The streets were remarkably quiet for the center of a metropolitan area of nearly 20 million people, though I heard blaring horns faintly in the distance across the river on the busier mainland. The sidewalks were wide and shaded by dusty green trees. A vaguely vegetable smell, presumably from the Nile, coated the air like a thin slime. A dense foglike haze enveloped the city, partly from automobile pollution but also from farmers out in the delta burning crop waste. It gave my sleepy Zamalek neighborhood a surreal, ghostly pallor that added to the dislocation I always feel when arriving in a new country.
Foreign embassies were all over the island, most of them right next to each other. They were the former mansions of rich Cairenes built in various European styles at the turn of the last century. But after Gamal Abdel Nasser and his so-called Free Officers Movement overthrew King Farouk in 1952, these magnificent homes were nationalized by the state. Nasser wrenched Egypt into the orbit of Soviet Russia with predictably disastrous results. Most of the island’s residents have been living in those drab apartment buildings ever since.
Nasser was long gone, though, by the time I arrived, as was his replacement Anwar Sadat, whom Islamist army officers assassinated in 1981 for signing a peace treaty with Israel. Egypt’s then-current president, Hosni Mubarak, had no interest in Nasser-style radicalism, nor was he brave enough to risk anything if he had to pay a price as Sadat had. He’d been ruling Egypt as a standard-issue status quo authoritarian for the previous quarter-century. The entire country was drowning in torpor. His regime calcified long before I got there.
At midnight I walked along the bank of the Nile. Two commercial pleasure boats—one lit up in neon and both playing Arabic music too loud—passed each other on the otherwise dark and quiet waters. International hotels skyscrapered behind them. Women were allowed out of the house during the day, nearly all with their heads wrapped in scarves, but every person I passed on the street that night was a man. Cairo is more than 10 times larger than Beirut, Lebanon—where I lived at the time—but it’s two or even three orders of magnitude more conservative.
I was surprised that Zamalek was considered upper-class. The sidewalks were crumbling. Almost every apartment building was coated in soot and grime. Many parked cars had been idle so long, they looked like they were covered in volcanic ash. Only the embassies were clean and well maintained.
Some of these people had money, though. Zamalek was dour on the outside, but when I saw through the front windows into the living rooms of some apartments in the older buildings, I had to revise my opinions. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who has high ceilings, color-washed walls, wedding-cake moldings and chandeliers in their living room. My house in the States is not as nice as many of these. Zamalek’s problem was that the neighborhood wasn’t kept up, as if civic pride didn’t exist.
In the 1980s, when travel writer Douglas Kennedy visited Alexandria, the largest city on the Egyptian Mediterranean, renowned painter Sarwat el-Bahr explained a key Egyptian concept to him. “Do you know why America does not understand Egypt? Because they do not understand the meaning of the word Maaleesh. In English, Maaleesh means ‘doesn’t matter,’ and it is the one word you need to understand Egypt. In America everything is now, now, now—make the money now, make the career now. But in Egypt, everybody believes in life after death, so everything in life is Maaleesh.”
That’s how much of Zamalek looked and felt. It simply didn’t matter if the public spaces were dreary. Not to the locals anyway. But it mattered to me. Zamalek disappointed—considering what it was supposed to be like—and I went back to my hotel and picked up my copy of Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a British Arabist expat who lives in Yemen.
“Few visitors have liked Cairo on first sight,” he wrote. “‘Uff!’ exclaimed an eighth-century caliph, ‘She is the mother of stenches!’ Later, a geographer wondered why anyone should have wanted to build a city ‘between a putrid and mephitic river, the corrupt effluvia of which cause disease and rot food, and a dry and barren mountain range devoid of greenery.’ The ground teemed with rats, scorpions, fleas, and bugs, the air with miasmas. In Cairo Symon Semeon buried his companion Brother Hugo, who had succumbed to an attack of dysentery and fever ‘caused by a north wind.’ My guidebook, compiled a century after I.B.’s visit, was disturbingly frank about the dangers of living in a polluted high-rise city where light and air rarely penetrate the dark alleyways. Its author, al-Maqrizi, warned that ‘the traveler approaching Cairo sees before him a depressing black wall beneath a dust-laden sky, from which sight his soul shrinks and flees away.’”
What I saw wasn’t nearly as bad as all that, at least. And the next day, when I found 26 July Street and the streets adjacent to it, I changed my mind about Zamalek. (I later changed my mind again and again about not only Zamalek but also all of Cairo.)
26 July had an elevated freeway that ran right over the top of it, giving the street a dark, Blade Runner feel. That may sound like a complaint, but somehow it worked. It reminded me a bit of Chicago, a city I love and wish I could visit more often. You can barely see the sky from the sidewalk, but the street is brilliantly lit up at night. All the usual neighborhood goods are for sale: shoes, watches, clothing, glasses, pharmaceuticals, snacks and so on.
I found a terrific Italian restaurant called Maison Thomas. The sign in the window said “Le Caire Fondee en 1922,” decades before Nasser drove all the non-Arabs out of Egypt in his Arab Nationalist “revolution” from above. Maison Thomas, unlike so much of Cairo and even the quieter back streets of Zamalek, felt truly modern. Its patrons were well dressed, most of them more so than me. The waiters and waitresses dressed sharply in black and white. Women and men—and I couldn’t tell if they were single or married—went there on dates. None of the women wore the hijab, the veil or the abaya. Almost everyone seemed to be in a good mood, and almost everyone smoked imported cigarettes rather than Egypt’s crap Cleopatra brand. My charming and disarming waiter seemed like the happiest man alive, as if nothing in the known universe pleased him more than bringing me food and a beverage.
I had to look hard, but I did find tiny pockets of sophistication. A first-class bookstore across the street called Diwa carried some of the best titles from the West as well as from the Middle East. A whole shelf was devoted to Arabic literature translated into English and published in beautiful eye-catching trade-paperback editions. Many of the original English titles were among the finest works of literature the West has ever produced. In the History and Current Events sections, I found books by Edward Said, David Frum, Thomas Friedman and Bernard Lewis. (No Salman Rushdie, alas.)
Cairo was ahead of bookstore-free Tripoli, then, at least in some ways, and miles behind Beirut. But Cairo is so large that you could fold Beirut and Tripoli into it five times each and have room left over.
For good or for ill, whatever happened there would have an enormous impact on the rest of the region.
* * *
Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh gave me an insider’s tour of Cairo and the ghastly political situation facing his country.
He took me down 26 July Street on foot to the bridge over the Nile connecting Zamalek to the mainland. As we walked up the entrance ramp—built for cars, not for people—he asked if I ever walked like this in Beirut. “In Egypt you can walk wherever you want,” he said. “There are no rules or laws here.”
Well, I thought. There were laws against involvement in politics. But I knew what he meant. The Egyptian government didn’t micromanage its citizens. Good on Hosni Mubarak for that one, at least. Egypt was a police state, but at any given moment it didn’t feel like one.
“There are no laws in Lebanon, either,” I said. “You can do pretty much whatever you want there.”
As soon as we crossed the river, the amount of traffic—both pedestrian and automobile—multiplied exponentially while the economic conditions plunged. Zamalek was hardly the most charming place in the world, but it was exquisite compared with the rest of the
city. Mainland Cairo was loud, crowded and crumbling. I could see that it must have been beautiful once, and some of its architecture was strikingly European, but it looked a bit like Prague must have during the 1970s, decades before its postcommunist restoration.
Hideous concrete tower blocks stretched to the horizon in every direction from the relatively compact downtown. I thought to myself that it looked more than a little Soviet, but it wasn’t until I visited 13 postcommunist countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and then returned to Cairo during the so-called Arab Spring that I realized just how accurate that observation actually was.
I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. Nasser’s Egypt was a Soviet client state, though officially “socialist” rather than communist. In the 1950s he purged Egypt of its tolerance, its riches, its openness and its variety. He brought in Russian advisers, ramped up the secret police and ruthlessly smashed everyone who opposed him. He expelled nearly all the Greeks, Jews and other minorities in his attempt to make Egypt monolithically Arab. (Egypt before Nasser was not considered an Arab country. Before him, Egypt was just Egypt.) His nationalization of industry and private property turned the economy into an incompetently micromanaged catastrophe.
“Can we talk about politics out in the open?” I said to Big Pharaoh.
“Yes,” he said. “We can say whatever we want.”
“Is it because we’re speaking in English?”
“No,” he said. “We could do it in Arabic too.”
“You’re not worried about the secret police?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “It is a real change from last year. Last year there was no way. But it’s better now, more open. Do you know why?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Because of pressure from George W. Bush.”
That was the only piece of good news I had to report from Egypt during the time of Hosni Mubarak.
We walked underneath an overhead freeway. I had to shout so he could hear me. The entire world looked as though it were made out of poured concrete, and I could taste the black tang of exhaust in the air.
Big Pharaoh pointed out a set of campaign posters on a wall. It felt good seeing campaign posters in Egypt. It was a long way from Libya, where menacing portraits of Muammar Qaddafi and no one else were plastered up everywhere. The main opposition to Hosni Mubarak, however, was not a liberal coalition but the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.
“Do you know what that says?” he said as he pointed at the Arabic script above the portrait of a candidate’s face. “It says Islam Is the Solution.”
We made our way to the nearest subway station and descended the steps. It was clean down there—much cleaner than the subway stations in New York City—and I said so.
“It is almost brand-new,” he said.
“How old is it, exactly?” I said.
“About 10 years,” he said.
I was amazed that such a miserably poor country could build a brand-new subway while American taxpayers said they couldn’t afford to build any new trains. How was that even possible?
“It must have been hugely expensive,” I said.
“France and Japan helped us pay for it,” he said.
“Japan?” I said. “Really. Why Japan?”
“To earn some goodwill, I guess,” he said.
As our train pulled into the station, I made my way toward the first car.
“Not that car,” he said. “The first car is only for women.”
The genders weren’t segregated as in Saudi Arabia. Women could ride any car on the train. But sexual harassment and sexual assault in Egypt were so off the scale compared with almost everywhere else in the world that the government gave women their own train car so they wouldn’t have their asses grabbed by aggressive, lecherous men.
“I got in that car on accident once,” he said. “By the time I figured it out, the doors closed. I got out at the next stop and was fined seven pounds.” Seven pounds is less than $2, but half of Egyptians earned less than $2 a day.
We got off the train in the center of downtown and emerged next to a huge, well-lit roundabout. Perhaps it was because he and I arrived after dark when the night washed the grime away, but Cairo suddenly looked like a European masterpiece. It was not at all what I was expecting after seeing the squalid condition of so much of the rest of the city. I changed my opinion of Cairo—again.
“This is amazing,” I said. “What a terrific downtown. Look at these buildings!”
“They are from another era,” he said. “They are just relics. They have nothing to do with what Egypt is now.”
“But they’re real,” I said, “and you still have them. No country builds streets like this anymore anyway.”
It felt like an Arab New York or, rather, an Arab Rome. Later, though, when I went downtown again by myself during the day, I understood what he meant. Downtown Cairo is all sparkle and no substance at night. Cities can’t lie during the day. Even this neighborhood, which surely once was exquisite, seemed to have all the prosperity sucked out of it. Only an empty husk remained. Egypt had clearly had a rough couple of decades. In the harsh afternoon sunlight, the neighborhood looked like it had been lifted hundreds of feet into the air and dropped back on the street.
I’ve seen photographs of this part of town that make it look sort of okay. Their smaller-than-life size conceals the backwardness, the gloom and the depressed condition of the place since Nasser took out his blunt instruments and went to work on it.
“I am going to take you to an Egyptian bar,” Big Pharaoh said. “Is that okay?”
“You mean an Egyptian bar where no tourists would ever go?”
“Exactly,” he said.
“Perfect,” I said. “That is exactly what I want to see.”
We walked past a women’s underwear store. “When the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power,” he said as he swept his arm in front of female-shaped mannequins modeling panties and bras, “they will ban this.”
He led me into an establishment called Cap’dor. Instead of glass windows it had wooden shutters painted red and green. The floor was laid with gray tile, the walls lined with wood paneling. There was not a single woman inside. Apparently that’s how it always is in that bar. They didn’t even bother to install a women’s restroom. Beer was the only beverage available.
“There are some prostitute bars around too,” he said.
“Is it legal here?” I said. “Prostitution is rampant in Lebanon.”
“No,” he said, “but the law is lax. The bar owner just pays off the police and no one cares.”
We ordered two stout bottles of Stella beer.
“Best beer in Egypt,” he said. “The company was started by a Greek guy in 1897.”
The bartender brought us carrots, sliced tomatoes and ful beans. We dug in.
I wanted to know what he thought of the Muslim Brotherhood. Many in the Western press described the organization as moderate, but compared with what? Al-Qaeda? Sure. But it was hardly moderate compared with anything in the West.
“They are moderate because they don’t have guns,” he said. “They don’t kill people. But most of the armed terrorist groups we see now were born out of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. My biggest fear is that if the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt, we will get Islamism-lite, that they won’t be quite bad enough that people will revolt against them. Take bars, for example. Most Egyptians don’t drink, so they won’t mind if alcohol is illegal. The same goes for banning books. Most Egyptians don’t read. So why should they care if books are banned? Most women wear a veil or a headscarf already, so if it becomes the law, hardly anyone will resist.”
“How many people here think like you do?” I asked him.
“Few,” he said. “Very few. Less than 10 percent probably.”
We ordered more Stella beers. He practically inhaled all the ful beans. I didn’t think they were that great. They had little taste, actually.
“There probably aren’t
many Muslim Brotherhood guys in this bar,” I said.
He laughed. “Ha! No way. This is a secular working-class bar. Just the fact that they’re here makes them liberals.”
The patrons didn’t look liberal. He used that word in the most elastic way possible. These men were secular, sure, since they drank beer, but there were no women around. This was a man’s establishment. How many of these guys, I wondered, were responsible for the government giving women their own car on the subway?
It was odd, I suppose, to see my pale face, blue eyes and black leather jacket in Cap’dor. No one stared, but almost all the other men’s eyes lingered on me a bit longer than usual. They seemed curious and slightly pleased that someone from somewhere else decided to hang out in their place.
I asked Big Pharaoh what he thought would happen if Egypt held a legitimate free and fair election instead of a rigged one staged by the government.
“The Muslim Brotherhood would win,” he said. “They would beat Mubarak and the liberals.”
It was obvious just from walking around that liberalism in the genuine sense of the word found little purchase in Cairo. Women wore headscarves. A large percentage of men wore robes. It was a traditional place despite its size. The vibrant culture that must have existed when the European Quarter was built had passed into history.
“I’ve had a theory for a while now,” I said. “that some Middle East countries are going to have to live under an Islamic state for a while and get it out of their system.”
Big Pharaoh laughed grimly.
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 3