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"Cairo and the Age of the Hedonists"

by Daniel Pipes
October 12, 2006

updated Oct 26, 2006

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Cover of "Egypt's Belle Epoque: Cairo and the Age of the Hedonists."

Cairo has a reputation these days for fundamentalism, anger, hatred, and the like, symbolically summarized by the 1994 stabbing in the neck of a Nobel-prize winning novelist for political reasons. So it was with mild shock that I took in the title of a newly-arrived paperback by Trevor Mostyn from Tauris Parke: Egypt's Belle Epoque: Cairo and the Age of the Hedonists. The book, originally published in the UK in 1989, offers a vivid evocation of the Egyptian capital between (roughly) the accession of Ismail in 1863 and the overthrow of his grandson Farouk in 1952. Mostyn gives a sense of the Europeans' grand life during those eight decades by quoting from journals, travelogues, press clippings, and the like.

As a former resident of Cairo who first arrived in that extraordinary city in 1971, I am highly aware of this layer of the city's history. I lived in the part of town Ismail had constructed, I enjoyed the faded but still recognizable architecture of that period, I hobnobbed a bit with the French-speaking Turko-Egyptian elite, I whiled away afternoons at the Gezira Sporting Club, and I heard reminiscences from old-timers who recalled the monarchy.

By now, this is an all-but vanished world, yet Mostyn's book and my memories both bear on the present, pointing out that the wheels of history never cease from turning:

The lesson is clear; there is no greater mistake than taking present circumstances and extrapolating them outward, assuming that what is must be. (October 12, 2006)

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