Three of the most memorable literary journeys I’ve made in 2008-09 have brought me to the ancient and venerable city of Cairo, Egypt. In Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy (English translation easily available in several editions, both as a single volume and in three separate books), I encountered the city in the early years of the twentieth century, still under British ‘protection’, through the experiences of members of the family of the domineering and sensuous patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. In Olivia Manning’s The Levant Trilogy (far more difficult to find and costly to acquire than it should be!), I followed British expatriates Guy and Harriet Pringle from Athens to Cairo during the Second World War and watched them struggle to get settled in a totally alien place. Finally, in Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (English translation also readily available), I got involved in the lives of the various characters living and working in that magnificent old structure.
With all these vivid images swirling in my brain, I was thrilled to see Great Cairo in a box of books from International Publishers Marketing, which distributes books from The American University in Cairo Press stateside. Desmond Stewart, who died in 1981, was a British journalist who worked for many years in Cairo. He wrote a number of books about Egyptian culture and history and translated two Arabic novels into English. His sources for this book include works published in English, Italian and French (some of which appear to have been translated from Arabic by their credited authors) primarily in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I’m sure Edward Said would accuse Stewart of being a latter-day Orientalist. I can’t say I would disagree!
Despite its name, Great Cairo is a very small book, just over two hundred pages long, which made me wonder what it might hold, given the long, long history of Cairo. Mind you, I have no problem at all with conciseness – I’ve read more than one lengthy scholarly treatise that could have been distilled into a twenty-page journal article. Apart from the nineteenth century French painting on the dust jacket, the book has no illustrations, not even any line drawings. I longed for a map, or preferably a whole series of maps, to give me a visual orientation to the city, its location, its major landmarks, and the ways it changed over the centuries since its establishment. (I finally bought a modern travel map of the city one day when I had a thirty percent off coupon at Borders!)
Stewart followed a chronological order in his narrative, as is the convention for any history of this sort. I would like to say that he kept his focus on the city that gave the book his title, but that would be misleading. Sure, part of the challenge is that the place we know as Cairo existed under several other names at different points in history (and under different regimes). The two names by which the city is still known to its inhabitants are Misr, whose origins and meaning are unclear, and al-Qahira, the Arabic word for the god of war, thus “the victorious,” so named when the boundaries of the city were initially established in 969 CE. The name Stewart used as the book’s subtitle, “Mother of the World,” (in Arabic, um al-dunya) refers to the primordial nature of human settlement at the site that became Cairo, on the southern tip of the Nile delta.
One of Stewart’s recurring themes throughout the book concerns the influence of various religions on the city and its successive and overlapping cultures. As I read the book, I often experienced these as unnecessary digressions, for three reasons: first, at times his discussion of the religions consumed multiple long paragraphs; second, in a book this short about a city this old, I wanted him to stay on topic; third, he didn’t provide the kind of narrative bridges that would have enabled me to understand why he decided to spend so much of his text time on this particular theme. (I suppose I should have expected this preoccupation after reading in his introduction that one of his references was inspired by a message from the dead channeled through a trance medium!)
Nonetheless, at some points Stewart’s insights about the cultural evolution of Egypt are brilliant and memorable. I made note of a wonderful analogy he drew between the symbiotic Egyptian and Hellenistic cultures and what might have happened between England and India if that relationship had lasted a thousand years and entailed considerably more mutual exchange.
I also greatly appreciated Stewart’s extensive coverage of the long years of Mameluke rule over Egypt as a whole. Although I have run across mentions of the Mamelukes in other books, this was the first relatively detailed depiction I have encountered. I easily saw their similarities with the Ottoman Janissaries – both are castes of warriors recruited as children from villages in eastern Europe and the Anatolian peninsula. According to Stewart, the word mameluke means ‘owned’ in Arabic. While they may have begun as slaves, many mamelukes earned their freedom when they converted to Islam or excelled on the battlefield. Although they remained primarily warriors for hire, some also became Egypt’s rulers and, remarkably, patrons of the arts and preservers of antiquities.
Stewart reckons that Mameluke rule over Egypt persisted from roughly the mid-thirteenth century until the Ottoman Turks invaded in the early sixteenth. As mercenary soldiers, the mamelukes served the Ottomans until the late eighteenth century, when Napoleon’s army invaded, ostensibly to bring French enlightenment to Egypt. When the French departed not long thereafter, an Albanian Muslim military officer named Muhammad Ali became the Ottoman pasha (governor) of Egypt. Although Muhammad Ali could have been a mameluke himself, he undertook to destroy the caste once and for all in a series of maneuvers that predated by less than twenty years the so-called Auspicious Event that destroyed the Ottoman Janissaries.
Quite inexplicably, Stewart’s narrative peters out at just about the time that written historical records of the city became more numerous and accessible. Great Cairo has barely thirty pages remaining when Muhammad Ali defeats the Mamelukes in 1811. In very quick order, Stewart uses those remaining pages to bring the reader up to date, or at least up to the late 1970s. About ten pages past the end of the Mamelukes, the Suez Canal opens in 1869. It’s at about this time that Cairo and other Egyptian cities, most notably Alexandria, experienced a literal invasion of European civilians, mostly merchants and explorers (both professional tour guides and tourists). A few pages later, as the twentieth century approaches, the English make Egypt a protectorate with a puppet ruler. Only in the last two or three pages of the book does Stewart refer, almost dismissively, to the Egyptian nationalist movements that figure so prominently in The Cairo Trilogy and that culminated in the 1952 revolt led by Gamal Abdul Nasser and the formation of the modern, independent Egyptian state.
I don’t think this is a bad book, so much as a limited and rather idiosyncratic telling of a story that has so many significant aspects. I think I will look around for some other pieces of Cairo’s (and Egypt’s) modern history.
(The American University in Cairo Press, third edition, 1996)
