Cairo: Metropolis of miracles

Cairo's strata are psychological as well as physical, as exhausting as they are inspiring. Merely to cross the crowded streets requires patience, daring, and a sense of humor. For Egyptians, the trials of daily life are complicated by the need to create a personal identity from the crumbling past and half-constructed present amid centrifugal forces of secularism and religion, tradition and modernity, and the challenge of integrating a 6,000-year-old culture with 21st-century technology. "We Egyptians are masters of compromise, which has always been the source of stability and tolerance," says the writer Alaa Al Aswany. But the increasing mood is of pessimism, claustrophobia, and economic frustration, which is chipping away at civility, friendliness, and family relations.

Al Aswany, 50, is the author of “The Yacoubian Building”; published in 2002, it quickly became the Arab world's best-selling novel, outstripping the sale of works in Arabic by Egypt's Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz. He is also a member of the opposition Kifaya movement, which was founded in 2004 in response to the calling of Egypt's first multiparty presidential elections but has since been crushed through government tactics, including police violence at rallies, the arrest and torture of Kifaya bloggers, and the jailing on trumped-up charges of presidential candidate Ayman Nour, who is a year younger than Gamal Mubarak and his potential rival.

Democracy is more than parliaments and political parties, however, and Al Aswany, both in his writing and his mentoring of young people, uses literature to open and excavate free space in a political society characterized by closed doors and thinking. Continuing a tradition begun in Cairo coffeehouses in the 16th century, he leads a public Thursday-night seminar in a borrowed office in the 19th-century neighborhood of Munira, in a room with high ceilings, blue-painted French shutters, fluorescent lighting, peeling yellow paint, and a long table. On the night I went, discussion ranged from “Madame Bovary” to Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez to Israel, American journalism to life under Nicolae Ceauşescu. Halfway through the evening, a young man raised his hand and began criticizing Al Aswany's latest novel, “Chicago,” about Egyptians living in America, because one of the characters, a veiled and lonely student, has an affair and undergoes an abortion (a procedure banned under Islam, except when pregnancy endangers the mother's life).

"You're breaking a taboo, and it's disrespectful of Islam," he said, politely but sternly, as the gathering of students and young writers and their parents listened intently.

“Chicago” presents Egyptian emigration as both self-preservation and moral compromise, and serves as a thematic sequel to “The Yacoubian Building,” which describes the dilemmas facing residents on different floors of a once grand building in Cairo's decaying downtown. An area of Italianate apartment buildings along Haussmann-style boulevards, downtown Cairo emerged in the wake of Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt. After the French troops left, the Ottoman viceroy Muhammad Ali and his heirs sought to remold Egypt in the image of Europe, and by the late 19th century, the influx of foreign investors, architects, and adventurers had transformed Cairo into the Dubai of its day. Set in the 1990s during the first Gulf War and the first tremors of America's intervention in Iraq, “The Yacoubian Building” paints a Cairo in decline. A businessman running for Parliament pays corrupt officials to fix his election, while the poor inhabitants of the building's rooftop shantytown dream of love or prosperity amid the city's corrosive soup of fundamentalism, sexual exploitation, and political ennui. One of the intersecting stories follows Taha, the son of the building's doorman, who aspires to be a policeman and marry his rooftop sweetheart but who falls under the influence of a radical sheikh, is arrested, and dies attacking the police investigator who sodomized him.

Al Aswany is one of the first Cairo novelists to write explicitly about sex and religion, and his main theme is how the injustice and frustration caused by dictatorship transforms these natural and wonderful human experiences into violence and terrorism. I made an appointment to see him privately one evening at his dental clinic in Garden City, originally a Kensington-inspired district of palaces and villas along the Nile's East Bank. Al Aswany's father, also a writer, advised him to have a profession besides literature to fall back on, and he became a full-time dentist after studying at the University of Illinois in Chicago; the job not only earns him a regular salary but brings him into contact with people from all walks of life. A large man, tending to overweight, he has a warm smile and the focused gaze of someone used to diagnosing and resolving sources of pain.

"Egypt," Al Aswany told me, "is suffering from the disease of dictatorship that infects everything from elections to marital relations." But he was hopeful, mentioning that he had himself resisted the temptation to leave for good, and insisting that the democracy movement combined with turmoil in the region has pushed Egyptians to realize that they are on the brink of generational change. "Egypt is like an intelligent person who's been in a coma and woken up," he said. "He's not starting from zero, but he needs a bit of time to recover his personality and get better." Like many secularists, Al Aswany is alarmed by mounting Islamic fundamentalism, the "combat between Egyptian tolerance and civility and closed Wahhabi aggression, an everyday struggle between the two ways of seeing the world."

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