Cairo University, only to become heavily involved with a Muslim student group in which he finds a community of other students of modest means. His activities with this group land him in prison, where he is interrogated, tortured, and sodomized. When he is finally released, he vows to take revenge on the system and seeks to do this by joining a radical jihadist group. Needless to say, he eventually meets a tragic end. Busayna’s trajectory, on the other hand, follows a very different course. When her father dies unexpectedly, she is forced to support her mother and siblings. She quickly learns that her paltry salary at a nearby clothing store will not sustain the family and she resorts to taking money from the boss as compensation for sexual favors. Her increasing cynicism leads her to take a job as a “servant” at the flat of Zaki el-Dessouki, where she comes to understand that she will be well paid for offering such sexual favors. Despite her


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initial repulsion at his age and excessive drinking, she gradually begins to care for Zaki, and they embark on a romance that culminates in their marriage at the end of the novel. Although it has a varied cast, the characters are drawn in a somewhat superficial or cursory manner. Thus, while many of the characters do transform, the movement of the plot seems to eclipse our investment as readers in their emotional or interior worlds. This is perhaps why some have claimed that the book merely offers a collection of clichéd portraits of Egyptian “types” and does not move beyond these clichéd or superficial renderings.12 Moving Inward, Backward: Wust al-Balad and the City We Knew In as much as Alaa al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building is, as many critics have offered, a novel indicative of Egypt in the historical moment of the late 1990s, the environment of the novel—the space of action—is deeply nostalgic. It recalls a downtown of the first half of the century, of former glory and elegance. Svetlana Boym’s work on nostalgia and the city and Edward Soja’s work on the modern metropolis speak to what they consider the present-day emergence among architects, urban planners, and urbanites of a longing for that “historical city” or that “Baudelairian city” of the past. Boym articulates this as follows: “In the nineteenth century the nostalgic was an urban dweller who dreamed of escape from the city into the unspoiled landscape. At the end of the twentieth century the urban dweller feels that the city itself is an endangered landscape. Recent discussions of the city reveal an acute sense of the loss of concrete corporeality of the material place, of the Baudelairian city with its smells and sounds, haptic and optic epiphanies, distinct architectural memory and urban theatricality, anonymous yet erotic.”13 In her discussion of the rebuilding of Berlin, Boym illustrates how the modern is increasingly conceptualized in terms of how the “past” can be rebuilt in the new city. Similarly Soja points to the urge many urban dwellers have for what he calls the “historical city,” in contrast to the entertainment and consumption-based theme parks of what Thomas Bender has termed “City Lite.” From Bender’s perspective, the historical city offers a “more clearly defined urbanism that is believed to have been civilized, urbane, and richly creative.”14 Soja goes on to acknowledge that even the field of urban studies itself is plagued with nostalgia: “There has always been a deep streak of nostalgia running through twentieth-century urban studies, a retrospective longing for the alleged spiritual glories of the ‘democratic’ Athenian polis, ancient Rome, the great Renaissance cities of Italy, the medieval Hanseatic league of cities and its famous motto, Stadt Luft macht frei (city air makes one free), and now, it would seem, the early modern metropolis.”15 The idea underlying the historical city is not only that it once offered clear definition but also that it served as a space of cultural and economic juxtapositions, where


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one might encounter both the familiar and the unfamiliar. In Thomas Bender’s formulation, the historic city (he offers New York as an example) served as a receptacle for history and as a container of cultural traditions, whereas the contemporary metropolis or “City Lite,” as he refers to it, “does not age; it is consumed and replaced.”16 With the rise of these new spaces in the latter half of the twentieth century, the “spirit of urbanity,” in his view, has declined, and with it the sense we once had of our “civic obligation to nourish a common life.”17 It is with this same sense of lament for a lost city center that we may contextualize urban projects of cultural refurbishment and heritage recovery. In the case of Cairo, Galila El Kadi and Dalila ElKerdany analyze what began in the 1990s as a project to refurbish 16 buildings in the central business district (downtown), investing this area with “great national value” with the aim of bringing about a “municipal renaissance.”18 As they reveal, the project not only was pushed forward by intellectuals and urban planners but was buttressed with support from foundations such as the US Fulbright Commission and Suzanne Mubarak. In other words, deciding what is worthy of being classified as national heritage and the ways in which one should go about preserving or resuscitating it is a matter of not only national but also global importance. In the passage that follows, the authors deconstruct the idea of “heritage” and consider the implications of the process of heritization: As far as we are concerned, the term “heritage” relates to architectural objects and urban sites that have been, or are in the process of being, recognized as a tangible vestige of a bygone age. Heritization, then, is a process geared to converting exchange value into cultural value by enhancing objects and sites with new functions so that they might serve as a means to transmit knowledge and construct culture and identities; as places where people (or certain classes of people) can spend their leisure time and contemplate aesthetic beauty; as driving forces for local and regional development that draw in tourists, stimulate consumption and generate income and profit on national and global scales.19

Traditionally Egypt has drawn on its pharaonic, Coptic, Islamic, and Ottoman architectural heritage. It is only in the recent past that there has been pressure (which the authors site as external to Egypt in origin, that is, not generated by the local Egyptian elite) to acknowledge and preserve the edifices of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings of downtown. Heritage, however, as numerous scholars have illustrated (and as we discussed with respect to Shalabi’s novel in Chapter 3) is a highly sensitive matter and is subject to much debate.20 The notion that there exists a shared sense of what should and should not be valued as part of a collective past or classified as national heritage is simply false. In most cases, as Jane Nadel-Klein has pointed out in her work on the Scottish fishing industry, what ultimately is included in such projects is what


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sells, particularly for countries in which the tourist industry is a large source of revenue.21 Cairo is no exception. Not only is the state vested in the way the narrative of Egyptian heritage is constructed, but the debate among Egyptians is equally as controversial. El Kadi and ElKerdany confirm this, suggesting that even within elite circles the “heritization process has been politicized and controversial . . . [particularly because the] notion of heritage is not agreed upon or consensually shared.”22 Thus it becomes clear that the idea of the “historical city” (understood for our purposes as the downtown, in contrast to the old Islamic part of Cairo) and the desire to refurbish or resuscitate it must be understood within the context of this process of heritage-making. And just as heritage is plural and subject to our position in the present, so too is the historical city a nostalgic construction of our making. As Boym aptly notes, “there is no ideal ensemble of the past buried underneath the contemporary city, only infinite fragments. The ideal city exists only in architectural models in the new total restorations.”23 That being said, even if the historical city is an invention, it is no less compelling or useful than other foundational ideas (e.g., pharaonism, Pan-Arabism, Islamism) in garnering and celebrating a sense of collective (and in this case national) identification. Before turning to Aswany’s work, I want to make one further note regarding a point brought up by El Kadi and ElKerdany vis-à-vis the memorialization of downtown Cairo. One of the catalysts for the surge of interest in the area of Wust al-Balad was, according to their research, the 1992 earthquake, which hit a number of schools housed in former nineteenth-century palaces and villas in the area of the downtown. When the ministry of education decided to demolish these buildings, public debate was generated in the press in an effort to bring awareness to the “vulnerability” of these sites. While preservationists had formerly focused on pre-nineteenth-century heritage sites, the campaign following the earthquake generated a surge of interest in the modern Belle Époque architecture of this district.24 And while the impulses behind the architecture may have been inspired by the ornamentation of neoclassical Parisian and British designs, as was noted earlier, the area, as El Kadi and ElKerdany remind us, was not wholly considered a colonial district (like other European centers in formerly colonized countries). Rather, it was also associated with the “agency, presence, and identification of Egyptian elites, middle classes and popular classes before, during and after the colonial period.”25 As a result, the memorialization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century downtown for many seemed a crucial addition to the project of preserving an Egyptian national heritage.


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Wust al-Balad as Modernist Ruin Before we consider the manner in which Aswany wants to “recover” the downtown as part of Egypt’s national heritage, it is important to reexamine how the project of modernity is scripted through the architectural imagery of the space in an advanced state of decline. As was noted earlier, the neoclassical or Beaux Arts Belle Époque architecture of Khedive Isma‘il’s nineteenth-century modernization project now stands alongside a number of Art Deco and modernist buildings that were subsequently erected throughout the downtown. Indeed, the influence of the functionalist–modernist style is apparent in the large Hilton Hotel in Tahrir Square, the TV and Radio Building along the Corniche, and the Mugamma‘ Building (the main administrative government complex), also in Tahrir Square, that many attribute to Soviet-influenced constructivist architecture. In its impulse, the modernist movement was intended to serve as a corrective to the Belle Époque style, particularly in a cities like Brasilia and New York. Presently the downtown buildings, without exception, remain darkened by pollution and dust and lie in various states of disrepair. However, the role of these buildings, even in their present states, is not to be dismissed. Beatriz Jaguaribe’s work on the architectural transformations of Rio de Janeiro traces both the decline of the “tropical Belle Époque” architecture in Rio and the transformation of the Le Corbusier-inspired functionalist architecture of the modernist movement in Brasilia. She analyzes what she terms the “architectural national narratives” underwriting modernist forms and their decline: These modernist architectural forms previously triumphed as the emblematization of national narratives of modernity or projections of the nation on a path to modernity. Nonetheless, as embodiments of the national modern ethos, these state-sponsored constructions decayed . . . By acknowledging the decrepitude of these public buildings, one negates their utopian premises. Built to convey a sense of the new and the ethos of the modern nation, these buildings were constructed under the sign of the future. They anticipated the trajectory of the nation by being the avant-garde of modernity. At the closing of the twentieth century, we glance at the outmoded structure of what was once the future projection of our present . . . In their fractured materials, they translate into ruin the fragility of former utopian projections. What is foregrounded by the decay of these edifices is the contradiction between the purpose of the modernist structure as the embodiment of the new and the tangible display of its datedness in the midst of the cultural transformations of the city. 26

In other words, in as much as it might be crucial to renovate or “recover” these buildings, it is equally as important to read what these ruins tell us about the utopian projections of the past and the “defeat of the new” exemplified by the structure of the “modernist ruin” in the present. Furthermore, the notion of the


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modernist ruin in Jaguaribe’s argument is not an atemporal classification. Rather, it emerges at a specific moment in time and, as she puts it, within a specific “context of contemplation,” that is, “a moment positioned between their former newness and their ultimate implosion or frustration.”27 The Belle Époque architecture imagined by Khedive Isma‘il was intended to modernize a district of Cairo by allowing Egyptians to partake in a European-style modernity that was based as much around the spectacle of consumption and public entertainment as it was about the Westernized rehabilitation of the Egyptian subject through education.28 Yet while traces of this agenda remain architecturally inscribed on the downtown, the district has lost the elegance and “civility” these buildings were meant to engender. The spaces for consumption and entertainment today not only are physically degraded but cater to a different demographic that is primarily that of the popular classes. The transformation of these once modern buildings into a collection of ruins marks the present state of downtown Cairo. To return to Aswany, it is within this historical space—as these buildings are being evaluated as potential objects of national heritage and potential sites of historical restoration—that this novel seeks to capture both the aura they projected in the past and their function in the present as testaments to the failure of the project of modernity (in its multiple architectural and psychic forms). It is thus required that we see the renewed interest in the area of Wust al-Balad as an important historical frame for considering the ideas and images put forth in his work. Specifically the novel captures in its portrait of the downtown exactly what many of the cultural and intellectual elite feared would be lost without an aggressive campaign to refurbish the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings. As will be seen, Aswany manages to convey both the sense of what once was—the glory and promise of the downtown at the height of the liberal era—and the sense that this glory has faded and made way for a downtown characterized by cunning nouveaux riche businessmen and nostalgic aristocrats from a former age. The Egyptian literary critic Husayn Hammuda, in his article on The Yacoubian Building, “Tahawwal al-Markaz” (Transformations of the Center), points to what he reads as the novel’s most salient contribution, that is, its ability to capture the passage of time across one place and to do so in a form that recovers the nature of what he calls the “lost novel” (al-riwaya al-mafquda).29 His analysis uses Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope in an effort to show how the Yacoubian Building stands as a “witness” to, as he puts it, “the fixity of place in confronting time,” where time is manifest in the novel as a historical progression that can be charted through the rapid transformations of the city center.30 He goes on to read the novel not so much as a national allegory (where the building itself represents the nation, as in Joseph Massad and Samia Mehrez’s reading31), but to show that the Yacoubian Building cannot be separated from the site of Wust al-Balad, which is indeed the overarching


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Figure 5.1 Tal‘at Harb Square, 1986 (photograph by Zbigniew Kosc)

Figure 5.2 Modernist plans for the area of Tahrir along the Nile Corniche, 1962 (drawing from the Dar al-Hilal Archives, Cairo, Egypt)

Figure 5.3 Tahrir Square, also known as “Liberation Square,” 2006 (photograph by the author)


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Figure 5.4 The Mugamma‘ Building in Tahrir Square, 2006 (photograph by the author)

frame for the author. In his interpretation, the novel offers a meditation on the center of the city, chronicling its decline and the beginning of the movement of this center to other spaces in Cairo, such as Madinat Nasr in the east and Muhandisin in the west.32 Taking my cue from Jaguaribe, I would like to examine a bit more closely the manner in which Wust al-Balad is fictionally historicized as a space of ruin in an effort to contextualize Aswany’s work in a larger project of heritage recovery. The locus of the narrative moves throughout the heart of downtown, revolving around Tal‘at Harb Square (formally Sulayman Pasha Square) in a manner that geographically traces the same routes as our three prior novels. This historic intersection of Tal‘at Harb and Qasr al-Nil Streets provides the central pivot for the action moving between the flats and rooftops of the Yacoubian Building, Chez Nous (an old European bar, and the primary locale of Cairo’s homosexual subculture), and Maxim’s (a Greek-owned French restaurant frequented by the older generation). The novel opens with our central protagonist, Zaki elDessouki. He is described as a “legend” and something of a relic harkening back to a former era when the old aristocratic classes governed the downtown. In many ways Zaki, the Yacoubian Building, and the downtown are rendered here as mirror images of one another—possessing remnants of a former greatness but now marked by decline. This parallel is obvious in the following passage:


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The distance between Baehler Passage, where Zaki Bey el-Dessouki lives, and his office in the Yacoubian Building is not more than a hundred meters, but it takes him an hour to cover it each morning as he is obliged to greet his friends on the street. Clothing and shoe store owners, their employees (of both sexes), waiters, cinema staff, habitués of the Brazilian Coffee Stores, even doorkeepers, shoeshine men, beggars, and traffic cops—Zaki Bey knows them all by name and exchanges greetings and news with them. Zaki Bey is one of the oldest residents of Suleiman Basha Street, to which he came in the late 1940s after his return from his studies in France and from which he has never thereafter left. To the residents of the street he cuts a well-loved, folkloric figure when he appears before them in his three-piece suit (winter and summer, its bagginess hiding his tiny emaciated body); with his carefully ironed handkerchief always dangling from his jacket pocket and always of the same color as his tie; with his celebrated cigar, which, in his glory days, was a Cuban deluxe, but is now of the foul-smelling, tightly packed, low-quality local kind; and with his old, wrinkled face, and his thick glasses, his gleaming false teeth, and his dyed black hair, whose few locks are arranged in rows from the leftmost to the rightmost side of his head in the hope of covering the broad, naked, bald patch. In brief, Zaki Bey al-Dessouki is something of a legend.33

Zaki is an anachronism, and, as is clear in the last few sentences, a potentially fleeting one. His ability to embody the past and sustain this performance is, as our narrator notes later in this same passage, iconic yet “completely unreal.” Like the Yacoubian Building itself, he is beloved for being such a fixture in the neighborhood, yet he emerges as a vulnerable one—his way of life threatened by the transformations taking place in the city center. Similarly the building is described from its erection in 1934 by the Armenian Hagop Yacoubian as a celebration of European architectural modernity in the district and now, as a vestige of a former age: He chose for it the best site on Suleiman Basha and engaged a well-known Italian engineering firm to build it, and the firm came up with a beautiful design— ten lofty stories in the high European style, the balconies decorated with Greek faces carved in stone, the columns, steps, and corridors all of natural marble, and the latest model of elevator by Schindler. Construction continued for two whole years, at the end of which there merged an architectural gem that so exceeded expectations that its owner requested of the Italian architect that he inscribe his name, Yacoubian, on the inside of the doorway in large Latin characters that were lit up at night in neon, as though to immortalize the name and emphasize the ownership of the gorgeous building.34

The narrator describes, in a manner echoing Radwa ‘Ashur, the utopian impulses underwriting the vision of a Western-style downtown and how the building, like the area in general, attracted the “cream of society” (i.e., ministers,


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land-owning pashas, and foreigners) until 1952 when “the revolution came and everything changed.”35 With the exodus of many members of the foreign community, the Egyptianization of the area began, and thus by the 1960s, as Aswany chronicles, more than half of the downtown apartments were taken over by Egyptian army officers. It is during this period that many of these officers begin using the roof of the building as informal sleeping quarters designated for the servants of their families. With the introduction of Sadat’s Infitah policy in the 1970s, Aswany goes on to chronicle how many of these residents eventually moved out of the district to the newer districts of Muhandisin and Madinat Nasr. As they left, their servants gradually left too, selling their rooftop quarters for small amounts of money to newer migrants to the city who undoubtedly worked in paltry jobs downtown and needed a place to sleep. Thus the building became more clearly vertically segregated, with an informal community living on the roof and a mixed group of fairly wealthy residents (many the sons and daughters of former owners) living in the flats below. Consequently the building, like Zaki, not only functions in the context of the downtown as a reminder of this history and the many phases through which the downtown has passed but is mocked by that history as an anachronistic relic whose elegance seems contradictory not only to its dilapidated outward appearance but to the disparities of wealth housed within and above. Alongside these two portraits, Aswany depicts the downtown as the central frame of the story; it is the space whose transformations epitomize the changing spirit of the times. While Zaki is described as a caricature, his excessive love of women and drink recall a lifestyle he had once enjoyed when the downtown was the apex of Cairene nightlife. The European businesses, the sidewalk culture, and the many bars that once populated the streets are described by the author with a nostalgic fondness. In this portrait, the once liberal downtown is rendered in the neoliberal present (the time of the novel) as historically anachronistic, and yet longed for all the same. In the narrator’s description, Wust al-Balad represents not only an aesthetically modern European center but also a liberal way of life that many Egyptians—and not merely the upper classes—had once readily embraced: Downtown remained, for at least a hundred years, the commercial and social center of Cairo, where were situated the biggest banks, the foreign companies, the stores, the clinics, and the offices of famous doctors and lawyers, the cinemas and the luxury restaurants. Egypt’s former elite had built the downtown area to be Cairo’s European quarter, to the degree that you would find streets that looked the same as those to be found in any of the capitals of Europe, with the same style of architecture and the same venerable historic veneer. Until the beginning of the 1960s the downtown retained its pure European stamp and old-timers doubtless can still remember that elegance. It was considered quite inappropriate for natives to wander


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around downtown in their gallabiyas and impossible for them to be allowed in this traditional dress into restaurants such as Groppi’s, À l’Américaine, and the Odeon, or even the Metro, Saint James, and Radio cinemas, and other places that required their patrons to wear, for men, suits, and, for ladies, evening dresses . . . Downtown had always been full of small bars where people could take a few glasses and tasty dishes of hors d’oeuvres in their free time and on weekends at a reasonable price. In the thirties and forties, some bars offered in addition to the drinks small entertainments by a Greek or Italian musician or a troupe of foreign Jewish women dancers. Up to the end of the 1960s, there were on Suleiman Basha alone ten small bars. Then came the 1970s, and the downtown area started gradually to lose its importance, the heart of Cairo moving to where the new elite lived in El Mohandiseen and Medinat Nasr. An inexorable wave of religiosity swept Egyptian society and it become no longer socially acceptable to drink alcohol. Successive Egyptian governments bowed to the religious pressure (and perhaps attempted to outbid politically the opposition Islamist current) by restricting the sale of alcohol to the major hotels and restaurants and stopped issuing licenses for new bars . . . Thus it was that, as the 1980s dawned, there remained in the whole of downtown only a few, scattered, small bars, whose owners had been able to hang on in the face of the rising tide of religion and government persecution.36

In much the same way that Khayri Shalabi laments the passing of an era when the ghurza was the site of community for a heterogeneous community of downtown intellectuals before the state began their raids on the cafes in the 1960s, so too here Aswany nostalgically points to this period and the centrality of such bars to the personality of the district. In Aswany’s portrait, the downtown—the once modern, now historic city center—has fallen victim to the increasing influence of Islam on the tactics of the state to retain its control and prohibit non-sanctioned forms of pleasure. As is evident in the previous passage, Aswany wants to document this shift in the centrality of the space. Just as Radwa ‘Ashur illustrates in Qit‘a min Urubba, the 1970s became a critical juncture after which the district began to rapidly decline in importance, becoming gradually overshadowed as an “urban center” by the outward expansion of the city. This signals, as Husayn Hammuda suggests, a radical shift in the city’s overall orientation from a city with a single center to a city with multiple centers.37 And yet the shift is not explored here in detail, only alluded to briefly. What is more primary is the author’s own nostalgia for his Baudelairian Cairo—a space not of social contest or colonial façades, but a historic district of entertainment for an imagined liberal public, streetside eateries, arcades, cinemas, cafés, and bars. While not exactly a red-light district, the downtown (particularly ‘Imad al-Din Street) was, as was noted in Chapter 1, a space in which Egyptians from all other parts of the city would come to see and partake in what they could not partake in elsewhere. It was,


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until the 1952 fires, a zone of pleasure and a prime site for consuming Western forms of entertainment.38 By reconjuring this space and Zaki el-Dessouki’s memories of what the heart of the city once meant to Egyptians, Aswany offers up the iconic imagery of the downtown, invoking a common sense of heritage and collective past. For example, consider Zaki’s description of Cairo to Busayna, the young woman from the squatter community on the roof who comes to work for him and whom he eventually marries: I lived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairo was like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were well mannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I was different too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were of a certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend the evening—the Automobile Club, the Club Mohammad Ali, the Gezira Club. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties and drinking and singing. There were a lot of foreigners, until Abd el-Nasser threw them out in 1956.39

Zaki’s nostalgia for a Cairo of the past is the nostalgia of a libertine aristocrat who reaped the benefits of a rigidly stratified class system. His bitterness for Nasser’s socialization policies reflects the running commentary throughout the novel that nationalization for the old elite not only was an offensive campaign but also somehow robbed these classes of what they identified with and loved most about Egypt—namely, its cosmopolitanism and its openness. The spaces these characters frequent beyond the Yacoubian Building itself (namely, Zaki Dessouki and Hatim Rashid), Maxim’s and Chez Nous, are equally as anachronistic—rundown vestiges of a liberal past. The sense of familiarity and “home” that Zaki feels at Maxim’s bar is largely due to its antiquated French decor and the sense of nostalgia and melancholy that such “European” ambiance evokes for him.40 The staged, once-modern and European space of Maxim’s now is described as a relic of modernity’s “elegant” past. While Maxim’s conjures up images of a Parisian space, it is not Paris that Zaki longs for, but Cairo’s staging of Paris, modeled as an expatriate’s European-styled home away from home that, from its very beginnings, was erected as a nostalgic echoing of some original modern space found only in Europe. Zaki’s sense of not feeling at home any longer in Cairo, yet feeling “at home” in Maxim’s, echoes what Marshall Berman has perceived as one of the driving questions of modernity that was posed in Chapter 1—namely, how can the contemporary subject find his or her way and be “at home in the world” when faced with a social and cultural environment that is constantly changing? For Zaki, Maxim’s is that staged, yet iconic, modern space impervious to the contradictions posed by the social environment of Cairo in the present. The bar functions as a closed theater, like the downtown once did, where the complexities


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of a changed Cairo remain at bay. For Zaki, being “at home” in modern Cairo means living in a space apart, reveling in the pleasure of conjuring up the Cairo of his past and allowing himself to slowly fade (with all his excesses) from living a life in the present. Yet the novel does not end with Zaki’s ultimate defeat in the face of an encroaching and complex present. Instead, his infatuation with Busayna turns into what appears to be a genuine romantic love. The relationship serves as a correction to his rose-colored version of Cairo—a dose of reality—and with his eventual marriage he is given a second lease on life. Busayna and the informal community residing on the roof of the Yacoubian Building are Aswany’s attempt to present the other half of Cairo—those for whom Nasser’s revolution was intended. They emerged in the 1970s in tandem with the flight of many of the wealthy to the outlying suburbs—Muhandisin and Madinat Nasr—and the migration of many rural poor to the downtown center to find work.41 While Aswany juxtaposes these two communities, his depiction of the Egyptians on the roof is, like other aspects of the novel, filled with certain clichés, where the children are described as “barefoot and half naked” and the women are said to “spend their days cooking, holding gossip sessions in the sun, and frequently quarreling.”42 Aswany’s description of the Yacoubian Building is that of a vertically segregated space. This suggests a shift in orientation that is in many ways indicative of modernism’s move away from an earlier Haussmannian focus on horizontal physical space (façades, window displays, squares, and sidewalk culture) to the vertical urbanscape (epitomized by the skyscraper and the high-rise). The residents and business owners in the lower flats (Zaki el-Dessouki, Hatim Rasheed, and the businessman Hagg Azzam) represent both the old moneyed set and, in Hagg Azzam’s case, the nouveaux riche of Cairo. On the roof, an entirely contrasting reality emerges, where the lives of Busayna, Taha al-Shazli, and the Coptic brothers Abaskharon and Malak revolve solely around the potential for social mobility and moving out of their circumstances as roof dwellers. Busayna has no illusions about the bleak future for Cairo’s poor. To Taha al-Shazli (her first love) she offers a line that could very well serve as one of the dominant refrains in the novel: “This country doesn’t belong to us, Taha. It belongs to the people who have money.”43 Taha learns as much when he is prohibited from entering the police academy because of his father’s modest position as the doorman of the Yacoubian Building. The presence of the rooftop community complicates the neat construction of the downtown as a historical city, thwarting Zaki’s ability to live out his idea of “Cairo past” in the present. Unlike Khayri Shalabi’s Salih Hisa, which offered a community of residents horizontally set apart from the downtown center in the neighborhood of Ma‘ruf, and Idris Ali’s young narrator in Taht Khatt al-Faqr, who lived in the adjoining popular neighborhood of Bulaq, here the community of rural migrants to the city, in this


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case mostly Sa‘idis and Copts, live alongside each other physically on top of the downtown. While the horizontal space of the downtown, with its active pedestrian culture, is not an exalted space for these residents (as it was in the previous novels), here it is the newly wealthy residents, like Talal, the Syrian owner of the clothing store where Busayna works, and Hagg Azzam, who control the fates of the poorer residents in the downtown.44 While Aswany physically situates the novel in the historically “modern” downtown, conjuring up Zaki’s nostalgic image of Cairo as a historical European urban space, the heterogeneity of the classes and their interlinked fates in the novel attest to the changing character of this district and its residents over time. For example, juxtaposed to the sentimentalized passages of a downtown past, Aswany describes the closing of the downtown bars and “rising tide of religion and government persecution” as epitomizing the present.45 Where the Royal Automobile Club on Qasr al-Nil Street once catered to the Western, aristocratic tastes of the upper classes who would spend their evenings “sipping whiskey and playing poker and bridge,”46 it is the kebab restaurant (al-Kababji) in the high-rise tower of the Gezira Sheraton in Zamalik, across the Nile, that now better suits the tastes of Cairo’s present elite. Of this ascendant class Aswany writes, “The great men of the present era, however, with their largely plebian origins, their stern adherence to the outward forms of religion, and their voracious appetite for good food, find the Sheraton’s kebab restaurant suits them, since they can eat the best kind of kebab, kofta, and stuffed vegetables and then drink cups of tea and smoke molasses-soaked tobacco in the waterpipes that the restaurant’s management has introduced in response to their requests. And during all the eating, drinking, and smoking, the talk of money and business never ceases.”47 Forsaking the downtown, with its Western associations and forms of entertainment, Aswany depicts the flight of this new moneyed class, “with their largely plebian origins” to newer suburban locations beyond the downtown where they are able to find expensive, elitist spaces offering forms of leisure more suitable to what Aswany reads as their more popular sensibilities and tastes. The downtown in Aswany’s novel, not wholly indigenized, remains caught between the two extremes—populated by the old guard, who seek out Maxim’s and Chez Nous in an effort to feel “at home” in a now changed district, and the poor migrant classes, who serve as a labor force for the businesses and flats below. Aswany thus constructs a polarized Wust al-Balad, that is a space mirroring the deep stratification afflicting Egyptian society overall. The Yacoubian Building as National Romance? Despite this image of stratification and the multiple forms of prostitution in the novel, Aswany’s ending leaves a certain room for considering a less than dystopic ending. Such a reading would work in contrast to, for example, Joseph Massad’s interpretation. In his reading, the Yacoubian Building itself is read allegorically


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as representing the Egyptian state or Egypt (not the downtown). He writes that the “failure of procreation” on the part of the protagonists ultimately “is part of a wider failure to imagine a future for the Ya‘qubyan building.”48 Exploring the theme of deviancy in the work and the effects of the aristocracy and the community of foreigners in “postrepublican Egypt,” Massad writes, “If the Ya’qubyan Building is indeed the modern Egyptian state, or even Egypt itself, designed by a foreign architect and owned by a foreigner . . . then perhaps the only thing that is left to do is to destroy [it] altogether (as well as Chez Nous), as all it contains today is the decadence and degeneracy of the ancienne aristocracy, as well as that of the republican nouveaux riches, the decadent and degenerate deviants, and the misery of the poor Egyptians floating on the surface like oil refusing to mix with the water-building.”49 Borrowing from Michel Foucault and theories of modernization, Massad reads the lack of social reproduction between any of the characters as signaling the impossibility of national progress, and thus the emergence of the deviant as the “new national subject.” As compelling as this interpretation is, we might also read the union of Zaki and Busayna quite differently, that is, as the only possibility the work offers for Egypt’s future. After all, Zaki retains in his character a deeply nationalist commitment to the nation, albeit an Egypt of the past. When Busayna says she hates Egypt and would like to leave “this hole,” he responds, “How can that be? Is there anyone who hates his own country?” “I never got anything good from it to make me love it.” She averted her face as she said this sentence. Zaki responded excitedly, “A person has to love his country because his country is his mother. Does anyone hate his mother.” “That’s all songs and movies. Zaki Bey, people are suffering.” “Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t be patriotic. Most of Egypt’s nationalist leaders were poor.” “All that was in your day. Now people are really fed up.”50

In the absence of a dominant mother figure in the novel, it is Egypt that becomes the mother.51 Here Zaki is puzzled by Busayna’s lack of patriotism. For him, in the spirit of the liberationist rhetoric of the 1940s and 1950s, all Egyptians owe a sense of allegiance to their country as she is their mother.52 Here he effectively instructs her in the meaning of nationalism and patriotic commitment. And yet Busayna is not convinced and attempts to open his eyes to her world, claiming that his nationalism is mere rhetoric—the stuff of songs and movies. Still, for Zaki, poverty is no excuse for a lack of patriotism and he once more attempts to teach Busayna that it has always been the poor who have led nationalist struggles. The scene is central because it underscores how much both of these characters appear to need each other in order to understand the nation. Here it is evident that Zaki, the ardent critic of Nasser,53 is not a critic


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of nationalism per se, but of Nasser’s brand of nationalism. For him, patriotism should be an unquestionable urge. It is, for him, as instinctive as a child’s love for its mother. It is this of which he must convince Busayna, who, as part of a younger, disenfranchised generation, has never felt the same sense of identification or security as a national subject. Similarly, despite Zaki’s recognition of the corruption surrounding him and his observation that the downtown is not the way it once was, he appears to be unaware of the depth of the problem. It is thus left to Busayna to instruct Zaki as to the deep despair suffered by the people. She effectively teaches him that there can be no patriotism if a country does not give anything back to its people. When Busayna confesses that all the girls she studies with at the “commercial school” want to leave the country, Zaki emphatically presses on in defense of what can only be read as a form of embittered nationalist commitment: “If you can’t find good in your own country, you won’t find it anywhere else.”54 Thus, despite his willingness to empathize with her desire to flee, he cannot help but defend the importance of staying, of belonging to one’s country. This scene is repeated with some variation a bit later in the novel once Zaki and Busayna realize their love for each other: “When are we leaving?” “Leaving for where?” “You promised me we’d go somewhere together.” Gazing at her face, he asked her, “You still hate this country?” She nodded her head, looking at the ceiling. “I can’t fathom your generation. In my day, love for one’s country was like a religion. Lots of young people died struggling against the British.” Busayna sat up and said, “You made demonstrations to throw out the British? Okay, they went. Does that mean the country’s all right?” “The reason the country’s gone downhill is the absence of democracy. If there were a real democratic system, Egypt would be a great power. Egypt’s curse is dictatorship and dictatorship inevitably leads to poverty, corruption, and failure in all fields.”55

Once more the dialogue reiterates Zaki’s own undying patriotism and Busayna’s skepticism. He cannot understand the cynicism of her generation and she cannot understand his outdated, deluded commitment to the nation. Again they attempt to bring these two perspectives closer together and it is in these conversations that Aswany works to articulate some sense of vision for a future Egypt. It is interesting to note that in the Arabic, Busayna asks when will they “travel” (“imta hanusafir?”), although in Humphrey Davies’ English translation it is expressed as “When are we leaving?”56 Later Zaki promises her that as soon as he receives a sum of money they will “travel” to France. The difference is slight, but perhaps significant. In Joseph Massad’s reading of the ending, Busayna and Zaki marry,


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but eventually go off to live the rest of their lives abroad, abandoning the country. But the passage might also be read another way, allowing for a more optimistic ending where their trip to France is just that, a trip abroad, not a life. If we agree that this is one possible reading and that Zaki and Busayna might in fact return to Egypt, then the final scene of their wedding party at Maxim’s is suggestive of a very different future for the couple and perhaps offers a somewhat romanticized hope that there might be an imagined future for the nation. It is with this closing scene that we come closest to a sense of promise in the work. The chapter begins with the sentence, “Starting in the late afternoon, Maxim’s had been turned upside down.”57 The narrator describes the transformation of Maxim’s into a place befitting a wedding reception. The antiquated elegance of the place is made new by a crew of workers “cleaning” and “disinfecting” the place, placing “gleaming white cloths” and vases on the tables, as well as lining up large baskets of flowers at the entrance. No longer jettisoned back in time to a more refined past, the restaurant is made new for the present and for the possibilities awaiting the new couple. Once the guests begin to arrive—a mix of Zaki el-Dessouki’s friends and Busayna’s friends from the roof and the Commercial College—the symbolism of this marriage is made clear. Here, at last, the two halves of the Yacoubian Building, the two sectors of the downtown finally come together.58 The image of the rooftop classes mingling with Zaki’s old aristocratic friends points to a different sort of space, a space apart from the rest of the novel, where class divisions are diminished by the foreign nature of the space (a Greekowned French restaurant) and the promise such a union of opposites presents. In many ways the scene is fantastical and not in keeping with the overwhelmingly negative resolutions of the other subplots, but it gives the reader a sense that the primary thrust of the novel might more aptly be read as an oddly twisted national romance rather than a direct piece of social realist fiction. Doris Sommer’s work is instructive here. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson, she argues that it is through the medium of the novel, “our democratically shared imagination,” that fictive romantic love becomes interlinked with the destiny of the nation. In her reading, such fictions do not merely represent romance and patriotism, but each engenders the other.59 Thus it is the passion of the couple and their ability to conquer the odds that enables them to realize their own love while the nation realizes (in the case of nineteenth-century Latin American novels) its independence. While this Egyptian novel (written in the era of Mubarak’s Egypt) does not precisely fit the criteria by which Sommer defines her nationalist romances, it is compelling to consider the telos of Aswany’s novel as inevitably leading to such a pairing, thus pointing to the possibility that the nation as well might also transcend its rot and eventually find itself. If we return to the allegorical reading of the nation through the space of Wust al-Balad, the official sanctioning of Zaki and Busayna’s union in a sublimely cinematic last scene suggests that the downtown is, at last, made


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right—returned to all the Egyptian people. The tensions brought about by the vertical stratification depicted throughout the novel are temporarily resolved (or at least suspended). With Christine, the Greek owner of the restaurant, singing “La Vie en Rose” in the background, the couple begins to dance. And yet they are not entirely propelled to an irretrievable rose-colored time and space, for no sooner does the song finish than the crowd demands that the band play music more appropriate for belly dancing, “al-ruqs al-sharqi.”60 This was the magical moment, for the women and the girls jumped up as though they had finally found themselves, clapping, singing, and swaying to the rhythm, more than one of them tying a sash around her hips and dancing. They kept insisting that the bride do the same until she gave in and allowed them to tie a sash on her and joined the dancers, while Zaki Bey el-Dessouki watched her with love and admiration, clapping enthusiastically to the rhythm. Then little by little, raising his arms aloft, he joined her in the dance, amid the joyful laughter and cries of the others.61

If we read this final scene as the culmination of the couple’s multiple conversations on the value of nationalism, Egypt’s class divisions, and the social ills facing the nation, it is as if, in keeping with Sommer, the couple earns their union and manages to achieve the impossible, that is, to love beyond class and to create, as an extension of this love, a nonstratified space of social conviviality (however fleeting). In this regard, the downtown, as a central part of Egypt’s national heritage, is recovered, returned to the people, and reimagined as a symbol of what could be, that is, beckoning to the possibility of a more socially unified Egypt of the future. The Novel as Cultural Phenomenon and Commercial Franchise In light of the commercial success of the work that was alluded to earlier, a controversy over the value of the novel, literary or otherwise, erupted within Egyptian academic circles. For example, when the novel was first published, the critic Mahmud ‘Abd al-Wahhab, writing in the Egyptian literary journal Fusul (in 2002), praised Aswany, noting that with his fiction he had “returned the novel to its place at the heart of society’s social, intellectual, and existential concerns . . . [drawing] a realistic portrait of Egyptian society in the last quarter of the twentieth century.”62 Other literary scholars were more critical. Sabry Hafez, writing on Salah Hashim’s website “Cinema Isis,” passionately attacked the novel, claiming that The Yacoubian Building offered little of literary value. Not only was it stylistically weak, written in a “naïve” language that neither is “discerning” nor offers any “wisdom,” but the work, filled with “generalizations” and erroneous facts, gives a horrible impression of contemporary Egyptian literature to readers in the West, many of whom have praised the novel


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for the social and political issues it raises.63 The critical frenzy surrounding this novel highlights two important questions: first, why was the straightforward and transparent manner of Alaa al-Aswany’s social commentary in this novel viewed as a threat to the literary establishment and read as a degradation of the novel as a form?; and second, in what ways might the popularity of the novel, with its simplified language and easy style, alter (and perhaps open) the fictional terrain in Egypt for other novelists from both the older and newer generations? Indeed, The Yacoubian Building, with its accessible style and candid treatment of key social issues plaguing contemporary Egyptian society, reignited—as Sonallah Ibrahim’s work Tilka al-Ra’iha did in years past—a debate over what constitutes Arabic literature.64 This debate not only highlights the critical role language plays in signaling whether a work is deemed “literary” or “popular” but also brings to light the challenges the new generation of Egyptian writers face in their battle to create a literary aesthetic indicative of the reality in which they live. In what follows, I attempt to offer an overview of the multiple avenues in which critics have approached this work. It is my contention that while one could argue this fiction is, perhaps, one of the first examples we have of how a technologically sophisticated Egyptian media apparatus can turn a modern novel into a commercial franchise, there is, in my reading (as I attempted to show earlier), something intrinsic to the work itself that caused it to touch a nerve among Egyptians. It is important, from the outset, to establish that The Yacoubian Building is a novel beloved by many. The novel garnered numerous positive reviews. As early as 2003, Gamal al-Ghitani celebrated the novel for its ability to offer both a literary and human perspective on Wust al-Balad, or downtown Cairo. He praised the work for its candor and, most notably, for Aswany’s fearlessness in telling us “what is happening in Egypt now.” He goes on to note that Aswany “enriches the art of the novel” by shifting the focus away from the self and onto the contemporary reality in Cairo. Such a shift, in Ghitani’s opinion, has been long overdue.65 On a technical level, Mahmud ‘Abd al-Wahhab extols the novel for its cinematic quality. By taking up the concerns of everyday Egyptians, ‘Abd al-Wahhab argues that Aswany, both in his content and in his visual style of writing, honors the tradition of Egyptian social realism prevalent in the first quarter of the century.66 In a similar vein, Ahmad al-Khamisi suggests that the narrative possesses a “popular quality” [hiss sha‘bi]. It is this quality that makes it more appealing to readers beyond the overintellectualized fictions that are often populated with protagonists whose existential torture or indecision is the central subject of the novel.67 Galal Amin, an ardent supporter of the novel from its first release, notes that on a basic level the novel offers the sort of suspense and potential for multiple interpretations that is so necessary to fiction to keep the reader engaged and turning the pages through to the very end.68


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Alongside these accolades, the work was critiqued and attacked for issues related to both style and content. Critics used the word “sensational” to describe the novel; an accusation that cuts across both of these domains. In fact, one might argue that such an accusation projects us into the heart of the debate over what constitutes a literary novel versus a popular one. The extent to which the novel is sensational is, I would suggest, not so much due to Aswany’s candid portrayal of sex throughout (with a frequency no different from that of many contemporary American novels by so-called literary authors such as John Updike or Philip Roth). Rather, such a claim may be made because of the detailed portrait of one of the main characters as both homosexual and ultimately violent. In fact, without fail, in almost all the reviews I have read, critics have felt the need to contextualize and explain this relationship. Joseph Massad, as I discussed earlier, reads Aswany’s homosexual characters, Hatim Rasheed and Abd Rabbuh, as manifestations of the overarching theme of decadence and deviance in the work. For Massad, the story becomes, at its core, a comment on the male postcolonial subject who, in light of colonial and postcolonial violence, cannot emerge as anything but a corrupt, sexual deviant.69 In his reading, this deviance leads to a broader failure on the part of the characters to reproduce, symbolizing Egypt’s stymied or failed national progress. However, this reading is qualified toward the end of the chapter, when he notes that the “sensationalism of the novel [ultimately] compromises the political critique the [novel] wants to offer.”70 In other words, as a sober political commentary, the work cannot be taken seriously. Mahmud ‘Abd al-Wahhab offers a somewhat similar reading of Aswany’s homosexual pairing, suggesting that the character Hatim Rasheed is not biologically homosexual, rather it is the fact that he was raised abroad and lived in a household that was more French than Egyptian that accounts for his aberrant behavior. He argues that his sexual inclination is linked to a deeper “psychological” and “existential” deviance resulting from a Western home life that was not only cut off from his Egyptian heritage but scorned its habits and traditions.71 In ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s prescriptive reading, had Hatim Rasheed been in touch with his Egyptianness and not constantly battling his own “double consciousness,” he would not have needed to cross over. Ahmad Zaki ‘Abd al-Halim reads Hatim Rasheed’s homosexuality in a manner similar to its portrayal in the film, that is, that it can be explained through Hatim’s tragic circumstances as a “victim” of sexual abuse at the hands of the Nubian servant.72 Whatever one’s interpretation, the role of the homosexual becomes an important cue for the ways in which the novel is morally coded, interpreted, and received by the public. This is nowhere more evident than in the case of the production of the film and the TV serial. While the film included the novel’s homosexual lovemaking scenes, once it was released, according to Aswany, close to a hundred members of the People’s Assembly tried to ban it.73 In the case of


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the TV serial, the homosexual character was written out, or as the screen writer ‘Atif Bishay put it, he was “substituted” (istibdal) on the grounds that the same sense of self-loathing and deviance could be portrayed through means other than that of a same-sex pairing—something that clearly would not have seen the light of day on an Egyptian state-run television channel during Ramadan.74 It is the link between what many perceive as the narrator’s paternalistic moralizing in conjunction with the so-called sensational scenes of deviant behavior that has given rise to much of the criticism over the novel’s content. For example, Faysal Darraj, writing in al-Hayat, argued that the novel attempts little more than a rewriting of Naguib Mahfuz’s Miramar.75 In his reading, the novel merely borrows Mahfuz’s metaphor of the building. But where Mahfuz was interested in exploring the different political and social perspectives of his characters, Aswany, as he puts it, “places the building in society and the society in the building,” then “plays the role of the judge,” defining the moral framework of the novel only to issue rulings to his characters based on this framework. Darraj goes on to praise Mahfuz for staying removed from his subject, whereas al-Aswany, to his dismay, offers us a moral exhortation in the form of a novel. In line with this, the novelist and critic Ra‘uf Mus‘ad has dismissed the success of the novel, calling it merely a reiteration of traditional “moral literature.”76 In an interview published in Akhbar al-adab in the spring of 2007, Ra‘uf Mus‘ad, in discussing Aswany’s novel in the context of Arabic literature, argues that Aswany’s novels (he includes his novel Chicago in this criticism) do not “add anything” to the canon of Arabic literature, largely because they are part of a style of writing predicated on a moral position.77 Mus‘ad links the notion of a “moral literature” to the idea of the conventional form of the novel. He admits that while he himself was part of a generation of authors who, after emerging from prison, declared the need for a new kind of writing (e.g., Sonallah Ibrahim, ‘Abd al-Hakim al-Qasim, and Ibrahim Aslan), most of his fellow writers from the 1960s eventually returned to the conventional form of the novel after a period of experimentation. In his estimation, this “retreat,” as he calls it, from breaking formal and aesthetic “taboos” (tabuhat) occurred as a result of social pressures, such that a writer like Sonallah Ibrahim became known for his work as someone who “exposed the situation in Egypt” as opposed to being acknowledged for his formal or aesthetic innovations. Thus, for Mus‘ad, The Yacoubian Building offers yet one more reiteration of a literary formula that had become obsolete. The reasons for its success he attributes more to curiosity over the media frenzy and the sense of moral satisfaction a reader might find in seeing certain events come to pass than to any real value it might have as a novel. In a scathing review of the work, Sabry Hafez describes how he was compelled to read the novel after one of his students at Harvard (where he was a visiting professor) asked him to discuss the work at a public lecture for students


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studying the Middle East. After first declining the invitation, he later, upon reading the novel, felt that he could not afford to pass up an invitation to set the literary record straight. In his estimation, not only does the work lack literary merit, but it is written in a style echoing that of the novels of the 1940s, expressing a deep naïveté, especially with respect to its “grammar” for conveying reality. Of Aswany’s style, he argues that the “text moves away from us, from its opening pages, to the world of the author, knowledgeable about everything, controlling everything in his text in a purely intellectual manner. In such a way he does not grant the text the ability to achieve its independence. Rather, he uses it as a mount in order to propagate his opinions and his wisdom in all its dimensions.”78 What concerns Hafez on a deeper level with respect to students in the West is the fact that such a work, because of its politicized subject matter and its manner of testimonial or journalistic style, gets passed off as a significant piece of literature, playing into the hands of Western students who, he notes, are often trained to examine Arabic literature through a sociological or political lens. And while Hafez praises much of the new writing emerging from the 1990s generation of writers (a generation in which he places Aswany), he discredits The Yacoubian Building, regarding it as little more than a “summary of what’s been overheard on Egyptian reality at coffee shops, devoid of any real knowledge.”79 This position echoes yet another line of criticism by the well-known Egyptian critic Faruq ‘Abd al-Qadir, who states that the novel might be classified as something he calls “gossip literature” (adab al-namima). The notion that one might apply this sort of category to literature has sparked a debate in its own right;80 however, it highlights a general ambivalence among readers toward Aswany’s drawing upon certain scandals surrounding known Egyptian personalities. So what, if anything, does this controversy illuminate? Why did this novel, so popular with many Egyptians, generate such a debate among those within the literary community? Why were critics still discussing it in blogs and literary publications five years after it was initially released? By way of conclusion I would like to point to a few possible avenues for contextualizing the aforementioned controversy. The independent publishing house Mirit has played a central role in publishing and disseminating the works of many oppositional and younger Egyptian writers in Egypt. For example, Mirit was the original publisher of Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. In an interview with Muhammad Hashim (the director of press), he describes his role as a publisher as an extension of his political commitment to working against the neoliberal, oppressive interventions of the state on artistic freedom.81 His decision to publish The Yacoubian Building, like his decision to publish other candid novels, emerged, he notes, out of his firm belief that what these authors have to say deserves a forum. For example, he cites the publisher Dar al-Shuruq as an institution


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where the ministries often choose what is published. Because Mirit is independent, he reserves the right to publish what he wants. On the issue of style, he comments that language, for many writers of this newer generation, serves as a practical vehicle for expression and for producing narratives written for one’s peers. The integration of colloquial or the use of a “high colloquial” (al‘ammiyya al-fasiha) is prevalent among this group particularly because, in his opinion, the text becomes more readable, is more direct, and thus appeals to a wider public. The notion that one must have a sophisticated mastery of fusha in order to write is, quite simply, outdated. Indeed, despite the complaints by critics over the “naïve” and “journalistic” quality of Aswany’s prose, and its lack of literary value, the book is, if nothing else, very readable; this perhaps contributed to its success. Given how outmoded or rarified literature (anywhere) can seem in the context of competing cultural domains, the fact that a novel—a written work—had the capacity to make an impact across a broad cross section of Egyptian society is significant and speaks to the potential for literary forms to still provoke and challenge a heterogeneous audience. And while the debate over colloquial or fusha rages on,82 it is a debate that often complicates the turf wars over notions of high–low and literary–commercial art in Egypt. Still, the question of readership at the heart of this debate—that is, for whom is one writing—remains prescient for writers and readers alike. Such questions have been posed since the early part of the twentieth century, when conversations over what ought to constitute an Egyptian national literature were most pressing. So too today, The Yacoubian Building forced this question to the forefront; namely, what, at most, can we hope for from our literature? Sensational or not, crudely written or not, this novel has pushed people to think about their social world. Isn’t this, at its essence, what literature was meant to do? There is one last point I would like to make regarding the popularity of this novel that returns us to the central argument of this chapter. There is no denying that the sexual relationships in the work, the pairing of sex and violence, and the use of suspense and intrigue also contributed to the novel’s popularity. However, on a much less obvious level, I suggest, as I noted earlier, that what has helped The Yacoubian Building to become a phenomenon, above anything else, is the deeply nationalist impulse underwriting the work. Indeed, this idea runs contrary to readings of the novel by Sabry Hafez and Joseph Massad. Admittedly Aswany’s characters criticize the Free Officers and Gamal Abdel Nasser.83 It is also true that Aswany’s overall depiction of Egypt is dystopic in his representation of government corruption, bribery, and the excesses of the upper classes contrasted to the depravity of the informal rooftop community. Yet the very idea that one building or district (in this case the downtown) can serve as an allegorical space for the nation suggests in


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a very old-fashioned way that one can still find a master narrative for the Egyptian experience. And as evidenced by the sales of this novel, there is an audience longing for such a narrative. While Aswany offers a certain degree of social heterogeneity between the characters, by locating the novel in the historic space of Wust al-Balad he gestures to a collective past. A space of contest and unified struggle for liberation, the downtown pulls these disparate groups together. The shadow of their collective history against colonialism and against the monarchy is grounded in this space. Indeed, this past haunts the novel, but it also proposes the notion of a collectively imagined Egyptian present. The most celebrated Egyptian novels in the late 1990s early 2000s have tended to emphasize local realities, displaying an attentiveness to the details of these unique cultures and subcultures (e.g., Yusuf Abu Rayyah’s Wedding Night [2002], Khayri Shalabi’s The Lodging House [1999], and Hamdi Abu Gulayyil’s Thieves in Retirement [2002]), or have experimented with postmodern literary techniques (e.g., Ahmad al-‘Ayyidi’s Being Abbas al-Abd [2003] or Yasir ‘Abd al-Latif ’s The Law of Inheritance [2006]). Aswany retreats from these approaches and therefore his novel is, in some ways, much more universal. The Cairo downtown for him is Egypt; it exemplifies the sort of “local cosmopolitan” space that Svetlana Boym has argued best epitomizes city life and our attraction to it.84 By returning the downtown to all Egyptians in this novel (as symbolized by the marriage of Busayna and Zaki el-Dessouki), Aswany suggests the possibility of a present shaped by collective experience. In so doing, it is the city, and the downtown more specifically, as a historic referent that unifies, inspiring us to rethink the link between identity, space, and the pleasure we draw from the nostalgic pull of a commonly remembered national past.


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CONCLUSION

Wust al-Balad as Neo-Bohemia Writing in Defense of a Vanishing Public Sphere

The vast majority of the populations of formerly colonized societies live in conditions of despair, to be sure, but it is no longer very plausible to offer colonialism as an explanation for their condition. Marginalization, rather than any systematic colonial exploitation, better explains it. . . . There is a new world situation at hand, in other words, and this world situation itself calls into question postcolonial arguments of various kinds spanning the half century from post-World War II decolonization to the appearance of the paradigms and ideologies of “globalization” at century’s end. Anticolonial ideologies no longer make sense, as they appear in hindsight not only to have been futile but also to have shared in the assumptions of the very colonialism they sought to overthrow. —Arif Dirlik, “Historical Colonialism in Contemporary Perspective”1

A

rif Dirlik, in his 2002 essay “Historical Colonialism in Contemporary Perspective,” argues that the general preoccupation of postcolonial studies on colonialism and the postcolonial nation-state often fails to recognize just how inextricably intertwined the two are. For him, the postcolonial nation-state not only is a product of colonialism’s legacy but is predicated on the assumption of a homogeneous national identity. To understand why vast populations of former colonized countries remain marginalized requires an understanding of how the native elites in these societies are “no longer excluded from contemporary configurations of global power at the political and economic levels but are very much a part of them.”2 Thus, he argues, we must turn our attention to the “problematic of capitalism” and the fulfillment of its historical destiny in the “ideology (if not the reality) of globalization.”3

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In many ways the impulse underlying this project is complicit in what Dirlik warns against. Chapter 1 looked backward to the architectural imprint of colonialism’s legacy on the space of Cairo in an effort to explain the way in which the space of the staged modern downtown became a national center—the primary focal point for political and cultural activity in Egypt.4 In so doing, we attempted to understand the way in which the modern Egyptian subject was formulated as an extension of the utopian ideas informing the construction of this space. The subsequent chapters use four very different literary works to show how the representation of the downtown and its transformations across these works served to mirror—at times reflecting and at times mocking or distorting—the image of the Egyptian national subject. The Arabic literary scholar Marilyn Booth noted that the specter of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his nationalist movement looms large over Egyptian literature, and in fact, in her words, “saturates today’s fictional scene.”5 To this I would add that it is the downtown as the physical embodiment of so many contradictory impulses in the nation’s history that continues to haunt the ever-expanding space of Cairo. The narratives examined here map, through their characters’ relationships to the city center, the discrepant, marginalized histories of contestation that challenged the project of modernity and eventually its heir, Nasser’s nationalist movement. In these novels the utopian imaginings of progress, of an official cultural establishment, of self-arrival and actualization, and of hypocrisy and marginalization all are projected onto and woven into the history of the downtown. The violence of capitalism is nowhere more evident than in the transformations of the city center—from nineteenth-century modern spectacle, Egyptianized heart of the anticolonial struggle, to modernist ruin and contemporary heritage site—where the relationships of the characters to this space serve as a point of departure for thinking about what and if there still exists something we might call a national self or a sense of national community. To return to the staging of modernity in the area of the new downtown is to be reminded of the critical role space plays in conceptions of selfhood and nationhood (gesturing back to the work of Benedict Anderson). More specifically, to return to the downtown is necessarily to return to the question of the nation. And for these authors this fictional mapping offers the opportunity to revisit the ways in which this national space historicizes (and puts into perspective) the optimism and hypocrisy of Egyptian nationalism under Nasser as the last articulation of a collective movement for social change. More broadly speaking, posing the question of what it means to be modern in spatial terms is yet one more way of asking, what do our cities say about who we are? And how, if we render our cities as legible—through fictional texts—can we reconfigure that fundamental question of identity for ourselves? My decision to use the “urban” or the “city” as an alternative theoretical framework for understanding and mapping the postcolonial subject is an attempt to address the inadequacies in postcolonial theoretical scholarship to contextualize the complex situations and characterizations presented in many


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newer Arabic texts. Indeed, many scholars have noted the Western and Anglocentric bias in the field, where the move away from a non-Euro-American subject (or set of texts) to an Arab-Egyptian subject, for example, is to fundamentally face a different set of questions.6 It is to these questions as posed by these Arabic texts that the field of postcolonial studies, in its present incarnation in the words of Susie Tharu, is “poorly positioned and ill equipped” to respond. If we agree with Simon Gikandi that postcolonial theory was, in its primary impulse, about accounting for the “place of the other subject in the narrative of European identity,”7 then the project at hand must be understood as an attempt to pose the question of what sort of identity and idea of community emerges from narratives that speak back to what he calls the “narratives of decolonization,” that is, the fictional correctives to the postcolonial novel. We began this study with an analysis of Radwa ‘Ashur’s Qit‘a min Urubba, which I read as a textual reclaiming of the area of Wust al-Balad for purposes of recovering the nationalist project as the natural inheritor of the project of modernity. At its core, the novel is a virtuoso scripting of a postcolonial critique of the colonial and neo-imperial role of foreign capital in the construction of the space of downtown Cairo. ‘Ashur shows the complex manner in which Egyptian identity was fashioned through and by the presence and models set up by the colonial establishment. As the city changes and increasingly reflects the growing presence of the United States in the region, ‘Ashur points to the generations of Egyptians whose tastes and sense of identity are equally as intertwined with what has been exported as American cultural identity and capital in the region. In contrast to her work, the three novels we explore subsequently attempt to tell a much less dichotomous story—stories in which America and Europe barely play a role. These fictions are, in effect, critiques of the flattening of power relations and identity formation that the postcolonial binary repeatedly sets up, one where the Western subject always figures, even if only as a referent. Khayri Shalabi’s novel Salih Hisa, like many of his other works, uses an “indigenous textuality”8 or an indigenous modernism grounded in a high form of Egyptian colloquial as part of his cultural heritization project to formulate the aesthetics of an Egyptian proletarian literature. While his novel mocks European modernity through his rendering of an oppositional public sphere of local intellectuals and artists in Hayy Ma‘ruf (a space parallel to the official downtown), his primary project mines the vernacular and deeply local urban spaces of Cairo in an effort to get at some authentic or precolonial sense of what it means to be Egyptian. Idris ‘Ali, in a novel that is similarly Egypt-centric, illustrates the bankruptcy in the rhetoric of anticolonial Egyptian nationalism. By narrating the 1952 revolution from the point of view of the poor and from his unique Nubian perspective, he draws a portrait of the disorientation and the abandonment felt by lower-class Egyptians following the successive failures of the ruling military elite to bring about genuine change. Cairo’s downtown


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remains for him an enduring symbol of class oppression at the hands of a corrupt establishment. It is the paradigmatic site of his exile that he returns to repeatedly, posing the question of justice and equality for Egypt’s disenfranchised. Finally, Alaa al-Aswany’s novel is similar to Radwa ‘Ashur’s work in that it too taps into a deep-seated nostalgia for a past national sense of belonging. While ‘Ashur’s nationalism is predicated on a resistance to Western hegemony, Aswany’s nationalist subtext is grounded in a pre-1952 liberal notion of what Egyptian citizenship once meant. Wust al-Balad, in Zaki el-Dessouki’s nostalgic recollections, is the site par excellence of an all-inclusive notion of cosmopolitan Egyptianness, where the foreigner once sat alongside the effendi in a Parisianstyle café imagining Egypt’s modern-as-Western future. The Yacoubian Building revises this vision by representing a divergent cross section of Egypt’s social classes in the present where Egypt’s class-divided society supplants the liberal order as its new master narrative. However, it is this promise of what Egypt could have been if the 1952 revolution had evolved differently that preoccupies this work, offering a bitter critique of its failure to bring about modernization in the form of social change and cultural openness. To revisit the “critical unfinished project of modernity”9 vis-à-vis an Egyptian urban imaginary is to consider, in the words of Bruno Latour, what the implications might be of “never having been modern.”10 To have never have been modern is to accept that a city might not be based on a teleology of progress, rather it is to understand it as a spatial and temporal hybrid, always old and new, past and present. To be at once premodern and modern, globally connected and locally cut off, is not only to view the idea of Cairo’s past differently (debunking the idea of the lost historical city), but to necessarily delink the idea of the future with the linear notion of progress (specifically progress as modernization). This is not to argue for an ahistorical reading of our cities; rather, it attempts to account for the uneven nature of urban transformation in both physical and social terms. Thus the emphasis falls, when not predicated on the idea of measurable growth or development from a fixed point in the past, on engaging with a living urban space and the complexities that come with it in the present. In the preceding chapters I have attempted to show that the battle for and over downtown Cairo as a historic public space—and thus regarded as a nationally symbolic site—is central to the question of contemporary Egyptian identity. These novels, as “contested remembrances”11 of this public sphere, point to the significance of the changing image of the downtown over time for Egyptians. Yet today, in the early millennial era, Cairo is a city whose imagined future for developers largely seems to have migrated from this former center to the new desert communities—land that is likened to a new “frontier” with all the Western connotations imbued in such an analogy.12 These desert projects


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exclusively designed for Egyptian elites and foreign expatriates fashion the new Egyptian twenty-first-century global citizen as an extension of such gated enclaves, partaking in the leisure activities and consumption practices available only to a class with significant capital and disposable income. As Anouk de Koning has argued, the narratives of national progress scripted into such developments feature only this upper-class sector as the “protagonists” of Egypt’s future and leave out entirely the vast majority of Cairo’s population, except perhaps as day laborers for these residents or service workers in local businesses. In other words, as de Koning makes clear, “such dreams of a global Cairo are reserved [only] for a minority of the city’s inhabitants.”13 The scholarship of Yasser Elsheshtawy and Khaled Adham, as discussed at the start of this project, documents the eerie similarity between these spectacular Dubai-influenced new developments—with their emphasis on bringing upscale global consumer experiences and First World living standards to Egypt—and the exclusivity, grandeur, and yearning for participation in a European-style modernity reflected in Khedive Isma‘il’s nineteenth-century vision of Cairo. It reminds us once more why a reconsideration of the downtown, allowing for the pride, contestation, and ambivalence that such a site evokes, is critical now more than ever to understanding the theater of neo-modern development in greater Cairo’s suburban “frontier” communities and the implications such “quartering” of space has for the constitution of contemporary Egyptian identity and notions of citizenship and collective belonging. Cairo’s new generation of writers, attuned to the metamorphoses taking place in the urban spaces around them and often excluded from the partitioned fantasyscapes defining Cairo’s future as luxury global city, reflect these changing social geographies in a manner that is distinctive from the fiction of their predecessors of the 1960s generation. Many newer writers, especially those living in the outlying districts of greater Cairo or the informal towns on the outskirts of the city (as we discussed in reference to Sabry Hafez’s work), have indeed taken these new urban spaces as the loci of their fictional worlds. Yet, for others, the lost historical city that once served as the nucleus of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cairo is not only still relevant but serves as an important lens for defining how this generation views themselves and their social reality. In spite of the radical changes taking place in Cairo’s outer core, Wust al-Balad’s literary double not only endures but continues to be mythologized as one of the last remaining public spheres (across generations) and as a unique space of middle-class social mixing and commerce. Indeed, for many of the writers of the 1990s generation, the iconic status of the downtown—owing to the felt presence of Egypt’s history and the universal recognition of this site as a locus of literary and political activity—has turned the area into something of a “new bohemia.”14 While the cafés, restaurants, and bars of the district have always


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made this space a renowned intellectual hive, it is now, with the flight of finance capital to the suburbs (including, in 2008, the American University in Cairo to New Cairo), interesting to observe the mixed-generation counterculture that still frequents the cafés and bars of Wust al-Balad. Not only does this space serve as the primary arena for political demonstrations for rights-claiming rallies and oppositional groups such as Kifaya (Enough!),15 but informal literary salons and weekly gatherings of artists and writers continue to take place in cafés such as Maqha Nadi al-Thaqafa (literally the “café of the culture club”), the Greek Club, the Atelier, and the publishing house Mirit. Thus despite the proliferation of malls in the suburbs and high-end coffee shops such as Cilantro and Beanos, which cater to a wealthier clientele, these somewhat run-down, longstanding cafés and bars—now institutions—continue to have cultural currency for a younger generation.16 The fresh work of Walter Armbrust on movie theaters in this district similarly speaks to the changing relevance of this space not only for the intellectual community and young artists who frequent the downtown but also for the lower- and middle-class youth who are unable to afford the luxury leisure activities, eateries, and theaters in the upscale malls in other parts of Cairo. Where Wust al-Balad used to be known as the theater district and was one of the only places one could watch a film in the city (i.e., in the 1930s and 1940s), today that is hardly the case, as people flock to malls (e.g., City Stars in Madinat Nasr, the Arkadia Mall on the Corniche, or City Center on the Ring Road)17 for shopping, socializing, moviegoing, family entertainment, and upscale café culture. In contrast to these exclusive sites of consumption, Wust al-Balad still allows for a certain “anonymity” among young people and consequently has become a place for social mixing and “dating” because of the “secluded areas, bars and restaurants.”18 While upper-class Egyptians of an older generation express nostalgia for the upscale downtown of their memory, for many of them the city center today is negatively associated with a “baladi” (lower-class) character, in part due to the stores, restaurants, and cafés targeting a middle-class clientele.19 This is especially true now that the American University in Cairo has relocated, a move that has changed the feel of the area as fewer upper-class students pass through the downtown. Even despite this change, and the rumors that many government ministries plan to relocate to the suburbs,20 the allure of Wust al-Balad as a bohemian enclave and site for indulging in a kind of collective nostalgia for a historic public sphere remains significant. In the newer works that treat the downtown (e.g., fictions by Yasser ‘Abd al-Latif, Makkawi Sa‘id, Hamdi al-Gazzar, Baha’ ‘Abd al-Magid, and Muntassir al-Qaffash), the district is embraced (and celebrated) for its baladi character, its seedy underworld, and as a destination for aspiring artists, writers, poseurs, intellectuals, eccentrics, foreigners, and youth of all class backgrounds.21


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For example, among some of the newer works memorializing this district is the film short Wust al-Balad. Directed by ‘Amir Ramsis, this film is a lyrical tribute to the nightlife of this neighborhood, as it depicts a group of Egyptian teenagers who meet downtown night after night in front of the “triangles” at Tal‘at Harb Square and aimlessly walk the area. The colloquial refrain “nit’abl fi wust al-balad” (we’ll meet downtown) repeats throughout the film. While the film has little plot, it follows the teenage character, Usamah, as he wanders in the course of one night from café to café, sitting with his friends drinking and smoking till dawn. While there is a heaviness to the film and the characters each seem alienated from their lives (though we, as viewers, have little sense as to why), they universally identify with Wust al-Balad as a site of freedom, their space, where they are not socially policed.22 Similarly the novella al-Nawm ma‘ al-Ghurba (Sleeping with Strangers),23 by Baha’ ‘Abd al-Magid, describes the active nightlife of Cairo’s youth in a somewhat seedier downtown where hustling teenagers peddle various goods and tourist trinkets. After spending some time in Boston, the protagonist, Bassam, returns to Cairo after having been thrown in jail for illegally residing in the United States without a visa. He reluctantly returns to Egypt and adopts a completely American style and set of mannerisms. At the same time, having not completed university, he takes up selling goods downtown, doing whatever he can to sell a bottle of perfume or a postcard to an unsuspecting tourist (usually a female). The novel offers an interesting portrait (and critique) of the relationships between young foreigners and Egyptian men and the way in which the downtown serves as a theater for this unfolding social drama. Finally, the novella Qanun al-Waratha (The Law of Inheritance, 2006),24 by the Nubian writer Yasir ‘Abd al-Latif, is a satirical work that chronicles the adventures of a young aspiring writer who, after moving to the suburb of Ma‘adi with his family, returns to walk the streets of Wust al-Balad and the adjoining district of Bab al-Luq to understand his boyhood growing up in the neighborhood and his grandfather’s experience as a Nubian migrant to the city in the early part of the twentieth century. After a series of adventures with his friends involving a drug binge and a student protest at Cairo University, at the novel’s close, we find our narrator downtown in Café Hurriya, writing in an attempt to piece together his identity (despite his sense of rootlessness) across the multiple urban landscapes of Cairo. While these sketches are brief, they point to the way in which the draw of this urban countercultural space is strong and reaccentuated through each of these imaginative works. The flourishing of a neo-bohemian culture in Wust al-Balad points to the desire on behalf of a younger generation of Egyptians to preserve the role of the downtown as a space rich with cultural capital and as an active public sphere. If, as Jürgen Habermas reminds us, the public realm is truly “vanishing” and must be “defended,” then these creative acts do just that—claim this space as a site for


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engaging in public debate and contest, and as a space of freedom meaningful for Egyptians in the throes of globalization. 25 The novels we have examined, primarily by writers of the 1960s generation, illustrate (after the work of James Donald and Samir Khalaf) how a reworking of the past vis-à-vis our cities is an important part of the process in determining who we are (and want to be) in the present. To revisit and analyze the multiple meanings vested in a national public square is to consider the critical role this space has played in conceptions of Egyptian selfhood and in our understanding of Cairo as an ever-changing and ever more global metropolis. As Egypt’s young generation of writers and culture producers continue to both remythologize and deconstruct the downtown in their fictions, such work will usher in new and unpredictable renderings of this historic city center imbued with a symbolism unique to their changing world view and sense of urban belonging. One can only imagine the cities they will build.


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Afterword While this book was in the initial stages of production, the demonstration on January 25, 2011, known as “youm al-ghadab” (the day of anger) was organized in Cairo by a broad coalition of grassroots activists and young people. Thousands of demonstrators from around the city flooded into the downtown area and occupied Tahrir Square. What began as a rally against human rights abuses, corruption, unemployment, and price inflation turned into a full-scale revolution that, after days of protests and hundreds of deaths, resulted in the fall of the regime and the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak. While the predominately peaceful protests bringing together Egyptians from all class backgrounds and all parts of the sprawling city were inspiring in their own right, the very fact that Tahrir—Liberation Square—became the site of contest for this battle over Egypt’s future only further emphasizes the significance of the downtown area in the collective imagination of Egyptians. Once known as Midan Isma‘iliyya, the square has since become one of the primary staging grounds for demonstrations over food prices (the 1977 bread riots), freedom of speech and representation, Egypt’s Emergency Law, the war in Iraq, and human rights issues and state violence. Bordered by the Egyptian National Museum (formerly the site of the British military barracks) and the recently burned building of the National Democratic Party on one end of the plaza, the administrative buildings of the American University of Cairo and the Mugamma‘ building on the other, the area is laden with national symbols. In addition, the People’s Assembly building (majlis al-sha’b) is located a short distance away down Qasr al- ‘Ayni Street, and Tal‘at Harb Square is located just two blocks north. As I have argued in the preceding chapters, the fires of January 1952 that marred the face of downtown almost 60 years ago suggested the extent to which the battle over the modern Egyptian subject was waged in space. During that turbulent January, modern establishments selling Western goods were burned and looted. In this recent turn, the downtown similarly became a site of contest where the character of the state and its obligations to its citizens was negotiated through a 14-day occupation of the area. This time the relationship of the

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demonstrators to Tahrir Square was not one of antagonism and anger; rather the crowds claimed the space and declared it the principle platform for expressing the will of the people. As Farha Ghannam has noted in an online piece written during the initial days of the conflict, “The Midan has become the symbolic as well as the physical anchor that represents right vs. wrong change vs. stability, and the nation (el-Sha‘ab) vs. the system (nizam). The way in which this space has been managed and regulated by the protesters is becoming central to how they see themselves as a group.” The demands of the protestors were hung on banners on the sides of buildings, a small triage unit was set up to aid the injured with a volunteer staff of doctors, people brought food and water for those who had not been home in days, and musicians came and organized songs and chants. Chief among the aims of the protesters, written in large Arabic script on one of the hanging banners, was the desire for a representative democracy and the immediate resignation of the president. Demonstrators camped in makeshift tents despite the cold nights and the constant threat of violence from pro-Mubarak supporters and security forces. The square, they emphatically told reporters, belonged to them and they would not give it up. And indeed they did not, protecting it even when military tanks flanked the area while hundreds throughout the standoff were randomly arrested and many injured. Tahrir remained the frontlines of the battle. When Mubarak finally resigned on February 11, 2011, the square—already filled with people waiting for the news—erupted into joyful chants and festive song. The collective will of Tahrir had won. A new day, it seemed, had dawned in Egypt. And that was not all. It also dawned in Pearl Square in Manama, Bahrain; Tahrir Square in Baghdad and San‘a’; in what is now known as Mohammad Bouazizi Square in Tunis; the Green Square in Tripoli; and Maydan al-Shajara in Benghazi—all of these historic centers have served for the last few months as squares of contest and as potential spaces through which long-standing autocracies will, we hope, be replaced by governments fairly elected by the people. I closed this work with a discussion of downtown Cairo and mentioned, in relation to this space, Jürgen Habermas’s lament that many societies these days show signs of a “vanishing public sphere.” If there is anything that these last few months of demonstrating, the congregation of diverse publics, and the peaceful expression of the collective will of the people has proven in the Middle East, it is that the public sphere can be reconstituted when fear has broken and the stakes are high enough.

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Notes Preface 1. Newt Gingrich as quoted by Hendrik Hertzberg, Comment, “Zero Grounds,” New Yorker, August 16, 2010, 27. 2. Philip Nobel, “Map to Ground Zero,” The Nation, September 23, 2002, 49–53, and “The Fix at Ground Zero,” The Nation, January 27, 2003, 25–29. 3. Nicholai Ouroussoff, “A Tower of Impregnability, the Sort Politicians Love,” New York Times, June 30, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/30/arts/30appraisal .html. 4. Samia Mehrez, “Introduction: Cairo, Mother of Cities,” in The Literary Atlas of Cairo: One Hundred Years on the Streets of Cairo, ed. Samia Mehrez (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 4. 5. Yasser Elsheshtawy, “The Middle East City: Moving beyond the Narrative of Loss,” in Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3. 6. Erik Swyngedouw, “The Post-Political City,” in Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City, ed. BAVO (Gideon Boie and Matthaias Pauwels) (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007), 59. 7. Robert Springborg uses this term in a recent paper to define state power in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak as a hybrid of hard and soft power. Robert Springborg, “Protest in a Recalcitrant Polity: Purposes and Reactions.” Paper presented at the 30 Years of Political and Social Protest in Egypt Symposium, Oriental Hall, American University in Cairo, April 21, 2007. 8. One who prepares the hashish. 9. Here this word is transliterated based on the commonly used Egyptian colloquial word for café, ’ahwa (pl. ’ahawi). Throughout this study, when necessary, I will transliterate certain words based on a colloquial pronunciation. 10. Beatriz Jaguaribe, “Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 327–47. 11. James Donald. “This, Here, Now: Imagining the Modern City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), 197.

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Introduction 1. Nancy Reynolds borrows this term from Jonathan Crary’s work to highlight the centrality of certain forms of representation (particularly the circulation of commodity signs) as a “central feature of modernity.” See Nancy Reynolds, “Commodity Communities: Interweavings of Market Cultures, Consumption Practices, and Social Power in Egypt 1907–1961” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2003), 18, 74. See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 2. See, for example, chapter 7 by Khaled Adham in Yasser Elsheshtawy’s edited volume. Adham compares Khedive Isma‘il’s expansion in the nineteenth century to the Heliopolis development project in the early twentieth century and the 1990s Dreamland project. Khaled Adham, “Cairo’s Urban Déjà vu: Globalization and Urban Fantasies,” in Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, ed. Yasser Elshestawy (London: Routledge, 2004), 134–68. 3. See Yasser Elshestawy’s article, “From Dubai to Cairo: Competing Global Cities, Models, and Shifting Centers of Influence,” in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 235–50. 4. Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), 54. 5. Ibid., 25. 6. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar, “Introduction: Contesting Myths, Critiquing Cosmopolitanism, and Creating the New Cairo School of Urban Studies,” in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 27–28. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Ibid. 9. Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). 10. The most noteworthy examples are those of Gloria Anzaldúa and José David Saldívar. See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1990), and José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 11. See, for example, Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), and Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 12. See Sabry Hafez, “Jamaliyyat al-riwaya al-jadida al-qati‘a al-ma‘rifiyya wa-l-naz‘a almudadda li-l-ghina’iyya” [The Aesthetics of the New Novel: Epistemological Rupture and Literary Space], Alif 21 (2001): 184–246; more recently Hafez published a variation of this article in English, “The New Egyptian Novel: Urban Transformation and Narrative Form,” New Left Review 64 (July–August 2010): 47–62. 13. I am thinking particularly of his work The Country and the City as one such example. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).


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14. The Nahda (or awakening) refers to the cultural renaissance and period of prolific translation in Cairo and eventually in other parts of the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The period witnessed developments in literature and print journalism as well as inspiring many of the works of major Muslim reformers. The political activism catalyzed by this renaissance would eventually give rise to several nationalist movements in the region, chief among them in Egypt and Syria. 15. Asef Bayat suggests that by the early 1990s more than half of the residents in the districts of Cairo and Giza could be classified as “poor” or “ultra poor.” See Asef Bayat, “Cairo’s Poor: Dilemmas of Survival and Solidarity,” MERIP Online 202 (Winter 1996), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer202/poor.html. 16. See Hafez, “Jamaliyyat al-riwaya al-jadida”; Dina Heshmat, al-Qahira fi-l-adab al-misri al-hadith wa al-mu‘asir: min hilm al-medina al-kabira ila ‘uzla al-dowahir [Cairo in Modern and Contemporary Egyptian Literature: From the Dream of the Big City to the Alienation of the Suburbs] (Cairo: al-Majlis al-‘Ala li-l-Thaqafa, 2006); Dina Heshmat, “De La Ville Vertige à La Mégapole Fragmentée,” Lettre d’Information de l’Observatorie Urbain du Caire Contemporain (CEDEJ) 6–7 (Spring 2005): 62–68; and Husayn Hammuda, al-Riwaya wa-l-madina: namadhij min kutub al-sittiniyyat fi misr [The Novel and the City: Examples from Authors of the ’60s in Cairo] (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Amma li-Qasur al-Thaqafa, 2000). 17. Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 357. 18. Abu Zayd Rajih, “al-Insan wa-l-makan: al-Qahira namudhajan” [People and Place, Cairo as an Example], in Misr: nazariyyat nahwa al-mustaqbal, al-amal wa-l-makhatir [Egypt: Theories Toward the Future, the Hopes and the Dangers] (Cairo: Asdiqa alkitab li-l-nashr, 1999), 111–33. 19. It should be noted that the three cities described in Hafez’s latest article in the New Left Review, “The New Egyptian Novel,” differ somewhat from the geographical districts described in his earlier article in Alif, “Aesthetics of the New Novel.” 20. Hafez, “Jamaliyyat al-riwaya al-jadida,” 195. 21. Hafez, “The New Egyptian Novel,” 57. 22. Hafez’s configuration is different from that of Franco Moretti, who posits a “third London” in the novels of Dickens as the “wedge” of the middle class in between the districts of the upper class (as represented by the West End in the “silver-fork novels” of the early nineteenth century) and the underworlds of the lower class (the marginals in Victor Hugo’s work). See Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1998), 115–22. It is also this third city that Dina Heshmat focuses on in her article, “De La Ville Vertige à la Mégapole Fragmentée,” in analyzing several novels set in Cairo. See Heshmat, 66. 23. Hafez, “Jamaliyyat al-riwaya al-jadida,” 194. 24. The Infitah, or literally “opening,” refers to the period throughout the 1970s during which the Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, opened up Cairo’s economy to allow for private investment. 25. Abu Zayd Rajih as cited in Hafez, “Jamaliyyat al-riwaya al-jadida,” 189, 191. 26. Hafez, “Jamaliyyat al-riwaya al-jadida,” 186.


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27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Ibid., 186–88. Ibid., 189. Hafez, “The New Egyptian Novel,” 61. Hafez, “Jamaliyyat al-riwaya al-jadida,” 197. Ibid., 193. For more on the proliferation of informal housing in Cairo, see also Asef Bayet, “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People,’” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997): 53–72. 32. It bears mentioning that some of the novels that I am referring to span an older generation than the group of authors that Hafez examines in his article.

Chapter 1 1. Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 26. 2. Farha Ghannam, Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 3. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1998), 56–57. 4. See James Donald on how narratives produce cities. Donald, “This Here Now: Imagining the Modern City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), 186–88. 5. Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 8. 6. Nancy Reynolds, “Commodity Communities: Interweavings of Market Cultures, Consumption Practices, and Social Power in Egypt 1907–1961” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2003), 151–73. 7. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 11. 8. Ibid., 12. 9. Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” 20. 10. Ibid., 24. 11. Ibid., 26. 12. Here I refer to the collection of essays in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). See, in particular, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar’s, “On Alternative Modernities,” 1–23, Leo Ou-fan Lee’s, “Shanghai Modern: Reflections on Urban Culture in China in the 1930s,” 86–122, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity,” 123–64. 13. Jonathon Shannon, Under the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 67. 14. Ibid., 67–68. 15. The word effendi is originally Turkish in origin and thus will be transliterated as it is most commonly transliterated in Egypt. A detailed discussion of its meaning and the connotations of the work will be taken up later in the chapter. 16. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (New York: Routledge, 2000), 13. 17. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).


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18. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991). 19. Reynolds, “Commodity Communities,” 64–74, 86–90. 20. I thank Professor Mona El-Ghobashy of Barnard College for illuminating and discussing this point with me. Marshall Berman suggests something similar in his discussion of the dual consciousness that epitomizes the modern condition. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Group, 1988), 17. 21. Algred de Tarde (a lieutenant in General Hubert Lyautey’s army in Morocco), speaking about the challenge and opportunity for the French in colonizing and rebuilding Morocco. Cited in Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87. 22. For more on the early foundations of capitalist market organization in Cairo, see the following works: Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), and Reynolds, “Commodity Communities.” 23. Susan Buck-Morss’s work on Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project is far more critical of Baron Haussmann’s “totalitarian” aesthetic of the imperial state than the work of David Harvey. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 89–90. See also David Harvey (Paris, Capital of Modernity [New York: Routledge, 2006], 13, 107–16) on the scale of Haussmann’s projects and the role of the RER, which was designed to connect the outlying arrondissements where most of the workers and migrant laborers lived to the inner parts of the city, 24. It should be noted that similar measures to modernize through an emphasis on hygiene and sanitation were implemented in many of the cities of the French colonies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with varying levels of success. For more on this see, for example, Gwendolyn Wright’s discussion of Casablanca (The Politics of Design, 101–6). 25. See André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 291–97. 26. Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), 162. 27. Lucie Ryzova, “Egyptianizing Modernity Through the ‘New Effendiya’: Social and Cultural Constructions of the Middle Class in Egypt under the Monarchy,” in Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy J. Johnson, and Barak A. Salmoni (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 125–26. 28. Ibid. 29. Ryzova, “Egyptianizing Modernity,” 130. See also Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, “The Roots of Supra-Egyptian Nationalism,” in Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11, 16–22. 30. Raymond, Cairo, 300.


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31. There seems to be a slight difference of opinion regarding the Azbakiyya gardens. Max Rodenbeck claims it was modeled after the Bois de Bologne garden in Paris, whereas André Raymond claims that it was an English-style garden modeled after the Parc Monceau in Paris. Jean-Luc Arnaud’s explanation seems to make the most sense: while the idea of a private park was definitely modeled after the English model, to avoid annual fees for the surrounding residents, the idea, modeled after the Bois de Bologne, of erecting commercial businesses surrounding the park and charging a small entrance fee seemed to be the most desirable solution. To compare, see Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious, 168; Raymond, Cairo, 315; and JeanLuc Arnaud, Le Caire: Mise en Place d’une Ville Moderne 1867–1907 (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 108. 32. Raymond, Cairo, 302. 33. A type of panel made of decorative wooden latticework used to cover a window or small balcony overlooking the street. 34. Raymond, Cairo, 306–8. 35. Mitchell, “Stage of Modernity,” 18. 36. Arnaud, Le Caire, 94 (translation from the French). 37. Mitchell considers the emergence of these schools in the center of the city as one of the defining moments when a “new politics of the modern state appeared” in Egypt. He argues that by spreading them out around the city, civilian education became a tool for control and disciplining the masses. Echoing Foucault, for Mitchell these institutions provided a way to establish a hierarchy of power after the nation-state. See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 63–94. 38. Raymond, Cairo, 314–15. 39. See Edward Said’s essay, “The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida,” on the way in which Verdi’s Aida (which was commissioned by Khedive Isma‘il) represented back to the audience of foreigners an Egypt that reified their view of the Orient. In so doing, Said argues, the opera also participated in the creation of the city’s European facade. In Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1995), 111–32. 40. See, as mentioned in the Introduction, Nancy Reynolds (Commodity Communities, 64–74) for a critique of this stark notion of duality. 41. Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 98. 42. Galila El Kadi and Dalilia ElKerdany, “Belle-Époque Cairo: The Politics of Refurbishing the Downtown Business District,” in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 353. 43. Laila Shukry El-Hamamsy, “The Assertion of Egyptian Identity,” in Ethnic Identity: Cultural Continuities and Change, ed. George De Vos and Lola Romanuccci-Ross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 287. 44. Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious, 171. 45. Buck-Morss The Dialects of Seeing, 90. 46. Ibid., 81. 47. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 114. 48. Ibid., 212. 49. Ibid., 212.


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Notes 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 17–18. Raymond, Cairo, 328–29. Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious, 184–85. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 183–84. The opening of Appaduri’s Modernity at Large suggests as much. Joseph R. Slaughter, “Master Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenya,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 37–38. Ibid., 47. Ryzova, “Egyptianizing Modernity,” 125. Gershoni and Jankowski, “The Roots of Supra-Egyptian Nationalism,” 11. Raymond, Cairo, 319–20. Ibid., 320–21. Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman cite slightly different figures for this period. Their figures are taken from The Census of Egypt Taken in 1907. They note that by 1907 there were already 147,000 Europeans living in Egypt. This number does not include the population of Arabs from other areas of the Levant (roughly 34,000), nor Armenians, Sudanese, or Jewish immigrants. See Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 35. Jean-Luc Arnaud includes two interesting maps dated 1874 and 1892 that show the distribution of foreigners in the district of the downtown in comparison to members of the Egyptian elite classes (Le Caire, 167, 259). Raymond, Cairo, 334. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 9. Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 356–57. Ibid., 358. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 5. Franco Moretti, Graphs Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 64. Donald, “This, Here, Now,” 185. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 193.

Chapter 2 1. Gamal al-Sharqawi, Hariq al-Qahira [The Fire of Cairo] (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1976), 5–6. 2. As quoted in Anne-Claire Kerboeuf, “The Cairo Fire of 26 January 1952 and the Interpretation of History,” in Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy Johnson, and Barack A. Salmoni (New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 201.


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3. See al-Sharqawi, particularly chapter 1 of part 3, “Britaniyya mutalabisa” [Britain . . . Caught Red-Handed] and chapter 2 of part 3, “al-waqud wa-l-kilab” [The Fuel and the Dogs], 426–54. 4. Jean and Simonne Lacouture, Egypt in Transition, trans. Francis Scarfe (New York: Criterion Books, 1958), 120–21. 5. Ibid., 201. 6. Ibid., 212. 7. Ibid. 8. William Granara, trans., Granada: A Novel, (Syracuse University Press, 2003). 9. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 183–84. 10. The connotations for the term al-nazir are multiple. It may refer to a spectator or gazer, as well as a school principal or a curator. 11. Radwa ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba [A Piece of Europe] (Beirut: al-Markaz al-thaqafa al-‘Arabi, 2003), 8. 12. Ibid., 209. 13. Amina Elbendary, “Part of Europe: Part of Nowhere,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online (June 19–25, 2003), http://www.weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/643/bo4.htm. 14. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Group, 1988), 9–10. 15. Ibid., 17. 16. Ibid., 10. 17. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 6. 18. Ibid., 5–9. Furthermore, her concluding chapter in the novel returns once more to the Sphinx, invoking al-Maqrizi’s idea that the Sphinx functions as a talisman guarding Egypt. 19. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 12–14. 20. The year of the narrator’s birth also marks that of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty whereby King Faruq sought British military reinforcements to guard the Suez Canal, fearing an invasion by Italy. According to Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, this decade in particular (the 1930s) were characterized by “a widespread mood of disillusionment” because of the ineffectuality of the Wafd and its failure to reflect popular interests. In the context of this growing dissatisfaction, the Treaty of 1936 set off a wave of anti-British protests by nationalists who had expected full independence from British control following Egypt’s independence on February 22, 1922. See Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, “The Roots of Supra-Egyptian Nationalism,” in Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–78. 21. Elizabeth Wilson, “Looking Backward: Nostalgia and the City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), 133. 22. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 206. 23. Ibid., 206. 24. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 15–16. 25. There are numerous occasions when the narrator confesses to the reader that he cannot quite recall something or that he might be getting one thing mixed up with


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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

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another (see, in ‘Ashur’s text, page 71 by way of example). In another instance, he draws on the testimony of a policeman watching the fires of 1952 in order to have an “outsider’s viewpoint” (see, in ‘Ashur’s text, page 20). ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 70. Ibid., 58. Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley: University in California Press, 1995), 33–41. Ibid., 59–60. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 70–74. Ibid., 75–76. David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 101. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 316. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 98. Ibid., 100. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 40–41. Although al-Tahrir Square was officially named Sadat Square (see, e.g., maps of the Cairo metro system where it is still referred to as such), it is not commonly referred to by that name. See James Donald on the idea of flânerie as a form of domesticating the space of the city. Donald, “This, Here, Now: Imagining the Modern City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), 194. Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 358. The proprietor of the Casino Badia (Badia’s Cabaret) was the well-known actress and dancer Badia Masabni. She designed the cabaret after European-style music halls and had a troupe of dancers that would perform regularly. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 18–19. One of the leading Communist leaders in the region, Henri Curiel, founded the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (DMNL), a group that was instrumental in organizing the February 21, 1946, anti-British demonstration. On that day, more than one hundred thousand workers and students protested the British presence in Egypt and demanded better working conditions and higher wages. For details on the demonstration, see Faiza Rady’s article on the experiences of the Egyptian trade unionist Attia al-Serafi, “The right to life,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online (July 28–August 3, 2005), http://www.weekly.ahram.org.eg/ 2005/753/profile.htm. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 57. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 20.


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49. This point is also discussed in Chapter 1 in reference to the work of Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation: 1930–1945, 11, 16–22, and Lucie Ryzova, “Egyptianizing Modernity through the ‘New Effendiyya’: Social and Cultural Constructions of the Middle Class in Egypt Under the Monarchy,” in Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy J. Johnson, and Barak A. Salmoni (New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 131, 150. 50. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 33–35. 51. Ibid., 172–74. 52. Ibid., 173. 53. Ibid., 171. 54. For instance, Gamal al-Sharqawi argues that the fire in Casino Badia (also known as Casino al-Opera) occurred spontaneously, whereas the others following it were set deliberately. Sharqawi describes a number of possible renditions of the scene at the casino collected in his interviews and research. The story that is most commonly told (and one that Jean and Simonne Lacouture also recount in their book; see Egypt in Transition. trans. Francis Scarfe [New York: Criterion Books, 1958], 109) is that immediately leading up to the fire, there was an officer (and there is some speculation as to whether he was a police officer or an army officer, and whether there was more than one) at the casino drinking with one (or possibly more) of the dancers at midday. A few of the protestors who had entered asked him if he did not feel ashamed drinking in light of the tragic battle of the officers at Isma‘iliyya the day prior. After that, and there is further speculation as to the exact details of what happened, some claim that the officer stood up to get the protestors to leave and pulled out his pistol. In so doing, he struck the table and a fire was lit (possibly from a candle), whereas other accounts claim that the protestors stormed the casino, smashed the furniture, and the fire was lit in the process (‘Ashur tells the story along these lines). Gamal al-Sharqawi ultimately discredits the story of the officer as the cause of the fire, considering it a fabrication on behalf of a number of police officers who were nowhere near the scene. He claims the fires at the al-Opera Square might have occurred for any number of possible reasons, but the important point is that they were spontaneous, whereas the others were planned. On these events in particular, see al-Sharqawi, Hariq al-qahira, 75–84. Still the argument could be made that the fire was set at the casino specifically as an act of renouncing certain activities that were viewed as an affront to Egyptian traditions and cultural practices (e.g., drinking, gambling, cabaret-style entertainment), particularly after the deaths at Isma‘iliyya the day before. ‘Imad al-Din Street, which at that time was the heart of the cabaret district in Cairo (today the majority of nightclubs are found on al-Haram Street in Giza), was also one of the most badly ruined areas in the fires of 1952. Thus it is reasonable to suppose (and Professor Husayn Hammuda of Cairo University has suggested this) that some of the bitterness by the demonstrators, and later the rioters, was directed at these forms of Western entertainment, for which these cabarets were the most prominent symbol. This particular dimension of the fires was discussed in a personal communication with Professor Husayn Hammuda of Cairo University, February 28, 2007. 55. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 89. 56. Ibid., 177–78.


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57. Anne-Claire Kerboeuf, “The Cairo Fire of 26 January 1952 and the Interpretation of History,” in Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy Johnson, and Barack A. Salmoni (New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 210. 58. Ryzova, “Egyptianizing Modernity,” 150. 59. Ibid., 201–2. 60. Here I am referring to the narration in chapter 1. See pages 11–23 of the novel. 61. Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 204. 62. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 210. 63. Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, 204. 64. Farha Ghannam, Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27–28. 65. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 211. 66. Saad-Eddin Ibrahim, “Cairo: A Sociological Profile,” in The Expanding Metropolis: Coping with the Urban Growth of Cairo, ed. Ahmet Evin (Singapore: Concept Media, 1985), 28. 67. Ghannam, Remaking the Modern, 30–31. Ghannam’s work offers a compelling exploration of the relocation of these Bulaq residents to al-Zawiyya al-Hamra as part of Sadat’s attempt to “beautify” the “face” of Cairo. 68. Ibrahim, “Cairo: A Sociological Profile,” 28. For two recent articles reflecting on the event thirty years later on the anniversary of the 1977 uprising, see also, Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal, “Anwar al-Sadat ba‘d zilzal 18/19 yanayir 1977” [Anwar Sadat after the Earthquake of January 18–19, 1977], al-Qahira (January 16, 2007): 7–10; and Fatima Faraj, “Chronicles of an Uprising,” Al-Ahram Weekly (January 18–24, 2007): 4. 69. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 183–84. 70. Elbendary, “Part of Europe,” 3. 71. ‘Ashur, Qit‘a min Urubba, 212. 72. Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 192. 73. By way of example, ‘Ashur’s conclusion that the fires were set as an extension of Egyptian outrage at Israel and the British role in bringing about the establishment of a Jewish state is one such historical revision. 74. See, for example, the following pages in ‘Ashur’s novel: 18–20 (demonstrations of 1946), 91–92 (demonstrations following the 1967 defeat), and 191–98 (demonstrations against the Gulf War).

Chapter 3 1. Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 26. 2. Janet Abu-Lughod, in her magnum opus on Cairo, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), suggests that colonial urbanism in Egypt (as in other cities as well) was epitomized by the bifurcation of the city into two parts, one modern and one medieval or traditional. On this idea


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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

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specifically, see also an earlier article that precipitated Abu-Lughod’s larger work, “Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, no. 4 (July 1965): 429–57. Gabir ‘Usfur, Zaman al-riwaya [The Age of the Novel] (Damascus: al-Mada, 1999), 314. Ibid., 317. Michael Denning uses this phrase in the context of American proletarian literature of the 1920s and 1930s. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), 201, 229. On this idea specifically, see Abu-Lughod, “Tale of Two Cities,” 429–57. Jean-Luc Arnaud, Le Caire: Mise en Place d’une Ville Moderne 1867–1907 (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 173. The 1952 fires on the eve of the revolution are a most obvious example of this “contest” over the class-coding of space. See also Farha Ghannam (Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002] on the way in which the old neighborhood of Bulaq became a similar site of social contest in light of Sadat’s renovation plans for the area and his decision to relocate several thousand residents to the suburban government housing project in the far north district of al-Zawiyya al-Hamra. Janet Abu-Lughod, “Migrant Adjustment to City Life: The Egyptian Case,” American Journal of Sociology 67, no. 1 (July 1961): 22. Gamal Hamdan, Shakhsiyat Misr: dirasa fi ‘abqariyyat al-makan [The Personality of Egypt: Reflections on the Genius of a Place] (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1967), 315–16. In this period, Abu-Lughod notes that one out of every three Cairenes was a migrant to the city. See Abu-Lughod, “Migrant Adjustment to City Life,” 23. Ibid., 25. In fact, it is interesting to note that on most maps that outline this area or offer information on the demographic, with the exception of Arnaud (see his map of the district; Le Caire, 115), there is no differentiation made between the popular quality of the neighborhood west of Tal‘at Harb/Sulayman Pasha and the wealthier district east of Tal‘at Harb/Sulayman Pasha (i.e., the district is not named). This may be due to the small size of the area and the map’s lack of specificity, but the area most commonly appears as a couple of streets on the edge of downtown lying between Tal‘at Harb and Ramsis. See the following maps by way of example: Abu-Lughod, Cairo, 187; Abu-Lughod, “Migrant Adjustment to City Life,” 25; Arnaud, Le Caire, 126, 259; Ghannam, Remaking the Modern, 3; Richard Jacquemond, Entre Scribes et Écrivains: Le Champ Littéraire dans L’Égypt Contemporaine (Paris: Editions Actes Sud, 2003), 213; André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 310, 323; Cairo City Map (Verona, Italy: Geodia, 2004); Cairo City Key: Detailed Maps and Street Index (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 2003). Khayri Shalabi, Salih Hisa (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 2000), 7–8. Café Riche historically was known as one of the prominent cultural institutions of downtown Cairo and was frequented by members of the Egyptian nationalist movement and leading leftist intellectuals and writers. Many intellectuals met at


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16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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Café Groppi as well, but it was primarily known as a foreign pâtisserie patronized by the upper and middle classes. In this respect, it is apt to compare Shalabi’s style to that of the American modernist writers of the “ghetto pastorals” or the “tenement novels” that Michael Denning has analyzed in the context of the Popular Front literature from the 1920s and 1930s. He describes the ghetto pastoral as a tradition of proletarian writing that narrates the cultural richness of American lower-class (often immigrant) quarters while also rendering them as tragic spaces of social and economic disenfranchisement. For a discussion of the genre, see Denning, The Cultural Front, 230. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 9. Ghannam, Remaking the Modern, 174–75. For a broader discussion of this idea in the context of her work, see her concluding chapter (pp. 170–77). Asef Bayat, “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People,’” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997): 57. Ibrahim Aslan, Malik Hazin [The Heron] (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 1983) and Naguib Mahfuz, Zuqaq al-Midaq [Midaq Alley] (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1947). The Sa‘id is the southern rural area of Egypt, most commonly referred to as Upper Egypt. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 22–24. While this practice no longer exists, it was common for many migrants from the countryside to arrive in Cairo without any official documentation. Thus they were referred to as saqit al-qayd, literally those with an absent record. See Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 249. Similarly, in Shalabi’s description of the makeshift, informal history of the quarter, he makes it a point to say that in official government records the residents of the buildings and the dilapidated buildings did not exist. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 34–35. Ibid., 96. The translation of this passage is taken from an article by Youssef Rakha, “End of an Era,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, September 14–20, 2000, http://www .weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/499/books1.htm. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 111–12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 5–6. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 11. One of the chapters in the novel on Salih is aptly titled Za‘im (leader). Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 33. Ibid., 271. See chapters 3 and 4 in Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 71–133. Marilyn Booth, Bayram Al-Tunisi’s Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies (London: St. Antony’s Middle East Monographs, 1990), 136. Ibid., 138. Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt: 1880–1985 (London: Routledge, 2004), 215.


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38. The linking of land (i.e., the countryside and the peasant) with the essence of national culture is hardly unique to Egypt. Such ideas were particularly evident in the writing of European nationalists (such as J. G. Herder) as well as Russian social realists writers such as Maxim Gorky and A. S. Neverov. See also the work by Raymond Williams on the subject, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). For the case in Egypt, see “The Literary Fallah” and “The Garralous Peasant” in Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary, 16–24, 25–59, and Hilary Kilpatrick, The Modern Egyptian Novel: A Study in Social Criticism (London: Ithaca Press, 1974), chap. 5. For a similar phenomenon in the case of northern Europe, see Jane Nadel-Klein, Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss Along the Scottish Coast (Oxford: Berg, 2003). 39. Muhsin al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 118. 40. Ibid., 53–54. 41. Ibid., 259. 42. Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 109. 43. See Kilpatrick, The Modern Egyptian Novel, chaps. 1 and 2; J. Brugman, “The Modern Novel,” in An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 1984), chap. 7; Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, “The Roots of Supra-Egyptian Nationalism,” in Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Pierre Cachia, “The Assumptions and Aspirations of Egyptian Modernists,” in An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), chap. 1; and Elliott Colla, “The Stuff of Egypt: The Nation, The State and Their Proper Objects,” new formations 45 (Winter 2001–2): 72–90. 44. On Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abd Allah’s particular style and use of colloquial, see Idwar al-Kharrat’s introduction to Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abd Allah’s short novel al-Duff wa-lsinduq [The Tambourine and the Box], “Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abd Allah: al-rihla ila ma wara’ al-waqa‘iyya” [Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abd Allah: The Journey into What is Behind Realism], al-Duff wa al-sinduq (Cairo: Khatwa, 1981), 5–32. 45. al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel, 18. 46. Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, 71–73. 47. For recent articles on the debate over the role of colloquial poets and colloquial more generally, see Gamal al-Ghitani, “Adonis wa-l-‘ammiyya” [Adonis and Colloquial], Akhbar al-adab (November 12, 2006): 3; Yusuf ‘Iz al-Din, “al-‘Ammiya tahaddid bi-indithar al-‘Arab” [Colloquial Marks the End of Arabism], Akhbar al-adab (March 19, 2006): 32; ‘Id ‘Abd al-Halim, “Mata ya‘ud al-i‘tibar l-shu‘ara al-‘ammiyya al-misriyya” [When will the Consideration of Egyptian Colloquial Poets Return?], al-Qahira (March 21, 2006): 18; Ibrahim Mansur’s interview with Gamil ‘Attiya Ibrahim (1981) in Ibrahim Mansur, al-Izdiwaj al-thaqafi wa ‘azma al-mu‘arada al-misriyya: muhawarat Ibrahim Mansur [Cultural Doubleness and the Crisis of the Egyptian Opposition: Conversations by Ibrahim Mansur] (Cairo: Dar Mirit, 2006), 147–57; Walter Armbrust, “The Split Vernacular,” in Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37–62; Noha Radwan, “Two Masters of Egyptian ‘Ammiyya Poetry,” Journal of Arabic Lit-


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Notes

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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erature 35, no. 2 (2004): 221–43; and Cachia, “The Use of the Colloquial,” in An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, 59–75. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 33–34. Marshall Berman as quoted in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 123. The name is thought by some to be a play on that of renowned Professor El-Said Badawi of the American University in Cairo, who compiled a comprehensive dictionary of colloquial Egyptian that was published by the American University in Cairo Press. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 209–10. I am grateful to Professor Batool Khattab of ‘Ayn Shams University for bringing this point to my attention. For more on the uses of this term, see Jane Nadel-Klein’s, “Fisherfolk under Glass? Memory and the Heritage Wars,” in Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss Along the Scottish Coast (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 171–212. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 58–59. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978) and Dust Tracks on the Road (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985)[0]. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 72–74. See David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006), and Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), for more on the relationship between consumption and modernity. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 119. Ibid., 227. Chakrabarty, “Adda, Calcutta,” 123–64. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 152–53. Ibid., 131. The English translation of Jacquemond’s text was published in 2008. Any passages referenced henceforth refer to the English translated edition. See Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt, trans. David Tresilian (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008). Jacquemond, Conscience of the Nation, 174–75. In addition, see Jacquemond’s brilliant map locating these cultural institutions (p. 176). Ibid., 174. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 173–74. Chakrabarty, “Adda, Calcutta,” 152. See also Janet Abu-Lughod on the role of the coffee shop as the focal point of social life for urban migrants from particular villages. She compares this closed club for men to the function of the British pub in the West. Abu-Lughod, “Migrant Adjustment to City Life,” 32.


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72. The narrator drops many hints throughout the novel that he is interested in the clique and the ghurza because he is writing about them. Salih soon becomes his primary focus, as is evident for example on page 108, when the narrator admits to visiting the ghurza early so as to get a chance to sit with Salih on his own because he had become more important to him than any other member of the clique. 73. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 155. 74. Ibid., 226. 75. Ibid., 115. 76. Ibid., 207. 77. For more on different ways of classifying facets of modernity and configurations of the modern subject, Dilip Gaonkar considers the differences between the Baudelarian cultural–aesthetic modernity and the Weberian societal–cultural modernity. See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” 4–9. 78. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso), 1997. 79. Denning, The Cultural Front, 230–31. 80. Ibid., 248. 81. Ibid., 239. 82. The case of the politics of the Nubian separatist movement in Egypt and the novels of Hajjaj Hasan Uddul suggests a more radical culture- and race-based political agenda. 83. In the context of the emerging Civil Rights movement in the United States and the creation of American race-based politics, these novels are about, first and foremost, the experience of racism, alienation, and ethnic difference. 84. Denning, The Cultural Front, 251. 85. Ibid., 244. 86. Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 66. 87. For example, the narrator, in making a point to the reader, refers casually to Sabir’s ‘Asal’s novel “Salih Hisa.” We can, with some certainty, assume that Sabir eventually succeeded in writing a novel about Salih. It does not appear that the narrator himself is the author of the novel that he refers to here. See Shalabi, Salih Hisa, 89. 88. Denning, The Cultural Front, 254.

Chapter 4 1. Robert Spencer, “‘The Zone of Occult Instability’: The Utopian Promise of the African Novel in the Era of Decolonisation,” New Formations: After Fanon 47 (Summer 2002): 75. 2. Idris ‘Ali, Taht Khatt al-Faqr [Under the Poverty Line] (Cairo: Dar Mirit, 2005). All translations in this chapter are taken from Elliott Colla’s English translation. See Idris ‘Ali, Poor, trans. Elliott Colla (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007). 3. Spencer, “The Zone of Occult Instability,” 76. 4. Ibid., 75. 5. Ibid.


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6. In Nubian culture and folklore the river’s symbolic meaning is twofold and contradictory. It is both the source of life (means of subsisting and fertility) and also feared for possessing a host of spirit beings (river angels and creatures) of both good and evil persuasions. John Kennedy, in his work on the subject, writes that those who enter the profession of fortune telling report to “being pulled into the river by the spirits, who endow their victim with special powers before allowing him to return to human habitation” (p. 440). ‘Ali’s narrator’s plunge into the Nile may be read as a metaphorical echoing of this myth, such that he is pulled into the river by these spirits, only to emerge from it with the ability to speak with heightened insight and vision. See John G. Kennedy, “Aman Doger: Nubian Monster of the Nile,” Journal of American Folklore 83, no. 330 (October–December 1970): 438–45. 7. ‘Ali, Poor, 29–30. 8. Ibid., 39. 9. For more on Idris ‘Ali’s style as it pertains to the tradition of Egyptian nationalist literature, see Elliott Colla’s “Translator’s Afterword,” in Poor, 198–99. 10. Haggag Hasan Uddul, Udaba nubiyun wa nuqqad unsuriyun [Nubian Writers and Racist Critics] (Cairo: Markaz al-Qahira li-Dirasat Huquq al-Insan, 2006), 13. 11. See the following articles as evidence of this debate: Haggag Hasan Uddul, “Haggag Hasan Uddul yatahaddath fi tathir ‘irqi li-l-Nubiyin” [Haggag Hasan Uddul Speaks on the Ethnic Cleansing of Nubians], Akhbar al-adab (December 18, 2005): 32– 33; Yahya Mukhtar, “Abadan lan takun al-Nuba waraqa li-l-tadakhul fi shu’un Misr” [Nubia Will Never be a Pretext for Interfering in Egyptian Affairs], Akhbar al-adab (December 25, 2005): 6–7; ‘Izzat al-Qamhawi, “Tathir ‘irqi” [Ethnic Cleansing], Akhbar al-adab (December 12, 2005): 7; Sayyid Salaam, “Qadiyya al-Nuba . . . ‘juz’ min kull’” [The Issue of Nubia . . . ‘A Part of the Whole’], Akhbar al-adab (December 12, 2005): 6; Muhammad ‘Amr, “Intaha al-dars ya Uddul” [The Lesson is Finished Uddul], Akhbar al-adab (January 1, 2006): 34; ‘Ali ‘Awad Allah Muhammad, “Haggag Ibn al-Nuba al-Barr” [Haggag . . . Loyal Son of the Nuba], Akhbar al-adab (January 1, 2006): 34; Hamdi al-Batran, “Haggag Hasan Uddul: katib Misri watani . . . raghm ‘anf al-karihin li-fawzihi bi-ja‘izat Sawaris” [Haggag Hasan Uddul: Egyptian Nationalist Writer in Spite of Those Who Begrudge His Winning the Sawaris Prize], al-Qahira (February 21, 2006): 19; Tal‘at Radwan, “Bara’at Haggag Uddul min almutalaba bi-dawla mustaqila li-l-nubiyin” [Haggag Uddul Free of the Demand for an Independent State for the Nubians], al-Qahira (February 28, 2006): 18; Rania Khallaf, “Right of Return: Are Nubians Really Comparable to the Palestinian Diaspora?” al-Ahram Weekly (March 30–April 5, 2006): 4; Nour Amin, “I Have a Dream,” Egypt Today (September 2002), http://www.mafhoum.com/press3/111C34.htm. 12. Ahmad ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti Higazi from the Preface of Uddal, Udaba nubiyun wa nuqqad unsuriyun, 8. 13. It is interesting to note that in a 2002 article by Pascale Ghazaleh on displaced Sudanese in the slum district of Arb‘a wa Nus, she reports that many race-related riots have broken out between the Egyptians and the Sudanese, with the refugees claiming the Egyptians are racist, particularly toward black Africans. See Pascale Ghazaleh, “Two Miles into Limbo: Displaced Sudanese in a Cairo Slum,” Middle East Report 225 (Winter 2002): 2–7.


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14. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Robert A. Fernea, Nubian Ethnographies (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1991), 184–85. For more on the complexities of Nubian identity, see specifically chapter 17 by Robert Fernea and Aleya Rouchdy, 183–200. 15. Specifically, see chapter 4, Tahjir wa-l-ta‘wid [Migration and Reparations] of Mahir Ahmad Zaki’s work where he discusses the difficulties Nubians faced during resettlement. The lack of arable land made the traditional Nubian way of life impossible in the resettled villages of Komambo and Esna. Furthermore, the Egyptian Ministry of Housing stopped building homes for the Nubians as early as July 1963, and those they had built were not enough to house the numerous migrants that fled during the flooding. This, and the reality of starvation due to their inability to sustain their way of life on the new lands, he argues, is part of the reason that so many Nubians were forced to emigrate to Cairo and Alexandria during the 1960s. See Mahir Ahmad Zaki, Hakadha takallama al-Nubiyun: mawsu‘a Nubiyya [Thus Spoke the Nubians: Nubian Encyclopedia] (Cairo: Mahir Ahmad Zaki, 2001), 124–39. 16. Confirming Uddul’s assertion here is beyond the scope of this work. 17. Higazi, from the Preface of Uddul, Udaba nubiyun wa nuqqad unsuriyun, 9. 18. Uddul, Udaba nubiyun wa nuqqad unsuriyun, 29. 19. Many of these themes are related to the natural environment of Nubia, such as the recurring presence in these works of the Nile, date palms, mountains, the moon, and the reservoir. He also discusses the integration of many Nubian songs in Nubian novels and poems and argues that it is from these songs that a Nubian narrative style has emerged. In Uddul, Udaba nubiyun wa nuqqad unsuriyun, see specifically chapter 4 (pp. 67–113). 20. Uddul, Udaba nubiyun wa nuqqad unsuriyun, 28–31. 21. Ibid., 31. 22. For more on the early ideologies of the Egyptian nationalist program and the role of Egyptian nationalist literature in cultivating this identity, see Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), specifically pp. 11–20 and pp. 191–227. 23. Uddul, Udaba nubiyun wa nuqqad unsuriyun, 33. 24. Ibid., 40–41. 25. Ibid., 38. 26. Interestingly, offering a somewhat contrasting position to Uddul, Richard Jacquemond suggests that Egyptian sponsorship of Nubian culture (he cites, for example, the Nubian museum inaugurated in Aswan in November 1997) “compensates” to some extent for the “social and economic marginalization” of the Nubian community in Egypt. In this same vein, he also notes that some of the critical attention paid to Nubian literary production is not merely a result of its “artistic value,” but what one might call “a compassion effect for a human community that has been the victim of history.” See Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State, and Society in Modern Egypt, trans. David Tresilian (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008), 183–84.


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27. Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 13–14. 28. Elliott Colla discusses the many literary and thematic allusions of Idris ‘Ali’s text, including those of Muhammad Choukri, Maxime Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, Ihsan ‘Abd al-Qaddus, Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa al-Aswany, Taha Hussayn, Yahya Haqqi, and Sonallah Ibrahim, among others. See Elliott Colla, “Translator’s Afterword,” 197–203. 29. The term “barabra” is the plural of the word “barbari” meaning barbarian(s) in Arabic. The word was formerly used by many Egyptians and colonials to refer to any person who is black in color and non-Arabic speaking. It was often used in reference to the Nubians. The definition of the term is that of Idris ‘Ali as stated in a personal interview. Idris ‘Ali, in discussion with the author, Hanager State Theater, Zamalik, April 5, 2007. See also Elliott Colla’s definition and exploration of the significance of this word in his “Translator’s Afterword,” 202–3. 30. ‘Ali, Poor, 59. 31. Cairo is often referred to by the epithet umm al-dunya. This title is taken from the Arabic edition (p. 89); the title in the English translation is “Cairo Arrival” (p. 77). 32. ‘Ali, Poor, 77–78. 33. Ibid., 81–82. 34. Adil Kamil’s Millim al-Akbar [Millim the Eldest], an Egyptian novel written in the 1940s, offers a similarly sympathetic account of poverty and struggle in Cairo, although the city as a space is not central to the novel. See Adil Kamil, Millim alakbar (Cairo: Lajnat al-Nashr li-l-Jam‘iyin, 1944). 35. Yusuf Idris, Qa‘ al-Madina (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1970), 129. The English translation is by Pierre Cachia. See Pierre Cachia’s “City Dregs,” in Roger Allen, In the Eye of the Beholder: Tales of Egyptian Life from the Writings of Yusuf Idris (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1978), 65. 36. Many of Yusuf Idris’s stories concern the lives of Cairo’s marginalized and poor. While the stories are often attentive to the minute details of the lives of these characters, the narrator describing them does so with a voice of objective detachment. 37. Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 199. 38. Ibid., 197. 39. Ibid., 197–99. 40. It is interesting to note that ‘Ali’s experiences in Bulaq as a migrant youth differ from Farha Ghannam’s anthropological research on the district. She argues that the residents of Bulaq (before being transplanted to the peripheral district al-Zawiyya al-Hamra by Sadat) retained strong social ties and a sense of pride in their identification as being from the neighborhood. 41. Peter Geiser, “Cairo’s Nubian Families,” Cairo Papers in Social Science 4, no. 1 (December 1980): 12–20. 42. ‘Ali, Poor, 87–88. 43. Ibid., 91. 44. See, for example, pp. 8, 20, and 175–76 in Poor. 45. ‘Ali, Poor, 99. 46. Ibid., 90.


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47. There is an unmistakable irony in the fact that the very household where he is employed as a servant is where he will first encounter Gorky and Marx. The irony is further intensified by the fact that the head of the house, Fu’ad al-Shami, is one of the petty tyrants that ‘Ali decides will never understand the meaning of revolutionary struggle and, in fact, will continually stand in its way by perpetuating uneven power relations. 48. Boris Byalik, M. Gorky: Selected Short Stories (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), 11. 49. ‘Ali, Poor, 119 (italics here are mine). 50. Ibid., 121–22. 51. Ibid., 120. 52. Ibid., 125. 53. Ibid., 131. 54. Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 78. 55. As quoted from Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 176, in Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice, 78. 56. Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice, 78. 57. Ibid., 68–69. 58. ‘Ali, Poor, 133. 59. Ibid., 135–36. 60. Abu-Lughod also describes the Egyptianization of the downtown with this new influx of military elites. See Abu-Lughod, Cairo, 204. 61. ‘Ali, Poor, 140. 62. Ibid., 141. 63. Specifically he writes, “The war intensifies while you sit pondering your personal defeat. The war. THE WAR! Kids start putting on overalls and carrying Czech rifles. You have your chronic issue with the men in tanks. The war is between them and foreign invaders, with the people stuck in between as mere pretext.” See ‘Ali, Poor, 191. 64. Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice, 79. 65. ‘Ali, Poor, 15–17. 66. Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice, 143. 67. According to Michael Denning, the “proletarian literary formation” that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States was an “alliance” of writers, artists, intellectuals, and activists who broadly shared a political commitment to raising social consciousness through cultural mediums for the struggle of the working classes. While they differed in their specific affiliations and the goals of many of these parties (i.e., some were Socialists, some were Communists, some were activists not aligned with a party), they were uniformly committed to the idea that their artistic and political pursuits were part of the same overall struggle. For more on this literary formation, see Michael Denning “‘The Literary Class War’: Rethinking Proletarian Literature,” in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), 200–29.


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68. James Donald, “This, Here, Now: Imagining the Modern City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), 194 (italics mine). 69. ‘Ali, Poor, 17. 70. Ibid., 10–11. 71. Mike Gold [Irwin Granich], “Towards a Proletarian Art,” Liberator (February 1921), as cited in Denning, The Cultural Front, 230.

Chapter 5 1. Samir Khalaf, Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (London: Saqi Books, 2006), 32. 2. Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies in Cities and Regions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 246. 3. al-Aswany, Alaa, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan: Riwaya [The Ya‘qubiyan Building] 4th edition (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 2003). For the remainder of this chapter, except when noted, any passages I cite from the novel in the body of the text refer to Humphrey Davies’ English translation. In an effort to avoid confusion, I will also refer to the novel by his transliterated title in English as well as the names of the characters in the work. See Alaa al-Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 3rd ed., trans. Humphrey Davies (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005). 4. See Gamal al-Ghitani’s review of the novel in the back pages of the Arabic edition (the publication of the original article is not listed), Alaa al-Aswany, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (Cairo: Maktabat Matbuli, 2003), 350–51. 5. Sabry Hafez, “Imarat Ya‘qubiyan: al-tanmit al-sardi wa-l-khibra al-sama‘iyya, wa adab al-talsin al-siyasi” [Generic Narrative Style, the Experience of Hearsay, and the Literature of Political Tongue-Wagging], Cinema Isis Blogspot (August 2006), http://www.cinemaisis.blogspot.com/2006/08/blog-post_17.html. 6. Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 410. 7. Huda Ibrahim, “‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan: jil jadid yughadhdhi awridat al-fann al-sabi‘ fi Misr” [The Yacoubian Building: A New Generation Feeds the Veins of Cinema in Egypt], Cinema 38 (June 2006): 82. 8. This issue of heritage recovery in the context of the downtown is discussed at length in Galila El Kadi and Dalila ElKerdany, “Belle-Époque Cairo: The Politics of Refurbishing the Downtown Business District,” in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 345–71. 9. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 81. 10. Beatriz Jaguaribe, “Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 330–31. 11. ‘Urfi marriage is a controversial form of common law marriage in Egypt. It is neither sanctioned by Egyptian religious authorities (i.e., the grand mufti, the Azhar shaykhs, and the ma‘zun or marriage officials) nor, for the most part, the broader public. 12. Hafez, “‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan: al-tanmit al-sardi,” 9.


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200 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

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Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 80. Soja, Postmetropolis, 246. Ibid., 247–48. Thomas Bender, as cited in Soja, “Exopolis: The Restructuring of Urban Form,” in Postmetropolis, 247. Ibid., 247. Galila El Kadi and Dalila ElKerdany, “Belle-Époque Cairo,” 348. Ibid., 350. See Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry (London: Methuen, 1987); David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade (London: Viking, 1997); as well as Jonathan Shannon, Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria (2006), particularly chap. 2. See also Jane Nadel-Klein, Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss Along the Scottish Coast (Oxford: Berg, 2003), particularly chap. 6. Nadel-Klein, Fishing for Heritage, 180. El Kadi and ElKerdany, “Belle-Époque Cairo,” 350. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 78. El Kadi and ElKerdany, “Belle-Époque Cairo,” 356. El Kadi and ElKerdany, “Belle-Époque Cairo,” after Jean-Luc Arnaud, Le Caire: Mise en Place d’une Ville Moderne 1867–1907 (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 353. Jaguaribe, “Modernist Ruins,” 330–31. Ibid., 331. Timothy Mitchell talks at length about the centrality of education to the project of modernity in Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), see, in particular, chap. 3, “An Appearance of Order,” 63–94. Husayn Hammuda, “Tahawwal al-markaz: hawla al-nasaq al-tarikhi fi ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan” [Transformations of the Center: Around the Historical Context in The Yacoubian Building], Awan 6 (2005): 210–12. Ibid., 212. See Massad, Desiring Arabs, 408, and Samia Mehrez, “From the hara to the ‘imara: Emerging Urban Metaphors in the Literary Production of Contemporary Cairo,” in Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (London: Routledge, 2008), 144–68. Hammuda, “Tahawwal al-markaz,” 213. Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 3–4. These references are to the English translation. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 32–33. See Hammuda, al-Riwaya wa-l-madina: namadhij min kuttab al-sittiniyat fi misr [The Novel and the City: Examples from Authors of the Sixties in Cairo] (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Amma li-Qasur al-Thaqafa, 2000), 32–75. As was mentioned in chapter 1, the downtown stretching from ‘Imad al-Din to Sulayman Pasha Street was an area known for its cabarets, bars, opera houses, cafés, and theaters. Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 161–62. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 13.


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42. Ibid., 14. 43. Ibid., 59. 44. For example, we encounter Abaskharon and Malak’s attempts to negotiate with Fikri Bey el-Shaheed (the agent of the Yacoubian Building) to open a tailoring shop in a room on the roof. Busayna is forced to sexually oblige her boss at the clothing store to make additional money to support her family. Similarly we learn that Muhammad al-Sayed, her father, before his death worked as a cook at the Royal Automobile Club, which was frequented by the upper classes. 45. Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 33. 46. Ibid., 145. 47. Ibid. 48. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 399. 49. Ibid., 408. 50. Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 137–38. 51. In Beth Baron’s article, “Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman,” she explores the many different ways in which Egypt was represented as a woman. In particular she examines political cartoons from the Egyptian press in the early part of the twentieth century. She notes that more often than not producers and consumers of this imagery were male and by representing the nation as a female, they intended to “tap notions of honor and instill in male viewers the sense that they had the duty to support, protect, and defend it.” She also remarks that such images also generated “a romantic attachment to the nation and encourage[d] a fusion with it.” Beyond the class and generational differences, such a reading might be one plausible explanation for Busayna’s inability to grasp Zaki el-Dessouki’s unconscious attachment to the idea of Egypt-as-woman and his desire to defend and support it. See Beth Baron, “Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman,” in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab World, ed. James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 120–21. 52. In the original Arabic, the sentence would more accurately be translated as “she is like your mother.” In Arabic it reads “al-wahid lazam yuhibb baladahu lianna balad al-wahid izay ummahu.” See the Arabic original of Aswany’s ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (2003), 192. 53. Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 162–63. 54. Ibid., 138. 55. Ibid., 198–99. 56. See Aswany’s original Arabic text, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (2003), 281. 57. Ibid., 242. 58. Ibid., 243. 59. Doris Sommer, “Part II, Love and Country: An Allegorical Speculation,” in Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30–51. 60. See Aswany’s original Arabic text, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (2003), 348. 61. Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 244–45. 62. Mahmud ‘Abd al-Wahab, “Qira’a fi ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan” [A Reading of The Yacoubian Building], in “al-Thaqafa al-sha‘biyya wa-l-hadatha” [Popular Culture and Modernity], special issue, Fusul 60 (Summer–Fall 2002): 372.


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63. See, for example, Lorraine Adams, “Those Who Dwell Therein,” review of the novel The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswany, August 27, 2006, http://www.nytimes .com/2006/08/27/books/review/Adams.t.html. 64. Samia Mehrez discusses, in particular, Yusuf Idris’s “Introduction” to Tilka al-Ra’iha and the manner in which he saw it constituting a radical break from the novels that had been written prior to its publication. See Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers Between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Gamal al-Ghitani (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994), 41–46; Sonallah Ibrahim, Tilka al-Ra’iha (Cairo: Dar al-thaqafa al-jadida, 1969). 65. Gamal al-Ghitani, in Aswany’s original Arabic text, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (2003), 350–51. 66. Mahmud ‘Abd al-Wahab, “Qira’a fi ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan,” 372. 67. See Ahmad al-Khamisi’s review in the back of the Arabic original of the novel (the original publication is not listed); Aswany, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (2003), 360–61. 68. See Galal Amin’s review in the back of the Arabic original of the novel (the original article appeared in March 2002 in the newspaper al-Hilal, 47); Aswany, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (2003), 358–59. 69. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 389. 70. Ibid., 410. 71. ‘Abd al-Wahab, “Qira’a fi ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan,” 372. 72. See Ahmad Zaki ‘Abd al-Halim’s review in the back pages of the Arabic original of the novel (the original publication of the article is not listed); Aswany, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (2003), 362–63. 73. Interview by Pamela Nice, “A Conversation with Alaa al-Aswany on ‘The Yacoubian Building,’” al-Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts 12, no. 56–57 (September 2007), http://www.aljadid.com/interviews/Alaa-al-Aswany-interview .html. 74. Akhbar al-Nujum, “Inqilab fi ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan” [Revolt in The Yacoubian Building] (February 3, 2007) (no author cited or page numbers given). 75. Faysal Darraj, “Bayn Miramar wa ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan . . . al-waqa‘iyya wa-al-maw‘iza al-Husna” [Between Miramar and The Yacoubian Building . . . Realism and Preaching Good Behavior], al-Hayat, April 25, 2006. 76. Ahmad Naji, “Ana didd al-kitaba al-akhlaqiyya” [I am against moral writing], an interview with Ra‘uf Mus‘ad, Akhbar al-adab (March 25, 2007): 6–7. 77. Ibid., 7. 78. Hafez, “‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan: al-tanmit al-sardi.” 79. Ibid., 2. 80. See, for example, the article by Muhammad Abu Zayd, “al-Adab yataghadha ‘ala dam al-namima” [Literature Feeds on the Blood of Gossip], al-Sharq alAwsat (November 29, 2006), http://www.asharqalawsat.com/details.asp?section =19&article=394285&issue=10228. 81. Muhammad Hashim (director of Mirit publishing house), in discussion with the author, Dar al-Mirit, Cairo (May 5, 2007). 82. Many articles have emerged in literary periodicals attesting to the continuance of this debate. See chap. 3, note 46, for exact references to articles pertaining to this issue in the Egyptian press.


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83. See in Aswany’s original Arabic text, ‘Imarat Ya‘qubiyan, 4th ed. (2003), 228–29, and pp. 162–63 in Humphrey Davies’ English translation. 84. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 76.

Conclusion 1. Arif Dirlik, “Historical Colonialism in Contemporary Perspective,” Public Culture 14, no. 3 (2002): 611, 613. 2. Ibid., 612. 3. Ibid., 614. 4. For more on the idea of colonial cities as national centers in Latin America, see Nestor Garcia Canclini’s essay “From National Capital to Global Capital: Urban Change in Mexico City,” trans. Paul Liffman, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 207–13. 5. Marilyn Booth, introduction to Thieves in Retirement, by Hamdi Abu Golayyel, trans. Marilyn Booth (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), xiii. 6. See the observations of Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Mamadou Diouf on the Western and Anglocentricism of the field in “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory?” Publications of the Modern Language Association 122, no. 3 (May 2007): 635, 643, 646. See also Waïl Hassan, “Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature: Horizons of Application,” Journal of Arabic Literature 33, no. 1 (2002): 45–64. 7. Gikandi, “Editor’s Column,” 635. 8. Diouf, “Editor’s Column,” 647. 9. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 30. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 77. 12. See Diane Singerman, “Introduction: The Contested City,” in Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity, ed. Diane Singerman Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009), 13, for an elaboration on this idea. 13. Anouk de Koning, Global Dreams: Class, Gender, and Public Space in Cosmopolitan Cairo (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009), 43. 14. The idea of a new or “neobohemia” is taken from Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. He asserts that the primary difference between early twentieth-century notions of bohemian culture (i.e., the writers and painters of Paris café culture) and the neobohemian culture of today is that today “new bohemia plays a necessarily novel role in enhancing the interests of postindustrial capitalist enterprises,” even while it is understood “in terms of marginality within and in opposition to the capitalist economy.” See Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17. 15. Kifaya (or Kefaya as it is sometimes spelled in English) more specifically refers to the “Egyptian Movement for Change”: a grassroots movement that emerged in 2004 in opposition to the presidency of Hosni Mubarak and his repressive policies. 16. For more on the literary culture of downtown and the cafés frequented by writers and artists, see Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State, and Society in Modern Egypt, trans. David Tresilian (Cairo: American University in


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17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

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Notes

Cairo Press, 2008), 174–77. For an anthropological treatment of upscale café culture, see de Koning, Global Dreams, chap. 4, “Class and Cosmopolitan Belonging in Cairo’s Coffee Shops,” 97–130. For more on the proliferation of malls and consumer culture in Egypt, see Mona Abaza, The Changing Consumer Cultures of Modern Egypt: Cairo’s Urban Reshaping (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006). It is worth mentioning that the Tal‘at Harb Mall and the Bustan Center are both small malls located downtown with less-expensive merchandise. These are frequented by young people at night. Walter Armbrust, “When the Lights Go Down in Cairo: Cinema as Global Crossroads and Space of Playful Resistance,” in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 420. Ibid., 418. Ibid., 440. See, for example, Sayed Mahmoud’s article in al-Ahram Weekly on many of the newer fictions that explore downtown Cairo. Sayed Mahmoud, “The Fictional Residents of Cairo,” al-Ahram Weekly Online (October 30–November 5, 2008), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/920/ee2.htm. There have been many Egyptian films that use parts of the downtown as the central space from which the plot or the characters develop. Besides The Yacoubian Building (2006), see for example, Banat Wust al-Balad [Downtown Girls], directed by Muhammad Khan (2005); Irhab wa-l-Kabab [Terrorism and Barbecue], directed by Sherif Arafa (1993); and Bab al-Hadid [Cairo Station], directed by Youssef Chahine (1957). Baha’ ‘Abd al-Magid, Al-Nawm ma‘ al-ghurba wa jabal al-zina wa-qissas ukhra [Sleeping with Strangers, The Mountain of Ornament and Other Stories] (Cairo: Dar Mirit, 2005). Yasir ‘Abd al-Latif, Qanun al-waratha [The Law of Inheritance] (Cairo: Dar Mirit, 2006). Jürgen Habermas cited in Malcolm Miles, “Public Spheres,” in Public Spheres after Socialism, ed. Angela Harutyunyan, Kathrin Hörschelmann, and Malcolm Miles (Chicago: Intellect Books, 2009), 138.

Afterword 1. Farha Ghannam, “Uprising in Egypt: Space and Resistance,” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, February 8, 2011, http://www.blogs .ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/08/space-and-resistance. 2. Jürgen Habermas, cited in Malcolm Miles, “Public Spheres,” in Public Spheres after Socialism, ed. Angela Harutyunyan, Kathrin Hörschelmann, and Malcolm Miles (Chicago: Intellect Books, 2009), 138.


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Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. ‘Abd al-Halim, Ahmad Zaki, 163 ‘Abd Allah, Yahya al-Tahir, 87, 90 ‘Abd al-Latif, Yasir, 73, 175 ‘Abd al-Magid, Baha’, 175 ‘Abd al-Majid, Ibrahim, 73, 87, 102 ‘Abd al-Qaddus, Ihsan, 110 ‘Abd al-Qadir, Faruq, 165 ‘Abdin district, 122 ‘Abdin Palace, 38, 58, 60 ‘Abdin Square, 45 Abu Gulayyil, Hamdi, 167 Abu-Lughod, Janet, xxii, 3, 73 Bulaq district, 121–22 café culture, 94, 193n71 duality/bifurcation of Cairo, 16–17, 26–27, 73, 189n2 Egyptianization of downtown, 65 informal housing for rural migrants, 74–75 migrant populations in Cairo, 190n11 poverty, 116 transformation of downtown, 66 Abu Rayyah, Yusuf, 167 “Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity” (Chakrabarty), 94–95 Adham, Khaled, 1, 173, 180n2 Age of the Novel, The (‘Usfur), 72–73 al-Ahram (state newspaper), 112 alcohol, 154 Alexandria, Egypt, 20, 21 ‘Ali, Idris, xxiii, 5, 16, 115, 116. See also Taht Khatt al-Faqr ‘Ali Pasha, Muhammad, 18, 19–21, 32 Amar, Paul, xxi, 2–3

pal-naaman-10index.indd 215

American University in Cairo colloquial Egyptian dictionary project, 88, 104, 193n50 relocation of, 174 Tahrir Square and, 177 Amin, Galal, 162 Anderson, Benedict, 13, 14, 33, 160, 170 al-Anqa aw Tarikh Hasan Muftah (‘Awad), 120 Appadurai, Arjun, 9, 30, 41 Arcadia Mall, 68 architecture, 35 Belle Époque, 147, 148 creation of urban space and, xix–xx downtown as achievement in, 44–45 French influence, 6–7 modernist movement, 147, 150 See also Haussmann, Georges-Eugène Armbrust, Walter, 174 Arnaud, Jean-Luc, 17 Azbakiyya gardens, 184n31 Cairo maps, 47, 190n13 elite nature of downtown, 27, 47 foreign populations in Egypt, 185n60 Hayy Ma‘ruf district, 73–74 Isma‘il’s creation of downtown, 24–25 ‘Ashur, Radwa, xxii, 5, 72, 90, 102. See also Qit‘a min Urubba Aslan, Ibrahim, 73, 80, 87, 102, 164 Aswan High Dam, 106, 112–13, 114 al-Aswany, Alaa, xxiii–xxiv, 5, 164. See also ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan al-‘Ataba Square, 45 Atiyya’s Caravanserai (Shalabi), 72

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Atlas of the European Novel (Moretti), 34 autobiography and fiction, 100 ‘Awad, Luwis, 120 al-‘Ayyidi, Ahmad, 167 Azbakiyya gardens, 20–21, 184n31 al-Azhar Square, 38, 75 Bab al-Luq district, 74 Bab al-Sha‘riyya district, 122 Badia Casino. See Casino Badia Baehler, Charles, 50, 51, 53 Baehler company, 30 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 83, 148 barabra term, 117, 197n29 Barclay’s Bank, 39, 127 Baron, Beth, 201n51 Baudelaire, Charles, 56, 144, 154, 194n77 Bayat, Asef, 80, 181n15 Beinin, Joel, 185n60 Bender, Thomas, 144–45 Bengal, 94–95 Benjamin, Walter, 56, 183n23 Berman, Marshall, vi modernity, 55, 70, 88, 155 postmodernism/modernism, 42, 43 Bhabha, Homi, 13 bifurcated city. See fragmented urban space, Cairo as Bonaparte, Napoleon, 53 Booth, Marilyn, 85, 170 borders/border crossing, 4, 100, 110 Boym, Svetlana, 141, 144, 146, 167 Brady, Mary Pat, 12 Bread Riots of January 1977, 68, 177 British occupation of Egypt effendi class and, 60 Egypt’s bankruptcy, 18, 27–28, 45 High Dam construction, 116 massacre of Egyptian police, 38, 39, 57 protest against, 187n46 Treaty of 1936, 186n20 use of downtown spaces, 29–32, 45, 50 See also colonization/colonialism; nationalist movement; riots/fires of January 1952


Buck-Morss, Susan, 28, 183n23 Bulaq district, xxiii, 7 forced relocation of residents, 68, 189n67, 190n8 industrial development of, 21 juxtaposition with downtown, 106, 107 population growth, 32 riots of January 1952 and, 126, 128 sense of community, 197n40 as space of despair, 106–7, 119–20, 121–22 Bulosan, Carlos, 100 Cachia, Pierre, 87 Café Americain, 54, 61–62 café culture, xxii–xxiii, 15–16, 94, 95– 96, 193n71. See also ghurza/hashish cafés Café Riche, 52, 76, 77, 95, 190–91n15 Cairo (Raymond), 18 Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Abu-Lughod), 73 Cairo Contested (Singerman and Amar), xxi, 2–3 Cairo Cosmopolitan (Singerman and Amar), xxi, 2–3 Cairo maps, x, 22, 47, 52, 190n13 Calcutta, India, 94–95 capitalism, 5 claim to universality, 13 cotton industry and, 19 decolonization and, 133 development of Alexandria port, 20 quasi-colonial commercial system, 27 staging of modernity and, 12 See also consumption, spectacle of cartography/mapmaking, 4, 6, 14, 33– 35, 55–59. See also Cairo maps Casino Badia proprietor of, 187n44 riots/fires of 1952, 37, 39, 57, 58, 188n54 Chakrabarty, Dilip, 14 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 88, 94–95, 97 Chicago (Aswany), 164 Chicano/a studies, 4 Childhood (Gorky), 116, 125

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Index chronotope concept, 148 Churchill, Winston, 44 Cinema Rivoli, 37, 38, 39 class, xxiii duality of Cairo, 122–25, 134–36, 174 education and, 123 intersection of classes, xxiv, 17, 65–66, 160, 173–74 national identity and, 99–101 nostalgia and, 155 race/ethnicity and, 100–101, 118 riots of January 1952 and, 39, 48, 110, 125–28, 135 urban planning and, 1–2 vernacular use and, 86 vertical segregation, 153, 156–57, 161 See also effendiyya class/effendis; elite classes; poverty; social mobility Colla, Elliot, xxiii, 106, 197n28 colloquial Egyptian. See vernacular use Colonising Egypt (Mitchell), 3–4, 12 colonization/colonialism foreign economic hegemony, 48–50, 62–63 literature as record of, xx mapmaking and, 6, 33, 34, 57 present poverty and, 169 production of a neighborhood, 41 relationship with modernity project, 1 and representation of real, 12, 21–22 spatial aspects, 2, 14 urban partitioning, 27 See also British occupation of Egypt Coming to Birth (Macgoye), 31 Communist Party, 187n46 consumption, spectacle of class and, 124 design of downtown and, 18, 23 as modernity, xxii, 28–29, 53–55, 92, 93–94, 148 progress and, 28 shopping malls, 174 contested spaces, 16, 71 challenges to modernity, 40, 59 class struggle, 110, 127–28 Hayy Ma‘ruf, 78–80


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217

riots/fires of January 1952 and, 59–60, 62–63, 105–6 space/identity connection, 174, 177–78 Corniche al-Nil Street, 124 cotton industry, 19, 29, 45 Crang, Mike, 16 Crary, Jonathan, 180n1 Cultural Front, The (Denning), 99–101 Curiel, Henri, 187n46 Dar al-Shuruq (publishing house), 165–66 Darraj, Faysal, 164 Davies, Humphrey, 159 Debord, Guy, 12 de Certeau, Michel, 16–17, 55 de Koning, Anouk, 173 Deleuze, Gilles, 33 democracy, 178 demonstrations of 1945, 62 of 1946, 62, 187n46 of 2011, 177–78 See also Bread Riots of January 1977; riots/fires of January 1952 Denning, Michael ghetto pastoral, 85, 99–101, 102, 191n16 proletariat literature, 101, 134, 198n67 department stores, 29, 30, 50 de Tarde, Algred, 17 Dhat (Sonallah Ibrahim), 110 Dirlik, Arif, 169 Donald, James, xxv, 35, 135, 176 downtown Cairo. See fragmented urban space, Cairo as; riots/fires of January 1952; symbolic value of downtown; transformation of downtown; specific squares, streets, and buildings Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Abu-Lughod), 116 Dreamland Project, 1, 180n2 dual city. See fragmented urban space, Cairo as Dubai (as development model), 2, 173

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Index

Dunqula (‘Ali), 115, 116 Dust Tracks on the Road (Hurston), 90 education class consciousness and, 109–10, 125 effendi class and, 31, 117 maintenance of power hierarchy, 184n37 secular/modern, 19, 25, 45, 200n28 social mobility and, 116, 117, 123, 132 effendiyya class/effendis attraction to Isma‘iliyya quarter, 26, 30 criticism of, 85 definition, 182n15 education and, 31, 117 emergence of, 15, 19–20, 31 nationalist movement and, 15, 20, 32, 59–60, 63–64 race and, 118 Sulayman Pasha Square and, 47 Egypt as woman/mother, 158, 201n51 Egyptian literature. See literature Egyptian national identity. See identity, collective/Egyptian Egyptian National Literature (project of ), 166 Egyptian National Museum, 177 Elbendary, Amina, 42, 68 elite classes postcolonial power of, 27, 107, 109, 129–34, 135–36, 169, 170–71 relocation to suburban developments, 64, 66, 67, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157 riots of January 1952 and, 39 social mobility and, 143 See also effendiyya class/effendis; military elite El Kadi, Galila, 27, 145, 146 ElKerdany, Dalila, 27, 145, 146 Elsheshtawy, Yasser, xx, 1, 173 Empain, Baron, 30 enframing narratives, 3–4, 5 exhibition. See modernity as representation


Fahmi, Ibrahim, 115, 116, 136–37 al-Falaki, Mahmud, 45 Fanon, Frantz, 107, 129, 133 Farrell, James, 103 Faruq, King, 39, 46, 58, 186n20 Fatimid Cairo, 16, 25, 32, 121 Fernea, Robert, 112 films, 175, 204n22 Fire of Cairo, The (al-Sharqawi), 39 fires of January 1952. See riots/fires of January 1952 flâneur figure/flanerie, 56, 134, 135 folk culture, 73 alternative modernity and, 106, 135 as heritage recovery, 77, 84–87, 88– 90, 104, 170 liberatory potential of, 83–84 selfhood and, 98–99 urban modernity as threat to, 69–70, 117–18 See also vernacular use foreign economic hegemony American, 40, 67–69, 171 downtown as symbol of, xxiii, 47–50, 51–53, 54–55, 62–63, 71, 123 foreign residents effect on development of Cairo, 21, 30, 41, 43 modernity spectacle and, 55 population of, 32, 185n60 post-revolution purging of, 60, 65, 66, 131 Sulayman Pasha Square and, 47 See also names of individuals Foucault, Michel, 33, 130, 158, 184n37 fragmented urban space, Cairo as, 1–2, 6–9 alternative modernities and, 103–4 class and, 122–25, 134–36, 174 duality/bifurcation, 17, 26–27, 32, 72, 73, 122–25, 189n2 failure of nationalist movement to address, 134–35 neglect of old Cairo by Isma‘il, 25 suburban expansion, 67, 154, 173, 175

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Index three cities concept, 6–7, 181n22 See also informal housing Free Officers, 107, 128 French occupation of Egypt, 18–19 frontier communities. See suburban development Fusul (literary journal), 161 Galerie 68 (literary review), 96 Gamaliyya quarter, 6, 32, 120–21, 141 Gaonkar, Dilip, 14 Garden City, 6, 29–30 gated communities, 1, 172–73 al-Gazzar, Hamdi, 174 Geiser, Peter, 122 Gershoni, Israel, 31, 186n20 Gezira Sheraton, 157 Gezira Sporting Club, 30, 66, 155 Ghannam, Farha, 11, 68, 80, 178, 197n40 ghetto pastorals, 73, 85, 99–101, 102, 137, 191n16 al-Ghitani, Gamal, 140, 162 ghurza/hashish cafés, 75 compared with elite cafés, 77 descriptions of, 79, 80–84 as Egyptian way of life, 103–4, 154 forced shut down of, 84, 154 function of, 94–99 as space of alternative modernity, 71, 94, 95, 96–99, 103–4 Gikandi, Simon, 171 Gingrich, Newt, xix global city, Cairo as, 1, 173 globalization, 169 Gold, Mike, 137–38 Gorky, Maxim, 116, 125, 128, 130 Grain of Wheat, A (Ngugi), 107 Grand, Pierre, 25 Graphs, Maps and Trees (Moretti), 34 Groppi (café), 47 burning of, 60–62 descriptions, 46, 51 location, 52 role of, 77, 154, 190–91n15 as symbol, 54, 66


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219

Groppi, Giacomo, 40, 50–51, 53, 54–55, 61 Guattari, Felix, 33 Habermas, Jürgen, 175–76, 178 Hafez, Sabry, xxi, 4 criticism of ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan, 140, 161–62, 164–65, 166 space/identity connection, 5–6, 29 space/literature relationship, 7–9 three cities concept, 6–7, 181n22 El-Hamamsy, Laila Shukry, 27 Hamdan, Gamal, 17, 74 Hammuda, Husayn, 5, 148–51, 154, 188n54 Harb, Tal‘at, 127 Hariq al-Qahira (al-Sharqawi), 39 Harvey, David, xxii, 17, 28–29, 53, 183n23 Hashim, Muhammad, 165–66 hashish cafés. See ghurza/hashish cafés Haussmann, Georges-Eugène concept of modernity, 28, 53–54 criticism of, 183n23 focus on horizontal space, 156 influence on downtown Cairo, 6, 17– 18, 23, 51 opinion of Isma‘il’s plans, 24 al-Hayat (newspaper), 164 Hayy Ma‘ruf district, 121 as contested space, 78–80 history, 73–74, 75–78 juxtaposition with downtown, xxii– xxiii, 75–78 riots of January 1952 and, 126, 128 as site of alternative modernity, 71–72 Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (Khalaf ), 139 hegemony. See foreign economic hegemony Heliopolis, 30 heritization (cultural), 140, 142, 145– 46, 148. See also folk culture; nostalgia Heshmat, Dina, 5

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Index

Higazi, Ahmad ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti, 112, 113, 114 hisa (freedom), 83, 97–98, 137 historical city concept, 139–41, 144–46, 156, 172–73 “Historical Colonialism in Contemporary Perspective” (Dirlik), 169 historical record constructed nature of, 64–65 history/fiction relationship, 39–40, 64–65, 69 literature as alternate, xx, 4, 40, 41– 42, 56–57, 69, 114 Hobsbawm, Eric, 129 homosexuality, 140, 142, 163–64 Huggan, Graham, 33–34, 57 Hurston, Zora Neale, 90 Husayn, Ahmad, 39 Husayn, Taha, 57 hygiene/sanitation, 18–19, 183n24 Ibrahim, Gamil ‘Attiya, 120, 121, 135–36 Ibrahim, Sa‘d al-Din, 68 Ibrahim, Sonallah, 90, 102, 110, 162, 164, 202n64 identity, collective/Egyptian class and, 99–101 countryside and, 192n38 foreign influences, 171 imagination of the past, 169–170 nationalist movement and, 110, 158– 61, 166–67 Nubian literature as challenge to, 113– 14, 134 symbolism of downtown, 40–41, 140– 41, 142 transformations of downtown and, xx– xxi, xxii, xxiv, 170, 172–73 See also space/identity connection identity documentation, lack of, 82, 88, 132, 191n23, 191n24 Idris, ‘Abd al-Rahman, 114 Idris, Yusuf, 73, 120–21, 197n36, 202n64 ‘Imad al-Din Street, 188n54


‘Imarat Yaqubiyan (al-Aswany), xxiii–xxiv, 110 critical controversy, 161–66 downtown as modernist ruin, 148–51, 152–54 Egyptian identity, 140–41, 142, 166– 67, 172 heritage recovery project, 151–57 homosexuality in, 140, 142, 163–64 as nationalist romance, 157–61 plot, 142–44 polarization of downtown, 155–57 success of, 139–40, 161, 162, 164, 166–67 Immobilia Building, 107, 123, 124, 126 indigenous modernism, 85–86, 171 individuality, 98 Infitah policy, xxii, 68, 153, 181n24 informal housing, 103 descriptions of, 7–8, 74, 78–79 effect on literature, 7–8, 173 migration and, 72, 74–76, 78–79, 156–57 as people’s entitlement, 80 rooftop communities, 143, 153, 156– 57, 166 See also Bulaq district; Hayy Ma‘ruf district Islam, 154 Islamophobia, American, xix Isma‘il, Khedive (Isma‘il Pasha) bankruptcy of Egypt, 27–28, 45 as character in Qit‘a min Urubba, 43– 44, 44–45 compared with Sadat, 68 creation of modern downtown, xxii, 1–2, 6, 22–25, 44–45, 47 extraction of Egyptian resources, 40 French inspiration, 18 performance of Europe/palace, 25–26 plan for Hayy Ma‘ruf district, 73–74 road-building, 20 Isma‘iliyya Square (Tahrir Square), 57, 58. See also Tahrir Square Israel, 50, 63

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Index Jacquemond, Richard, 95–96, 97, 196n26 Jaguaribe, Beatriz, xxiii–xxiv, 141–42, 147–48 Jankowski, James, 31, 186n20 Jusdanis, Gregory, 69, 85 Kamil, Adil, 197n34 Kamil, Mustafa, 127 Kennedy, John, 195n6 Kerboeuf, Anne-Claire, 39, 63 Khalaf, Samir, 139, 176 al-Khamisi, Ahmad, 162 al-Khubz al-Hafi (Shukri), 116 Kifaya group, 174, 203n15 al-Kitaba al-Ukhra (literary review), 96 Lacouture, Jean and Simone, 39 language, 113, 114, 162 Latour, Bruno, 172 Layali al-Misk al-‘Atiqiya (Uddul), 115 Lazarus, Neil, 129–30, 133, 134 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 14 Lefebvre, Henri, 17 Liebeskind, Daniel, xx Literary Atlas of Cairo, The: One Hundred Years on the Streets of the City (Mehrez), xx, 4 literature as alternative historical record, xx, 4, 40, 41–42, 56–57, 69, 114 café culture and, 95–96 cartographic novels, 34, 57 critique of nationalist movement, 5 debate over constitution of Egyptian/ Arabic canon, 162, 163, 164, 166, 170 effect of changing urban geography on, 6, 7–9, 173 ghetto pastorals, 73, 85, 99–101, 102, 137, 191n16 Nubian, 111–16, 196n19, 196n26 proletariat literature, 101, 134, 137– 38, 198n67 reciprocal production of urban spaces, 11–12, 35 social realism, 114–15, 116, 162


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221

Lloyd, Richard, 203n14 local cafés. See café culture; ghurza/ hashish cafés local tyranny/lawlessness, 7, 79–80, 98, 124–25, 198n47 Lockman, Zachary, 185n60 Lodging House, The (Shalabi). See Wakalat ‘Atiyya Louis-Philippe of France, 53 Ma‘adi district, 43, 67, 175 Macgoye, Marjorie, 31 Madinat Nasr district migration of elites to, 64, 66, 151, 153, 154, 156 Nasser’s development of, 67 Mahfuz, Naguib, 8 comparison with Aswany, 141, 164 comparison with Shalabi, 73 critique of nationalism, 5 Egyptian identity, 110 old city, 6, 87, 121 use of café, 80 vernacular use, 87, 90 Malik Hazin (Aslan), 80 malls, 68, 174, 204nn17–18 Manamat ‘Amm Ahmad al-Sammak (Shalabi), 72 Manshiyyat Nasr quarter, 7 mapmaking/cartography, 4, 6, 14, 33–35, 55–59. See also Cairo maps al-Maqrizi, 44, 186n18 marriage, ‘urfi, 199n11 Ma‘ruf. See Hayy Ma‘ruf district Marxism/Marx, 125, 130, 136, 198n47 massacre of Egyptian police (January 1952), 38, 39, 57 Massad, Joseph, 166 deviance in ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan, 157– 58, 163 ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan as national allegory, 148, 158, 159–60 sensationalism of ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan, 140, 163 Matar, Muhammad ‘Afifi, 96

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Index

Mehrez, Samia, xx, xxi, 4, 5, 148, 202n64 memory, identity and, 139 Metro Cinema, 39, 52 migrants/migration, 5 Aswan High Dam and, 106 choice of urban locations, 121–22 hopelessness of, 109–10 informal housing of, 72, 74–76, 78– 80, 156–57 Nubian experience, 75, 101, 122, 196n15 populations of, 190n11 See also Bulaq district; Hayy Ma‘ruf district; identity documentation, lack of; poverty military elite failure to bring revolutionary change, 171 inhabitation of downtown, 65, 131– 32, 136 Madinat Nasr and Muhandisin, 67 power of, 93, 130, 131–32, 135, 136 See also elite classes; nationalist movement Miramar (Mahfuz), 110, 164 Mirit (publishing house), 165–66, 174 Misr al-Gadida district, 43, 64, 66, 67 Mitchell, Timothy, xxii education as maintenance of power structures, 184n37 enframing narratives, 3–4, 5 on mapmaking, 33, 34 modernity as representation, 12–13, 21–22, 29 modern/non-modern relationship, 11, 13–14, 25, 71–72 modernity, alternative, 72 commercial activity and, 76, 77, 78 ghurza culture and, 71, 94, 95, 96–99, 103–4 indigenous modernism, 85–86, 171 subaltern modernism, 100 vernacular/folk heritage, 106, 135 modernity as representation consumption and, 28–29, 91–92, 93–94


Egyptians as spectators, 12–14 gaze concept, 41 preoccupation with European original, 21–22, 25–26 public spaces and, 17, 28–29 modernity project, 1, 11–16 ‘Ali Pasha and, 19–21 challenges to, 40, 59 consumption and, xxii, 28–29, 53–55, 92, 148 co-production of, 14–16 critique of, 90–94 development of modern downtown, 6–7, 16–17, 20–21 education and, 19, 25, 45, 200n28 European hegemony, 12–14, 15, 21– 22, 29, 53–54 French occupation of Egypt, 18–19 Groppi building as center of, 51 modern subject and, 45–46, 88, 170 nationalist movement and, xxi, 7, 20, 60, 63–64, 70, 71, 106, 142, 147, 170 non-modern distinction, 11, 13–14, 25, 71–72 nostalgia for, 141–42, 155–56 vs. postmodernism, 42–43 poverty and, 119–20 progress and, 172 tradition/folk heritage and, 69–70, 117–18 modern subjects. See identity, collective/ Egyptian; space/identity connection Moretti, Franco, 11, 34–35, 58–59, 181n22 Mubarak, ‘Ali Pasha, 25, 45 Mubarak, Hosni, xx, xxii, 2, 3, 177–78 Mubarak, Suzanne, 145 Mugamma‘ building, 136, 137, 147, 151, 177 Muhandisin district migration of elites to, 64, 66, 151, 153, 154, 156 Nasser’s development of, 67 parallels with downtown, 43 Mus‘ad, Ra‘uf, 164 al-Musawi, Muhsin, 86, 87

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Index al-Muski Street, 20 Mustafa Kamil Square, 46, 47, 49, 52, 57, 58 Nadel-Klein, Jane, 145–46 Nadim, ‘Abd Allah, 85 Naguib, Muhammad, 130 Nahas Pasha, Mustafa, 39 Nahda (awakening), 181n14 Nairobi, 31 narrative structure, 58–59, 69 unreliable narrator, 42, 47, 56, 64–65, 186–87n25 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, xx criticism of, 5, 93, 136, 158–59, 166 Egyptianization of downtown, 41, 65– 66, 70, 105 impact on Egyptian literature, 170 modernity project and, xxi, 7, 16, 67, 106 riots of January 1952, 39 See also nationalist movement national identity. See identity, collective/ Egyptian Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Lazarus), 129–30 nationalist movement effendi class and, 15, 20, 32, 59–60, 63–64 Egyptian identity and, 110, 158–61, 166–67 as elite movement, 129–34 erasure of social difference, 107, 110, 113, 114, 127, 169 failure of, 129, 130, 134–35, 163, 171–72 folk culture and, 73 heritage recovery and, 84–85, 85–87 impact on Egyptian literature, 170 lack of true unity, 105, 134–35 literary critique of, 5, 110, 136 modernity project and, xxi, 7, 20, 60, 63–64, 70, 71, 106, 142, 147, 170 symbolic value of downtown, xxiv, 4, 58 vernacular as political tool, 85–86


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223

See also military elite; Nasser, Gamal Abdel nationalist romances, 157–61 al-Nawm ma‘ al-Ghurba (Magid), 175 Necessary Nation, The (Jusdanis), 69, 85 neo-bohemia (new bohemia), 173, 175, 203n14 New Cairo, 1 New York Times, xx Nobel, Philip, xix–xx nostalgia class and, 155 for downtown, xxiii–xxiv, 140, 154 for Egyptian unity, 172 historical city concept, 139–41, 144– 46, 156, 172–73 for indigeneity, 98 urban, 141–42, 144–46 Nubian experience, xxiii cultural significance of river, 195n6 in Egyptian proverb, 105 migration, 75, 100–101, 122, 196n15 Nubian literature, 111–16, 196n19, 196n26 race/ethnicity and, 111–13, 197n29 al-Nuzul ila al-Bahr (G. Ibrahim), 120, 121, 135–36 Opera Square Groppi café, 54 location, 25, 26, 52 riots/fires of January 1952, 37, 39, 57, 58, 188n54 Other, creation of the, 22, 109 Ouroussoff, Nicholai, xx Paris, Capital of Modernity (Harvey), 28–29 Paris, France, xxii Haussmann’s transformation of, 17– 18, 53 modernity and, 16, 17, 28 Pasha, ‘Abbas, 21 Pasha, Ibrahim, 20 Pasha, Isma‘il. See Isma‘il, Khedive Pasha, Sa‘id, 18, 21 pastiche, 42

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224

●

Index

Piece of Europe, A (‘Ashur). See Qit‘a min Urubba (‘Ashur) Poor (‘Ali). See Taht Khatt al-Faqr (‘Ali) popular districts. See Bulaq district; Hayy Ma‘ruf district; informal housing population of Cairo, 32 postcolonial theory, 163, 170–71 Postmetropolis: Critical Studies in Cities and Regions (Soja), 139 postmodernism, 42–43 poverty colonial past and, 169 critique of, 5, 68, 137–38 fragmentation of Cairo and, 135 modernity and, 119–20 nationalism and, 158–59 oppression by postcolonial state, 116 prevalence of, 181n15 riots of January 1952 and, 126–27 rural-urban migration, 74–75 urban wealth disparity, 69, 118–19 as violence, 109, 120–21 See also class; informal housing; migrants/migration proletariat literature, 101, 134, 137–38, 198n67 prostitution, 143–44, 157 public sphere, xxi, 171, 172, 173–74, 175, 178 Qa‘ al-Madina (Y. Idris), 120–21 al-Qaffash, Muntassir, 174 al-Qamar Buba (Fahmi), 115 Qanun al-Waratha (‘Abd al-Latif ), 175 Qasim, Abd al-Hakim, 164 Qasim, Muhammad Khalil, 114, 115 Qasr al-‘Ayni Street, 57, 58, 177 Qasr al-Nil Square, 57 Qasr al-Nil Street, 141 descriptions/location of, 46, 50, 51, 52, 124 historical significance, 47, 52, 151, 157 riot/demonstration route of 1952, 58 as symbol of downtown, 66 Qatawi brothers, 40, 49–50, 51, 52, 53


Qit‘a min Urubba (‘Ashur), xxii, 134–35 creation of downtown, 44–45, 46 downtown as contested space, 105–6 Egyptianness, 40–41, 110 foreign economic hegemony, 48–50, 54–55, 62–63, 67–69, 123, 171 gaze, 41–42, 44, 47, 69 history/fiction relationship, 39–40, 64–65, 69 modernity/postmodern tension, 42–43 riots/fires of January 1952, 57–58, 59–62, 62–63, 70, 127–28 Sulayman Pasha Square, 47–48, 50– 53, 54–55 transformation of downtown, 65–67, 68–69 walking/mapping of Cairo, 55–59, 64, 70 Questions of Modernity (Mitchell), 3–4 race/ethnicity barabra term, 117, 197n29 class and, 101, 118 Nubians and, 111–13, 197n29 racism, 111–13, 117, 195n13 railroad development, 21, 24 Rajih, Abu Zayd, 6, 7 Ramsis, ‘Amir, 175 Ramsis Railway Station, 24 Raymond, André, xxii, 17, 18, 25, 184n31 representation. See modernity as representation Revolution of January 2011, 177–78 Revolution of July 1952, 23, 63 disconnect from prior demonstrations, 128 as elite consolidation of power, 129– 34, 135–36 See also military elite; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; nationalist movement Revolution of 1919, 23, 32 Reynolds, Nancy, xxii, 12, 17, 180n1 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 147–48 riots/fires of January 1952

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Index as class war, 39, 48, 110, 125–28, 135 contested nature of downtown, 59–60, 62–63, 71, 105–6 demonstration routes, 56, 58 descriptions/summaries, 37–39, 57– 58, 60–62, 188n54 effendi class and, 63–64 symbolism/significance of, 39–40, 60– 63, 70, 110 Zionist movement and, 50, 63, 189n73 Rivoli Cinema, 37, 38, 39 Robins, Kevin, 35 Rodenbeck, Max, xxii, 17, 19, 30, 184n31 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 44 Rouchdy, Aleya, 112 Rule of Experts (Mitchell), 3–4 Ryzova, Lucie, 19–20, 31, 63, 64 Sabri Abu ‘Alam, 51 al-Sadat, Anwar, xx Americanization and, 67 comparison with Isma‘il, 68 criticism of, 5 forced relocation of Bulaq residents, 189n67 Infitah policy, xxii, 68, 153, 181n24 modernity project and, 7 shutdown of hashish houses under, 84 Said, Edward, 22, 26–27, 184n39 Sa‘id, Makkawi, 174 Sa‘id, Mustafa, 109, 119 Sa‘idi migrants, 75, 80, 97, 101 Salih, Tayyib, 107, 108–9, 115, 116 Salih Hisa (Shalabi), xxii–xxiii, 71–72, 134–35, 137 class/race issues, 101, 102, 103 as comment on modernity, 90–94 as ghetto pastoral, 191n16 ghurza community, 80–84, 94, 95, 96–99, 103–4 Hayy Ma‘ruf history, 78–80 Hayy Ma‘ruf juxtaposed with downtown, xxii–xxiii, 75–78 heritage recovery, 84–85


●

225

Salih Hisa character, 82–84, 97–99, 101–2 vernacular use, 87–90, 104, 106, 171 Sannu, Ya‘qub, 85 Savoy Hotel, 50 Sawaris brothers, 49 Season of Migration to the North (Salih), 107, 108–9, 115 Selim, Samah, 85–86 September 11, 2001, attacks, xix–xx, 50 Shakhsiyyat Misr: dirasa fi ‘abqariyyat almakan (Hamdan), 74 Shalabi, Khayri, xxii–xxiii career/works of, 72–73, 86 class/race issues, 16, 101 See also Salih Hisa; Wakalat ‘Atiyya al-Shamandurah (Qasim), 114, 115 Shannon, Jonathan, 14–15 Sharif Street, 124 al-Sharqawi, Gamal, 39, 188n54 Shepheard’s Hotel, 20–21, 23, 39, 66 Shukri, Muhammad, 116 Sidnawi, Samaan, 40, 51–52, 53 Singerman, Diane, xxi, 2–3 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, xx Slaughter, Joseph, 30–31, 45 Socialism/Socialist Party, 39, 65, 128, 130, 136 social mobility education and, 116, 117, 123, 132 effendiyya class and, 31–32 myth of, 103, 107, 110, 156 new elite, 143 social realism, 114–15, 116, 162 Soja, Edward W., 139, 144 Sommer, Doris, 160 space. See contested spaces; space/identity connection space/identity connection complexity of, 2–3 contested spaces and, 172, 177–78 Egyptian national subject, xx–xxii, xxiv, 4, 170 Ground Zero site, xix–xx modernity and, 11–16, 29, 30–31, 45–46

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226

●

Index

space/identity connection—continued symbolic value of downtown, 40–41 transformations of Cairo and, 5–6, 172–73 See also contested spaces; identity, collective/Egyptian Spencer, Robert, 105, 107, 108 the Sphinx, 44, 186n18 Springborg, Robert, 179n7 “Stage of Modernity, The” (Mitchell), 11, 12 Studs Lonigan (Farrell), 103 suburban development, 67, 154, 173, 175 Sudan, 83, 109, 113 Sudanese displacement, 195n13 Suez Canal defense of, 132, 186n20 Egyptian loss of control of, 27, 45, 186n20 establishment of, 21 inauguration of, 2, 18, 23, 25, 46 suicide, 108–9, 136 Sulayman Pasha Square, 56, 122 descriptions/location of, 46, 48, 50–53 symbolism of, 47–48, 51–53, 54, 55 See also Tal‘at Harb Square Swyngedouw, Erik, xxi symbolic value of downtown, 32–33 ambivalence towards, 59, 117–22 collective Egyptian identity, 40–41, 140–41, 142 dystopic imagery, 110, 119–21, 133, 157–58 as Egypt, 169 Egyptian modernity, 45 foreign economic hegemony, xxiii, 47–50, 51–53, 54–55, 62–63, 71, 123 juxtaposed with other spaces, 34, 75– 78, 106–7 nationalist movement, xxiv, 4, 58 present relevance, 5, 9, 173–74, 177–78 as relic/ruin, 141–42, 148–51, 152–54 urban nostalgia and, 145–46


Tahrir Square (Isma‘iliyya Square), 75, 150 architecture, 67, 147 British occupation, 29 demonstrations of 2011, 177–78 location, 52 Mugamma‘ building, 136, 151 renaming of, 56, 187n41 Taht Khatt al-Faqr (‘Ali), xxiii critique of nationalist propaganda, 110, 136 division of Cairo along class lines, 122–25, 136–37 elitism of nationalist revolution, 129–34 failure of nationalist movement, 134– 35, 171–72 juxtaposition of Bulaq with downtown, 106, 107 migrant experience, 109–10 narrative frame, 108–9 riots/fires of January 1952, 125–28 rural life descriptions, 116–17 violence of displacement, 115 Tal‘at Harb Square, 52, 149 as center of downtown, 151–52 demographics, 190n13 juxtaposed with Hayy Ma‘ruf, 75–78 present use/neo-bohemia, 175 proximity to Tahrir Square, 177 as symbol of Egypt, 58, 141 See also Sulayman Pasha Square Tharu, Susie, 171 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 90 Thinking Space (Crang and Thrift), 16 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 58–59 Thrift, Nigel, 16 Thulathiyyat Gharnata (‘Ashur), 40 Tilka al-Ra’iha (Sonallah Ibrahim), 110, 162, 202n64 time, suspension of, 97 tourist gaze, 68, 69, 145–46 transformation of downtown, 1, 17 as anachronism, 153–54 bohemian enclave, 173–75 class and, 110

5/2/11 9:06 AM

Index decline/deterioration, 64–67, 68–69, 70 Egyptian identity and, xx–xxi, xxii, xxiv, 170, 172–73 fires/riots of January 1952, 40–41 Isma‘il’s creation of modern downtown, xxii, 1–2, 6, 22–25, 44–45, 47 literary themes and, 5, 7–8 to modernist ruin, 147–48, 152 See also fragmented urban space, Cairo as; symbolic value of downtown transliteration, xi, 179n9, 182n15 Trilogy (Mahfuz), 6, 110, 121, 141 Tsiang, H. T., 100 al-Tunisi, Bayram, 85 Udaba Nubiyun wa Nuqqad Unsuriyun (Uddul), 111–12 Uddul, Haggag Hasan, 111–12, 113–16, 194n82 United States Egyptian heritage recovery and, 88–89 influence on development of Cairo, 67–68, 145, 171 negative impact, 40, 68–69 occupation of Iraq, 84 ‘Urabi, Ahmad, 28 ‘Urabi rebellion (1881–82), 23, 32 urban design, 2, 45–46, 145–46 urban studies, xxi–xxii, 2–3 ‘Usfur, Gabir, 72–73 vernacular use, 192–93n47 authenticity and, 87–90, 106 Egyptian heritage and, 104, 171, 193n50 nationalist movement and, 85–86 public appeal/debate, 73, 166 selfhood and, 98–99 See also folk culture


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227

Vitalis, Robert, 49 Wafd party, 39, 60, 186n20 al-Wahab, Faruq ‘Abd, 72 Wahhab, Mahmud ‘Abd al-, 161, 162, 163 Wakalat ‘Atiyya (Shalabi), 72, 83, 84, 137 wa Thiong’o, Ngugi, 107 Williams, Raymond, 4 Wilson, Elizabeth, 45 Winegar, Jessica, 86 Winichakul, Thongchai, 14 work/labor, 101–2 World’s Fair (1867), 18, 23 World Trade Center, 67–68 Wright, Gwendolyn, 2, 12, 17, 45 Wright, Richard, 100 writing process, 64–65 Wust al-Balad (film, Ramsis), 175, 204n22 Wust al-Balad district. See fragmented urban space, Cairo as; riots/fires of January 1952; symbolic value of downtown; transformation of downtown; specific squares, streets, and buildings Yacoubian, Hagop, building of, 152 Yacoubian Building, The (al-Aswany). See ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan youm al-ghadab (the day of anger), 177 Zaghlul, Sa‘d, 127 Zaki, Mahir Ahmad, 196n15 Zamalik district, 30, 120, 157 Zaman al-Riwaya (‘Usfur), 72–73 al-Zawiyya al-Hamra district, 68, 190n8 al-Zayyat, Latifa, 110 Zilal al-Nakhil (A. Idris), 114 Zionist movement, 50, 63, 189n73 Zuqaq al-Midaq (Mahfuz), 80

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5/2/11 9:06 AM

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