Plain Talk

By Mrusi Saad El-Din

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The Greek must count among Cairo's most active cultural centres and among its recent events was a seminar on the historiography of the Greeks of modern Egypt. Alexander Kazamias and Anthony Gorman were among the participants, and I found the latter's paper very illuminating.

While small numbers of Greeks were living in Egypt in the early modern period Gorman dates the beginnings of the modern Greek presence in Egypt from the first half of the 19th century. The active immigration policy introduced by Mohamed Ali encouraged a steady migration of Greeks into Egypt, a wave that continued until the late 1920s by which time the Greek community had assumed a significant commercial role. The state census of 1927 put the number of ethnic Greeks living in Egypt at 100,000 though some Greek writers and historians have upped the figure to 180,000. Though the greatest concentration of Greeks lived in Alexandria and Cairo, unlike other foreign groups substantial numbers also lived in the Suez Canal cities and in towns in the Delta.

Gorman furnishes a brief description of two broad bodies of scholarship on the Greeks of Egypt -- the work of Egyptian and Greek historians, identifying four strands within Egyptian historiography. First there was the royalist school of what he calls bureaucrat- historians, exemplified by Ali Mubarak and Rifaa Rafei El- Tahtawi, nurtured by a generous royal purse. He quotes El- Tahtawi as writing in 1869 that Egypt was encouraging foreigners to settle in the country, and consequently to contribute to the country's development, which they did.

By the beginning of the 20th century a liberal school emerged, its chief exponent being Abdel-Rahman El-Rafei. The bourgeois nationalist movement had as its principal objective the withdrawal of the British. The Greeks, alongside other foreign minorities, were regarded as beneficiaries, if not accomplices, of British colonial rule and little else.

By the 1940s a materialist socialist school was emerging, led by historians such as Shuhdi Attiya and Ibrahim Amr, wedded to the cause of national economic independence and favouring the rise of a national bourgeoisie as a way to socialist transformation.

A fourth school invoked Islam in a modern and national context -- it, alongside the three others, Gorman concludes, acted to reduce Egypt's religious and ethnic minorities, the Greek among them, to stereotypes. "Whether as a pioneer of civilisation, a foreign national, an economic exploiter or a religious and cultural alien, they have been effectively marginalised with little or no distinction made between different social classes within the Greek community," he writes.

Greek scholarship is similarly divided into different strands. First there is the celebratory, often nostalgic tone of older works praising the achievements of the super wealthy upper echelons of the Greek community.

A more recent trend has concentrated on the Egiptiotes in terms of the social organisations which served as fora for much of Greek political, social and cultural life in Egypt.

While it is generally held that Egypt's Greeks were aloof from Egyptian politics, concerning themselves more with the politics of the Greek State, there were examples of political cooperation, especially in the labour and communist movements.

The Greek community in Egypt, Gorman writes, boasted a most active and organised intellectual and cultural life. In the century from 1860 more than 3,000 books in Greek and 400 different newspapers and periodicals owned by Greeks were published in Egypt.

While these publications obviously reflect various community concerns over developments in mainland Greece they also focussed on manifestations of Greek culture in Egypt and its place within broader Egyptian culture. There are also efforts to encourage Greeks to learn Arabic and to encourage Egyptians to become acquainted with modern Greek literature. In this respect a number of novels by Greeks in Egypt have been translated into Arabic and, of course, the status of the Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy in Egypt illustrates the great respect we have for the contribution of the Egiptiotes.