Posts by khaledFahmy:
The seven deadly sins of the Muslim Brotherhood
September 19th, 2013
By Khaled Fahmy.
One of the biggest casualties of yesterday’s events in Egypt is US Ambassador, Anne Patterson. For months now, she has been insisting on a slanted reading of the political scene in Egypt, constantly letting the Muslim Brotherhood off the hook (in a bizarre move last week, she even visited Khayrat El-Shater, the strong man of the MB in his personal office), and giving erroneous accounts to John Kerry about the opposition to President Morsy.
The biggest casualty, however, has to be Morsy and his Muslim Brotherhood, who have insisted on a disastrous reading of the political map after the revolution and succeeded in fooling Patterson (and many other western diplomats and journalists) of their delusional views.
The Muslim Brotherhood and their western backers stand accused of committing the following seven deadly sins.
1. They have thought that running and winning free and fair elections was what the revolution was all about. When Morsy won with a 52 % of the vote, his group convinced him that this is a sufficient source of legitimacy and that the revolution, now that it has fulfilled its main objective, is over. People should now go back home and mind their business. This was a disastrous reading of the political situation. People did not take to the streets in Jan-Feb 2011 and risk their lives only to have free and fair elections. And they were not willing to go back home just because someone won the presidential elections (no matter who), until they made sure that this person at least appeared to be answering their main demands.
2. The second fatal mistake is not to proceed to tackle the security sector, i.e. the police, the intelligence services and the many para-military forces lying around. From day one, we insisted that the fact that the revolution erupted on the 25th of January, Police Day, was not an accident. We insisted that people were sick and tired of police brutality and abuse, most seriously the endemic use of torture as a means of state policy. We realized how difficult reforming the police would be, but we handed in many concrete proposals of how to do so in a gradual, but serious way. But the Muslim Brotherhood was adamant on not taking on this important and crucial portfolio. Instead, both the President and the Prime Minister repeatedly praised the police and went as far as to say that the police were to be thanked for their role in the January 25 revolution. As a result, no serious actions were taken to put any of the officers accused of torture on trial. And not a single officer accused of killing more than 800 demonstrators during Jan-Feb 2011 has been found guilty.
3. The third fatal mistake of the MB and Morsy was to go after the press and the judiciary rather than the police. This, most famously, culminated in the catastrophic November Constitutional Decree whereby Morsy thought he could forestall a coup by the constitutional Court by staging his own constitutional coup. According to the interview with Patrick Kingsley in yesterday’s Guardian, Morsy now admits that this move was taken against his own wish and that it had been a mistake. Also according to an analysis of many opinion polls taken over the past year and published in Magued Othman’s article in yesterday’s al-Shorouk, this was the moment that saw the President’s population plummeted. It has not recovered since.
4. Fourthly, and most bizarrely, the President and his group constantly accused the opposition of all the problems that had befallen the country since Morsy was elected. Repeatedly, the MB has accused the opposition of being unprincipled and of doing everything possible to thwart the sincere efforts of the president and the cabinet to solve the country’s problems. Blaming the opposition for the disastrous measures taken by the government belies a woeful lack of common sense. The opposition’s role is, well, to oppose. They are not supposed to make things easier for the government. Whereas the government’s job, again to state the obvious, is to govern. Part of governing is to reach out to the opposition and to try and meet them midway. But the MB insisted on a winner-takes-all approach and failed to give the opposition credible and meaningful concessions. Invitations to reform dialogs are a farce and are in no way a serious alternative to what the opposition has been calling for: a more inclusive approach to writing the constitution, an even handed electoral law, a staunch defense against all calls to curtail freedom of association and free speech, etc.
5. Fifthly, and equally bizarrely, the MB has opted to see all opposition as a result of feloul machinations. Whereas there are definitely some businessmen, journalists, judges and many police and army officers who are feloul and who are still lurking around, the millions of people who have been taking to the streets could not all be said to be in the pay of these corrupt members of the ancien regime. The political map is not simply divided between the new inexperienced regime and the old one still bent on preserving its power and prestige. This is the situation of many countries that have witnessed the birth pangs of transitional democracy. In Egypt, however, things are more complex. They are more complex because in addition to the new regime and the old regime, we have the revolution. The new regime, i.e. the MB and the Salafis (the other winners of the parliamentary elections), were not the ones who had called for this revolution , and many of them joined only in the eleventh hour and only very reluctantly. Yet, they were the ones who ended up winning the elections. This is fine and understandable given the MB’s formidable electoral machine. But insisting to see the people who constantly take to the streets and those who have joined political parties, those who write in newspapers and those who dance in the streets, as feloul proved to be a grave error.
6. Sixthly, the MB has also shown their true undemocratic colors when they decided to go after the constitutional court, the judiciary, the free press, the NGOs, and to draft a deeply flawed electoral law slanted to their favor. Theoretically, the MB seems to be relying on an ancient and outdated political philosophy whereby the people’s participation in the political system seems to start and finish with the ballot boxes, what my dear friend Amr Ezzat coined as ballotocracy. According to this view, which has precedents in medieval Islamic political philosophy, the leader once elected (in a bay‘a) should command total respect and obedience from his (and of course there is no ‘”or her” in this political vision) followers. He is constantly compared to a captain of a ship or a leader of a caravan. If you don’t follow his commands you run the risk of drowning or perishing in the barren desert. The MB, and strangely Anne Patterson, do not seem to believe that the president’s role is more akin to the CEO of a company or the president of a university who is accountable to a board of directors or to stockholders/board of trustees; who is subject to laws and procedures; and who can be fired and sacked if he does not do his job properly. If this philosophy seems generally outdated and unsuitable to modern times, it is particularly unsuitable for a revolutionary moment. Not realizing the people cannot be expected to go home and mind their business after casting their votes in the presidential elections is the gravest mistake the Brotherhood/Patterson coalition has committed.
7. Lastly, the Muslim Brotherhood has failed to realize that its time is over. This is a secret organization founded in the 1920 to fight the British in Egypt. During their long history, they have suffered draconian measures under Egypt’s many rulers, most seriously under Nasser. Their ideology and their tactics, their rhetoric and their philosophy have all reflected this siege mentality. One would have expected that having come to power as a result of free and fair elections that have, in turn, been the result of an amazing popular revolution, that they adopt a more relaxed, open, inclusive and tolerant attitude. Personally, I think the Brotherhood should have disbanded itself and morphed into political party. Instead, they did form a party but in an avaricious, greedy attitude they not only kept their organization, but also kept its secretive, clandestine structure and mentality. Famously, the president showed his true preference when he addressed the MB cadres and members as “my family and folk”, raising doubts in the minds of millions of Egyptians about his true allegiance. And in a drooling hunger for control, the MB unleashed their cadres onto the institutions of the state in a rabid race to control them, what we have called ikhwanization. What is more, this ikhwanization has been going on with no vision, philosophy or aim except to control the hinges of the state. And with their old literature making it abundantly clear that this “tamkin” tactic aims at nothing less that imprinting their vision on the totality of Egyptian society, no wonder people got scared and rebelled.
I believe the Muslim Brotherhood is dead. It is a very tragic death as it happens paradoxically just when they thought that the future is theirs. Their best days are already behind them. And what makes it even more difficult for them to accept this tragic end is that it was brought about not because of the clever tactics or the insightful leadership of the opposition, as much as it was the result of their own bullheaded, stubborn leadership that, in the words of my dear friend Sherif Younis, had caused them to win all the battles but lose the war. This, and the friendly advice that Ms. Patterson has been giving Mr. El-Shater.
Espionage And Historical Research
May 10th, 2013By Khaled Fahmy.
Researchers in Egypt face suspicion and a misguided obsession with security concerns, which is both a symptom and a cause of the country’s cultural backwardness.
On a trip to London last week, I visited the Royal College of Surgeons, which houses an impressive museum about the history of medicine and surgery from the 18th century to the present. As I have an interest in the modern history of medicine in Egypt, I spent an entire day at the museum and the College’s archives.
I was intrigued at how the museum told the story of anatomy in England and Scotland, and how anatomy eventually occupied centre stage in the education of physicians and surgeons. The traditional tale of this important process focused on the resistance of the Church to physicians’ heroic efforts to open the cadaver, and highlighted the objections of priests to dissecting corpses for the purpose of medical instruction. The common version was: persistent scientific efforts by “enlightened” physicians versus the backwardness of the Church and its rigid dogma.
Compared to this “heroic” tale and relying on recent research in the history of medicine, the museum tells the tale of history of anatomy in a more nuanced manner. According to the new version, religion neither obstructed nor encouraged scientific research. The main obstacle standing in the way of dissecting the human body was not the Church but the members of faculty of the leading schools of medicine in Europe.
These doctors had learned medicine from classical, Latin texts and the last thing they wanted was to be challenged by an upstart doctor to declare that what he sees with his own eye in a body is more accurate and authentic than what the ancients said in their tomes. Thus, prominent physicians opposed the new surgeons whom they described as “butchers”, and tried to block their progress in the profession, denying them any recognition of their expertise and professionalism.
In a similar manner, I believe that the biggest problem facing scientific research in Egypt is not religious dogma or lack of funds or a paltry budget for scientific research, as much as it is the tight grip of security agencies that killed our cultural and educational institutions, whether universities, libraries or museums. This is coupled with a conservative, backward mentality of those in charge of these facilities.
To give you a clearer picture, I share here some of what I and many of my students have been suffering from while trying to conduct scientific research in our field, history.
When I began preparing my doctoral thesis at Oxford University about Egypt’s history under the reign of Mohamed Ali, my adviser, Roger Owen, suggested I go to the British National Archives, which was then called the Public Record Office (PRO), that houses reports by the British consuls to Egypt, reports which are considered an indispensable source for anyone studying that period. Given that I had no prior experience with archival research, and that I was deeply intimidated by the prospective encounter, I kept postponing this visit.
Then one day I found myself stuck in traffic close to the PRO so I finally mustered my courage and decided to go in and ask about the process of obtaining a permit for access. A staff member met me at the reception desk and asked for my ID. As I only had a university student ID, she photocopied it then began filling some forms and asked me to sit down and look into a camera in front of me. A few minutes later, she gave me a permit and informed me apologetically that the permit was valid for “only” three years.
Stunned at the ease with which I was inducted into that bastion of historical knowledge, I went in and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I came out a different person for I had my first taste of historical research, something that I still deeply cherish and treasure.
After spending six months at this amazing institution, it was time to return to Egypt to begin dissertation research in earnest. For despite the rich content of the consular reports that I consulted at the PRO, my supervisor reminded me that it would be a pity to repeat the mistake of earlier researchers and write a dissertation on Egypt’s history by relying on foreign records. He insisted I focus on the Egyptian records found in Egypt.
I returned to my country to follow his advice and given that I had chosen the history of Mohamed Ali’s army as the topic of my dissertation, I went to the National Archives to consult the letters of Mohamed Ali to his son and commander in chief of his army, Ibrahim Pasha.
At the archives, I was overwhelmed by the amount of forms, official stamps and letters of introduction the staff member there asked of me. After I gave them everything they asked for, they asked me to return several weeks later without being more specific. I found out later that access to historic records at the National Archives requires a security screening of my topic and my person. And like everything else that has to do with the notorious “amn” i.e. security, no one could really guess how long it would take for a permit to be issued.
To save time – I had a deadline to submit the draft of the first chapter – I decided to go to the Military Museum at the Citadel where I heard there was a small library. I, of course, quickly found that if receiving a permit at the National Archives was difficult then a permit for the museum library is almost impossible. A major general in the army put in a good word for me and we both went to the headquarters of military intelligence in Heliopolis where we found ourselves subjected to a serious interrogation.
Q: Why do you want a permit to the Military Museum?
A: Because I am writing a doctoral dissertation on Mohamed Ali’s army.
Q: Why the army specifically?
A: Because then I can conduct a social history of Egypt 150 years ago.
Q: The library does contain old texts about Mohamed Ali’s army; however, most of them are old training manuals that are worthless.
A: But these manuals are exactly what I am looking for because they are priceless primary sources.
Q: These books are written in Ottoman and difficult to read.
A: I learnt some Turkish and think I will be able to decipher them.
Q: When and where did you learn Turkish?
At this, the officer I went with lost his patience and shouted: “Do you think he is an Ottoman spy?!”
Months later, I finally received the good news that my permit to the National Archives has arrived. I began my research in disbelief at the immense volume of unique and fascinating records that few previous researchers had consulted even after all these years. Then I was faced by another avalanche of questions by archive staff and, interestingly, other researchers preparing their dissertations at local universities.
Q: Your supervisor is foreign, right? Is he the one who prompted you to study the army?
A: No, I chose the topic myself as I believe it can allow me to study the condition of Egyptian society 150 years ago.
Q: But the topic of the army has been researched before. Didn’t your supervisor tell you that?
A: I know Dr. Serougi had written a book on Mohamed Ali’s army in the 1960s, but this does not mean that that topic is off limits. Maybe one can still say something new about a topic that has been researched before.
This all happened more than 20 years ago. Since then, I have finished my dissertation, and published it in English and Arabic, and I think I proved that I was never an Ottoman spy or a young student misled by his supervisor.
I have tried as best as I can to continue visiting the National Archives, and as much as I am fascinated by its contents of more than 100 million documents, I am very dismayed at the very few visitors who go there — no more than a handful on any given day. I am even more saddened when I realise the hardship my students face while doing research there, and how deep security concerns have penetrated the mentality of the staff or even the students working at the National Archives.
The state of the National Archives is similar to all our research facilities, including universities, libraries and museums. These institutions are mostly obsessed with the security, not research. The success of any official at these institutions is measured by his or her success at protecting and safeguarding the contents, not attracting researchers and transforming the facility into a place for generating knowledge.
This obsession with security matters, coupled with a conservative mindset that is suspicious of researchers, is not only a sign of the cultural backwardness we are suffering from but also a key cause of it. If ever this nation is to see a revival of the arts and science, we must work hard to defeat this security mentality.
The Essence Of Alexandria
March 1st, 2013
By Khaled Fahmy.
In 1977 Lawrence Durrell revisited Alexandria to participate in a BBC film about the city. Titled Spirit of Place, the film, we are told, shows “palatial villas overgrown with bougainvillaea… abandoned, confiscated or left to rot by their impoverished owners, their rusting gates opening into wild and unkempt gardens where marble fountains and crumbling statuary testified to a glory since departed.” Attempting to guide the crew through the city he is supposed to have known well, Durrell found himself filled with anxiety, and “feared that Nasser’s puritanical socialist revolution had destroyed the city”:
The city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its harbor a mere cemetery. Its famous cafés, Pastroudis and Boudrot, no longer twinkling with music and lights… All about him lay ‘Iskandariya’, the uncomprehended Arabic of its inhabitants translating only into emptiness.1
These feelings of bewilderment, anxiety and sadness at the fate of “the Alexandria we have lost”2 that Durrell felt during this visit are common tropes characteristic of much of the literature about modern Alexandria. Idealizing the cosmopolitanism that is seen to have infused life in the city in its modern golden age3 (c. 1860–1960), novelists, poets, literary critics, travel writers and others typically turn with disgust and repugnance to the natives who are implicitly (and at times, explicitly) blamed for the city’s fall, and who are referred to in what is supposed to be a pejorative term: “Arabs”.
This essay (which is part of a larger study) deals with the location of “Arabs” in the discourse of cosmopolitan Alexandria, “the paradigm case of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism”.4 It identifies a number of curious moments of silence that all but erase the very long and vibrant presence of these “Arabs” in the city and attempts to analyze the manner in which “Arabs” have been left out and have always been associated with what is considered to be the city’s loss. In addition, this essay explores themes of disgust, filth and squalor, commonly associated with the “Arabs”, and takes its cue from the olfactory sense. Given its inherently ambivalent nature, smell offers a suitable guide to identify both the ephemeral, spiritual nature of “cosmopolitan Alexandria”, and, at the same time, the filthy, squalid material of its antithesis, i.e. Arab Alexandria.
Ancient Alexandria: A Fallen City
In the Western imagination Alexandria has always been associated with loss. In Plutarch’s Life of Antony, the great Roman soldier is seen in the city awaiting the final confrontation with Augustus and ordering his soldiers to pour wine and to feast him generously when he realizes that his luck has run out and that defeat is inevitable. It was during that night of clear insight that strange and harmonious music was heard coming forth from Alexandria, music which “those who sought [its] meaning… were of the opinion that the god to whom Antony always most likened and attached himself was now deserting him.”5 In the great poet Constantine Cavafy’s imagination, the tragedy of Antony is transformed into a universal human tragedy, and in the process Alexandria becomes both the goddess that inspires this only too-human self-realization and at the same time the object of the ensuing inevitable loss of divine life. Two other famous literary figures constitute what has been called the “Alexandria Archive”,6 namely, E.M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell, who have also dwelt on this link between Alexandria and loss. Unlike Cavafy, however, they do not consider Alexandria’s loss to be evocative of a general human tragedy; rather, this loss refers to a decline from the previous splendor that the city used to enjoy in its classical golden age, and it is a decline for which the “Arabs” are mostly to blame. Durrell saw the Arab invasion of the seventh century CE only as a signal of the city’s doom. In the introduction of the 1986 edition of Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide, he wrote that “[w]ith the arrival of Amr and his Arab cavalry the famous resplendent city took a nosedive into oblivion; the sand dunes encroached and covered it.”7 Likewise, Forster, in his famous Guide, remarks that the invading Arab armies in 642 CE could not comprehend the significance of the city they had captured and that their onslaught could only lead to its ruin. Forster adds that the Arab leader, Amr ibn al-‘Ās, wrote to his superiors in Arabia, remarking with indifference that he had “taken a city of which I can say that it contains 4 000 palaces, 4 000 baths, 400 theaters, 1 200 greengrocers and 40 000 Jews.”8 Forster comments that in spite of having “no intention of destroying her”, the Arabs failed to comprehend that “there was no other [city] like it in the world,” and ended up destroying it “as a child might a watch.”9
Typical of the western understanding of Alexandrian history, Forster’s Guide devotes only five pages to the thousand-year-long “Arab Period”, a period he designates as “a thousand years of silence”.10
Modern Rebirth and Loss Again
These “thousand years of silence” are said to have finally ended at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the auspicious appearance of the reform-minded governor Mehmed Ali Pasha (a.k.a. Mohamed ‘Alī Bāshā), and modern Alexandria is seen to be the “errant child of [his] hopes.”11 Stressing the fact that he was born in “Cavalla on the Macedonian coast”12 and highlighting how he was tolerant to Jews, and to Greeks, Italians and other Europeans,13 Mehmed Ali is usually seen as the founder not only of modern Egypt,14 but also, like his Macedonian “predecessor”, as having contributed in a unique manner to Alexandria’s history. The “rebirth” of modern Alexandria and its growth from a town that numbered around 8 000 dwellers at the beginning of the century to a large city of some 100 000 inhabitants at the time of Mehmed Ali’s death in 1849 is commonly described as the result of a number of factors, chief among them was the government policy of tolerance to Europeans, a policy that the European community acknowledged in 1860 when they unveiled an equestrian statue of Mohamed Ali in a square named after him.
An ecnomy geared to European markets; a “founder” famous for his tolerance to Europeans and who is anecdotally, but significantly, described to be of Macedonian origins; and a plethora of European communities who were vibrant, entrepreneurial and mutually accepting of each other and of the open world: these are the factors commonly stressed to explain what is seen as the remarkable, if brief, case of modern Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. As in mediaeval Alexandria, conspicuously absent from the history of the modern city are the majority of its inhabitants, the “Arabs”. When these “Arabs” are finally introduced into the city’s narrative it is either to highlight how much they did not really belong there, or to stress how the responsibility of the city’s final demise falls squarely on their shoulders, and theirs alone.
The first grand appearance of “Arabs” in modern Alexandria is usually taken to be that of Nasser when on a fateful hot July evening in 1956 he stood in Mīdān al-Manshiyya (formerly Place Muhammad Ali) announcing the nationalization of the International Maritime Company of the Suez Canal to the cheerful masses of Egyptians in front of him and to a stunned audience abroad. This famous coup de théâtre triggered what is known in the West as the “Suez Crisis” and in Egypt as the “Tripartite Aggression” when Britain, France and Israel conspiratorially attacked Egypt in October of that year. In retaliation, orders were issued to Jews and to British and French nationals to be expelled from Egypt, their property either confiscated or put under sequestration. While it is acknowledged that Nasser, by this and other gestures and policies that “gave Egypt back to the Egyptians”15 was indirectly reacting to a colonial situation represented by, among other things, the Alexandrian “modern palaces—homes for the established members of the foreign colony that brought much exploitation and snobbery, some progress, and a strong cosmopolitan flavor to Alexandria”,16 many of those who wrote about the end of cosmopolitan Alexandria blame Nasser and his “puritanical socialist revolution [for] destroy[ing] the city… the uncomprehended Arabic of its inhabitants translating only into emptiness.”17
While the fame of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism owes a lot to the three literary “Alexandrian” figures of Cavafy, Forster and Durrell, the themes of the fallen city, of loss and of ensuing exile, as demonstrated by Robert Mabro, have been perpetuated by numerous semi-autobiographical novels which “have been coming out of the press at an alarming rate.” These “memoirs”written by people who were forced to leave the city in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflect an urge by “those former Alexandrians… to take advantage of the mystique created by Durrell and Constantine Cavafy… Alexandria sells. The Exodus sells”, Mabro adds cynically. In spite of the questionable nature of some of them (as shown below), these “memoirs” about lost childhood and adolescence have nevertheless been instrumental in perpetuating the Western image of Alexandria as the city of loss.
Alexandria, the Capital of Memory
Given this association between Alexandria and loss, it is no wonder that much of the discourse of the city deals with history, memory and nostalgia. Forster, who found himself trapped in Alexandria during a world war, drew upon Alexandria’s ancient history in writing his major Alexandrian work, Alexandria: A History and a Guide, and as he admits the city’s present and topography gain significance only if read against its glorious past: “The ‘sights’ of Alexandria are in themselves not interesting, but they fascinate when we approach them through the past, and this is what I have tried to do by the double arrangement of History and Guide.”18 Likewise, Cavafy, the “old poet of the city”, had used the city’s history as part of his creative effort to cast a “detailed and coherent image of the human predicament that would be less idiosyncratic and nationalistic […] an image more universal than those his Alexandrian preoccupation occasioned.”19 Cavafy’s ability to sift through the city’s ancient history for moments that could speak to the modern sensibilities of loss and exile, in addition to attesting to the poet’s creativity, has further entrenched the image of Alexandria as a lost city.
The Essence of Alexandria
Describing the essence of the city that he was losing, Durrell curiously takes this essence literally. When he anticipates the impending loss he alludes to the smell of the city: “I began to walk slowly, deeply bemused, and to describe to myself in words this whole quarter of Alexandria for I knew that soon it would be forgotten and revisited by those whose memories had been appropriated by the fevered city, clinging to the minds of old men like traces of perfume upon a sleeve: Alexandria: the Capital of Memory.”20
Forster, too, made a similar remark connecting memory with an odor clinging to a piece of garment. In a letter to a friend of his in England soon after his arrival in Egypt and after his initial disappointment for not finding the landscape “oriental” enough he wrote that “[t]o one who has been to India, it is almost irritating—the ‘real East’ seems always vanishing ‘round the corner, fluttering the hem of a garment on the phantom of a smell.”21
Commenting on this association between smell and memories of the lost Alexandria, Haag remarks:
Cavafy, Forster and Durrell all knew that perfume. [Quoting Durrell, he adds], ‘I inhaled the warm summer perfume of her dress and skin—a perfume which was called, I don’t know why, Jamais de la vie’—the phrase means ‘never’. Haunted by failure and haunted by glory, for a while there was a resonance between the modern cosmopolitan city and the one Alexander founded long ago on this African shore.22
“Une Odeur d’Arabe”
Proust, Alexandria, smell and memory come together in the works of André Aciman, a Proust scholar and author of one of those memoirs about Alexandria that have appeared in recent years, and one which received much critical praise.
In an article that appeared in the New Yorker Aciman describes his first encounter with Proust, an encounter which took place in Paris, but which was connected to his memories of Alexandria. Referring to a Livre de Poche edition of Swann’s Way, he describes how he had bought it with his father, when he was fifteen, one summer evening in Paris.
We were taking a long walk, and as we passed a small restaurant I told him that the overpowering smell of refried food reminded me of the tanneries along the coast road outside Alexandria, in Egypt, where we had once lived. He said he hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yes, I was right, the restaurant did smell like tanneries. And as we began working our way back through strands of shared memories—the tanneries, the beaches, the ruined Roman temple west of Alexandria, our summer beach house—all this suddenly made him think of Proust. Had I read Proust? He asked. No, I hadn’t. Well, perhaps I should.23
In a true Proustian moment, the smell of refried food drifting from a Parisian restaurant takes Aciman back to his early childhood years in Alexandria, where memories of the family’s summer house, ruined Roman temples, beaches, and tanneries immediately flow through his mind. This particular set of memories is very characteristic of the Western discourse on Alexandria, a discourse that is replete with references to the supposedly open Alexandrian society of artists, intellectuals, flâneurs and dilettantes (represented, as will be elaborated on below, by “the family house”); to the lost glory that was Alexandria (“Roman temples”); to the manner in which Alexandria had always been thought to be not in Egypt, but ad Ægyptum,24 (“the beaches”), and to the filth and squalor that had come to dominate modern Alexandria (“the tanneries”).
In his much acclaimed book, Out of Egypt, Aciman eloquently recreates this lost Alexandrian society;25 but according to an interview he gave to the CNN, he does so by “pretend[ing] to remember” it.26] His large and jovial family occupies center stage in his depiction of Alexandrian society in its “Golden Age”, and the book, described by the publisher’s blurb as a “richly colored memoir” that “chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family”, has been praised on the back cover as “an extraordinary memoir of an eccentric family.” At the center of everyone is the author’s great uncle, Uncle Aaron, nicknamed Vili, who we are told, was “an octogenarian Turco-Italian-Anglophile-gentrified fascist Jew who started his professional life peddling Turkish fezzes in Vienna and Berlin and was to end it as sole auctioneer of deposed King Farouk’s property.”27 However, according to meticulous research in contemporary phone and business directories as well as in Le Mondain Egyptien (Egypt’s Who’s Who), Robert Mabro corroborated the findings of S. Raafat, author of Maadi 1904–1962: History and Society in a Cairo Suburb, in concluding that Uncle Vili’s character looks suspiciously similar to that of a certain Moïse G. Levi who was indeed involved with the sale of King Farouk’s property, but who most certainly lived in Maadi and therefore was a Cairene and not an Alexandrian. More to the point, Mabro argues that Levi “was related to the Acimans but it is doubtful that he was as close as being André’s great uncle.” Mabro convincingly argues that, disguised as an “extraordinary” memoir when it could be more correctly described as a first novel, but which nevertheless won a literary prize under the category of “memoirs”, Aciman’s Out of Egypt could be described as “only in part a memoir”.
The point, however, is not one of an author’s supposed plagiarism or a publisher’s clever marketing tactics; rather, it is about the need, both literary and political, for a character like that of Uncle Vili’s to be inserted in the “memoir” of a Jewish family in cosmopolitan Alexandria. For the cosmopolitanism of cosmopolitan Alexandria that is much celebrated by Western novelists, poets, literary critics and travel and memoir writers depends for its very existence on the presence of such figures of dilettantes, flâneurs, bohemian artists and polyglot intellectuals such as Uncle Vili. What is characteristic of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is the need to stress the flamboyancy of such figures in order to highlight the concomitant themes of exile, loss and exodus that are so central to the myth of modern Alexandria. The exodus theme is pivotal in Aciman’s work, expressed by its title, Out of Egypt.
That “exodus” is never really contextualized, and we are not given an explanation for it. For example, in that same CNN interview, the host argues that the author’s exodus from Alexandria is crucial for understanding his subsequent work: “Aciman’s loss of Alexandria—‘the capital of memory’ as he calls it—is ground zero for the feelings of nostalgia and loss that pervade his stories. Aciman and his family left Egypt in 1965 when he was fourteen. They were among the last Jews in Alexandria, the remnants of a 2 000 year-old community forced out by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist regime.”28 Besides the fact that Aciman’s family arrived in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century—his maternal side from Aleppo and his paternal side from Constantinople—and was not part of a 2 000 year-old community, the expulsion of Egyptian Jews and of British and French nationals, as unjustified as it is, cannot be explained simply as the result of “ungrateful Egyptian nationalism.”29 One has to wonder, alongside Mabro, “What about seventy years of British occupation, Dinshaway, or the creation of Israel—causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to wretched refugee camps, not to the ‘hard’ life of Rome, Paris, Geneva, Montréal, Rio, New York, or Tel Aviv? And what about the simple fact that Egypt was invaded by France, Britain, and Israel in 1956?”30
The silence about these important political aspects is characteristic of the discourse of cosmopolitanism, and Aciman feels no need at all to dwell on such “trivial” matters as imperialism, colonial wars and racism when reconstructing the idyllic life his family had in Alexandria. Nor do we see in that discourse a credible account of how Arabic-speaking Alexandrians, those who are disparagingly referred to as “Arabs”, actually interacted with members of the polyglot, dilettante, cosmopolitan elite. In Out of Egypt, however, they do, and what a scene they make! Noteworthy, first, is that the only Arabs to appear in the book, and to whom Aciman graciously grants a name, are the servants who worked for his family; furthermore, it is telling that they are all described as being physically deformed. There is Om Ramadan, the washerwoman, who, besides being one-eyed, had lost the pigmentation on the skin of her arms as a result of the powerful bleach that she used.31 And there is the one-armed waiter, Hisham, who, incredibly, had to set the table and serve food at the large and festive family gatherings.32 Then we are introduced to the cooks, both called Abdou, one of whom was an alcoholic, and the other, his much older cousin, had a “terribly ulcerated leg, which my grandmother suspected was leprous”.33 Young Abdou, the one with the healthy leg, we are told, and his nephew, Mohammed, were in the habit of stealing Aciman’s grandfather’s clothes and shoes, which, one is asked to believe, they were incapable of wearing properly: “The servants did not appreciate shoelaces, so they would pull them out, walking with the instep wide open, their shoe tongues sticking out insolently.”34 Next, there is Fatma, who limped, and Aziza, who was deaf. Finally, we are introduced to Latifa, the maid, who was in the habit of fainting apparently for no good reason, and would complain in an inarticulate manner of bodily pain that she could not even locate. It had to fall to the European doctor, Alcabès, to explain Latifa’s mystery: Latifa had a cancerous tumor blocking her liver, and when it eventually grew to touch the spinal cord, the pain became unbearable. Soon thereafter Latifa died after only two weeks’s illness.35
However, what is wrong with the “Arabs”, Aciman asserts, is not how they appear, not their physical deformities, as grotesque as they may be. Rather, it is their very essence; their smell that makes them repugnant. For Egyptians, we are told, all drank hilba, “an auburn-colored substance” that is believed to have “curative properties”, but which “made their bodies exude what Europeans considered a repellent, dirty odor. My father called it une odeur d’arabe (an Arab smell), and he hated to find it trapped in his shirts, his linens, his food.” Aciman then goes on to elaborate further on why the Arabs could never really be admitted to Alexandrian, cosmopolitan society, in spite of their earnest efforts to look and act as Europeans:
This odor was so unmistakable and so over-whelming that one could immediately distinguish Westernized Egyptians, who used strong aftershave, from those who affected Western habits but whose minds, homes, and regimes were still steeped in the universe of hilba. Even if an Egyptian had completely adopted Western ways, shed his native customs to become what my parents called an évolué, and wore a suit every day, learned table manners, kissed mazmazelles’s hands whenever he greeted them, and knew his wines, his cheeses, and the required number of La Fontaine fables by heart, the fact that his clothes gave off the slightest trace of that telltale scent would make one think twice about his professed inclination for the West and suspect that not everyone in his household—himself included—had risen above the dark, sinister underside of Arab hygiene.36
In the travel literature from mid-nineteenth century Egypt the present inhabitants of this ancient city come across as “a degraded nation… It is a continuous theme of this tourist literature to associate, or rather to identify [Egyptians] with earth and with their habitations.”37 The intimate connection that the “Arab” population is believed to have always had with earth and mud proved to be an enduring characteristic of much of the writing about Alexandria. In a letter to a friend, for example, Forster writes of Egypt “the soil is mud, the inhabitants are mud-moving, and exasperating in the extreme.”38
The Ambivalence of Smell
Smell plays an ambivalent role in the discourse on cosmopolitan Alexandria. On the one hand, through its association with memory, the olfactory sense is evoked to refer to the “essence” of Alexandria, i.e. the belief that it can only be approached as a lost city. Hence, the attempt to retrieve this lost essence by talking about memories, by searching for lost time, and by the remembrance of things past. In the process, an idyllic city is created; a city whose credibility is premised not on faithfulness to historic realities but on its approximation to a poetic image. Here the essence of the city persists precisely because of its fragility, its unsubstantial form. This city, the Capital of Memory, cosmopolitan and open, endures and persists through the countless memoirs and literary works that struggle to retrieve those memories that “cling to the minds of old men like traces of perfume upon a sleeve”.39
On the other hand, the olfactory sense is poignantly used to refer to those who do not belong to this idyllic city, those whose presence in the city is only accidental, and never essential, and who, in fact, pollute and defile it.
This double role that smell plays in the discourse of modern Alexandria is also a reflection of the ambivalent nature of the olfactory sense itself. In both the Western and the Arab-Islamic medical traditions, smell occupied a curious position amongst the five senses, the number and order of which were fixed from early times. Unlike the immaterial qualities of light and color, smells were thought to have a material quality, making the odor of a rose, for example, linger in the air even after the rose itself has been removed. But at the same time, the very materiality of smell was thought to be quite distinct from the materiality of taste and touch. Not only was the materiality of smell different from that of touch and taste, it was also different from the immateriality of sight and sound: “The nose was not equivalent to the eye in seeing, the ear in hearing, or the tongue in taste. In smell alone the brain was the primary organ of perception.”40
It is this ambivalent nature of the olfactory sense that partly explains the contrasting manner in which the “cosmopolitan” and the “Arab” Alexandrias are written about: given that the first is believed to be a lost city, smell, through its close association with memory, i.e. with a cerebral function, is evoked to reconstruct it by piecing together the unsubstantial, immaterial fragments of memory. By contrast, in describing the second city, smell is again evoked, but in a drastically different manner. Here it is the filth and squalor of the city that are provided as keys to understanding it, and it is the very debased functions of the bodies of their residents—their eating, urinating, defecating and procreating functions—that are stressed as markers of that “Arab” city.