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  International Acclaim for MAX RODENBECK’s

  Cairo

  THE CITY VICTORIOUS

  “Riveting.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A pleasant, speedy Grand Tour….Lovely, chaotic city; lovely, chatty book.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “A delightful way to visit the city.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Jaunty and learned….Few cities can inspire as interesting a book as this and few writers can carry it off as well as Mr. Rodenbeck.”

  —The Washington Times

  “As much fun as a masked ball, as full of tales as Scheherazade, and as informative as an encyclopedia.”

  —Men’s Journal

  “This book is as satisfying as a gourmet banquet.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Interesting….The anecdotes are lively, the characters finely drawn.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “A splendid meditation on Cairo’s evolution from a center of ancient civilization to a vibrant, semi-modern metropolis.”

  —Business Week

  “Well written….[Rodenbeck] has a fine warm description for this most exhausting of places.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “An excellent work, marked by deep knowledge, enthusiasm, and love.”

  —National and Financial Post (Toronto)

  “Delightful…richly entertaining.”

  —Middle East Economic Digest

  “A wonderful book, both a serious history and a personal account.”

  —The Sunday Times

  MAX RODENBECK

  Cairo

  THE CITY VICTORIOUS

  Max Rodenbeck is a correspondent for The Economist. He lives in Cairo.

  FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, FEBRUARY 2000

  Copyright © 1998 by Max Rodenbeck

  Map copyright © 1999 by David Lindroth, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Picador, London, in 1998, and subsequently in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Rodenbeck, Max, [date]

  Cairo : the city victorious / Max Rodenbeck. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published : London : Picador, 1998.

  Includes bibliographical references (p.).

  ISBN 0-679-44651-6

  1. Cairo (Egypt) I. Title.

  DT143.R63 1999

  962’.16 98-14214

  CIP

  Vintage ISBN 9780679767275

  Ebook ISBN 9780525562986

  Author photograph by Elena Seibert

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v4.1

  a

  To K.K.

  We shall omit from our history the tales invented by Herodotus, and certain other writers on Egyptian affairs who deliberately prefer fables to fact, and who spin yarns merely for the sake of amusement. We shall, however, set forth the things written by the priests of Egypt in their sacred records, which we have examined diligently and minutely.

  —Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, first century B.C.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  An Orientation

  1. Beginnings

  2. Dead Cities

  3. Cities of the Dead

  4. Mother of the World

  5. Medieval Decline

  6. The Phoenix Caged

  7. Where Worlds Collide

  8. Conflict and Fusion

  9. Keeping the Faith

  10. High Life, Low Life

  11. The Voice of Cairo

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  is the hieroglyphic symbol for a city, showing a wall surrounding crossroads

  AN ORIENTATION

  Every year a little deposit of mud is left by the Nile on its banks, and every year sees deposited upon the counters of the London booksellers the turbid overflow of journalising travel. Alas! It has not the usefulness of the leavings of this sacred river.

  —Thomas Gold Appleton, A Nile Journal, 1876

  MR. APPLETON IS RIGHT, which is why when a friend urged me to write a book about Cairo, I said tsk and went back to my water pipe. Yes, I agreed, this was a magnificent city, and one whose story has rarely been told with sympathy or truth. But books about cities, I argued, were of two kinds. They were either travelogues or histories, and I knew that, while a travel story could barely scratch the surface of Cairo’s depth, a straight history was sure to founder in the immensity of the city’s past.

  Besides, there was the question of where to begin in a tale so vast in scope as Cairo’s. Fourteen centuries ago, when the Muslim conquerors of Egypt made this their capital? Or several millennia earlier, when great cities had already bloomed and faded here at the apex of the Nile Delta? And where to end? This place I had known since childhood was changing elusively fast. Between my starting and finishing its portrait Cairo was certain to slip out of the frame.

  Then, perhaps I had come to know the city all too well. If Cairo was, in the words of its great novelist the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, like meeting your beloved in old age, then was I to tell about her wrinkles, her bad breath and worse taste, and her unfortunate habit of shouting at the servants? Because just as one could expand on the city’s wonders—its pyramids and minarets and showbiz glitter—one could also mutter over its noise and pollution and sheer, bewildering, annoying clutter.

  The fact was that after a twelve-year stretch of living in Cairo, most of which was spent in enchantment, I was falling out of love. The city was changing, and what it was changing into disturbed me, as it disturbed most Cairenes I knew. I felt increasingly estranged from what was becoming a harder, more impatient, less tolerant city of ugly new buildings—a place far removed from other Cairos I had known.

  I FIRST ARRIVED here at the age of two. What I remember is heady color bursts of bougainvillea crimson, jacaranda violet and flame-tree red, and the glistening blackness of olives at the Greek grocer. I remember the crackling urgency of backgammon dice in cafés and the tooting insistence of human, animal, and motorized traffic. I recall the glamor of seeing Lawrence of Arabia open at that Art Deco jewel of a cinema, the Metro on Sulayman Pasha Street, and the sheer fun of hurling potatoes into the gap-toothed maw of a hippo at the zoo (still elegant then, with its pathways in Portuguese mosaic and lemonade served beside the still-lush lotus ponds). I remember the peculiarity of that cartoon mountainscape of pyramids on the western horizon, and the taxis—those high-sprung jalopies in harlequin black and white whose radios moaned a single song by the city’s great diva Umm Kulsoum, then at the climax of her fortunes. “You are my life,” she crooned over and over as the Nile’s sunset sheen flickered through the treacly jungle of banyan trees lining the Corniche. “You are my life that dawned with your light.”

  I didn’t understand the words then. That particular light dawned much later, when I returned to study Arabic here, worked as a reporter, and discovered the Mother of the World—as Egyptians fondly call their capital—in all her shambolic grandeur and operatic despair. The city seduced me. Her depth seemed limitless, whether by the measure of time or the fortun
es of her people or the mystery of their ways. Layers overlapped effortlessly: the ancient and the new, the foreign and the native, the rich and the poor. Worlds mingled in the bookstalls along the edge of the Azbakiyya Gardens: the works of Enver Hoxha next to a score by Puccini beside an Armenian body-building manual on top of The Thousand and One Nights. They mingled in the streets, where the barefoot incense man swirled his censer from shop to shop, collecting a shillin or barīza from their keepers in exchange for a blessing. Brandy-swilling leftists at the Café Riche spun tall plots to tease eavesdropping, hookah-puffing secret police. Refugees out of Africa rented their bodies at the Borsalino discotheque to key-jangling spivs and Israeli agents and German engineers and backpackers straying from the road to Kathmandu. On the weathered marble floor of a fourteenth-century mosque, under the coffered and gilded ceiling, a turbaned sheikh dozed over his holy book. Young couples cooed at the chipped tables of the venerable Groppi Tea Rooms. They ignored their neighbors, the painted old birds in laddered stockings who had lost the will to migrate back to Salonica or Trieste or wherever it was they had come from, and so reminisced in ragged Levantine French about Cairo’s Roaring Forties—and when the waiter turned his back slipped scarce sugar cubes into their tattered Hermès handbags.

  In time the old birds at Groppi became extinct, along with most of the variegated cosmopolitans whose world had closed in after the 1952 revolution. The Nileside banyans fell to road-widening schemes. Secret police began to do their mufti in beards and robes. They now hunted not harmless leftist barflies, but the new breed of violent zealots who buzzed with pious anger and chiseled busily at Cairo’s old civility. A chorus of full-volume Koranic cassette sellers invaded the Azbakiyya bookstalls. Instead of weeding out these noisy intruders, the dullard city government abolished the market altogether.

  I grew wary of exploring the city. Each successive visit to its old core—the zone of grand medieval mosques and palaces and bazaars—brought fresh evidence of further decay: marble buckled off walls, ancient minarets toppled into neighboring houses; and in the markets plastic shoes and pharaonic T-shirts replaced camel-hide slippers and satin kaftans. Strolling one day downtown—in what used to be the “European” Quarter—I discovered one favorite café transformed into a tawdry jeans outlet and another replaced by a burger bar called Madonna’s. The National Hotel, whose crusty, broken-keyed piano bar once boasted a preposterous coterie of Second World War—vintage prostitutes, was bought and torn down by an “Islamic” investment company. When its pyramid scheme went bust the site remained a gaping parking lot.

  It was not just my own proprietorial sensibilities that made this breakneck defoliation sad. Everyone from Shukri the ironing man to Ahmad the tailor to Dr. Sabri the dentist felt it, and moaned about it. The weather had never been humid like this, they agreed. The streets had never looked so scruffy. The Cairene character itself, they chimed, had altered. People were now sanctimonious, rude, and grasping where once they lived only for laughs. Those who could were simply leaving. Embarrassed clusters of would-be émigrés huddled outside foreign consulates. Even Usta Mahmud the mechanic, a gruff fellow more interested in feeding stray cats than in servicing cars, took off to live with his son in Jersey City, New Jersey.

  After a particularly scorching, frustrating summer I joined the exodus.

  “HE WHO DRINKS the water of the Nile is destined to taste its sweetness again.” The proverb is something of a cliché to Egyptians, but I couldn’t help recalling it as my plane touched down at Cairo three years later. The idea of the place had made me uneasy, but all hesitation evaporated with the first sniff of the city’s hot night air, with the welcoming image of a soldier sleeping in an airport corridor and the familiar feel of playful bustle as taxi hustlers swooped like seagulls onto the crowd of dazed travelers at the airport’s exits. As the impressions flooded in I knew without a doubt I was home. The place was tatty, yes. It was grubby and noisy, too. But Cairo fitted snug as an old shoe.

  Right away I knew, too, that I must write this book. There lurked a faint recollection of how the ancient gods had kept Menelaus dawdling by the Nile on his way home from the Trojan War. “And so he tarried, for he had not paid their due of sacrifice,” is how Homer explained the strange reluctance of Odysseus’s friend to return to Sparta. I felt that in some similar sense I owed an offering, however flawed, to this city which had given me so many stories and whose people had been so unfailingly kind.

  Besides, my brief hejira had renewed my appreciation of Cairo. Other places may have been neater, quieter, and less prone to wrenching change, but they all lacked something. The easy warmth of Cairenes, perhaps, and their indomitable insouciance; the complexities and complicities of their relations; their casual mixing of sensuality with moral rigor, of razor wit with credulity. Or perhaps it was the possibility this city offered of escape into other worlds: into the splendors of its pharaonic and medieval pasts, say, or out of its bruising crowds onto the soft, gentle current of the Nile—even if the tapering lateen sails of the river feluccas did now advertise Coca-Cola.

  And then, reading into Cairo’s past, I saw how foolish it was to fret about its future. How silly to imagine that this great town—this Ur-Stadt if there ever was one—could ever decay beyond repair. The fact was that not one generation in Cairo’s five millennia of incarnations had failed to whine about decline, and still the city had endured.

  Cairo’s ancient stone guardian, the Sphinx himself, had been known to complain of neglect. According to the 3,000-year-old stone inscription between his paws, the Sphinx appeared in a dream to a young prince who, exhausted by a desert gazelle hunt, had fallen asleep in his shadow. “My manner is as if I were ailing in all my limbs,” moaned the idol. “The sand of this desert upon which I stand has reached me.” The Sphinx vowed that if the prince dusted him off he could have the god’s kingdom on earth “at the head of the living.” The Sphinx kept his promise. The prince was to rule Egypt as the pharaoh Tutmosis IV.

  The plaintive tone echoed in medieval times, when Cairo was reborn as the greatest of Muslim cities. Here is a certain Sheikh Badr al-Din al-Zaytuni, complaining in verse about the sultan’s closure of the Birkat al-Ratl, a seasonal lake outside the great city walls, where fifteenth-century Cairenes had whiled away autumn evenings on torchlit pleasure boats:

  The eater of opium found constant delight…

  While the mirth of the drunkard was at its height.

  Goblets brimmed beneath the full moon…

  While poets sang to the gentlest of tunes.

  Now time has erased these haunts…

  O eyes, shed tears of grief, O heart endure!

  And God’s favor bless those days of joy when Cairo was secure.

  And here is the French novelist Pierre Loti, who reckoned at the turn of the last century that the city had grown too modern. It had lost its Thousand and One Nights allure: “What is this? Where are we fallen? Save that it is more vulgar than Nice, or the Riviera, or Interlaken…[the] great town—which sweats gold now that men have started to buy from it its dignity and its soul—is become a place of rendezvous and holiday for all the idlers and upstarts of the whole world….”

  Loti was wrong.

  Cairo may have lived through periods of bad as well as good taste. (Actually, much of what Loti saw as vulgarity is now considered fine stuff and worthy of preservation—such as the beaux arts and neo-Islamic architecture of the European Quarter.) The city may have plundered many of its own riches or wantonly scarred them or let them tumble into ruin. But it has never sold its dignity or its soul. This is, after all, the place that endowed the world with the myth of the phoenix.

  It was to ancient Heliopolis, the oldest of Cairo’s many avatars, that the bird of fabulous plumage was said to return every 500 years, to settle on the burning altar at the great Temple of the Sun and then to rise again from its own ashes. Time and again, Cairo too has risen from its ashes. It has survived countless invasions, booms and busts, famines, plagu
es, and calamities. Through them all the city has ultimately remained, as in its classical Arabic name, al-Qahira—The Victorious.

  It was this resilient fluidity, above all, that I wanted to explain. To do so required neither a history nor a descriptive travelogue. It demanded a narrative that would fuse the two, and that would let the city tell its own story through the voices of its old gods, of its stones and chronicles, and of its lovers and critics through the ages down to the present. The writing would be difficult, but if the story were to loop and tangle and digress, well, that too would be in the character of Cairo.

  A GAS STATION marks the site of the old Shepheard’s Hotel on Gumhuriyya Street. Jitney cabs honk and jostle in the roadway out front, urged along by underage barkers who lean out the sliding doors shouting “Kit Kat! Kit Kat!” (They refer not to the Kit Kat, which was a Second World War nightclub on a houseboat across the river, but to the adjacent mosque, which adopted the name and happens to be where this minibus route terminates.)

  A hundred years—a mere drop in the Nile-flood of Cairene history—separate this scene from another.

  Then, silent Nubian waiters in satin kaftans swished among the tables on Shepheard’s streetside terrace. They bore whiskey-sodas to officers of the occupying British army, who retired here after a hard day on the polo grounds of the Gezira Sporting Club. They served hibiscus teas to tarboosh-topped pashas and beys of Cairo’s upper crust, who talked cotton prices and political scandal. But the grand Victorian pile also drew another kind of customer. It was a key port of call for what wags dubbed the Imperial Fishing Fleet, by which they meant the flotilla of debutantes who set out from home each winter with the express aim of trawling for a husband in the British colonial service.

  It was here that my great-grandmother Alfreda made her catch.

  One afternoon in the spring of 1895, Alfreda Eppes and her sister Josephine joggled toward Shepheard’s, perched sidesaddle on twin white donkeys with henna-stained manes. The ladies were proud Virginia gentle-women. In the months since embarking on this grand tour, since leaving their ancestral estate by the lazy James River, they could claim to have seen something of the Old World. But in truth it had been most trying, this day of perusing Oriental sights in the company of importunate dragomen and donkeyboys. And now, in front of the hotel, the dainty memsahibs were engulfed in a human squall. Fiercely mustachioed hawkers pressed in, proffering all manner of unwanted goods, from hippo-hide whips and horsetail fly whisks to flowers, stuffed crocodiles, live leopards and boa constrictors, sandalwood boxes, beads, tarbooshes, and—by the sour account of a contemporary traveler—“images of ancient gods made 3,000 years too late to get into the tombs of the pharoahs.”