| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : MARCH 1, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Cairo: The Bane of Egypt--and Its Treasure CAIRO The City Victorious By Max Rodenbeck Knopf 300pp $27.50 Most visitors to Egypt take a circumscribed tour encompassing the pyramids and the Egyptian museum. Perhaps they trek to Luxor to see the ancient royal tombs. But tourists have a hard time coming to grips with sprawling, noisy Cairo, which is both the bane of Egypt and its treasure. It's not surprising that foreigners give Cairo short shrift: It is marvelous--but also infuriating and intimidating. Now, Max Rodenbeck, a correspondent for The Economist and a longtime Cairo resident, has written a many-layered history of one of the world's oldest cities. It won't teach you to read hieroglyphics, and it doesn't weigh you down with detail about the pharaohs. But it is a splendid meditation on Cairo's evolution from a center of ancient civilization to a vibrant, semi-modern metropolis of more than 12 million. Following in the tradition of such British travel writers as Jan Morris and the earlier Alexander Kinglake, the well-researched account takes us into the social milieu and street life of earlier days. Cairo, says Rodenbeck, is so old that no one really knows when it began. It may date back 4,000 years to the town of Om--now a part of the city called Heliopolis--which jostled for influence with Memphis, the pharaonic capital across the Nile. But the heart of the present city began taking shape under the Fatimids, an Islamic dynasty that swept into Egypt from Tunisia in the 10th century. Heeding astrologers' advice, they called their capital al-Qahira, after the planet Mars the Triumphant. The next three centuries were Cairo's golden age. Under the Fatimids and their various Islamic successors, Cairo became the jewel of an empire that at times embraced much of Arabia, the Levant, Iraq, and Iran. Many of the tales in The Thousand and One Nights were composed in Cairo during this period. What distinguished the city was its intellectual atmosphere and its location on the trade routes linking the West to India and Africa. Europe, then comparatively backward, became a beneficiary of Cairo's architecture and science. But a long period of decline set in around the 15th century. Misrule by dynasties of central Asian soldiers known as the Mamelukes sapped the country's resources, put a damper on intellectual progress, and ended a period of tolerance toward Christian and Jewish minorities. When Napoleon, his troops, and a team of French scientists arrived in the late 1790s, they found Cairo ''ripe for the picking''--with the state of both scholarship and public health badly deteriorated. So began an uneasy century and a half of Egyptian-European cohabitation, much of it under the rule of the British, who seized power in 1882 to make sure that those now in charge, rulers of Ottoman background called the khedives, paid the huge debts run up digging the Suez Canal. The Europeans brought capital and vitality to a stagnating Egypt. But there was a sinister side. Huge red-light districts arose. A social chasm widened between Egyptians and Europeans, who looked down on even Westernized pashas. ''They dance with foreign ladies, wear Frankish clothes...and, but for their Eastern habits of tyranny, peculation, insincerity, and corruption, they might for all the world be Europeans,'' sneered one British writer in 1892. Egyptians' resentment erupted in rioting in Cairo in January, 1952, leading to a coup by Gamal Abdel Nasser six months later. Nasser promised a renaissance that would see Egyptians manufacture everything on their own, ''from needles to rockets.'' But his nationalizations of businesses and his futile wars with Israel left Egypt prostrate. Still, in these socialist years, Cairo had an elan that it lost under the more materialistic rule of Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat. A hero abroad, Sadat showed a disregard for the poor that made him a figure of scorn in Egypt. Although squalid, Cairo in the 1960s and '70s had charm. Rodenbeck excels in describing the fun that residents had in such crumbling lairs as Groppi's Tea Rooms and the Cafe Riche, ''with its mix of leftist conspirators and the secret police who surveilled them.'' He provides a classic description of two archetypal local barflies, Shawki and Sabri, ''jaded souses'' whose rants about the rottenness of it all are fueled by such Egyptian knock-off liquors as ''Chiras Renal'' and ''Goldon's London Dry Gin.'' Rodenbeck is realistic about Egypt's shortcomings. The country boasts that it is the cultural center of the Arab world, but this has happened mostly by default, Rodenbeck says. Cairo's film, publishing, and music businesses have all been declining, partly a result of stultifying Islamic fundamentalism. Even Egypt's Nobel-prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz became the object of an Islamist's wrath and was wounded in a knife attack in response to his ''blasphemous'' work. Still, Rodenbeck takes courage from the recent revival of private industry, even if it is accompanied by excesses on the part of the rich. The long-moribund stock market is thriving, and Cairo is again producing ''fine linens and brocades, handwoven carpets, and elegant tableware.'' Of course, an enormous gulf remains between rich and poor, and the Islamic monuments in the old city that Rodenbeck loves are being shaken to bits by traffic. But, he says, they are crumbling because Cairo, with its ''air of imperturbable permanence'' remains a dynamic, thriving metropolis. BY STANLEY REED _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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