Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World Edited by Hamid Dabashi

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Hamid chaired the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures from 2000 to 2005 and was a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His most recent books include Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire; Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker; Iran: A People Interrupted; and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East: The Chaotic Imagination Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Literature, Gender, and Nation- Building in Nineteenth- Century Egypt: The Life and Works of `A’isha Taymur Mervat F. Hatem

Islam in the Eastern African Novel Emad Mirmotahari

Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo Mara Naaman

Poetics and Politics of the Shahnameh, Iran’s National Epic Mahmoud Omidsalar (forthcoming) Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature Portraits of Cairo

Mara Naaman urban space in contemporary egyptian literature Copyright © Mara Naaman, 2011. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-10865-3 All rights reserved. Map of Greater Cairo reprinted from Sabry Hafez’s article, “The New Egyptian Novel: Urban Transformation and Narrative Form,” courtesy of the New Left Review. Isma‘il’s Cairo (1869– 1870) (after Abu- Lughod) reprinted from André Raymond’s Le Caire, courtesy of Études et Cartographie (Lille), Editions Fayard (Paris), and Harvard University Press (Cambridge). Map of downtown Cairo (the east bank) originally published in Samir W. Raafat’s Cairo, the Glory Years and reproduced by permission from Harpocrates Publishing, Alexandria, Egypt. Photograph of Tal‘at Harb Square (1986) reprinted by permission from Zbigniew Kosc. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-29143-4 ISBN 978-0-230-11971-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230119710 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data. Naaman, Mara. Urban space in contemporary Egyptian literature : portraits of Cairo / Mara Naaman. p. cm. — (Literatures and cultures of the Islamic world) 1. Egyptian literature—History and criticism. 2. Public spaces in literature. 3. Cities and towns in literature. 4. National characteristics, Egyptian, in literature. I. Title. PJ1488.N33 2011 892.7'093586216—dc22 2011002892 A catalog record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: July 2011 For my mother Mary Jacqueline Namen It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create modernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead. To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities— and in the modern men and women— of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

— Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity Contents

List of Figures ix Map of Greater Cairo x Note on Transliteration xi Acknowledgments xiii Note from the Editor xvii Preface xix Introduction: The Urban as Theoretical Frame 1 1 Specter of Paris: The Staging of Cairo’s Modern City Center 11 2 Reconstructing a National Past: Radwa ‘Ashur’s Revisionist History of the Downtown 37 3 The Indigenous Modernism of Khayri Shalabi: Popular Intellectuals and the Neighborhood Ghurza 71 4 The Proletarian Revolution That Never Was: Idris ‘Ali’s Nubian Perspective 105 5 The Nation Recast through a National Bestseller: Alaa al- Aswany’s Ode to Downtown Cairo 139 Conclusion: Wust al- Balad as Neo-Bohemia: Writing in Defense of a Vanishing Public Sphere 169 Afterword 177 Notes 179 Bibliography 205 Index 215 Figures

1.1 Isma‘il’s Cairo (1869– 70) 22 1.2 The Shepheard’s Hotel 23 1.3 Ramsis Railway Station 24 1.4 Opera Square 26 2.1 Fire at the Rivoli Cinema, Fu’ad Street, January 1952 38 2.2 The triangles of Sulayman Pasha Square, 1949 48 2.3 Mustafa Kamil Square 49 2.4 Map of downtown Cairo 52 2.5 Café Americain pictured at the intersection of Fu’ad and ‘Imad al- Din Streets 54 5.1 Tal‘at Harb Square, 1986 149 5.2 Modernist plans for the area of Tahrir along the Nile Corniche, 1962 150 5.3 Tahrir Square, also known as “Liberation Square,” 2006 150 5.4 The Mugamma‘ Building in Tahrir Square, 2006 151 Map of Greater Cairo Note on Transliteration

I have used the simplified International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) conventions for most Arabic transliterations in this work. The ‘ represents the Ù (ayn) and the ’ stands in for the Á (hamza). There are a few exceptions. In the Egyptian dialect, the Arabic letter Ì (jiim) is generally pronounced as a hard “g” as in “girl.” Thus when referencing places in Cairo, I have chosen to transliter- ate the name of the area using the more common Egyptian colloquial form of pronunciation (e.g., the district of Gamaliyya instead of Jamaliyya). I have done something similar when referring to Egyptian writers and intellectuals (e.g., Gamal al- Ghitani and not Jamal al- Ghitani). Furthermore, for Arab writers and intellectuals whose works circulate fairly widely in English translation, I have referenced these proper names using the spelling most common to their publi- cations in English (e.g., Alaa al- Aswany instead of ‘Ala’ al- Aswani). Acknowledgments

I am indebted to so many people and institutions that have helped make this book a reality. The late Magda al-Nowaihi— my advisor at Columbia when I first began my PhD—taught me the value and importance of intellectual friendship and collaboration between fellow feminists. Beyond her expertise in the field, her unconditional support and amazing spirit carried me through those years. Hamid Dabashi has been a force of conviction and unwavering faith in this project. His Theories and Methods course my first year at Colum- bia was one of the most existentially challenging experiences I have had. So many years later, I am grateful for all that he stirred up with his intellectual provocations. Muhsin al- Musawi was a wonderfully warm and insightful advisor. With his gentle hand and encyclopedic knowledge of Arabic literature, he guided me and kept me on track as I was piecing this work together. His con- sistent belief in me meant a great deal. Finally, if not for the creativity and bold ideas of Elliott Colla, this book would never have taken shape. Through our many conversations he managed to take a diffuse set of ideas and help me see the theoretical outline of a much more focused project. His meticulous readings have held me to the highest standards. I am also grateful to Roger Allen, Noha Radwan, and the two anonymous readers of this manuscript for taking the time and patience to read this work and for giving me valuable insight into possible avenues for revision. It would be unfair not to mention the many wonderful Arabic and Ara- bic literature professors I have had throughout what has seemed a lifetime of language training; in particular Farouk Abdel Wahab, Ahmed Ferhadi, Hoda Awad, Sinan Antoon, Elias Khoury, Nevenka Korica, Nadia Harb, Zeinab Taha, and Shahira Yacout. A special thanks is reserved for Abbas al- Tonsi, who first introduced me to the work of Khayri Shalabi in his Modern Arabic Litera- ture course, and for the warmth and encouragement that his family extended to me throughout my time in Cairo. My language training and fieldwork in Cairo would not have been possible without the generosity of several outside fellowships. In particular, I am most grateful to the Middlebury Language Schools in Vermont, the CASA Program (I xiv O Acknowledgments and II), and a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship and Mellon Founda- tion grant I was awarded to study Arabic. My last year of writing and research in Cairo was made possible by a Fulbright International Education award. In Cairo I benefited from the generosity of several scholars and friends who took an interest in my research. Professor Muhammad Badawi of Cairo Uni- versity and Professor Samia Mehrez of the American University in Cairo took the time both to meet with me and to discuss my ideas as I gradually narrowed my topic. Their acknowledgement of the value of this project gave me the con- fidence to continue working. I would also like to thank Riem El- Zoghbi for discussing many ideas with me and whose comparative course on cities at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in the spring of 2006 gave me many crucial insights as I was outlining the contours of this work. I owe a special thanks to Professor Hussein Hammuda, whose work on the city and the Egyptian writers of the 1960s informed many of my ideas. For his willingness to talk with me at length about Egyptian writing, I am most grateful. Also Hassan Sarour, an editor at the Journal of Folklore Studies, taught me more about Cairo than probably anyone else. His wise reflections on popular Egyptian life and culture hover beneath these pages. Amira Mittermaier introduced me to many people and parts of Cairo I might never have known without her. The moulids I attended with her and her mother have left lifelong impres- sions. Batool Khattab provided much friendship and conversation over my last year and a half in Egypt and then later at Williams, where she became a visiting professor. Her careful review of my translations and our endless discussions on language and the fullness of the Egyptian dialect enhanced this work in so many ways. In addition I have benefited from the warmth and support of my colleagues at Williams College. Finally, a special thank you is reserved for Brit, Ingrid, and Nikki. My editors at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull, Joanna Roberts, and Richard Bellis, have been most patient and encouraging through every step of this process. I am grateful to the Lehnert & Landrock Bookstore as well as the Dar al-Hilal Archives in Cairo for helping me procure many of the images in this work from the early twentieth century. In addition, it is an honor to be able to reprint here the dramatic black-and- white photograph of Tal‘at Harb Square taken in 1986 by the photographer Zbigniew Kosc. The three maps I refer to have been used with the kind permission of New Left Review, Études et Cartographie, Editions Fayard, Harvard University Press, and Harpocrates Publishing. I am appreciative to have such humble, open, and caring people as my family; in particular, Elaine and Frank Knox, Allyson, Mark, Sheryl, Katie, Mad- eline, Brennan, and Reid. There is no way to return all the warmth and love they have shown me. My late maternal grandmother, Raina Kazanji Namen, was, I imagine, an important catalyst in my search for origins. Once a gifted Acknowledgments O xv storyteller, she shared with me on our walks in the suburbs of Detroit tales from her childhood in Mosul, memories of Baghdad, and all the family history. I am also grateful for my Iraqi and Iraqi American aunts, uncles, and cousins who have made me feel so loved and cared for over the years. This book in many ways belongs to my mother. Her commitment to the creative life—to making art daily despite the obstacles and the roar of the world outside— has shaped who I am and why I work on what I do. She built for me a home out of barely anything, painted murals on the walls, played a lot of rock and roll, and taught me to dream. There was hardship, but much laughter and hope. She remains for me my ever- unpredictable muse. Finally, there is my husband Alex, to whom I owe so much. He is my true mentor, faithful editor, and lifelong confidant. His belief in the power of art and the dignity of hard work has given me the two anchors by which I live. May we go forth fearless. Note from the Editor

The Islamic world is home to a vast body of literary production in multiple languages over the last 1,400 years. To be sure, long before the advent of Islam, multiple sites of significant literary and cultural productions existed from India to Iran to the Fertile Crescent to North Africa. After the advent of Islam in the mid- seventh century CE, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish authors in particular produced some of the most glorious manifestations of world literature. From prose to poetry, modern to medieval, elitist to popular, oral to literary, this body of literature is in much need of a wide range of renewed scholarly investigation and lucid presentation. The purpose of this series is to take advantage of the most recent advances in literary studies, textual hermeneutics, critical theory, feminism, postcolonial- ism, and comparative literature to bring the spectrum of literatures and cultures of the Islamic world to a wider audience and appreciation. Usually the study of these literatures and cultures is divided between classical and modern periods. A central objective of this series is to cross over this artificial and inapplicable bifurcation and abandon the anxiety of periodization altogether. Much of what we understand today from this rich body of literary and cultural production is still under the influence of old- fashioned orientalism or post– World War II area studies perspectives. Our hope is to bring together a body of scholarship that connects the vast arena of literary and cultural production in the Islamic world without the prejudices of outmoded perspectives. Toward this end, we are committed to pathbreaking strategies of reading that collectively renew our awareness of the literary cosmopolitanism and cultural criticism in which these works of creative imagination were conceived in the first place.

— Hamid Dabashi Preface

Space is not neutral. The recent debacle concerning the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero in Manhattan was a reminder that space—urban or rural, private or public— is something we infuse with mean- ing. Spaces become symbolic based on our relationship to them and the extent to which we view them as central to our identity and our way of seeing the world around us. Urban spaces, in particular, may be vessels for memory, sites of entertainment, sites of labor, or receptacles for our utopian fantasies of community. The controversy surrounding the community center reminds us of the extent to which our identities as national subjects are intimately linked to our identification with certain public spaces. In the summer of 2010, the idea of building a space of Muslim congregation and community- building within the vicinity of Ground Zero, and the site of what was then known as the Freedom Tower, set off a national debate over the sacred nature of the building site and its symbolism for Americans. It also exposed the deep- seated Islamophobia latent in Americans across multiple demographics, many of whom were unashamed to protest the building of the Islamic center on the grounds that it was a mag- net for terrorism and that its construction would defame a site of mourning. Newt Gingrich, for example, has called the building of the center “an assertion of Islamist triumphalism . . . designed to destroy our civilization.”1 And yet, despite the fervor unleashed on various media platforms regarding the controversial nature of this space for many Americans, this debate echoed a less emotional, but no less public controversy concerning the design of the space at Ground Zero, and ultimately the design of the Freedom Tower (now less senti- mentally referred to as 1 World Trade Center), in the aftermath of 9/11. Even before the final plans for the site were presented in 2003, architectural critics, urban planners, business owners, and politicians took issue with how to erect the right structure on this hallowed ground. Clearly, delinking the site from the competing memories and stakes many Americans have in the space is impos- sible. The architectural critic Philip Nobel, writing in The Nation magazine at the time, declared that in many ways the whole idea of finding an “inventive spatial solution” for Ground Zero was flawed; one design will never be able to xx O Preface aptly respond to the multiple (if often unconscious) expectations Americans, and specifically New Yorkers, have for a memorial that must serve both as a commercially viable transportation hub and as a business nexus.2 And indeed, once the final plans for the site (a variation on Daniel Liebeskind’s original master plan) were presented by the New York architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, they were criticized by various constituencies. For example, the architecture critic for the New York Times, Nicholai Ouroussoff, critiqued the design for its bombastic, overly imperial qualities, writing in 2005 that the design of the proposed tower “embodies a world shaped by fear . . . [it serves as] an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power.”3 Ultimately, whatever reception the eventual tower and surrounding space will receive by New Yorkers, it is bound to be colored with ambivalence. More important to us, however, is that the ongoing debate around this site serves as a reminder of the (often unacknowledged, but no less universal) centrality of space in our daily lives. This is nowhere more true than in urban environments, where the spaces where we live, work, consume, and recreate become intimately linked to fantasies of communal belonging and, for many, local and national pride. This project takes as its central question the relationship between space, the literary, and the national identity in Egypt in the latter part of the twentieth century. As Samia Mehrez’s edited volume The Literary Atlas of Cairo: One Hundred Years on the Streets of the City (2010) illustrates, Egyptian novels serve as a way of archiving and creatively rendering Cairo’s many urban incarna- tions: as liberal city during the monarchal period, as socialist city under Gamal Abdel Nasser, and later as a neoliberal space under Anwar al- Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.4 Contemporary Egyptian literature serves as an alternative form of historical record and as an archive of the way in which battles over urban space are deeply linked to questions of modernity and the national self. The architectural scholar Yasser Elsheshtawy has written that the typical urban narrative of Middle Eastern cites is one of loss; cities, once great, now stand plundered as a result of colonization, ongoing wars, poor infrastructure, and underdevelop- ment.5 Reflecting this, Arabic literature has served as a record of these narratives of contest, loss, and regeneration. From the literature of North Africa, the Persian Gulf, as well as the countries in the Levant, contemporary Arab authors have used fiction as a way of responding to crucial, and often traumatic, historical moments (e.g., colonization, Zionism, missionary activity, the discovery of oil, dictatorial regimes, civil war, etc.) where questions of political authority and power are largely enacted through struggles over space. This study explores the relationship between space and national identity in Egypt by way of four contemporary Arabic novels by writers of the 1960s generation. It chronicles the transformations throughout the nineteenth century of the district of downtown Cairo, today referred to by Egyptians as Wust al-Balad Preface O xxi

(the city center). In particular, I hope to show the way in which the notion of the modern Egyptian subject has evolved in direct relationship to the changes manifest in the space of the downtown. The sense of pride, ambivalence, and contest this symbolic space evokes for Egyptians is in every way linked to the project of modernity and its legacy, the Egyptian nationalist movement under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the chapters that follow I argue that the very ambivalence of Egyptians to their recent past and the traces of the contradictory history that Wust al- Balad bears in its very design and architecture are part of what makes this district a space to which Egyptian writers have begun to return in their works. Ultimately I hope to show how the contested nature of the downtown—as a spectacular imitation of European modernity, as Egyptian public sphere, as a site for the staging of a revolution, and as modernist ruin—was and continues to be central to the notion of what it means to be Egyptian. The Introduction aims to provide the theoretical and historical framework for the literary analyses I offer in the subsequent chapters. When I began this project in 2005, there were only a few works treating space as it related to Arabic literature or even contemporary urban studies pertaining to the Middle East. In the last five years, the number of works in the field has grown tremendously. Such prolif- eration suggests, as Erik Swyngedouw argues, that contemporary political debates in postsocialist and postdemocratic states are being “recentered” to focus increas- ingly on the urban as the site of political action.6 Anchoring this surge of interest in spatial analyses of Cairo is the work of Diane Singerman and Paul Amar, particularly their work Cairo Cosmopolitan (2004) and Cairo Contested (2009). The first edited volume of articles inaugurates what the authors call the “Cairo School of Urban Studies,” after the work of urban studies scholars from the Los Angeles School of Urbanism (among them Mike Davis, Edward Soja, and Michael Dear), and previously the Chicago School of Sociology and Urbanism (whose leading figures include E. W. Burgess, Robert Park, and Louis Wirth, among others). Contextualizing my work in this intellectual “school” and taking my cue from two leading Egyptian literary scholars, Sabry Hafez and Samia Mehrez, I seek to understand how the space of downtown Cairo is represented and produced through the works of four prominent Egyptian writers of the 1960s generation. The Introduction further explores Sabry Hafez’s recent work on contemporary novels by writers of the “’90s generation” who use Cairo’s liminal spaces (i.e., cities on the periphery) as important locales for these emergent voices. In dialogue with his work, I argue that as much as the periphery is writing back to the center by way of these younger writers, certain novels—particularly newer fiction from writers of the 1960s and 1970s generation—use this same space-based framework, though focusing on Cairo’s city center, to problematize the question of an Egyptian collective identity and national consciousness. To understand this phenomenon, I xxii O Preface borrow from Timothy Mitchell’s poststructuralist reading of colonial Cairo. In light of his scholarship, I argue that understanding Egyptian identity involves an understanding of how the modern Egyptian subject was initially conceived as an actor in the staged space of European modernity downtown, then later reimag- ined as an anticolonial nationalist in which the downtown (through demonstra- tions, political activity, and the fires of January 1952) served as the primary stage of this identitarian contest. In using the work of David Harvey on Paris and that of Janet Abu- Lughod, André Raymond, Max Rodenbeck, and Nancy Reynolds on Cairo, I attempt to show the ways in which the circulation of capital and the spectacle of consumption largely defined from the beginning what it meant to be modern in Egypt. Underlying the four novels around which this study is focused is an economic history of how the downtown, as a space of commerce, serves as an allegory for the greater transformations of Cairo: from the period of colonial modernity, through Nasser’s nationalist–socialist modernization, to Anwar al- Sadat’s open- door (Infitah) policies in the 1970s, through Hosni Mubarak’s “liberalized authoritarian state”7 of the last few decades. It is only through reading these novels as maps of this district or as countercartographies that we are able to trace across time the linkages between this space and a national subjectivity. Chapter 2 examines Radwa ‘Ashur’s Qit‘a min Urubba (A Piece of Europe; 2003) as a rewriting of the history of Wust al- Balad with an attentiveness to this district as a space of social contest. ‘Ashur’s work offers a critical reading of the way in which Khedive Isma‘il envisioned this western quarter as a miniature staging of Paris in Cairo. Her narrator tells the history of the quarter from the colonial occupation, to the rise of the foreign elites, through to the contemporary period of US dominance in the region. Her project is a political one first and foremost. She creates a narrative that effectively writes back to the colonial history of this area, highlighting the rise of spectacular consumption in the downtown and the way in which the fires of January 1952 and the subsequent revolution were symbolic and literal attempts to mar this image of colonial modernity and reclaim the area in the name of the Egyptian subject. Chapter 3 discusses Khayri Shalabi’s Salih Hisa (Saleh Heisa; 2000), where the sha‘bi quarter of Hayy Ma‘ruf (neighboring Wust al- Balad) offers a shadow history of the district from the point of view of a neighborhood ghurza (hash- ish den). In this café, where popular intellectuals and locals congregate, Shalabi seeks to show the way in which the major historical and political events of the time were experienced and discussed by those on the margins. By effectively narrating the period of the 1960s and 1970s from the point of view of Salih, the half- Nubian ghurzaji,8 and showing the way Wust al- Balad is represented from his point of view and that of the other local intellectuals, Shalabi challenges the notion of an official culture that flourished in the downtown to suggest the way in which certain countersites became the loci for the flourishing of a Preface O xxiii rich, counterculture based around the ’ahawi (cafés).9 The contrast between the official intellectual life of the effendi and upper classes in Wust al-Balad alongside the dynamic cultural spaces of the more sha‘bi (popular) neighborhoods are discussed within the discourse of alternative or improvised practices of the modern in the space of the downtown. In Chapter 4 I analyze the work of the Nubian writer Idris ‘Ali to show how Nubian experiences between the areas of Bulaq and Wust al- Balad from the early twentieth century through to the present constitute an underhistory or counterhistory to mainstream depictions of this area. Idris ‘Ali’s Taht Khatt al- Faqr (Under the Poverty Line; 2005, translated by Elliott Colla as Poor, 2007) narrates the migration of a young Nubian following the displacement of his family due to the flooding of their village resulting from construction of the Aswan Dam. Wust al- Balad, where his father works as a doorman (bawwab) in one of the downtown buildings, remains, for the young narrator, the part of the city symbolizing foreign wealth, bourgeois living, and a modern sensibility and work ethic. It is here where the narrator becomes aware of his class, the lines dividing certain quarters of the city, and discrimination toward Nubians. His identification with the overpopulated neighborhood of the poor in Bulaq alongside his fascination with the wealth and modernity of Wust al- Balad come to create a double consciousness in the narrator that finds its fraught articula- tion in his pointed critiques as an adult against the hypocrisy of the rhetoric of nationalism in the face of the destitute millions in Cairo. Finally, in Chapter 5, I explore Alaa al-Aswany’s immensely popular novel ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan (The Yacoubian Building; 2003), which has since been made into a large-budget film and television serial. Although the work was considered controversial because of its frank narration of taboo social issues (e.g., drug use, homosexuality, prostitution, political bribery), sales of the book— already more than ten printings—and the success of the film suggest that the novel hit a nerve for Egyptians. In light of this popularity, the pulp- like quality of the work and its use of a media-inflected colloquial generated a wave of divergent opinions among Arab literary critics about the value of the novel from a literary standpoint. In examining the various critical responses to the novel, I attempt to understand what it was that made this novel so successful and how this success may be tied in part to our associations with the space of Wust al- Balad, in which the narrative unfolds. In brief, the work tells the retrospective history of the downtown through the stories of multiple residents living in one of its historic buildings during the 1990s. I read Aswany’s work as a partial response to the antinationalist socialist critique of Idris ‘Ali’s Taht Khatt al- Faqr. The district of Wust al- Balad functions nostalgically in Aswany’s writing (echoing Radwa ‘Ashur’s novel), symbolizing a space that once reflected the liberal Belle Époque in Cairo and now functions in the manner of what Beatriz Jaguaribe xxiv O Preface has called a “modernist ruin.”10 Aswany’s Wust al- Balad is a theater in which all the corruption, scandal, and desperation of the various classes in Egypt are played out. He seeks to unearth the abject side of Cairo, using his characters to expose the frustrated, self- interested tactics that many Egyptians resort to in order to survive in a neocapitalist environment. Here the downtown is a socially heterogeneous site where the lives of Cairo’s old aristocratic classes, the nouveau riche, and the enterprising lower classes intersect in both personal and business capacities. And yet the downtown is not an entirely dystopian site. Rather Aswany points repeatedly both to Wust al-Balad as an idealized space of Cairo’s cosmopolitan and once liberal past and— via the romantic relationship of two characters from divergent social classes—to the potential for a notion of Egypti- anness to transcend class boundaries. I argue, in contrast to the commonly held idea that ‘Imarat Yaqubiyan serves as a critique of nationalism, that largely what has made this novel popular is its recovery of a nationalist portrait of Egypt; that is, the way in which Aswany uses the symbolic space of the downtown to point to a collective sense of an Egyptian past and sense of national identity. Ultimately these authors all use the unified form of the novel as a way to exam- ine the metanarrative of the city through the lens of the more local histories that have contributed to Cairo’s formation in our collective imagination. All of these works, in one way or another, take Wust al- Balad and the surrounding neighborhoods as a significant reference point. Through this lens, these texts problematize the manner of the city’s development into an ever more fragmented megacity and consider the human casualties of this course. Another, perhaps more romantic reason why Wust al- Balad emerges as a necessary location to which writers return in their work may be related to the symbolic value it garnered not just as the center of Cairo but as the staging ground for the nationalist struggle. If we read the nationalist movement as the central originating point for the telos of the nation, to return to Wust al-Balad is to consider the way this symbolic space of the nation (as represented by the stories about this district) can house such contradictory impulses: of optimism and tumult, of the promise of western modernity and the human labor caught in capitalism’s undertow, of nationalist euphoria that gathered its momentum on the streets of downtown and the subsequent tactics by the leaders of the July revolution to suppress human rights and free speech. While I do not mean to suggest these stories are allegories for the nation, I argue that one can read the history of Egypt through an examination of the transformation of this quarter. Thus I offer an allegorical reading of a particular space, Wust al- Balad, as standing in for that of the nation. The stories that continue to emerge about this urbanscape help us to piece together the sense of both loss and optimism that characterizes what it means to be Egyptian. The act of imagining the city, at once joyous, violent, and alienating, is in every way an attempt to constitute an imagined “home.” This idea, as echoed Preface O xxv in the following passage by James Donald, is one of the central themes of this study. The narratives here are each in their own way about a neighborhood that serves as that “home,” and to some limited extent these neighborhoods func- tion as allegorical spaces through which we can read the history of the nation. An understanding of the social forces that radically alter these local spaces and their characters points to the sort of oscillating landscape that is Cairo for these protagonists. It remains a contingent space, marked by traces of the past and spaces of familiarity, but never offering a sense of a secure present.

What can we hope for from cities? What, in particular, can we hope for from imagining the city differently? All of us long for a place that is bounded and secure, where the noise stops, and where we are sustained by the love of those we love, or—more desperately—by infantile fantasies of plentitude and security. This urgent desire for home is real enough, and should not be dismissed as hope- less nostalgia. Equally, though, we have to admit that, in the end, no such place exists this side of the grave. That is why Le Corbusier’s Radiant City has the chill of the Necropolis about it, and why the urbane life of café and square can trans- mogrify so easily into an Expressionist Dance of Death. City life as a normative ideal acknowledges not only the necessary desire for the security of home, but also the inevitability of migration, change and conflict, and so too the ethical need for an openness to unassimilated otherness. The city becomes the symbolic space in which we act out our more or less imaginative answers to the question which defines our ethos: ‘how to be “at home” in a world where our identity is not given, our being-together in question, our destiny contingent or uncertain: the world of the violence of our own self- constitution.11