Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Symposium for Olympic

From Athens to Cairo: The Rise of Modern Sport in Egypt Paul Tchir University of California San Diego, USA This study uses documents from both the British and Egyptian National Archives to elucidate the lives of several of Egypt's earliest international sporting figures and their contributions to the development of modern sport in Egypt. It argues that by observing, reproducing, and reinterpreting the frameworks of the British model of global sport and its concomitant discourse, as performed by prominent locals of foreign ancestry, Egyptians began to experiment with the different ways in which physical culture could function as an authentic reflection of their own intrinsic identity. The emergence of competing narratives that attempted to express the many perspectives of Egyptian life was the first step in the process of coalescing through sport a unified representation of what it meant to be "Egyptian" Introduction It may be difficult to imagine that 1896 tennis Olympian Demetrius Casdagli, a British citizen of Rus sian origin with a Greek name, was the first in a line of athletes that would influence the develop ment of an authentic, indigenous sporting movement in Egypt. Following the 1952 Free Officer Revolution, which effectively ended the seven-decade British political domination in the country, sport1 in Egypt became an essential tool for the new government to promulgate revolutionary culture and nationalist ideology.2 This was due in large part to the indigenous sporting press, which devel oped from the 1930s on into a medium through which calls for genuine change and appeals to nationalism could be spread to the general population. According to traditional narratives, however, sport prior to the mid-1 930s in Egypt, particularly during the first decades of British occupation between 1882 and 1920, "propagat[ed] the colonizer's culture under the guise of accessibility and equality, [but] denied the indigenous people true partici pation in practice."3 While this description is not inaccurate, it does not capture the rich sporting cul ture that was emerging at the local level during this period despite obstacles placed by the British. Several key moments, such as the founding of the Al-Ahly Club in 1907 and football career of Hus sein Hegazi, have been acknowledged, but are usually dismissed as inconsequential. This paper, however, argues that these exceptions were indicators of an important pattern of developments, based in a framework of global sport that was "codified and standardized in Britain, then spread to other countries" so that by the mid-twentieth century it had become an "established global supremacy in the realm of physical culture."4 By observing, reproducing, and reinterpreting these frameworks and their concomitant discourse, as performed by prominent locals of foreign ancestry such as Demetrius Casdagli and Angelos Bolanaki, Egyptians were beginning to experiment with the different ways in which physical culture could function as an authentic reflection of their own identity. The emergence of competing narratives that attempted to express the many perspectives of Egyptian life was the first step in the process of coalescing a unified representation of what it meant to be "Egyptian." The formation of a hegemonic notion that used sport to establish a substantive vision of the imagined community of "Egypt" was critical in providing an accessible vehicle for nationalism, one that was seized upon by sports publications run by nationalist-minded members of the "middle class" and, eventually, by the Free Officers after the 1 952 Revolution. Inauspicious Beginnings Shortly after the British occupation in 1882, Egypt first engaged with its own complex sporting iden tity. The International Olympic Committee's (IOC) database of Olympic medalists lists only two facts about the runner up in the singles tennis tournament at the 1896 Summer Games: that his name was Dionysios Kasdaglis and that he represented Greece. In both cases, this information is incorrect. With regard to the first matter, his real name, as he spelled it in English, was Demetrius Emmanuel Cas- dagli. The truth behind the second issue is more complex, but if there was one subject on which he and his soon-to-be ex-wife could agree upon during their years of divorce proceedings, it was that Demetrius was not Greek. Nonetheless, in the official reports for the 1906 Intercalated Games (at the time considered to be part of the Olympic Games),5 Casdagli is listed explicitly as Greek. Demetrius was born October 10, 1872 in Salford, England to Emmanuel Casdagli, a naturalized British citizen who had been born in Rhodes, Greece to Russian parents.6 Emmanuel had established himself as a merchant in Manchester in 1 8627 and eventually organized an arm of the business in Cairo, Egypt, where Demetrius moved to in 1 895.8 The following year, the younger Casdagli entered the tennis tournament at the 1896 Summer Olympics, where he won silver medals in both the singles and doubles events. In 1905 he married Jeanne Casulli and, a year later, was back in Athens for an international sporting tournament, where he was eliminated in the first round of the mixed doubles tournament. On November 8, 1914, Demetrius committed adultery and this, along with alleged cruelty during the marriage, became grounds for divorce proceedings the following year.9 As the case unfolded, Demetrius argued that he was not subject to the authority of the British courts in the matter, claiming that he had "acquired domicil [sic]of choice in the British Protectorate of Egypt" and that he and Jeanne were "not domiciled in Egypt and never ... [ had] had a matrimonial home or residence in England."10 It was at this juncture that Jeanne made a critical claim regarding Demetrius' identity. In an attempt to demonstrate that he was a British subject and nothing else, she noted that "[a]t the time of said marriage [1905] my family put forward the suggestion that the Respondent [Demetrius] should become a Greek subject which would have been an easy thing for him to do, but he stead fastly declined and has ever since declined to abandon his British nationality."11 Demetrius never denied the assertion that he was not Greek, but continued to argue steadfastly that, for the purposes of the law, he was domiciled in Egypt. By 1919, it was determined that Casdagli possessed a valid claim for having established domicile in Egypt, a decision that had a significant impact in English case law.12 He spent most of the rest of his life in Cairo, although he died in Bad Nauheim, Germany on July 6, 1931, aged 58.13 Attempts to define individuals within the rigid boundaries of national identity have met not only with difficulty, but criticism regarding the utility of engaging in such exercises. Despite the growing tide of nationalism, the Olympic Games, like many of the individual athletes who participated, saw no need to define participants in terms of a "nationality," particularly as the Olympics were founded on the principle of bringing together individuals across political and territorial boundaries. Prior to 1908, "any members of athletic clubs were permitted to represent the country where that club was domiciled, irrespective of their own nationality."14 It is from this perspective that unpacking Casdagli's identity becomes a worthwhile pursuit. Hav ing lived most of his adult life in Egypt, Casdagli was a member of the Alexandria Sporting Club and, later, Ifitous Cairo, which, by the standards of the early Olympic Games, would pave the way for a claim that he was the first Olympian from Egypt. While such a contention may seem facile on the sur face, it is bolstered somewhat by Casdagli's own assertions during his divorce, ones that, from a legal perspective, later proved to be more than merely trivial. Sport's Foreign Influences Rather than considering Casdagli as the first Egyptian Olympian, or even an Egyptian at all, he should instead be seen as a microcosm of modern sport's complex origins in his adopted homeland. For much of the period under consideration, "sport" from the British perspective focused almost exclu sively on elite pursuits, some of which implied significant barriers to access, as in tennis, cricket, and horse racing. It is this conceptualization of sport that has often been used as a reference point for scholars of Egypt's sporting past, and thus the period prior to 1920 in particular has been largely ignored.15 In reality, however, evidence from the indigenous perspective indicates not only that Egyptians experienced a wide variety of influences on their sporting culture, but that they eventually took these experiences and transformed them into something unique and culturally authentic. As Wilson Chacko Jacob argues in his study of Egyptian masculinity, Working Out Egypt, attempts at imitating colonial discourses of modernity, when repeated over time, vary in their reproduction over the course of these performances and diverge from both the original and other indigenous interpretations.16 In other words, while Egyptians set out at first to mirror British sporting structures within their own coun try, over time these attempts resembled the foreign model less and less, particularly as they were influenced by factors other than the original example, and as they were performed by Egyptians with out any foreign ancestry. While many of these new forms did not develop until after 1920, their roots can be traced back to influences that emerged prior to World War I. The earliest English

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