Cairo: The City Victorious By Max Rodenbeck Knopf. 300 pp.

Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy Contributor, "New Republic," New York "Times Magazine"

IN THE WINTER of 1997, Egyptian police arrested 140 young Cairo heavy metal music fans on suspicion of Satan worship. The ensuing scandal transfixed the city for several weeks. In drawing rooms, offices and coffeehouses, explanations proliferated. Egypt's Attorney General blamed the Internet, arguing that the youths had been led astray via a Church of Satan home page. Nationalists blamed Israel and the CIA, while Leftist intellectuals argued that the real problem was one of rich parents spoiling their children. Others whispered that the entire affair had been concocted by ambitious secret policemen. Muslim clerics thundered that if found guilty, the young people should be put to death.

A few weeks after the arrests, all the so-called Satanists were released for lack of evidence. In truth, they were mostly harmless, MTV-addled couch falafels. The truth hardly mattered, though. Amid the sermonizing and the lurid media details of pentagrams, black lipstick and all night dance parties, there was a pervasive sense that these alienated rich kids "deserved a reprimand for straying so far West of the Egyptian mainstream," even if they didn't really worship the devil.

Yet, as the finger-pointing showed, Cairo has no mainstream--social, political or otherwise. If there is an ultimate message in Max Rodenbeck's pointillist history of the city from prehistory to the present, that is it. Like the Nile, which used to overflow its banks every year (until President Gamal Abdel Nasser's engineers completed the Aswan Dam in 1970), Cairo cannot be contained within a single explanation.

Take the city's origins. Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians believed that Creation itself occurred where Cairo is today. What happened at Creation? Accounts differ. According to the priests of On, a town built near the modern city's northeastern suburbs, the world began when the sun god Atum aroused himself "so that he should create orgasm." Atum's primal masturbation engendered the nine gods of On, including Osiris, Isis and the outsider Seth. Overcome by his exertions, Atum wept: His tears became mankind.

Across the Nile, the priests of Memphis told a different story. "`It was not Atum of On,' they asserted, `but Ptah of Memphis who created the world; not Atum the sun, but Ptah, the beautiful of face, who conceived of all, then uttered it into being with his Word, and fashioned man in his image.'"

Most modern Cairenes have forgotten such legends. If they want stories of how mankind came to be, they turn to the Koran, the Bible, or evolutionary biology. New compared to those of On and Memphis, these views of the world are no easier to reconcile.

Rodenbeck is the prototypical old Cairo hand. His familial involvement with the city began a century ago, when his American great-grandmother traveled to Egypt with her sister and fell in love with a British officer. Rodenbeck himself has spent much of his life in Cairo. The son of a professor at the American University, he is currently a local correspondent for the Economist.

The author's intimate knowledge makes for beguiling prose. He seems to have access everywhere: coffeehouses for cripples only; Sufi festivals where blissed-out Egyptians and Western hippies dance until dawn; bars populated by bitter, whiskey-sodden middle-class intellectuals; and elite costume parties where Coptic Christian playboys dress as white robed Islamic militants brandishing toy Kalashnikovs.

Reporting on the Egyptian government's bloody underground war against real Islamic militants, Rodenbeck penetrates the slum hideout of Dr. Ala' Muhieddin, a veterinarian-turned-radical who was gunned down six months after the interview. The assassins were unidentified, but are presumed to have been affiliated with the state security forces.

On a Greek island, Rodenbeck meets an exiled matron who asks him what Cairo women are wearing nowadays. This is the starting point for a fascinating riff on the impact that Islamic revivalism has had on women's fashion: "What would Madame Eleni make of today's Qasr al Nil Street, where the plaster mannequins sometimes show not even their blue dolls' eyes? What they display is not so much fashion as Koranic exegesis."

But unlike many Western analysts, Rodenbeck does not simply dismiss Egypt's current fundamentalist fervor as backward. Instead, he provides an incisive account of the middle-class despair that has driven many educated yet downwardly mobile Egyptians to believe Islam, rather than Nasserite socialism, Arab nationalism, or global monoculture, is the answer to their problems.

Cairo has been the center of gravity for Egypt since Pharaonic times. All roads lead there, one in four Egyptians live there, and virtually everything of consequence gets decided in the dusty corridors of its massive government bureaucracy. However, the painful effects of Egypt's rapid transition from the Nasserist command economy of the '60s to the free market, inaugurated in the '70s by President Anwar al-Sadat's Open Door policy, still linger.

While entrepreneurs drive around in Rolls-Royces and live in million-dollar marble penthouses, civil servants must often work three jobs to feed their families. The government can no longer offer guaranteed employment to every university graduate. Along with the challenge posed by the regional dominance of Israel and the global dominance of the United States, this breakdown in the Egyptian social contract helps explain why radical Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood remain popular, despite many years of violent state repression.

Social upheaval is not new in Cairo, of course. The city that medieval Arab geographers named Al Qahira (The Victorious) has had many ups and downs over the last few millennia. After its golden Fatimid era, Cairo endured plagues, invasion, economic stagnation, and intellectual decline. All are detailed by Rodenbeck who, apart from his reporting skills, is widely read. His accounts of the Pharaonic, Fatimid, Mameluke, and colonial periods are lucid and richly anecdotal. He is particularly good at explaining the premodern social framework that made medieval Cairo coherent: the university-trained jurists who enforced Islamic civil and criminal law; the urban neighborhoods, each with its own gate that closed two hours after sunset; and the myriad waqf (charitable trusts) that wealthy Muslims used to protect their estates from division under Islamic inheritance law. The trusts maintained schools, hospitals and bathhouses. One small property, endowed in the 13th century, even provided daily sustenance for the city's stray cats.

In medieval Cairo, rapacious sultans would sometimes seize estates regardless of their status as charitable foundations. In modern Cairo, similarly, very little happens by the book. Hence the improvisational genius of the city's residents: To survive, you need to work the system. Rodenbeck understands this well:

"In richer cities' formal structures, rules and regulations channel a smooth flow of things. In Cairo informal structures predominate. It is these that fill the yawning gap between claims and facts; between, for instance, the nominal promise of free education right through medical school and the fact that without costly private lessons there is no hope of passing exams; or between the rule that drivers must pass a test before getting a license and the reality that a modest bribe will do instead. In this gap there is enormous room for diddling, for finesse--in short, for enterprise."

Perhaps as a result, Cairo is the joke center of the Arab world. Nothing is more prized here than the ability to quip one's way out of a sticky situation. "Where else" writes Rodenbeck, "would a taxi driver leap out of his cab, kneel down on the asphalt, and kiss the white line at an intersection? This happened once in front of me. `See, ya bey' [your lordship] the cabbie shouted to the cop who was about to ticket him, `the white line isn't angry anymore.'"

Of course, it takes a sense of humor to survive in modern Cairo. This is the most densely populated large urban area in the world, according to the United Nations. In poorer districts, three to five people live jammed into each tiny room. Family members take turns eating and sleeping. Schools sometimes run three daily shifts; even so, they are forced to squeeze up to 80 students into a single classroom.

But there are compensations to life in the intellectual, political and cultural center of the Arab world. Cairo has the biggest universities, the largest-circulation newspapers, the most coffeehouses, and the best belly dancers of any Arab city. Its studios produce films, television dramas and songs that define a common frame of pop cultural reference from Morocco to Saudi Arabia. And while the symbols of global consumer culture permeate the city, Cairo is quite rich enough to assimilate McWorld and remain unique.

COPYRIGHT 1999 American Labor Conference on International Affairs

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