The Making of Downtown Cairo as Modern Stage
There is a spectre haunting social theory and that spectre is nineteenth century Paris . . . If modernity meant the urbanization of the mind (Schlor 1998) it often implied a specifically urban experience, whereby Paris came to be a metonym for both urban life, urbanity, and modernity.
—Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, Thinking Space16
To study downtown Cairo as a social process involving contest is to understand how the various phases of modernization, colonial rule, the nationalist move- ment, and modernity as a social and aesthetic experience have intersected and left their imprint in one unique urban space. Wust al-Balad in Cairo is the palimpsest of those multiple histories and the novels that tell the story of this space unearth the traces of these movements as they have altered the city center across two centuries. In reexamining the history of this space through a number of fictional works, it becomes clear the extent to which Janet Abu-Lughod’s embrace of the idea of Cairo as a “dual city” in her expansive work on Cairo (where the downtown functions at one extreme as the modern, wealthy Gold Coast and the old districts, for example, Fatimid Cairo, exist on the other) is limited in that it fails to describe the way in which the downtown was used, consumed (Michel de Certeau)17 and produced (Henri Lefebvre),18 albeit often through contest, by multiple classes throughout the twentieth century. Nancy
Reynolds, in her work on commodity culture in Egypt at the turn of the twen- tieth century, also critiques the depiction of Cairo during the liberal period as genuinely bifurcated (socially, geographically, and commercially) by arguing that modernity was not simply “grafted” on to one part of town apart from old Islamic Cairo, but rather involved a give-and-take between the existing spheres of commercial culture and the newer sites of commerce and recreation. In her reading, not only were there baladi stores intermixed between the more modern stores in the new city center, but al-Muski Street (running from the area of old Islamic Cairo through to al-‘Ataba Square) and al-‘Ataba Square become com- pelling zones of such mixing.19 This will become further evident as we look at the work of Radwa ‘Ashur, Kharyi Shalabi, Idris ‘Ali, and Alaa al-Aswany, whose portraits of Egyptian effendis, migrants, and members of the lower and upper classes remind us of the presence of multiple invisible groups in the downtown district. Far from depicting an isolated enclave of foreign-owned businesses and a Western way of life, their research offers a more tenuous portrait of the down- town as a spectacular exhibition space where Egyptians of all classes as well as foreigners struggled to make this newly emerging modern stage their own.
More broadly, we will examine the process through which the downtown was progressively transformed at the hands of Khedive Isma‘il, then under the British, and eventually by the throngs of people who set fire to the city. The people’s response to this space—the practices of their daily lives, their consump- tion, the demonstrations, and their physical acts to mar the space—will be read as improvised negotiations of modernity as well as acts of contest. This vacilla- tion between repulsion and attraction to the modern and the Western will be considered as paradigmatic of what has come to constitute modern Egyptian life.20 To further this point, it is important to explore the fetishizing of Paris as the model of the modern city par excellence in the eyes of the Khedive. The works of David Harvey on Paris (2006), Gwendolyn Wright (1991) on French colonial design more generally, Jean-Luc Arnaud (1998), Janet Abu-Lughod (1971), André Raymond (2000), Jamal Hamdan (1967), and Max Rodenbeck (1999) are instructive in this regard, especially with respect to how Paris as urban ideal influenced the urbanization of Cairo.