16 - 22 May 2002
Issue No.586
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 May 2002 Issue No.586 |
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Plain talk
Though I am a citizen of Cairo, and proud to be one, I have never liked the term Cairene, least of all when it is applied to people.
I was born in Sayeda Zeinab, often described as a popular quarter, and brought up and educated in Shubra, a typical lower middle class area with a sprinkling of Italians and Jews. I was living in Shubra when I first went to England, where I would stay for 12 years as cultural attaché, returning in 1956 to live in Heliopolis, an upper middle class neighbourhood with quite a large number of foreigners.
In the meantime my family had moved to Zamalek, one of the city's smartest areas.
Such information I include simply to show the various levels at which I have experienced my native city, a city that has appeared in innumerable studies, from Edward Lane's Manners and Customs to Max Rodenbeck's Cairo: The City Victorious, taking in, along the way, Stanley Lane- Poole's Cairo: History, Monuments and Social Life and, of course, Desmond Stewart's Great Cairo, Mother of the World.
Stanley Lane-Poole believed that the Cairo he described in Kahira the Guarded remained, to a great extent, the city of the Arabian Nights. "We can still shut our eyes to the hotels and restaurants," he wrote, "the dusty grass plots and villas of the European Quarter, and turn away to wander in the labyrinth of narrow lanes which intersect the old parts of the city -- and we may fancy ourselves in the gateway of Aly of Cairo. A few streets away from the European quarter it is easy to dream that we are acting a part in the veracious histories of the Thousand and One Nights." But he was describing the Cairo of 1898.
Robin Fedden's Egypt: Land of the Valley, is one of the most sympathetic treatments of Egypt. He devotes a chapter to Medieval Cairo and I shall always remember the last paragraph: "But there is reason to hope. A great fund of character and vitality resides somewhere in this ancient people. In a country where there was never a caste system in Pharaonic times, a new corporate identity comes naturally. Given a rule they respect the fellahin and their river are capable of untold achievements. A long historical hibernation, which proved imperious to the passage of dynasties and the pressures of imperial policy, seems to have reached its terms. The Egyptian is perhaps aware that an inheritance awaits him. After all this time, he deserves it."
To Fedden Cairo "is still the first of medieval cities. For centuries, it was immensely rich, and was spared the Mongol invasion that destroyed the splendours of its rival Baghdad. It remains a threatened but a miraculous survival."
Desmond Stewart was one of the greatest lovers of Cairo. We worked together, him as adviser and myself as editor-in-chief at The Arab Observer. Desmond was the author of many books, including Men of Friday, a novel about the 1952 Revolution. He also translated Fathi Ghanem's masterpiece The Man Who Lost His Shadow. About his book on Cairo Desmond wrote: "It is a product of a love affair with a city, spanning in my case the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although the passion has mellowed into affection, Cairo still seems to me -- for its history and what survives of its buildings -- one of the most fascinating cities in the world."
James Aldridge, the well known American novelist also wrote Cairo: The Biography of a City. In the preface he insists it "is not an academic study, nor an amateur history. It is really a passionate involvement in the place by someone who has long admired the city and its people."
These are but a few samples of what non-Egyptians have written about my Cairo. I may not like the adjective formulation Cairene, but the city continues to beguile.
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