Al-Ahram Weekly | Books supplement

I was at the Hilton, where my host, the American University of Cairo, had put me up. I was waiting for my old friend Hala to pick me up. Hala, now a distinguished economist, was taking me to stay with her for my remaining days in Cairo, in the apartment in Zamalek that she shared with her mother.

When she arrived we sat out for a while on the balcony over drinks, enjoying the spectacular views of the Nile and of the island of Zamalek just opposite. Beyond it, on the Nile's western bank, the city extended now almost to the pyramids. Most of Cairo -- the heart of the modern city and Old Cairo -- was behind us. But standing in a corner of the balcony and looking back, one could see just a little of the old city and, past it, the purple outline of the Mu'attam hills and the citadel, with its famous pencil-thin minarets against the lilac sunset sky, a sky perceptibly more polluted now than when I lived here all those many years ago.

Cairo's traffic problems were enormous. (A city that in my day had a population of perhaps a million was now home to nearly ten million.) I abandoned any thought of nostalgic expeditions that, before arriving, I had thought I might make -- to Ain Shams, for instance, even though house and garden were gone, or Zatoun, still there and still a school. Given Cairo's traffic, just getting there would have been a major undertaking. Having plunged at once into the business of preparing, revising, and delivering lectures, I in fact had little time for nostalgia or for comparing how things had been and how different it all was now -- which was probably all to the good.

And, of course, it was quite different. Particularly striking to me was the prevalence among women of some form of Islamic dress -- but all of it now modern Islamic dress. There were no milayyas to be seen in the streets, no simple way like that by which you could immediately tell class difference. As I knew, the veil no longer meant what it had in my day. The women wearing it were quite likely to be educated professional women, working women, upwardly mobile women. The veil did not connote for them, as it had for my grandmother, women's seclusion, invisibility, confinement to the home. Quite the contrary -- it meant exactly the opposite: it was affirmation of their right to work and to be in the public world pursuing professional and working lives. Why? It would take a chapter or two to explain this, let alone the rest of the tremendous cultural transformation going on in Egypt.

Despite this enormous change -- change that was visually very striking simply because people were dressed so differently now -- and the many other ones just in the appearance of the city, with its high-rise buildings and overpasses and various other features new to me, there was a feel to Cairo that harked back not to Nasser's days but to the pre-Nasser era. It was a sense of the enormous intellectual vitality and cultural richness of this city and a sense of an almost palpable vibrancy and ferment: this place that was (as it has been for millennia) a meeting place of so many histories, so many ways of thought, so many forms of belief. And this sense of the complexity and mental aliveness of the place was there despite the growing presence of fundamentalism and fundamentalism's deadly intent to curtail freedom of thought.

Everywhere I went I experienced this vibrancy. Almost everyone I met seemed passionately engaged in trying to understand this complicated moment of history and in analysing all the different strands that went into making it and all its conceivable outcomes. And almost everyone was utterly committed to standing against the tide of fundamentalism and to fighting for and preserving their freedom to speak, to write, to think. Here, moreover, commitment to ideas and to the right to think and speak freely had an edge that it didn't necessarily have in other places. It could mean being willing literally to put your life on the line for your beliefs. At least one of the journalists I met, Galal Amin, who along with his intellectual acuity and courage also had a tremendous capacity to laugh, had had his life repeatedly threatened by fundamentalists simply for his being forthrightly critical of their positions. Of course, though, the community I had tapped into through the American University included some of Cairo's most lively and distinguished intellectuals. Still, the exhilarating intellectual vibrancy of almost every party and gathering (almost every time, I'd come away feeling the way one does after a particularly exhilarating conference) was so remarkable that I began to wonder whether there weren't perhaps some unintended benefits to having one's freedom of thought and speech threatened -- in the way that hanging, as they say, wonderfully focuses the mind. Perhaps it not only focused the mind but made one prize and understand all the more acutely how important, how vital, indeed, to one's life and well-being it is to question and reflect on and openly share one's ideas.

		Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Cairo moments