Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism

An Archive

Hala Halim

Fordham University Press   New York   2013

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Halim, Hala.

Alexandrian cosmopolitanism : an archive / Hala Halim. — First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5176-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Alexandria (Egypt)—In literature. 2. Cosmopolitanism in literature. 3. European literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. European literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN56.3.A42H35 2013

809’.93358621—dc23

2013009212

First edition

To Youssef Halim

and

to the memory of Amal Halim and Marie Yassa

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Of Greeks, Barbarians, Philhellenes, Hellenophones, and Egyptiotes: C. P. Cavafy

2. Of Hellenized Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Subalternity: E. M. Forster

3. Uncanny Hybridity into Neocolonialism: Lawrence Durrell

4. Polypolis and Levantine Camp: Bernard de Zogheb

Epilogue/Prologue

Notes

Works Cited

Figures

1. Etching by Ahmad Mursi inspired by C. P. Cavafy’s poetry, particularly The City.

2. Al-Busiri Mosque, in the foreground, and Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi Mosque in the background, Alexandria.

3. Interior of al-Busiri Mosque, with al-Burda inscribed on a frieze, and detail showing verses from al-Burda.

4. Mohamed El-Adl, visiting card.

5. Georges (Ziquet) de Zogheb in a revue titled Bal Français on 22 April 1950 at the San Stefano Hotel in Alexandria.

6. Bernard de Zogheb in a dramatic performance in 1949.

7. Watercolor of the Shallalat Garden, showing part of the premodern Arab wall, Alexandria, 1997, by Bernard de Zogheb.

8. A drawing from Bernard de Zogheb’s 1957 diary.

9. An illustration by Bernard de Zogheb for his libretto Malmulla ou Il Canale, showing Malmulla and de Lesseps.

10. An illustration by Bernard de Zogheb for his libretto Le Vacanze a Parigi, showing the two American students, outside Prunier in Paris, being accosted by the prostitute.

11. ‘Ali, left, reciting Cavafy’s The City, as Firas listens, in Yousry Nasrallah’s al-Madina.

12. Recital of Cavafy’s Ithaca in Ibrahim El Batout’s Ithaki.

Acknowledgments

From Alexandria, where it all began, this project has taken me to several cities where I incurred many a pleasurable debt. First and foremost, I wish to express my gratitude to Vincent P. Pecora for his rigorous guidance and generous spirit as my graduate advisor. His faith in my work continues to inspirit me long after leaving the University of California, Los Angeles. Ali Behdad’s moral support and work on travel literature have meant a great deal to me. I shall always remember Aamir Mufti’s unstinting advice and encouragement at a crucial juncture. In their various ways, Katherine King, the late Michael Heim, and Michael Cooperson made my time at UCLA that much more enriching. Among much else, Lucia Re welcomed and offered insightful comments on Chapter 4 when it was first written as an article, in addition to checking my translations from Italian.

At New York University, Kristin Ross, both as scholar and as colleague, set an excellent example. Kristin also read and commented critically on earlier versions of the Introduction, Chapter 3, and the final pages of this book. Jacques Lezra, my faculty mentor, exceeded expectations, invariably making the time to meet and giving wise counsel at every step. Everett Rowson’s responsiveness and unflagging encouragement were particularly helpful as this book reached completion. Participating in discussions with my colleagues in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies I have gained much insight into their range of specializations. For advice and approval of research leaves, I am indebted to the chairs, past and present, of my two departments: Marion Katz, Jacques Lezra, Zachary Lockman, Everett Rowson, and Nancy Ruttenburg. I thank Ella Shohat for her wit, and staunchness in our shared commitment to promote interdisciplinarity in Middle Eastern Studies. I am grateful to John Chioles, Cavafy scholar and translator, for his thoughtful and affirming comments on an earlier draft of Chapter 1. My engagement with Translation Studies has been reinforced in dialogue with my colleagues Emily Apter and Richard Sieburth. Cristina Vatulescu proved a wonderfully loyal colleague. Although I have not so far taught a course on Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, my students, particularly in the seminar on Mediterraneanism, have enlivened my work with the freshness of their response to literature. I thank Susan Protheroe and Angela Leroux-Lindsey, administrators in the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU, for all their assistance.

Nelly Hanna will always have a place apart for the exemplary ethics and consistent support I have found in her over the years. Nelly also read and offered pertinent comments on a portion of the Introduction. Benedict Anderson—in an e-mail exchange about a shared interest in cosmopolites and pidgins—generously responded with his reflections on an earlier, published version of my work on Bernard de Zogheb. Peter Gran stands out for his uncompromising positions and the anti-Eurocentrism of his scholarship. Azza Kararah and Mostafa El-Abbadi, Alexandrian humanists of rare erudition, are an abiding inspiration. I cannot but remember here the late Amal Abou Aly, cherished friend whose highly promising career as classicist and historian of medicine was cut short so early. My years in Los Angeles would have been considerably less enjoyable had it not been for the friendship of Samira Qaddis and Sharon King. Now extending across three continents, my friendship with Hana Soliman and Ibrahim Fathi remains as bracing as ever. I have found invigoration in Joseph Massad’s sustained and trenchant critique of Orientalism. As editor of the Hawwa journal, Amira Sonbol went out of her way to include my work on E. M. Forster. Special thanks go to my interlocutors in different fields, including Beverley Butler, Michael Hames-Garcia, Simona Livescu, Nadine Naber, Noha Radwan, Kamran Rastegar, Ken Seigneurie, Mirana May Szeto, and Shaden M. Tageldin.

I thank the following individuals for their informative responses to my requests for references on specific points: Stanley Burstein, Vangelis Calotychos, Langdon Hammer, Tarif Khalidi, Maged Mikhail, the late Raja’ al-Naqqash, Dimitri Papadimitriou, Alekko Vlakhos, and Edward Wente. P. N. Furbank graciously supplied me in 2002 with a copy of the unpublished correspondence between Forster and the Alexandrian group who undertook revisions to the 1938 edition of Alexandria: A History and a Guide, as well as with information about the group. For access to unpublished material pertaining to de Zogheb, information about him, and contacts, I am grateful to Christine Ayoub, Gilles Beraud, Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, Jack Hagstrom, Jacky Lumbroso Nimr, Stéphane Olry, Monsignor Pierre Riches, Lucette de Saab, and the late Ion Zottos. At Misr International Films, the late director Youssef Chahine and Gaby Khoury were most helpful. I thank Yannis Zikoudis for instruction in modern Greek and for his painstaking translations from Stratis Tsirkas’s two books on Cavafy. Eleni Tsaggouri provided translations of prose texts by Cavafy; and Lori Lantz, a translation of an extract from Hermann Thiersch’s Pharos, Antike, Islam und Occident. Jennifer Newman undertook a translation of the libretto Malmulla ou Il Canale with zest and talent.

I could not have been more fortunate than to work with Helen Tartar as editor: her enthusiasm for this first book made all the difference. At Fordham University Press I also want to thank Thomas Lay for his considerateness throughout. Tim Roberts of the Modern Language Initiative and copy editor Sheila Berg were most accommodating while this book was in its final stages. Of the two reports on this book, one was signed: I am grateful to Roger Allen and to the other reader, who remains anonymous, for their feedback and endorsement. I thank the two anonymous readers of the article, published in California Italian Studies, on which Chapter 4 is based for their comments. I owe a debt of gratitude to the late Hosny Guindy, founding editor in chief of Al-Ahram Weekly, for his impeccable values and for his wholehearted backing of my work on Alexandria that has come to inform my thinking in this project. Any errors in this book are my responsibility alone.

Earlier versions of some of the chapters of this book were written on a UCLA Chancellor’s Fellowship Award. Research on unpublished E. M. Forster papers at the Modern Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge, was enabled by a Lenart Travel Fellowship, administered by the office of the Dean of Humanities, UCLA. Further research and writing were made possible by an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, directed by Vincent P. Pecora, with the Humanities Consortium, UCLA. The time to do some of the research for and the writing of Chapter 4 was made possible by a Faculty Fellowship with the Humanities Initiative, directed by Jane Tylus, NYU. Research for other parts of this book was supported by NYU funds and by a Goddard Junior Faculty Fellowship, with additional funding offered by the Department of Comparative Literature, NYU. This book received a subvention from NYU research funds.

At the Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales in Cairo, I am indebted to Frère Jean-Marie Mérigoux for several enriching discussions about Gaston Zananiri and for graciously facilitating my access to the library’s holdings. Jean-Yves Empereur, director of the Centre d’Études Alexandrines, courteously gave me permission to consult the Zogheb papers and scan images, and the scholar Dominique Gogny was always helpful. My research was aided by the librarians and archivists at the Alexandria Municipality Library; UCLA’s Young Research Library, especially Don Sloane; the Modern Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge; NYU’s Bobst Library, especially Peter Magierski; the New York Public Library; the Special Collections Department of the library of Washington University in Saint Louis; and Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections.

Quotations from C. P. Cavafy’s Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Theoharis C. Theoharis, © 2001 by Theoharis C. Theoharis, are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved. Quotations from the published Forster texts are printed by permission of the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors as the E. M. Forster Estate. Quotations from the unpublished Forster texts are printed by permission of The Society of Authors as agent for the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge. Quotations from Justine by Lawrence Durrell—© 1957, renewed © 1985 by Lawrence George Durrell—are used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.; from Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell—© 1958, renewed 1986 by Lawrence Durrell—are used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.; from Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell— © 1958 by Lawrence Durrell, renewed 1986 by Lawrence Durrell—are used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc; from Clea by Lawrence Durrell and from Alexandria taken from Lawrence Durrell’s Collected Poems, © Estate of Lawrence Durrell, are used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Kind permission to quote from de Zogheb’s manuscripts and reproduce his drawings, as well as family photographs, was granted by his nieces, Margot de Zogheb-Bogert, Anne Anka, and Patricia de Zogheb.

An earlier version of part of Chapter 2 was published under the title Forster in Alexandria: Gender and Genre in Narrating Colonial Cosmopolitanism in Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 4, nos. 2–3 (2006): 237–73, and is reprinted here by permission of Koninklijke Brill NV. Chapter 4 is a revised version of an article published under the title Latter-day Levantinism, or ‘Polypolis’ in the Libretti of Bernard de Zogheb in California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–41. An abridged Arabic version of Chapter 1 appeared under the title Mukhayyalat al-Sha‘ir: al-Akhar fi Nusus Kafafi in Amkenah, no. 8 (June 2007): 212–24. Some points about Naguib Mahfouz in the Epilogue/Prologue are drawn from my article Miramar: A Pension at the Intersection of Competing Discourses, published in the volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, edited by Waïl Hassan and Susan Muaddi Darraj (New York: Modern Language Association of North America, 2012): 184–201, and are reproduced by permission of the Modern Language Association. A few sentences in the introduction are drawn from my article Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 32, no. 3 (2012): 563–83, and are reproduced here by permission of the journal and Duke University Press.

I have given talks based on parts of this book at: the Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Binghamton University; California State University, Long Beach; the Lebanese American University; the Middle East Studies Association’s annual convention; the Modern Language Association’s annual convention; NYU; Princeton University; UCLA; the University of Pennsylvania. I thank the organizers and audiences for their comments and questions.

Last but not least, my families—the Halims, the Yassas, the Moftahs, the Bisharas, the Awadallahs, the Sidhoms, and the Rifaats, in particular Margo Yassa, Laurence Moftah, the late Mona and Magdy Rifaat, and my late uncles Helmy Yassa, Roushdy Yassa, and Azmy Awadallah—have bolstered me in more ways than I can enumerate. Without the multiple forms of support I received from my father and the formative influences of my mother and grandmother, this book could not have been written: to my three dedicatees, no words of gratitude can possibly suffice.

Abbreviations

AH, Forster, Abinger Harvest

AHG, Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide

AM, Nasrallah, al-Madina

AN, Forster, Aspects of the Novel

AP, Cavafy, Atele Poiemata

APK, Cavafy, Anekdota Peza Keimena

APM, Cavafy, Apokerygmena Poiemata kai Metafraseis

AS, Forster, Arctic Summer and Other Fiction

B, Durrell, Balthazar

BTCT, Cavafy, Before Time Could Change Them

C, Durrell, Clea

CA, Christine Ayoub collection

CC, Forster, The Creator as Critic

CEAlex, Centre d’Études Alexandrines

CP, Cavafy, Collected Poems [trans. Mendelsohn]

CPC, Cavafy, The Complete Poems of Cavafy [trans. Dalven]

CPCCP, Cavafy, C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems [trans. Keeley and Sherrard]

GB, Gilles Beraud collection

HH, Hala Halim collection

J, Durrell, Justine

JH, Jack Hagstrom collection

JLN, Jacky Lumbroso Nimr collection

HTQK, Imam, al-Haya al-Thaniya li-Qustantin Kafafis

I, El Batout, Ithaki

INE, Durrell, Introduction to the New Edition

KCC, King’s College, Cambridge, Modern Archive Centre, E.M. Forster papers

KP, Cavafy, Krymmena Poiemata

KMP, Durrell, Key to Modern Poetry

LG, Forster, The Lost Guide

M, Durrell, Mountolive

MMA, Forster, Memoir: Mohammed El Adl

NE, Forster, Notes on Egypt

OJH, De Zogheb, Opere, Jack Hagstrom collection

OWU, De Zogheb, Opere, Washington University collection

P, Cavafy, Peza

PNF, PN Furbank collection

PP, Forster, Pharos and Pharillon

PU, Princeton University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections

SB, De Zogheb, Le Sorelle Brontë [Fibor de Nagy Editions]

SO, Stéphane Olry collection

SPW, Cavafy, Selected Prose Works

TCD, Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy

TE, Forster, The Trouble in Egypt. Treatment of the Fellahin

TP, Cavafy, Ta Peza

TP1, Cavafy, Ta Poiemata, vol. 1

TP2, Cavafy, Ta Poiemata, vol. 2

TUP, Cavafy, The Unfinished Poems

UEE, Forster, The Uncollected Egyptian Essays of E. M. Forster

URP, Cavafy, The Unissued and Repudiated Poems

VAHH, De Zogheb, La Vita Alessandrina, Hala Halim collection

WU, Washington University Libraries, Special Collections, James Merrill papers

Introduction

Alexandria in the twenties was a European city, where Italian, French, Greek or English were heard far more often than Arabic. The city was beautiful, and so clean that one could have eaten off the streets. Anything from Europe could be found in Alexandria for half the price: cinemas, restaurants, dance halls . . . But all that was for the foreigners. We could only observe from the outside. The real inhabitants of Alexandria—the itinerant vendors, the shoe-shine boys—lived in the popular quarters, in Ramleh.

There used to be an open-air cinema on Saad Zaghloul Street which had a section reserved for Egyptians. A sign in French read: for the natives—meaning, for the real, national citizens. The cinema no longer exists.

—Naguib Mahfouz, Alexandria for the Egyptians

Alexandria—the last great cosmopolitan center of the Mediterranean—is special, unique, because people of different nationalities and faiths lived there, people going about their ordinary, everyday lives. They lived side by side—Muslims, Copts, Nubians, Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Maltese, Shamis, Lebanese, Jews, English, French, Spaniards, Germans, Austrians—they were all Alexandrians; together they made up the whole. They laid the foundations of the new Alexandria upon the remains of the ancient city.

—Harry Tzalas, Prologue, Farewell to Alexandria

Iskindiriyya mariyya; Alexandrea ad Aegyptum; cosmopolitan Alexandria. Far more than the Egyptian folkloric catchphrase and the Roman epithet, it is the link between this city and cosmopolitanism that has acquired the ineluctability of the perennially self-evident.¹ This book asks the questions, Was Alexandria ever really cosmopolitan? And if it was, is it possible to speak of such a thing as an Alexandrian cosmopolitanism? In other words, is there something sui generis about Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism? When, by whom, and why was its cosmopolitanism construed as exemplary?

Well into the nineteenth century this city and that concept had not been so firmly yoked. Certain leitmotifs reappear in the accounts of travelers who disembarked in Alexandria in the first half of the nineteenth century and did not tarry long there.² Gustave Flaubert, writing home in 1849, observes that one curious thing here is the respect, or rather terror, that everyone displays in the presence of ‘Franks,’ as they call Europeans. . . . [T]here are so many Europeans here. . . . [T]he place is full of Englishmen, Italians, etc.³ The resonance of ancient Alexandria in his fiction aside, Flaubert perceived the modern city as bâtarde (bastardized; mongrel), being half-Arab, half-European.⁴ Having done the sights in Alexandria and its environs in about a week, Flaubert and company were soon off to Cairo and thence to Upper Egypt. Some seven years earlier, Sophia Poole, the sister of the eminent Orientalist Edward Lane, observed the oppression of the working class and described the contrast between the Arab and the Frank part of the town, which is in appearance almost European. Watching the scene in the main square, she was disconcerted by the call of watch out: The camel-drivers’ cries ‘O’a,’ ‘Guarda,’ and ‘Sákin,’ resound every where, and at every moment, therefore, you may imagine the noise and confusion in the streets. Reporting on the city’s monuments and history, Poole noted, Although the modern Alexandria is the successor of one of the most illustrious cities of ancient times, it disappoints me, and occasions only melancholy reflections; thus we find little to interest us in this place, excepting by association with bygone times; therefore our stay will not be long.⁵ The city in the eyes of these travelers is gratingly lacking in the exotic as well as in archaeological vestiges, its most fabled monuments, such as the Lighthouse, having long since disappeared.

But what is arresting is that these Western accounts contain signifiers of ethnic diversity (Egyptians, Englishmen, Italians, and Frenchmen in Flaubert) and polyglossia (Arabic, Italian, and Turkish in Poole)—signifiers, that is, of what would come to be designated Alexandrian cosmopolitanism but that in the 1840s were not pronounced as such. It is not the fact of the oppression and abjection of the local Egyptian population that prevents the dubbing of the city in a valorizing vein as cosmopolitan, for these conditions would continue. Granted, the proportion of non-Egyptians, specifically Europeans, residing in the city would rise in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the explanation is not demographic, given that this shift in demography is itself a symptom of a wider political-economic process of an accelerated colonial modernity.⁶ It is no coincidence that what is referred to as Alexandria’s cosmopolitan period—roughly from the 1860s or 1880s to the 1950s or early 1960s—overlaps precisely with growing European intervention in the country, the British occupation and hence direct colonial control that ends in the 1950s.

To argue that it is as underwritten by an accelerated colonial modernity that Alexandrian cosmopolitanism comes into being is by no means to suggest that cosmopolitan practices or different modes of cosmopolitanism had been hitherto absent from Alexandria or, for that matter, Egypt. It is, rather, to identify and critique the dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as a discourse that, beholden to colonial conditions, drew on a site-specific archive to configure itself. However, in the larger portion of the literature and scholarship about cosmopolitan Alexandria, there is a failure to recognize the degree to which Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is complicit with colonialism.

Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, I contend, was a Eurocentric colonial discourse that perched the city precariously between quasi and pseudo, multiply Europeanizing its diversity in a gesture of appropriation while ambivalently placing it under the sign of Levantine to impute a shifty derivativeness. While various disciplines, including archaeology and history writing, made their contribution to Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, this book is primarily a comparatist study of literary representations in different genres that also relates them to other disciplines. Probing the whys and wherefores of the nomination of Alexandria as exemplary of cosmopolitanism, I interrogate the canonization of a given set of writers, and moreover only selected texts by them, as canonical of that discourse. Reading against the grain of received critical wisdom, I reappraise texts enshrined as classics of the city and excavate overlooked and altogether unknown ones to elicit occluded resistances, foreground complicities passed over in silence, and dwell on unexpected solidarities. A word concerning the concept of cosmopolitanism is due first.

Many have been the cultural and geopolitical realities that motivated the appeals to a rethought cosmopolitanism across the humanities and the social sciences in the Western academy since the early 1990s. These include exacerbated nationalism and ethnocentrism (witnessed in many contexts, not least in 9/11 and its fallout, and in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the worsening situation in Gaza and the West Bank); globalization, transnationalism and the question of multiple belonging; and the debate between canon conservatives and multiculturalists/postcolonial scholars, among others.⁷ My navigation through the vast scholarship on cosmopolitanism will be strategic and geared in part toward prefacing issues to be brought out in the discussion of Alexandria to follow.

A traditional account of cosmopolitanism would begin by paying the obligatory homage to Diogenes the Cynic’s self-designation as a "kosmopolitês" (citizen of the world/universe), as the presumed etymological origin of the word, then recapitulate at least two signal moments, Stoic thought and the Enlightenment with Immanuel Kant.⁸ Diogenes the Cynic’s neologism, when asked where he came from, indicates, in the immediate, that he rejected identification with any given city-state, preferring instead allegiance to the whole world, being at home nowhere—except in the universe itself, hence un cosmopolitisme négatif.⁹ But there can be little doubt, Malcolm Schofield argues, that the Stoic doctrine of the cosmic city was developed in explication of this dictum. The Stoics, as part of their doctrine of divine providence, held that only men and gods live by reason and hence by law, both groups therefore constituting a community or a city, the latter being the universe itself.¹⁰ The specific form of reason at stake, as Schofield expounds, is "prescriptive reason, [one] with which law is identified, [this being] focused on matters of social morality, and it is this that men and gods have in common. The community of mortal and divine thus construed belongs to a city conceived of as the universal city, in view of the Stoic idea of a city [as] nothing but an idea of a community founded on common acceptance of social norms.¹¹ The related notion of cosmopolis found its utmost expression in Rome as the imperial city par excellence. The manifold manifestations of the city/world equation included legal—citizenship is the mechanism through which urbs and orbis are equated—architectural, and cultural—the city . . . could be figured as dominating the world but also as representing or summing up the world—in terms of synechdoche constituting its head (caput mundi), in terms of metonymy standing for its totality (every region represented within it), in terms of epitome gathering together its most precious contents.¹² The deployment of cosmopolis" in relation to Alexandria in an overlapping but different vein is a point I shall take up later.

In Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent (1784), Kant argues that nature’s design to develop humans’ capacities to their utmost through a universal civil society is achieved through "men’s unsociable sociability, which drives him both to desire human society and to desire to isolate himself. The conflict thus engendered on both the individual and collective scales awakens all of man’s powers, his rationality thereby making for the first true steps from barbarism to culture, but man requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will, whereby everyone can be free. This, he maintains, can be none other than a civil constitution that would also govern external relations among nations, a federation of nations, fulfilling nature’s supreme objective—a universal cosmopolitan state, the womb in which all of the human species’ original capacities will be developed."¹³ In the later To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), Kant proposes a set of definitive articles for achieving this aim, namely, that all nations should have a republican civil constitution, that "a league of peace among nations should be established, and that cosmopolitan right," in the form of hospitality in alien lands, be guaranteed.¹⁴ Here we may well ask, What connections exist between Stoic and Kantian articulations of cosmopolitanism? And what relevance could either or both hold today, whether historically (the age of modern imperialism, decolonization, globalization) or intellectually (in view of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory)?

In the reinvigorated turn of the past two decades to cosmopolitanism, the move of recouping Stoic and/or Kantian cosmopolitanism has not been absent. Most prominently, it was Martha Nussbaum who made a strong bid for what she sees as the interconnected classical and Enlightenment legacies of cosmopolitan thought. She marshaled this argument in Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism—first published in the Boston Review in 1994, then reprinted with responses in the benchmark volume For Love of Country?—that was written, in part, against the philosopher Richard Rorty’s endorsement of patriotic values and national pride in the course of an attack he made on the left in the academy and its promotion of multiculturalism.¹⁵ Nussbaum was to follow this with several essays on the subject elaborating her position. In Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, she anchors her argument for a cosmopolitan education and a universal orientation in Kantian morality but primarily in the statements of Diogenes the Cynic, Marcus Aurelius, and generally the Stoics who suggest that we think of ourselves not as devoid of local affiliations, but as surrounded by a series of concentric circles . . . [outside which] is the largest one, humanity as a whole.¹⁶ Elsewhere, she draws out the deep affinity with the Stoics that Kant found . . . with his own unfolding ideas about cosmopolitan humanity, with the aim of pinpointing the common, specifically moral, grounds based on reason that can give the world a paradigm . . . to inform its engagement with the political life, in a time of ethnic violence, genocidal war, and widespread disregard for human dignity.¹⁷ Less germane to my concern here are the two key differences between Kant and the Stoics that Nussbaum so compellingly discusses, teleology and the passions.¹⁸ And I am in full agreement with her critique of—though certainly not proposed remedies for—American ethnocentrism, one that she was to restate in the wake of 9/11 when, condemning the backlash against Arabs and Muslims and the parochialism of U.S. media and education, she called for an empathic expansion of [Americans’] ethical horizons to embrace the equal worth of all humans.¹⁹

Most saliently, my disagreement with Nussbaum lies in the Eurocentric genealogy of cosmopolitanism she espouses. In pitting cosmopolitanism against chauvinism, American or otherwise, she laments that we find that the very values of equality, personhood, and human rights that Kant defended, and indeed the Enlightenment itself, are derided in some quarters as mere ethnocentric vestiges of Western imperialism.²⁰ It is Nussbaum herself who, in fine-tuning the genealogical continuity between the Stoics and Kant, concedes a qualified difference between them on the question of empire that turns out not to be major. In contradistinction to Kant, who maintains that colonial conquest is morally unacceptable, Marcus Aurelius, she observes, focuses on the task of managing the existing empire as justly and wisely as he can rather than on whether it should be abolished; then again, she admits, what Kant objects to in colonialism is the oppressive and brutal treatment of the inhabitants . . . more than the fact of rule itself.²¹ Granted, in To Perpetual Peace, which Nussbaum adduces here, Kant inveighs against the subjection of the natives of East India in the name of trade, and the disregard by European imperialism in many other parts of the world of the will of the inhabitants.²² But it was also Kant who, in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, argued that a philosophical world history teleologically guided by the goal of a perfect civic union for all humanity would necessarily begin with "Greek history—the one through which all other more ancient or contemporaneous histories have been preserved or at least authenticated. Kant glosses the authority to authenticate as premised on an educated public, hence the history of those peoples living outside it can begin only at the time at which they entered it, the example he gives being the Septuagint, or translation of the Bible into Greek in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, without which their isolated reports would receive little credence."²³

That Greece is appointed fountainhead of European rationality, which, by extension, becomes the one legitimate epistemological, civilizational mode, delegitimizes in the process other textualities and intellectual traditions in a move that buttresses European imperialism. That Kant elevates Greece as a point of entry into a universal history narrated with the telos of a cosmopolitan intent ipso facto renders other genealogies of cosmopolitanism null and void, indeed forecloses their very existence. Well may Scott Malcomson, in response to Nussbaum, contrast Diogenes the Cynic with Alexander the Great,²⁴ bring out the complicity of one form of Stoic cosmopolitanism with empire, and go over the well-rehearsed imperial pedigree of universalism as seen in Kant. He then suggests that the cosmopolitan’s challenges are not in theory but in practice, and in practice Kant and the cosmopolitan Stoics of classical Greece and Rome are not of great use. He commends instead the study of actually existing cosmopolitanisms with an attention to non-Western and hence more likely nonimperial instantiations.²⁵ True, his position resonates with a trend in recent scholarship on cosmopolitanism, which has privileged in-process, ad hoc definitions elicited from situated particulars and ‘thick slice[s]’ of cosmopolitan space-time.²⁶ But while I am all for this apparently more embracing sea change in scholarly discussions of cosmopolitanism, my sense is that some of the conceptualization of the notion has fallen short of the ecumenical and the non-/anti-Eurocentric.

A case in point is the introduction to an issue of Public Culture devoted to cosmopolitanism in which the editors, albeit conceding a very qualified legitimacy to nationalism and its mobilizing power in anticolonial movements, designate it as motivated by an increasingly retrograde ideology producing evil and harm, insisting that the modernist (and nationalist) insistence on territorialized imaginations of identity has produced horrendous conflicts in recent history. Granted, the converse for them is not globalization, presented here as reviv[ing] its earlier form, colonialism, and construed as promoting neoliberal cosmopolitan thought . . . founded on a conformist sense of what it means to be a ‘person’ as an abstract unit of cultural exchange. Avowedly committed to steering clear of Western universalism and inventorying cosmopolitical genealogies that provincialize Europe, the introduction identifies refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles [as] represent[ing] the spirit of the cosmopolitical community with which transdisciplinary knowledges in the academy are in dialogue.²⁷

All manner of issues arise here. To start with, not all lives are transnational; many remain sedentary while experiencing the sorts of duress, economic and political, that have sent refugees, migrants, and exiles across borders. Indeed, no less a proponent of travel in its myriad forms as crucial sites for an unfinished modernity than James Clifford is the first to concede that he makes no claim that everyone is—or should be—traveling, or cosmopolitan, or deterritorialized. Rather, he conceives of the task of a comparative cultural studies as eliciting practices born of a dialectic of traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling.²⁸ With Clifford, I would note parenthetically that sedentary lives are potentially no less cosmopolitan than those of the various groups identified in the Public Culture introduction as bearers of cosmopolitanism. I would add that the very list refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles assembles a not altogether commensurate array of positionalities.²⁹ Granted, transnational lives are eminently worthy of study; but there is the question how the various displacements of the groups in that list relate to a globalization that has been construed critically, unless there is an implicit assumption that it is as victims of or acted upon by globalization. More pertinently, there is a danger of overlooking vast differences in enfranchisement and access to privilege between peoples of the diaspora and migrants, and indeed a risk of romanticizing the plight of the latter group by virtue of the ennobling aura of cosmopolitanism.³⁰ As for exile and the stringency that needs to be exercised in invoking it, one need only cite Edward Said. Himself an exile for whom the notion has been a central critical tenet as overwhelmingly reflected in his choice of exemplary figures—for example, Erich Auerbach—he nevertheless scrupulously insists on maintaining the distinction between exile as a literary trope and as an experience lived on a large scale in the twentieth century, whereby to think of the exile informing this literature [of exile] as beneficially humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them, the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to understand it as ‘good for us.’³¹

The hasty dismissal of nationalism as inimical to cosmopolitanism scants a whole trajectory that comes out of anticolonial nationalism—from Bandung, the Afro-Asian movement, to the nonalignment movement—that in its avowed aims was internationalist and emancipatory, regardless of the tug of the Cold War that ultimately ran it aground. Nor is internationalism passé: it was palpably with us in 2011 in the spread of the Arab Spring’s radicalism from the periphery/South to the center/North in a trajectory of activism that astonished commentators by its invigoration of dissent and protest not seen since the 2003 war on Iraq. This was invoked in the iconography (a placard in Wisconsin: Impeach Scott Mubarak), in the model of protest (Occupy Wall Street’s website states that the movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia), and in the statements of individual protesters (a protester in London: ‘It worked in Tahrir Square, it can work in Trafalgar Square’; and another in Madrid: ‘You can’t really compare us to people who are risking their lives by protesting.’ . . . ‘But yes, you can say that we are inspired by the courage of the Arab spring’).³² If one adopts the position on cosmopolitanism outlined in the Public Culture introduction, one would be hard put to explain this phenomenon of radicalism that is both national and supra- or inter-nationalist without the mediation of states or international organizations but as underwritten by radical solidarities. The introduction’s stance also scants the way in which the search for non-Eurocentric traditions of cosmopolitanism would need to attend to the manner in which some intellectual traditions are national ones.

I do not propose or espouse a rigid definition of cosmopolitanism in this book: instead, I have chosen to elicit it from the archive I deal with, proceeding from the premise of a given tradition, national included, against but also through which cosmopolitanism is defined. If cosmopolitanism is to be worthy of its name, as Timothy Brennan puts it in his 1997 At Home in the World, it would need to embrace too the rights of small nations—patriotism and all—including . . . socialist nationalism that is also an internationalism.³³ Revisiting the subject a decade later in Wars of Position, Brennan takes to task what he sees as U.S. scholarship’s conviction that national sovereignty and the nation-state are obsolete in favor of diasporas, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and Internet users who are outwitting a new world order in the name of a bold new transnational sphere. He argues that with some exceptions, no fundamental distinction is entertained between [nations] created by imperial expansion and those created . . . by the peoples resisting that expansion. As part of an argument about what he sees as U.S. humanities scholars’ lack of reflexivity about their positionality and interpellation in the economic, Brennan tackles cosmo-theory, his term for what he sees as the dominant trend in discussions of cosmopolitanism. Granted, his grievance about the upholding of new diasporas with insufficient attention to the market and the coercion involved is legitimate.³⁴ And granted, there is a certain exaggerated and celebratory assumption that modernity has permeated the globe in its entirety without factoring in rural modes of life that "are hardly in modernity in any sense meaningful to cosmopolitanism.³⁵ But whereas some of these features are evident in one trend in the scholarship, as my discussion above has demonstrated, Brennan overstates the case when he ascribes them to an unacknowledged consensus."³⁶ Indeed, a substantive portion of the scholarship on the subject has made a case for the continuity between cosmopolitanism and nationalism or patriotism, to the extent that one of the proponents of this position, Bruce Robbins, was later to take issue with the lack of political rigor in such appeals and revise his position.³⁷

A staunch advocate of the pluralizing and particularizing of cosmopolitanism, Robbins has proffered the term thus redefined as a card of self-legitimization in face of conservatives’ attacks on the academic left’s espousal of multiculturalism and the opening of the canon.³⁸ In a 1990s essay he vacates the term of its earlier associations with privileged mobility. Distinguishing it from an abstract, ahistorical universalism, he vests it with the task of making explicit one’s positionality and acknowledging a density of overlapping allegiances rather than the abstract emptiness of nonallegiance.³⁹ For him, the binary cosmopolitanism and nationalism is untenable and unproductive: For better or for worse, there is a growing consensus that cosmopolitanism sometimes works together with nationalism rather than in opposition to it.⁴⁰ Designating the project of comparative cosmopolitanisms as occupying a space between the universal and the particular, he offers this by way of definition: Instead of renouncing cosmopolitanism as a false universal, one can now embrace it as an impulse to knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcend particularity that is itself partial, but no more so than the similar cognitive strivings of many diverse peoples. His wager is that this is a project . . . that would help clinch the point that the concept is neither a Western invention nor a Western privilege, and it is the case that a good amount of recent scholarship on cosmopolitanism has brought out other genealogies and articulations of cosmopolitanism.⁴¹ But in surveying the scholarship on the subject in 2007, Robbins observes that in many, if not quite all, instances, the sharp knife of antinationalist critique has been sheathed and insists, not unlike Brennan, on reintroducing the issues of economic equality [and] geopolitical justice. He questions the efficacy of the latest version of cosmopolitanism, with its newfound comfort with patriotism, in dealing with Zionism and Israeli military incursions as well as American nationalism. Taking issue with liberalism, he sets out the task of a newer cosmopolitanism of the left in an American context as struggl[ing] schizophrenically on two levels at once: for less national solidarity, if national solidarity means . . . military aggression and the displacing of capitalism’s worst costs onto nonvoters, but also for more national solidarity, if solidarity means defense of the welfare state.⁴² His prescription may be valid for the American context; but I would insist that in other contexts that are the subject of military aggression and of (American) globalization’s dictates of deregulation and free trade, the picture is different if not inverted. Hence, while acknowledging the juggling involved in maintaining local commitments and a politicized allegiance to broader justice, I would certainly edge closer to Brennan’s point by insisting on maintaining the distinction between (neo)colonial nations and Third World/underdeveloped nations as well as the contrasting orientations of a cosmopolitanism articulated in the metropole and one articulated as part of the decolonized nation’s resistance.

In modern Arabic, the obvious word for cosmopolitanism is the recent loanword "kuzmubulitaniyya."⁴³ From at least the 1980s on, the word has been an entry in some English-Arabic dictionaries, such as al-Mukhtar, with glosses on cosmopolitan derived from the then-current Western definitions of the term, to the effect that it denotes free from partiality to regionalism [or provincialism] and localism, inclusive of different races, and citizen of the world.⁴⁴ Indeed, the very transliteration of the term varies regionally, appearing in Lebanon as kusmubulitiyya or kuzmubulitiyya and in Egypt mostly as kuzmubulitaniyya.⁴⁵ One might then conclude that the concept is derivative in the Arab context and that its transliterated foreignness makes it at best partially ineffectual, and that would be the end of the story. Or one might, as I would, suggest that this is only the beginning of the story. First, the Arabic transliteration of cosmopolitanism has been out and about since at least the mid-1960s, if among intellectuals, as in the writer Yusuf Idris’s statement that "the rules of science are constant, eternal and kuzmubulitaniyya, the rules of art are variables that change from one country to the other and one civilization to the other."⁴⁶ More recently, the term and a number of its cognates have proliferated in public discourse in a range of applications—including cities, with Alexandria retaining pride of place, but also Beirut and Cairo; individuals; world literature; interfaith dialogue; and music.⁴⁷ Among other current usages that overlap with kuzmubulitaniyya, if addressing a specific aspect of the notion, are hiwar al-thaqafat (intercultural dialogue); ta‘ayush (coexistence); tasamuh (tolerance); and increasingly al-ta‘addud al-thaqafi (cultural pluralism) or its synonym al-tanawwu‘ al-thaqafi (cultural diversity), not to mention old Egyptian colloquial terms such as bazramit (meaning métis or racially hybrid). Although the discussions do not adopt commensurate positions or even address the same subjects, what often underlies the proliferation of the term and its cognates is an ongoing, acute concern for issues of civil society and the vexed questions of interfaith relations and secularism. In many of the discussions that deploy these terms, Egypt’s erstwhile ethnic and religious heterogeneity is invoked to translate into calls for pluralism and secularism in the present.⁴⁸

And yet there has been little sustained attention in Western scholarship to cosmopolitanism in the Middle East. In one notable exception, the volume Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Authenticity in the Middle East, there is only a single essay that gives an overarching reading of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism, by Sami Zubaida. After a prefatory analysis of the term’s interrelated and not always commensurate applications, Zubaida turns to several salient cosmopolitan moments and milieus in the history of the region: to wit, the hybridity of the cultural output of the Abbasid court in Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries; intellectual Sufism that sought a universalism beyond the ritually bound community; the matrix of Hellenism’s heritage that transcended the boundaries between the three monotheistic religions; and the changes the elite underwent in the Ottoman Empire and Muhammad ‘Ali’s Egypt effected by exposure to Europe. Discussing what he designates the cosmopolitan era in the context of Cairo and Alexandria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Zubaida goes over the well-trodden grounds of the spread of Western educational and cultural institutions through growing foreign intervention and the influx of Syro-Lebanese intellectuals into a more tolerant Egypt as a situation that favored the formation of these cosmopolitan urban spaces. To his credit, unlike others writing on the subject, Zubaida scrupulously puts the accent on the colonial conditions and processes which established the legendary cosmopolitan enclaves in Cairo, but especially Alexandria.⁴⁹ I have no quarrel with the assertions that this imperial-linked cosmopolitanism belonged to an elite, whether of mixed origins or local; that this particular cosmopolitan formation was (largely but by no means altogether) undone by the rise of a secularist pan-Arabism, the anticolonial moment of Suez, and the sequestrations in Egypt; and that it was later shunned by Islamism. Indeed, the perception of Middle Eastern cosmopolites—albeit from a Western point of view—as elite and complicit is one that I discuss at some length in this book.

What I have significant reservations about is Zubaida’s confining of cosmopolitanism, via an appropriation of Karl Mannheim’s account of the emergence of the modern intellectual, to deracinated figures and members of the elite, Western-educated classes. It comes as no surprise that the account should teleologically claim that cosmopolitanism now lives on nostalgically in pockets of postcolonial Middle Eastern countries among the intelligentsia and the Europeanised bourgeoisie but that the main cultural flourishing of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism now occurs in London and Paris.⁵⁰ If one allocates Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism solely to those with access to privilege often conferred by colonial conditions, then it becomes inevitable to proclaim its falling off in the postcolonial period. One consequently remains locked within the binary of a colonial cosmopolitanism versus a postcolonial exclusionary conservatism. This, in turn, makes for a failure to salvage other, distinctly noncomplicit models for more receptive modes of affiliation—both in the colonial and postcolonial periods—that would point a way out of the impasse.

By noncomplicit models, I mean non-Eurocentric traditions and practices of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism that, being indigenous and even vernacular, have a broader constituency and a more egalitarian potential. Elsewhere, I have argued that the Alexandrian writer Edwar al-Kharrat’s novels provide an alternative, postcolonial reconfiguration of cosmopolitanism by appealing to popular traditions of syncretism and interfaith reciprocities not indebted to Western influence, their idiom drawn from components both Coptic and Islamic. This move is reinforced by the texts’ nuancing, along ethnic lines, of the association between the key constituency of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, those of foreign descent, and colonial complicity by factoring in their access to privilege, this also in relation to gender.⁵¹ Adducing examples that demonstrate the rich intellectual environment open to the world that Cairo supported in the first half of the twentieth century, Zubaida asserts that this cultural mix and excitement was cosmopolitan in a much more profound sense than the celebrated European-Levantine milieu of Alexandria, the paradigm case of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism.⁵²

To be sure, the Cairene memories of Edward Said and Magdi Wahba attest to various other aspects of the capital’s cultural diversity.⁵³ Thus it behooves us to ask, if it is perfectly feasible to be Cairene and cosmopolitan, what is it that makes Alexandrian cosmopolitanism a genus onto itself in a way that a Cairene cosmopolitanism is not? Why should it have been Alexander’s city that was elected for this pronounced association with cosmopolitanism and not Cairo, the city founded by the Fatimids?

While the focus of this study is the modern period, it should first be noted that classical cosmopolitanism’s trajectory overlaps with Alexander’s trajectory and thence the city he founded. The contemporaneity of Alexander with the self-proclaimed "kosmopolitês" Diogenes the Cynic is only a part of it. The philosopher’s biography is fairly interspersed with aneċes of encounters between the pair that have themselves become the subject of representations.⁵⁴The most oft-quoted of the encounters—‘I am Alexander the great the king.’ ‘And I,’ said he, ‘am Diogenes the Cynic [the dog]’; or: ‘Ask of me any boon you like.’ To which [Diogenes] replied, ‘Stand out of my light’⁵⁵—have commanded different interpretations such as human dignity versus temporal power and the extremes of passive versus active cosmopolitanism.⁵⁶ But it is primarily Plutarch’s On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander that is responsible for propagating the notion of Alexander as a philosopher in action put into practice what had only been a theory of cosmopolitanism as propounded by the Stoics. The key passage is worth quoting at length:

The much-admired Republic of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect, may be summed up in this one main principle: that all the inhabitants of this world of ours should not live differentiated by their respective rules of justice into separate cities and communities, but that we should consider all men to be of one community and one polity, and that we should have a common life and an order common to us all. . . . This Zeno wrote, giving shape to a dream or, as it were, shadowy picture of a well-ordered and philosophic commonwealth; but it was Alexander who gave effect to the idea. For Alexander did not follow Aristotle’s advice to treat the Greeks as if he were their leader, and other peoples as if he were their master. . . . [H]e believed that he came as a heaven-sent governor to all, and as a mediator for the whole world, those whom he could not persuade to unite with him, he conquered by force of arms, and he brought together into one body all men everywhere, uniting and mixing in one great loving-cup, as it were, men’s lives, their characters, their marriages, their very habits of life. He bade them all consider as their fatherland the whole inhabited earth, as their stronghold and protection his camp, as akin to them all good men, and as foreigners only the wicked.⁵⁷

Although elements of this⁵⁸ and other parts of Plutarch’s account of Alexander would continue to resonate into the twentieth century, scholars such as Schofield and A. B. Bosworth have viewed as untenable the motive Plutarch attributes to Alexander, namely, creating a world-wide community, and espousing a program of cultural homogenization, which Plutarch questionably suggests was an application of Zeno’s ideas.⁵⁹Bosworth, particularly, rebuts the motives attributed to Alexander of the so-called policy of fusion, commenting that there is no denying the force of Plutarch’s rhetoric, but it is rhetoric none the less, remarkably unsupported by corroborative detail.⁶⁰ Despite this, he continues, later historians would cite evidence taken out of context in support of Plutarch’s view and minimize the well-attested violence of his reign, the result [being] a sanitized Alexander detached from and unrelated to the carnage he created.⁶¹ Of the historical Alexander, rather than the Alexander of myth, what can be said with some certainty is that his project of world conquest eventually resulted in large-scale ethnic intermingling, with multiple infusions of tongues, cults, and literatures in the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed, particularly Ptolemaic Egypt.

The foundation myth of Alexandria in the anonymous Alexander Romance, which was to receive new accretions in later texts, emphasizes this intercultural melding, not least in the conception of the bicultural, part-human, part-divine Macedonian founder. Nectanebo, the last pharaoh, is said to have fled incognito to Pella in Macedonia where, Philip being away at war, he announces to Olympias that she will conceive a child by the Egyptian god Amun. With recourse to magic, Nectanebo then visits her in disguise and impregnates her himself. Years later, Alexander, whose mother had informed him of his divine paternity, visits the temple of Amun in Egypt’s western desert and receives an oracle in a dream confirming his mother’s story and his desire to build a great city which shall be named after me, and from which my memory shall not pass away. When his teacher Aristotle hears of Alexander’s intention to found the city, he sends him a message trying to dissuade him: Nay my lord, do not begin to build so great and mighty a city, nor to make people of various countries and tongues to dwell therein; peradventure they may rebel against thy service, and take the city from thee. The warning attributed to Aristotle reads like a warning specifically against cosmopolitanism or, more specifically yet, the order of a cosmopolis. But, as the Alexander Romance continues, Egyptian soothsayers assure the Macedonian that the city . . . will be great, and renowned, and abounding in revenues, and all the ends of the earth will bring articles of trade to it . . . and everything manufactured in it will be esteemed by the rest of the world, and they will carry it to remote lands.⁶²

Of the undated Alexander Romance, which she maintains provides us with the earliest surviving literary material about the foundation of Alexandria, material that must come from a generation after Alexander himself, Susan Stephens has cogently argued in Seeing Double that it draws on the standard Egyptian mythology of the pharaoh’s divine paternity, albeit with a reversal in that the human lover assumes the form of the god, and on Greek elements. But Alexander’s dual royal-divine Egyptian paternity in this story—which, she maintains, operates not only on the level of the mythological but also on that of political realism (drawing on Nectanebo’s apparent flight from Egypt)—functioned differently for Greek and Egyptian audiences. Thus the author of the Nectanebo story has devised a potent instrument that operates on multiple levels, human and divine, political and mythical, historical and romantic, comic and serious, and has produced a narrative that Egyptians and Greeks could recognize as possessing features not only of their own culture but of both cultures. By this token, the resulting act of foundation is presented as avoiding the hierarchies of dominance and submission, conqueror and conquered; the enterprise is cast as a cooperative cultural activity. While the narrative is ideologically overdetermined by the dominance of the Greeks, it also contains a tacit admission of the existence of a heterogeneous culture.⁶³

Hellenistic Alexandria—albeit differently from Rome and after its own fashion—was a cosmopolis, a status to which it rose at a time when Athens had faded, Pergamum was still to come, Antioch and Seleucia lacked an equal political or cultural weight; no other capital could claim to rival the city of the Ptolemies.⁶⁴ Various factors contributed to the city’s bid to universality: its marked ethnic diversity and different cults and religions; its geographic position at the juncture of Africa, the Mediterranean, and hence Asia, rendering it the greatest emporium in the inhabited world,⁶⁵ in Strabo’s words; its monuments—such as the Pharos Lighthouse and Alexander’s mausoleum, the Sema (or Soma), around which a cult developed⁶⁶—and above all its institutions, primarily the library and the Mouseion, the research center and academy so closely associated with it. For my purposes, the signal aspects of these two latter institutions are the aspiration to universal knowledge and the codification of the procedures of textual scholarship. For if the Ptolemies wanted their library to be universal [and to] contain the bulk of Greek knowledge, but also writings from all nations to be ultimately translated into Greek, as Mostafa El-Abbadi—Alexandria University classicist and key figure in the revival of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina—puts it, the Alexandrian scholars inaugurated and laid the rules for textual criticism.⁶⁷ It was in Alexandria that the whole apparatus of textual scholarship—editing, annotating,