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rfmcdonaldMichael Haag's recent book Alexandria: City of Memory is a favourite of mine. Not only is it a composite biography of the great writers Forster, Cavafy, and Durrell in the light of their experiences in the Egyptian metropolis of Alexandria, but it is an ambitious sociological and historical study of Alexandria during its cosmopolitan period. Haag cites two French-language titles, Alexandrie entre deux mondes (edited by Robert Ilbert, published in Aix-en-Provence in 1988) and Alexandrie 1860-1960 (edited by Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis, published in Paris in 1992), as the only comparable texts; certainly I've no reason to doubt this, or the completeness of Haag's survey. If nothing else, Haag's Alexandria serves as a superb introduction to an oft-overlooked corner of history that prefigures and criticizes the early 21st century's own shaky cosmopolitan transnationalism.
Alexandria begins with an anecdote, with Durrell's return to Alexandria in October of 1977 as part of a film project (Spirit of Place). Durrell, it seems, was tremendously depressed by the appearance of the city that he loved.
What was the Alexandria that Durrell remembered?
The Alexandria of Durrell's memory--and of Forster's, and of Cavafy's, and of millions of others through lived experience and second-hand knowledge--was a city with a cosmopolitan reputation that its exceptionally cosmopolitan Hellenistic and early Roman past. At its peak, Alexandria was home to a half-million people including large Greek and Jewish populations, and was the main portal For any number of reasons, the city declined after the Arab conquest; by the time that Napoleon arrived in Egypt with his armies in 1798, only five thousand people lived in what was then little more than a village.
Alexandria revived only as a consequence of the efforts of Mehmet Ali to modernize Egypt. The capital earned for the Egyptian state by exports, particularly of the cotton grown in the Nile delta, played a crucial role in the Albanian dynast's plans; Alexandria, despite its desolation, retained an excellent harbour. The digging of the Mahmoudiya Canal in 1819-1820, connecting Alexandria's harbour to the Nile river, allowed the city to enjoy a marked revival, as the interface between Egypt and a Western-dominated Mediterranean.
For the first century of its history, at least, Alexandria occupied an interstitial position "at Egypt but not in it" (17). Alexandria's prosperity depended on its connections with its popoulous hinterland in the Nile valley, and for no substantial length of time did the city's Arab population find itself a minority. By the same measure, Alexandria's prosperity also depended heavily upon the immigration of Europeans--British, French, Greeks, Italians--to provide, if not the technical skills lacking in Egypt, at least the raw labour needed to connect the Nile valley's economy with that of the wider Mediterranean world. At the beginning of the 19th century, Egypt was if anything underpopulated, with only three million people and a rather sedentary population; mobile foreign labour was essential if Egypt was to grow.
Within a century of Alexandria's restoration, the city boasted a population of a half-million people, of which between one-quarter and one-third were foreigners: European Christians, Armenians, Jews, and members of other minorities. Capitulations were granted to the stronger foreign communities, legal concessions on the model of those granted in the Ottoman Empire proper which granted these communities near-complete independence from the Egyptian state, with foreign consuls running their own legal and governing systems in miniature for their country's expatriates. In the 1860s and 1870s, as Egypt's modernization faltered and foreign debts accumulated, a nationalist movement arose; when violent anti-foreign riots broke out in Alexandria in 1881, a British protectorate was swiftly imposed over the country.
Alexandria remained cosmopolitan--in the sense of being pluralistic and multicultural--throughout the period of British presence, from 1882 to 1956. Alexandria was, politically as well as culturally, semi-autonomous from Egypt; municipally self-governing from 1890 on, possessing a population that was decidedly confusing from the ethnographic and political perspectives (at one end one-quarter of ethnic Greeks were not Greek citizens; at the other the French consulate happily extended citizenship to almost anyone who asked), and multilingual, with French and English vying for supremacy while Italian persisted among some working classes and Arabic remained the suppressed vernacular. This cosmopolitanism, the Alexandrians examined by Haag seem to have known, was ultimately fragile, depending on British support against the mass of natives. But still, for more than a half-century modern Alexandria seemed to reflect the glories of the Alexandria that enjoyed such prominence in the Classical era.
E.M. Forster took refuse in Alexandria on his return from India in October 1916. The city ended up taking on much greater importance in his life, ironically enough given how he was initially opposed to the cosmopolitanism embodied in Alexandria. In Howard's End, for instance, Forster described urban life and modernity as fundamentally sterile and terribly destructive of authentic human relations. Nonetheless, he authored in causing him to write Alexandria: A History and a Guide, a document that is still in print as much for its insights on the city and its country as for its outdated if entertaining advice to tourists.
More importantly for Forster's evolution, it was in Alexandria that he fell in love for the first time, at almost 40 years of age, with the young streetcar attendant Mohammed el Adl. Alexandria was a somewhat more forgiving place for a homosexual--more cultural ambiguity, more anonymity--than contemporary London, allowing him what was a remarkable degree of emotional freedom. In Alexandria, Forster was able for the first time to fulfill his dictum in Howard's End, that one needed "[o]nly connect . . . and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
Forster knew Constantine Cavafy, meeting him in 1917 when the Greek poet was 54. Cavafy suffered a personal isolation similar to that of Forster's, compounded by his sense of a broader sense of national and municipal loss. At the time, Alexandria's Greek community readily surpassed Athens', in wealth and in cultural prestige; Cavafy did not call himself a "Greek (Hellene)" but rather a "Greek (Hellenic)", relating his ethnicity not to that of the minor southeastern European nation-state but to the much vaster and older Greek diaspora. Though he was born in Egypt, he was disassociated from his native land: he spoke no Arabic, expressed little interest in ancient Egypt, had no Egyptian friends, took no Arab sexual partners.
Haag convincingly demonstrates that Cavafy knew, though, that the Hellenic diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean was doomed, by the growth of local nationalisms, by the expansion of the Greek nation-state, and by the fatal conjunction of the two. The critical moment for him came in the Greco-Turkish War of 1921-1922, which ended not only with a crushing Greek military defeat but with the expulsion of almost all of the Greeks from the Hellenic communities three millennia old on the eastern shore of the Aegean. In February of 1922, Cavafy wrote the archly mournful "Those Who Fought for the Achaean League":
Durrell's experience of Alexandria occurred almost a generation after those of Forster and Cavafy. Durrell, of course, was heterosexual, and the sanction of his heterosexuality ensured that his relationships would meet with decidedly more favourable outcomes. In Durrell's biography, Alexandria played a critical role in his romantic life: Durrell lost his first wife, evacuated with him and their child from the Greek island of Corfu, in Alexandria; he found his second wife, the beautiful Jewish woman Eve Cohen, in Alexandria; almost two decades later, he met his third wife, Claude-Marie Vincendon, an Alexandrian expatriate, as he was tiring of Cyprus, the second-last enclave of cosmopolitan in the eastern Mediterranean behind Lebanon.
More importantly, Durrell wrote at a time when Alexandria's cosmopolitan culture was breaking down. That his introduction to Alexandria coincided with the Second World War is telling. Though Alexandria and Egypt's Nilotic core were never directly affected by the war, distant battles like El Alamein and threats of air raids aside, the war did signal the beginning of the decline of Britain, which lost interest in Egypt to the extent that the Capitulations had been abolished in 1937 by mutual agreement. The Second World War proved quite conclusively that regardless of the merits, total warfare did a superlative job of breaking down cosmopolitan transnational cultures elsewhere in the world. Already in the eastern Mediterranean, the creation of the Greek nation-state in the century after the first Greek national rebellion hinted at the impending doom of the city's Hellenes, simply because of the irresistible superiority of a consolidated national society numbering in the millions over a dispersed and vulnerable diaspora with nodes numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
What one nation-state's existence did a single diasporic community reconfigured as a secondary offshoot in Egypt, the growth of a new sort of Egyptian nationalism did for all of Alexandria's diasporic communities. The failure of liberal constitutionalism over the mid-290th century coincided with the growth of a new sort of nationalism, grounded in an Arab identity that demanded the intensification of Egypt's links with the surrounding Arab world at the expense the country's minority communities, particularly those with foreign connections. For instance, although the Italians--according to Haag--were subjected to a high rate of assimilation into the Muslim Arab working classes of Alexandria, they remained a prominent component of the Alexandrian population; here, the growth of an expansionistic Italian nationalism under Fascism endangered the Italian presence on Egypt's Mediterranean shore. The growth of the Jewish settlements in nearby Mandatory Palestine, in the meantime, led to the growth of a popular opinion distrustful of the Jews, despite the fact that Alexandrian Jews tended to be criticized by Zionist visitors for their lack of interest in a Jewish nation-state. As unquestionably Egyptian as they were, Copts came under doubt because of their religion. And, of course, the citizens of Britain and France living in Egypt were tainted by their states' colonialist pasts.
The end of cosmopolitan Alexandria was swift. The post-war decline of western Europe coincided with the growth of radical Arab nationalism in Egypt, culminating in 1956 with the failure of the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt (at one point, Alexandria was considered but dismissed as a target of the Anglo-French fleets). The subsequent mass emigration of the denizens of cosmopolitan Alexandria, and the nationalization of foreign property by the Nasserist state, was likely a foregone conclusion. In the meantime, the continuing urbanization of the Egyptian population led to the almost tenfold growth of the city's population, now almost entirely Arabic in language and Muslim in religion. Alexandria has been, at long last, assimilated into Egypt. Haag concludes that "the city is haunted by a sense of vacancy, for almost all the citizens of cosmopolitan Alexandria have long since gone away, leaving a new people with memory to inhabit the carcasses of others' lives" (350). All that remains, Haag grimly concludes, are the cemeteries of the dead.
Haag's account of cosmopolitan Alexandria is compelling, and not only because it represents a historical what-if that's decidedly attractive in the era when geopoliticians and armchair strategists eagerly plot out civilizational clashes. Liminal spaces are loci of creativity; the existence of liminal spaces in a given state's territory implies good things about its tolerance for imperfections, for shadings of identity and loyalty falling between the bright primary colours inscribed on passports and flags. Haag provides proof that Egypt was entirely capable of this, and not only by citing the persons of Saad Zaghloub and Taha Hussein, secular nationalists in Egypt who argued--ironically enough, contrary to the arguments of Western colonists--that there was no clash of cultures inherent.
This narrative of cosmopolitan Alexandria, though, fails on two accounts. The first and relatively minor, one is that it focuses entirely on the notables in the foreign communities of Alexandria, on the writers and the socialites and the prominent businessmen and on the passing worthies of global notes. Haag didn't intend to write a sociological tome, surely, but he demonstrates quite adequately that cosmopolitan Alexandria was as diverse socioeconomically as it was ethnopolitically. The lower classes of Alexandria's foreign communities are notable mainly as implicit contrasts to the important people who are the subjects of his study. Why were Italians so prone to being Arabized and Italianized? What made Armenians and Persians and Greeks seek French citizenship so avidly? How well-off were the foreign communities? You won't find the answers in Alexandria.
Far more importantly, Haag shares with his historical subjects a telling indifference to the Arabs of Alexandria. Haag at least mentions the presence, in cosmopolitan Alexandrian society, of members of other Western nationalities--Americans, Germans, Turks, Russians, Hungarians. The Arabs of Alexandria, who always formed the city's majority population and that formed a prominent component of Egypt's total population of 24 million in 1950, scarcely feature in Haag's survey at all save as a source of cheap labour, local colour, and political menace. Cavafy made a point of looking to immigrant Greeks for sexual partners; Durrell's second and third wives were of recent immigrant stock; and even Forster's Muhammad is shown in Forster's own letters and diaries to have been ambivalent, reluctant to commit sexually and accusing Forster of not taking him seriously as an equal partner. Egypt's King Farouk is the singular exception, late in this period, and the details of his presence--marked by his enthusiastic hunting and his political scheming and his humiliating domination by foreigners--are telling.
Haag makes a very strong case that Alexandria in the century before the catastrophe of 1956 possessed a complex and vital culture. What he singularly fails to demonstrate is that the majority of Alexandrians were particularly attached to this culture. It shouldn't be very surprising that cosmopolitan Alexandria's collapse was so complete, given how the majority of the Alexandrian population was never included in the ranks of this culture. The collapse of cosmopolitan Alexandria might have been inevitable. I'd go so far as to wonder whether Alexandrians should have cared, or should care, about the homogenization of their city.
And yet, Fatemah Farag concludes her Al-Ahram article "Alexandria of the heart's mind" by suggesting that some modern Alexandrians do care:
If cosmopolitan Alexandria can survive so well in the memory of its local inheritors, for all of its imperfections it just couldn't have been so fundamentally broken as to merit oblivion. Despite its flaws, Haag's Alexandria has at least helped save the past of Egypt's second city from just that fate.
Alexandria begins with an anecdote, with Durrell's return to Alexandria in October of 1977 as part of a film project (Spirit of Place). Durrell, it seems, was tremendously depressed by the appearance of the city that he loved.
The city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its harbour a mere cemetery, its famous cafés, Pastroudis and Baudrot, no longer twinkled with music and lights. "For posters and advertisements have vanished, everything is in Arabic; in our time, film posters were billed in several languages with Arabic subtitles, so to speak." [. . .] All about him lay Iskandariya, the uncomprehensible Arabic of its inhabitants translatable only into emptiness.
What was the Alexandria that Durrell remembered?
The Alexandria of Durrell's memory--and of Forster's, and of Cavafy's, and of millions of others through lived experience and second-hand knowledge--was a city with a cosmopolitan reputation that its exceptionally cosmopolitan Hellenistic and early Roman past. At its peak, Alexandria was home to a half-million people including large Greek and Jewish populations, and was the main portal For any number of reasons, the city declined after the Arab conquest; by the time that Napoleon arrived in Egypt with his armies in 1798, only five thousand people lived in what was then little more than a village.
Alexandria revived only as a consequence of the efforts of Mehmet Ali to modernize Egypt. The capital earned for the Egyptian state by exports, particularly of the cotton grown in the Nile delta, played a crucial role in the Albanian dynast's plans; Alexandria, despite its desolation, retained an excellent harbour. The digging of the Mahmoudiya Canal in 1819-1820, connecting Alexandria's harbour to the Nile river, allowed the city to enjoy a marked revival, as the interface between Egypt and a Western-dominated Mediterranean.
For the first century of its history, at least, Alexandria occupied an interstitial position "at Egypt but not in it" (17). Alexandria's prosperity depended on its connections with its popoulous hinterland in the Nile valley, and for no substantial length of time did the city's Arab population find itself a minority. By the same measure, Alexandria's prosperity also depended heavily upon the immigration of Europeans--British, French, Greeks, Italians--to provide, if not the technical skills lacking in Egypt, at least the raw labour needed to connect the Nile valley's economy with that of the wider Mediterranean world. At the beginning of the 19th century, Egypt was if anything underpopulated, with only three million people and a rather sedentary population; mobile foreign labour was essential if Egypt was to grow.
Within a century of Alexandria's restoration, the city boasted a population of a half-million people, of which between one-quarter and one-third were foreigners: European Christians, Armenians, Jews, and members of other minorities. Capitulations were granted to the stronger foreign communities, legal concessions on the model of those granted in the Ottoman Empire proper which granted these communities near-complete independence from the Egyptian state, with foreign consuls running their own legal and governing systems in miniature for their country's expatriates. In the 1860s and 1870s, as Egypt's modernization faltered and foreign debts accumulated, a nationalist movement arose; when violent anti-foreign riots broke out in Alexandria in 1881, a British protectorate was swiftly imposed over the country.
Alexandria remained cosmopolitan--in the sense of being pluralistic and multicultural--throughout the period of British presence, from 1882 to 1956. Alexandria was, politically as well as culturally, semi-autonomous from Egypt; municipally self-governing from 1890 on, possessing a population that was decidedly confusing from the ethnographic and political perspectives (at one end one-quarter of ethnic Greeks were not Greek citizens; at the other the French consulate happily extended citizenship to almost anyone who asked), and multilingual, with French and English vying for supremacy while Italian persisted among some working classes and Arabic remained the suppressed vernacular. This cosmopolitanism, the Alexandrians examined by Haag seem to have known, was ultimately fragile, depending on British support against the mass of natives. But still, for more than a half-century modern Alexandria seemed to reflect the glories of the Alexandria that enjoyed such prominence in the Classical era.
E.M. Forster took refuse in Alexandria on his return from India in October 1916. The city ended up taking on much greater importance in his life, ironically enough given how he was initially opposed to the cosmopolitanism embodied in Alexandria. In Howard's End, for instance, Forster described urban life and modernity as fundamentally sterile and terribly destructive of authentic human relations. Nonetheless, he authored in causing him to write Alexandria: A History and a Guide, a document that is still in print as much for its insights on the city and its country as for its outdated if entertaining advice to tourists.
More importantly for Forster's evolution, it was in Alexandria that he fell in love for the first time, at almost 40 years of age, with the young streetcar attendant Mohammed el Adl. Alexandria was a somewhat more forgiving place for a homosexual--more cultural ambiguity, more anonymity--than contemporary London, allowing him what was a remarkable degree of emotional freedom. In Alexandria, Forster was able for the first time to fulfill his dictum in Howard's End, that one needed "[o]nly connect . . . and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
Forster knew Constantine Cavafy, meeting him in 1917 when the Greek poet was 54. Cavafy suffered a personal isolation similar to that of Forster's, compounded by his sense of a broader sense of national and municipal loss. At the time, Alexandria's Greek community readily surpassed Athens', in wealth and in cultural prestige; Cavafy did not call himself a "Greek (Hellene)" but rather a "Greek (Hellenic)", relating his ethnicity not to that of the minor southeastern European nation-state but to the much vaster and older Greek diaspora. Though he was born in Egypt, he was disassociated from his native land: he spoke no Arabic, expressed little interest in ancient Egypt, had no Egyptian friends, took no Arab sexual partners.
Haag convincingly demonstrates that Cavafy knew, though, that the Hellenic diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean was doomed, by the growth of local nationalisms, by the expansion of the Greek nation-state, and by the fatal conjunction of the two. The critical moment for him came in the Greco-Turkish War of 1921-1922, which ended not only with a crushing Greek military defeat but with the expulsion of almost all of the Greeks from the Hellenic communities three millennia old on the eastern shore of the Aegean. In February of 1922, Cavafy wrote the archly mournful "Those Who Fought for the Achaean League":
Valiant are you who fought and fell gloriously;
fearless of those who were everywhere victorious.
Blameless, even if Diaeos and Critolaos were at fault.
When the Greeks want to boast,
"Our nation turns out such men" they will say
of you. And thus marvellous will be your praise. --
Written in Alexandria by an Achaean;
in the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyrus.
Durrell's experience of Alexandria occurred almost a generation after those of Forster and Cavafy. Durrell, of course, was heterosexual, and the sanction of his heterosexuality ensured that his relationships would meet with decidedly more favourable outcomes. In Durrell's biography, Alexandria played a critical role in his romantic life: Durrell lost his first wife, evacuated with him and their child from the Greek island of Corfu, in Alexandria; he found his second wife, the beautiful Jewish woman Eve Cohen, in Alexandria; almost two decades later, he met his third wife, Claude-Marie Vincendon, an Alexandrian expatriate, as he was tiring of Cyprus, the second-last enclave of cosmopolitan in the eastern Mediterranean behind Lebanon.
More importantly, Durrell wrote at a time when Alexandria's cosmopolitan culture was breaking down. That his introduction to Alexandria coincided with the Second World War is telling. Though Alexandria and Egypt's Nilotic core were never directly affected by the war, distant battles like El Alamein and threats of air raids aside, the war did signal the beginning of the decline of Britain, which lost interest in Egypt to the extent that the Capitulations had been abolished in 1937 by mutual agreement. The Second World War proved quite conclusively that regardless of the merits, total warfare did a superlative job of breaking down cosmopolitan transnational cultures elsewhere in the world. Already in the eastern Mediterranean, the creation of the Greek nation-state in the century after the first Greek national rebellion hinted at the impending doom of the city's Hellenes, simply because of the irresistible superiority of a consolidated national society numbering in the millions over a dispersed and vulnerable diaspora with nodes numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Incidentally, George Prevelakis' working paper "Finis Greciae or the Return of the Greeks? State and Diaspora in the Context of Globalisation" (PDF format) goes into more detail about the dynamics of the decline of the Hellenic diaspora and the subsequent reconstruction of a second extra-Mediterranean diaspora through emigration. His nationalist conservatism should be taken into account, i.e. in his privileging of the old artificial literary language over the actual Greek vernacular, and his lamentation about the rise of new forms of Greek diasporic identity. It's a useful survey nonetheless.
What one nation-state's existence did a single diasporic community reconfigured as a secondary offshoot in Egypt, the growth of a new sort of Egyptian nationalism did for all of Alexandria's diasporic communities. The failure of liberal constitutionalism over the mid-290th century coincided with the growth of a new sort of nationalism, grounded in an Arab identity that demanded the intensification of Egypt's links with the surrounding Arab world at the expense the country's minority communities, particularly those with foreign connections. For instance, although the Italians--according to Haag--were subjected to a high rate of assimilation into the Muslim Arab working classes of Alexandria, they remained a prominent component of the Alexandrian population; here, the growth of an expansionistic Italian nationalism under Fascism endangered the Italian presence on Egypt's Mediterranean shore. The growth of the Jewish settlements in nearby Mandatory Palestine, in the meantime, led to the growth of a popular opinion distrustful of the Jews, despite the fact that Alexandrian Jews tended to be criticized by Zionist visitors for their lack of interest in a Jewish nation-state. As unquestionably Egyptian as they were, Copts came under doubt because of their religion. And, of course, the citizens of Britain and France living in Egypt were tainted by their states' colonialist pasts.
The end of cosmopolitan Alexandria was swift. The post-war decline of western Europe coincided with the growth of radical Arab nationalism in Egypt, culminating in 1956 with the failure of the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt (at one point, Alexandria was considered but dismissed as a target of the Anglo-French fleets). The subsequent mass emigration of the denizens of cosmopolitan Alexandria, and the nationalization of foreign property by the Nasserist state, was likely a foregone conclusion. In the meantime, the continuing urbanization of the Egyptian population led to the almost tenfold growth of the city's population, now almost entirely Arabic in language and Muslim in religion. Alexandria has been, at long last, assimilated into Egypt. Haag concludes that "the city is haunted by a sense of vacancy, for almost all the citizens of cosmopolitan Alexandria have long since gone away, leaving a new people with memory to inhabit the carcasses of others' lives" (350). All that remains, Haag grimly concludes, are the cemeteries of the dead.
Haag's account of cosmopolitan Alexandria is compelling, and not only because it represents a historical what-if that's decidedly attractive in the era when geopoliticians and armchair strategists eagerly plot out civilizational clashes. Liminal spaces are loci of creativity; the existence of liminal spaces in a given state's territory implies good things about its tolerance for imperfections, for shadings of identity and loyalty falling between the bright primary colours inscribed on passports and flags. Haag provides proof that Egypt was entirely capable of this, and not only by citing the persons of Saad Zaghloub and Taha Hussein, secular nationalists in Egypt who argued--ironically enough, contrary to the arguments of Western colonists--that there was no clash of cultures inherent.
This narrative of cosmopolitan Alexandria, though, fails on two accounts. The first and relatively minor, one is that it focuses entirely on the notables in the foreign communities of Alexandria, on the writers and the socialites and the prominent businessmen and on the passing worthies of global notes. Haag didn't intend to write a sociological tome, surely, but he demonstrates quite adequately that cosmopolitan Alexandria was as diverse socioeconomically as it was ethnopolitically. The lower classes of Alexandria's foreign communities are notable mainly as implicit contrasts to the important people who are the subjects of his study. Why were Italians so prone to being Arabized and Italianized? What made Armenians and Persians and Greeks seek French citizenship so avidly? How well-off were the foreign communities? You won't find the answers in Alexandria.
Far more importantly, Haag shares with his historical subjects a telling indifference to the Arabs of Alexandria. Haag at least mentions the presence, in cosmopolitan Alexandrian society, of members of other Western nationalities--Americans, Germans, Turks, Russians, Hungarians. The Arabs of Alexandria, who always formed the city's majority population and that formed a prominent component of Egypt's total population of 24 million in 1950, scarcely feature in Haag's survey at all save as a source of cheap labour, local colour, and political menace. Cavafy made a point of looking to immigrant Greeks for sexual partners; Durrell's second and third wives were of recent immigrant stock; and even Forster's Muhammad is shown in Forster's own letters and diaries to have been ambivalent, reluctant to commit sexually and accusing Forster of not taking him seriously as an equal partner. Egypt's King Farouk is the singular exception, late in this period, and the details of his presence--marked by his enthusiastic hunting and his political scheming and his humiliating domination by foreigners--are telling.
Haag makes a very strong case that Alexandria in the century before the catastrophe of 1956 possessed a complex and vital culture. What he singularly fails to demonstrate is that the majority of Alexandrians were particularly attached to this culture. It shouldn't be very surprising that cosmopolitan Alexandria's collapse was so complete, given how the majority of the Alexandrian population was never included in the ranks of this culture. The collapse of cosmopolitan Alexandria might have been inevitable. I'd go so far as to wonder whether Alexandrians should have cared, or should care, about the homogenization of their city.
And yet, Fatemah Farag concludes her Al-Ahram article "Alexandria of the heart's mind" by suggesting that some modern Alexandrians do care:
Mohamed, my cab driver, is hopeful. "The Alexandria of my childhood was beautiful. I remember that when it rained, the streets shone and you would swear that someone had polished them by hand. Today, when it rains, the city becomes a dirty swamp. But I see things getting a bit better and I hope that after having reached the dumps we will be able to pull the city together. I want my children to have the opportunity of seeing at least a bit of the city of my childhood." And as I look towards the sea, beyond the colourful fishermen's boats of Anfoushi and the wet stone of Qayt Bey, I, too, am again overwhelmed by that bittersweet constriction of the chest known as nostalgia.
If cosmopolitan Alexandria can survive so well in the memory of its local inheritors, for all of its imperfections it just couldn't have been so fundamentally broken as to merit oblivion. Despite its flaws, Haag's Alexandria has at least helped save the past of Egypt's second city from just that fate.
