Middle East Perspectives: Personal Recollections (1947 – 1967)

Copyright © 2010 Bassil A. Mardelli

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Contents

Prologue

Part 1:   1947–1956

Chapter 1:   Introduction

Chapter 2:   First Distinctive Episodes Remembered

Chapter 3:   Simple Descriptive Facts of Life

Chapter 4:   Who Knows?

Chapter 5:   Palestine the Crucible

Chapter 6:   The Queen Mother

Chapter 7:   Egypt’s Talleyrand

Chapter 8:   Unforgettable Periods

Chapter 9:   A Scene of Grief

Chapter 10:   Hassan el-Banna

Chapter 11:   Separate Armistice Agreement

Chapter 12:   Accidents, Fantasies, and Espionage

Chapter 13:   The Kondor Mission

Chapter 14:   Misfortunes

Chapter 15:   Work in Abundance

Chapter 16:   El-Ikhwaan

Chapter 17:   Now Is the Time for Implementation

Chapter 18:   Coup d’État

Chapter 19:   The Young Officers Take over the Reign

Chapter 20:   The Strong Arm

Chapter 21:   Iran! A Precursor to Nationalization

Chapter 22:   The Arrests

Chapter 23:   The Lavon Affair

Chapter 24:   The Third Camp

Chapter 25:   Building Nasser’s Stardom

Chapter 26:   Israel Is Here

Chapter 27:   Breathing Period’s Gone

Chapter 28:   Holidays No More

Chapter 29:   Dead Nights and a Punch

Part 2:   1957–1967

Chapter 30:   Lebanon

Chapter 31:   Dirty Works!

Chapter 32:   Pro-West Leaders Brutally Betrayed

Chapter 33:   The Marines Are Here

Chapter 34:   Bias for the General

Chapter 35:   America’s Wish Was Granted

Chapter 36:   In the Family Counsel

Chapter 37:   Middle East Stability Improved Markedly

Chapter 38:   O’ Beirut!

Chapter 39:   The First Half of the 1960s

Chapter 40:   A Demonstration for Algeria

Chapter 41:   Our Teacher from West Germany

Chapter 42:   The Rising of a Rocket, the Falling of the Star

Chapter 43:   A Business Guru Out of Time

Chapter 44:   The Collapse of Brain Power

Chapter 45:   Coup and Countercoup in Syria

Chapter 46:   Arab Banana Republic: Good Morning Coups

Chapter 47:   Eli Cohen

Chapter 48:   No One Really Listens to Anyone Else

Chapter 49:   Amin el-Hafiz Versus Eli Cohen

Chapter 50:   Frères Mardelli

Chapter 51:   Lebanese Jews Are Leaving

Chapter 52:   PLO and Field Marshal Amer

This book is dedicated to my parents,

Henriette and Adel Mardelli

Prologue

This is my first book of a trilogy about the Middle East. As its title implies, I seek to portray personal recollections of events that occurred mainly in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, over a span of twenty years. Decisions taken by key political players have influenced our lives, and many readers can offer a concise preliminary account of their experiences in the Middle East and provide a dramatic log of observations. Contributions in terms of personal perspectives and interpretations, as firsthand accounts in their global context, pay more attention to the substance of international affairs than to personal minutiae.

Book One owes a great deal to many people in Egypt and the Levant, who have already departed but who voluntarily allowed me to draw on their knowledge and experiences, particularly my father, Adel; my maternal grandfather, Jawdat Barghout; Aunt Camilla Hajjar; my father-in-law, Najib Mardini; and especially my mother, Henriette, who is still living. I kept diaries from my high-school days as well as personal memoirs that I later recorded in my personal computer, and to which I often referred to look up particular dates, for instance, the demonstrations that were started during my highschool days for the causes of Algeria and Patrice Lumumba and the launching of Lebanon’s first rockets. Nevertheless, the ensuing chapters, each of which focuses on an event of specific importance, are designed for consecutive reading but may also be read as independent appraisals. However, I do not claim they are comprehensive or official.

Book One addresses the period from 1947 to 1967, beginning with an early stage when the Middle East was still experiencing the unforeseen repercussions of the victorious Allied Forces over Germany in World War II, until the commencement of the one hundred and twenty hours of the Arab-Israeli War in 1967.

In fact, the ensuing situation is still one of the factors behind the turmoil in the Middle East. When the governing elite begin to compete and fight among themselves, there is every certainty that their journey will be hazardous, and there is no guarantee they will arrive safely. It is true that their differences in the end will prove to be illusory, and in the absence of any serious effort at reconciliation, rebellious second raters will take over.

The prestige and importance of the incoming rebels is considered to exceed by far that of those of the outgoing rulers themselves. The political powers of the newcomers are interwoven with the material rewards of offices. When the rebels become rulers, the palaces, jewels, and treasures of the deposed monarchs (as for example in the cases of Kings Farouk I of Egypt and Faisal II of Iraq) are taken over and distributed among the minority of their successors. Eventually these rebels begin to establish a tradition for which they have perceived hereditary rights to their new important offices, each to retain the position as heirs or next heirs to the authority. This fact, strangely typical of its kind up to now, should be borne in mind when considering the explosive relations between clans at this juncture of Middle Eastern history. And that will continue to be true as long as a constitutional statehood is not in place.

One of the primary objectives of the junta is to figure out how to preserve their presence and maintain power. Deeply moving is when foreign intervention begins to capitalize on such weaknesses; thence, the wheel begins to turn full circle.

As the realm flounders in inflation brought about by an endless series of wars and rising prices, the intellectual elite and upper-middle classes turn away in vain from their home countries which can no longer satisfy their living needs. Here begins the body of immigrants arriving in Australia, Europe, and America.

Book Two, covering the period from 1968 to 1989, because of its prominence throughout seventeen years of internecine feuding among proxy holders, will mainly cover the events in Lebanon during those twenty years, when the Gulf petrodollars were pouring into well-governed Lebanese banking systems in the land that had once been a quiet haven in a turbulent Middle East. It is the era in which the term conspiracy theorists became more artificially propagated. In fact, I began writing Book Two the moment Book One went to the publishers.

Book Three, covering the years 1990 to 2009, will focus on the aftermath of Iran’s Islamic revolution, with Lebanon’s part in the composition of the story and its constant importuning moments. Unless something else comes up to eclipse the two main subsequent events, I can still see very long queues moving slowly, waiting for the full truth behind 9/11 to unfold and with questions that remain unanswered concerning the reasons, not the tools, for the assassination of businessman magician Rafik Hariri. It is a period in which money management was stronger than those who kept it, ran after it, and went crazy about it—in a clean or dirty manner—in a world full of terrorists claiming rightful vengeance and handled within the confines of benevolent tyranny tempered by occasional assassinations.

In gratefully acknowledging the readers of this book, I, in no way presume to be writing history. I have merely tried to provide a frank account of my observations, what I heard and saw, in the hope of rendering service to those who prefer to base their judgments on cognition and discernment.

The reader will note that the narration is interspersed with quotes from unnamed sources (always shown between quotes). Who are they, and why did you use their statements? you may ask. They are the voices of parents, relatives, friends, colleagues, and pundits expressing opinions about matters of their time. In using such quotes, I am in no way dissociating myself from the responsibility of their content or meaning, nor am I endorsing them. My objective is merely to convey to the reader the general colors and flavor of the time and to inject a slight dose of dialogue into the text.

Bassil Adel Mardelli

Beirut, March 1, 2009

PART ONE:

1947–1956

Chapter 1

Introduction

Sitting in the elementary school classroom in 1949 was always pleasant for me. Approaching the age of seven, I became more attentive and was keenly aware of my surroundings. I knew later that almost all my classmates were descendents of a harmonious Shawam¹ community² that had lived and flourished in Egypt since the beginning of the twentieth century, enjoying the warmth and friendliness of the Egyptian people. Our parents and grandparents undertook to educate their many offspring by all means, even at the expense of their own worldly delights, and that was how they felt their debt was due to us.

My family believed in education as a way of preparing their children to educate themselves throughout their lives. It was a sacred obligation from them to their children and from their children to future generations. On many occasions, I heard my father remonstrating about his times during World War I when they had fewer educational institutions, The lot was schools without teaching. Such a comment would swirl over our heads and produce a windfall of energy and motivation to learn and teach.

I spent the first two years of my education, 1947 and 1948, in kindergarten. My folks decided to send me to preschool at the Maronite College in Cairo.³ They planned to prepare me for primary school to final graduation. The journey of such a curriculum, as they set in advance, was to end by 1958. I would then have been fifteen. Much the same hopes prevailed regarding my sister and brother. By 1956, the program that had begun in Egypt was unfortunately interrupted, never to be completed.

A typical building entrance in

Daher Street where the school

was located. Daher Street was the

thoroughfare lined with buildings of

immense apartments in a mixture

of baroque and oriental styles.

Daher Street, where the school was located, was the thoroughfare lined with buildings of immense apartments in a mixture of baroque and oriental styles. Many families were gathering together in close quarters to form the social fabric of the majority of Cairene⁴ homogeneous minorities—mainly Christians, Lebanese, Syrians, a few Palestinians, and Armenians who had taken refuge in the Valley of the Nile. They came to this affectionate country, having fled what they had perceived to have been repetitive persecutions from 1915 up to 1923 until the Ottoman Empire⁵ ceased to exist. Perhaps the most illuminating aspect was that we were all interdependent organisms. We had persistently come to inhabit the same neighborhoods, interacting with each other in a wide range of common habits, and never got out of them. There, we could see the way Shawam chose their friends, which was also part of the smooth functioning of the dynamics of business interests they all shared together.

By mid-1957, our family of seven had already left Egypt for Lebanon. We simply gave up the revolutionary catchwords for better opportunities. Lebanon, I learned at school, was the magnet of the Arab countries. At the Maronite elementary classes,⁶ I heard a great deal of its beautiful and ever-green mountain range. My late father, Adel, foresaw the Republic of Lebanon as the thriving and prosperous future, free from fanaticism and excessive intolerance of opposing views. Whatever he had in mind, Lebanon was for him synonymous with democracy, freethinkers, and the lush verse writers of Zajal.⁷ Up to now, I don’t know how far anyone in the Middle East perceives the words democracy or freethinkers apart from their inclusion in some kind of snotty verses in Zajal.

Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, with a population of less than ten percent of that of Cairo, was the beginning of my first awareness that, because of the oil boom and the management of water resources, no region of the world was receiving as much attention from the superpowers as the Middle East.

Here, against a political climate complicated by the old, inexorable hatred between the Arabs and the Israelis, my family would soon be facing challenges which would pose constant tests of will and which would make us resolve never to be displaced again.

Forty years later, I learned that one million people had left Egypt⁸ during two decades—the ’50s and ’60s—of the twentieth century.

Sixty years later, the situation in Lebanon⁹ became comparable to that in Egypt as one million people emigrated during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century.

Chapter 2

First Distinctive

Episodes Remembered

The first sensation I can remember from my time in the classroom was when I opened my Arabic reader for the 1949 kickoff. I was absorbed by the picture of King Farouk I. He was really impressive. The young monarch was called the King of the Valley of the Nile. He was hailed—to the chagrin of his royal rivals—as the new Menes.¹⁰

Our Arabic language teacher, Miss Leila Nazmy, taught us he was the king of Misr¹¹ and the Sudan. Her generation adored him. He was the perfect embodiment of New Egypt. King Farouk is very clever and possesses immense knowledge of all schoolbooks. His mathematics solutions are intelligent, and his Arabic is perfect. Has any one of you heard the king’s address to the nation? Listen to it, and learn from his perfect articulation.¹² His Majesty’s handwriting is as legible as printed papers. Some of yours is undecipherable, and you’ve got to practice more. In your age, he was ahead of his class because he spoke Arabic, English, and French. Our king speaks Italian too. You see, Gentlemen! Four languages are excelled by one person! Miss Nazmy belonged to a young generation of Egyptians, which for the last thirteen years had been idolizing Farouk.

While he ruled, I never saw a picture of him taken after he had turned corpulent and his head had grown bald. After the 1952 coup, I was astounded to see our king so rotund and always wearing dark glasses. That person could not have been the young man we were brought up to adore as the perfect monarch symbolizing the ultimate standard of excellence.

Long Live the King.

Farouk I of Egypt, in 1936.

Like all my classmates, I knew the young rex on his stallion,¹³ upright in position and broad-shouldered, his form indicative of continuous exercise; he was slim but not slight in build, his cherubic face wearing a thin moustache to appear older than his actual age. Another picture showed his chest decorated with a variety of medals and embellishments. At that time, Farouk was in his teens when the Ministry of Education decided to adopt these pictures as our daily icons for thought and inspiration. Our Monarch is a flawless and genuinely good ruler, came the witty reply from the teacher to a question that none of us had ever asked.

My most vivid recollection

of young King Farouk

sitting upright on his

horse Nafaa.

Farouk beamed in our minds as our sovereign, the benevolent ruler of Misr—the mother of the entire universe. You should study to grow up like His Majesty and similarly honor your country, our Arabic teacher repeated this command almost every morning as we finished singing the Royal/Egyptian national anthem. Altogether, I recall we had to mutter words indistinctly in a low tone,¹⁴ and this minute brought us much of the national fraternity by establishing some sort of brotherhood of young boys intended to form a new social fabric.

The fellahin saw in Farouk the champion of the downtrodden and the enemy of the privileged who, represented by the British occupation, controlled both wealth and government.

My second encounter was also in 1949.

A typical Egyptian Fellah.

As the school year began, I heard for the first time an accent that was absolutely foreign to my ears. My classmate whined to me that his family had emigrated from Palestine the year before. Being Christian (and a Shaami),¹⁵ his parents, as my parents had done for me, enrolled him in the Maronite school. I can recall him stuttering his sentences. I didn’t know if that was because of the curious accent or the trauma his entire family had been through the previous years. The little child made his protestation in his own way. Much of it was a reflection of emotional wounds and painful shocks that made him speak in a murmuring manner. Psychologically hurt, the boy grew up to hate and to fear.

Nevertheless, those were the promising days under the knowledgeable Bishop Johanna (John) Tohme, head of Maronite College.

One afternoon, at the beginning of the school year of 1950,¹⁶ Father Shamel Baroud¹⁷ knocked on the class door and said, All the Catholics in this class are required to go to the church. We went up the stairs where the choir would sing, or as they called it "Elchantre" and found Father Sfeir on the organ. He tested our voices one by one, and that was how I came to join my Lebanese/Egyptian school friends¹⁸ as a member of the Maronite church choir.

Class of 1954 at the Maronite College, Cairo. The image was taken

in the school yard on a sunny spring morning in April 1954. Bishop

Tohme is at the center of the photograph. Prof. Nazmi, our English

teacher, can be seen to the right. On the left is seated Father Menhem

who taught us catechism. The author is kneeling, second row, fi rst

from the left (image taken from author’s private album).

Chapter 3

Simple Descriptive Facts of Life

King Fouad I of Egypt (1868 – 1936).

Like the picture portraying our king on my table at the Maronite school, the Egyptians spoke of Farouk. They portrayed him as a handsome young man and anticipated the highly coveted changes to come faster than the trying times of his deceased father, King Fouad I.¹⁹ Farouk stood for the sublime ideas; the man who would do away with the anguish and despair of the multitudes of poor. These were the people who supposed everyone else looked down upon them.

Hapless Egyptians lived in decrepit slum areas that just about every village had and in the underground areas of most Cairo buildings.

The poor didn’t go to school because they were not legally bound to do so. Instead, they worked erratically at unskilled or semiskilled labor, finding fewer and fewer job opportunities. The less success conscious often found their work boring, but they kept trying to feel pleasures where they could. They conversed humorously even when appearing serious, acting in a funny way when badly distressed.

The poor, relatively indifferent, still possessed the property of producing offspring abundantly at a much higher rate than their fellow citizens of the upper and middle classes. As they went down the ladder that was absolutely the will of Allah, most well-to-do Egyptians knew of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of their compatriots to elevate their own lives by the unconscious endeavor of messing with that will.

Ironically, beginning in the cradle, the poor appeared to include the great majority of the Egyptian populace. To them, that was a matter of fact, with the occasional spontaneous expression of a few personal dramas.

Egypt’s social fabric was then classified by some 93 percent²⁰ of the working and existent lower category; the remaining 7 percent was spread across all other class lines made of the actual upper class, the quasi-upper class, and the lower-middle class of high prestige landowners, Évendi, white-collar workers, intellectuals, bureaucrats, traders, physicians, bankers, who were predominantly Shawam, Jews, Greeks, Italians, French, and immigrants. They were the real engine for economic activities in the country. They were the newcomers from the British and French empires, seeking better opportunities in a nascent marketplace. And they were the minorities. Isn’t the minority always wrong at the beginning?

King Farouk, who was only sixteen, had prematurely started his reign as the most beloved one of the masses of sixteen million Egyptians. Until 1951, after he had divorced his first wife, Farida²¹, (she was the darling of Egypt), but within fifteen years, the pendulum of his luck had swung backward. Then, he was perceived as avaricious and desirous of acquiring wealth and influence, which he stacked in a bottomless basket. In the eyes of the majority of the indigenous middle-class Egyptian intellectuals, he had become a slovenly person, negligent with an unkempt administration manned by corrupt Italian, Jewish, and Shawam cronies who masterminded the king in all his illicit activities.

Egypt’s royal couple, King Farouk

and Queen Farida (his first wife)

in formal attire, circa 1949.

It was apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood abhorred Egypt’s refined universal society. In their eyes, foreign penetration was personified by those who amused themselves with the entertainment in the bar of the widely celebrated Shepherd Hotel—the barons and big businessmen—and they should leave. "Mainly Jews²² and high-class Shawam [the boss chimp²³] are misappropriating Egypt’s wealth, compared to the brownish contaminated waters of rural fellahin²⁴ who are confined within the limits of their arduous environment," summed up a concept the Muslim Brothers had developed.

January 1952 remains a memorable time. Conditions were such that parents had to rush to schools to save their children. They feared harassment or indecent advances by the rioting mobs. Hooligans went berserk together with rebellious members of political parties who had been venting their spleen against outsiders. Persons with fair complexions and white skin were mistaken for foreigners. We were told the disturbances were instigated by the Ikhwaan, the Muslim Brotherhood, who promised their rank and file that they would punish irresponsible officials for the deteriorating moral standards of the young Egyptian generation.

In January 1952, Cairo, the most beautiful capital of the entire Middle East, was burning.

We loved our capital. Students had been taught how Khedive Ismail hurriedly built Cairo in order to make a vivid impression on the triumphant foreign powers attending his opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Ismail was actually racing time; he was the second of three sons of Ibrahim Pasha, the stepson of Muhammad Ali el-Kebeer (the Great). Ismail’s main objective had been to outdo Muhammad Ali Pasha’s descendants in modernizing Egypt, to turn it into a technologically advanced and renovated nation, particularly with an overhauled health-care system.

Hizb el-Wafd, the Delegation—possibly the only secular party Egypt had ever known—had evoked potential among the Egyptian masses, promising a future free from chagrin, abasement, and British occupation.

The king and the Wafd were breast-fed on one shared, common maxim: hatred of the British presence in Egypt. To dissimilar degrees, they both felt that their authority was being enfeebled to the advantage of Britain, which had a strong military and political bearing. An unhappy backlog of reminiscences inherited from past events pertaining to the days of Lord Cromer²⁵ and extending to the callous²⁶ British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson,²⁷ had made their impact on the expanding hierarchy of the Wafd, but Britain felt less likely to call it a pain in the neck. On the other hand, to the British, Farouk was the baby boy always in the mood for a nap.

Sir Miles Lampson (picture

taken in 1938) – the tallest.

In the beginning, Egypt’s wealthy conservative minorities had won the king’s heart and ruled over a financial conglomerate pretty much inherited from father to son. Naturalized Egyptians of foreign descendants were enjoying privileges equal to those of Muslim pashas of Egyptian origin and developed some rather explicit rules for themselves. Those are the best friends of the king.

Educated middle-class Egyptians had become acquainted with Western culture and illuminated by the teachings of Imam Mohammed Abdu, the Islamist reformist who revolutionized Islamic thought late in the nineteenth century. The remaining majority of the needy and poor were fellahin; bordering on mediocrity, unfortunate, abused, and oppressed by a sense of failure, they figured their predicaments came from the upper class in power.²⁸ Interestingly, they feared they were only remembered when the big players could use them as pawns on the chessboard of internal petty political semantics. The Fellah was seen more vividly as an entity to further the purposes of others. He was scared deep beyond the human level. He usually came through the gate first when duty called, and yet his great spirit had commonly found violent opposition from second-raters.

Actually, the majority of Egypt’s fellahin were not anti-British. They couldn’t have been because of their overwhelming degree of illiteracy and plague-driven standard of living. For them, cholera was forthcoming, so was bilharzias,²⁹ and those were their most feared enemies.

Encouraged by a tradition that went back to the 1830s, the principal worries of the Egyptian peasant were that he would be allowed to live and he would not have his son recruited by any power to serve in its army. During the first years of Great Britain’s occupation in the 1880s, the average Egyptian Fellah decided the British Empire would not leave him alone with his Gamoussa³⁰; they also needed manpower, and his sons provided them with a cheap, obedient, and motivated labor force.

At the turn of the twentieth century, it was the perfect atmosphere for the growth and flowering of a nationalist movement among students, civil servants, and the upper classes: in fact among all the articulate groups. All they needed was a leader. The only group that was apathetic to this ferment consisted of the fellahin, numerically the majority of Egypt’s population. It was customary for fallah mothers to frighten their children with the Injilizi Englishman as a variant to the time-honored bogey, the Afrit. But apart from such comment, the occupation, when thought about at all, was regarded as an affliction from the Almighty, similar to a flood, to punish the faithful for their iniquity. The only articulate social elements who were actively opposed to the nationalist spirit were the Levantine³¹ and European communities, who were the richest groups in Egypt, and the ones to benefit from the capitulations and the occupation.³²

By the beginning of the 1920s, the bulk of the Wafd Party was comprised of property owners, lawyers, and Évendi. Egyptian landowners, in particular, boasted that the gift of the Nile is ours, because we own and cultivate its land; therefore, the occupiers must go, as what they only do is dissipate Egypt, soaking up its wealth like with a sponge.

Partly the result of deliberate encouragement by their successive governments, the British in Egypt were adamant, impervious to the Wafd’s repetitive pleas and persuasions to leave. Britain refused to budge. Egyptians felt the Injilizi didn’t know where he was going but was determined to set a record of occupation that began in 1882. In the absence of any indications that they were leaving, the Egyptians protested, We are fed up with them; Imperialists are coming from a land where their citizens will cross the oceans and seas to fight for democracy! They laugh at us with their magic word, and they want to keep us addicted to its meaning while they are selfishly trying to keep it for themselves, thus spoke Zaeem el-Umma³³ when he wanted to make pleasant conversation with his political rivals.

As the occupation continued, there was a perceptible shift in the reasons given for sustaining it. It had first taken place to restore Khedive’s (Tewfik³⁴) authority over the rebellious army,³⁵ then the occupation was pursued while they supervised the administrative reforms that Dufferin³⁶ suggested, and then it was needed to defend Egypt from an invasion by the dervishes, and when that was no longer a valid excuse, Salisbury³⁷ added that England would continue to occupy Egypt until the Sudan had been restored to it. Finally, the British government announced that it would remain in occupation until it had taught the Egyptians self-rule, at a time when all its actions pointed to turning Egypt into a British colony. Such a procession of excuses could no longer be accepted by the thinking Egyptians. Although the real reason for the occupation, which had nothing to do with Egypt, was not revealed to the Egyptians, eventually, those with any knowledge of world affairs came to realize that England’s interests in Egypt as the key to India were permanent.³⁸

As the Second World War was fast approaching, the British eluded any attempts to dispense with their colonial grip, especially concerning the strategic location of the Suez Canal—their road to India. And Saad Zaghloul, the outspoken Zaeem el-Umma,³⁹ and his successor, el-Nahas Pasha, had not been able to carry out their promises to free Egypt from the occupation.⁴⁰

Egyptian politicians were now at the point where they had to decide whether to honor their aim of a freed Egypt that could gain strength through diversity or to have bitter confrontations with the British, which would result in perpetual tension and strife.

It was a period of revolutionary fermentation within ageing empires, where the distinction between two theories blurred and the barriers separating economic systems were seen as insurmountable. Here, we could see the first serious Communist penetration into the Middle East and the first sober involvement of the United States to maintain a rough equilibrium between the military strength of Israel and the neighboring Arab countries, a thorny task that would soon be on the horns of dilemma. In a nutshell, that was how it stood as Egyptians, and Egypt’s visitors, were baffled over the events and situation in January 1952.⁴¹

Chapter 4

Who Knows?

Consequential to the Cairo Fire, the exodus from Egypt was set in slow motion at the beginning of 1952. After more than half a century, there were many open questions awaiting a definitive verdict.

Why was Cairo burned? And who did it?

Even now, historians are unable to agree on who was to blame for Black Saturday, January 26, 1952. However, we had a deep-seated belief that the Ikhwaan⁴² were principally responsible for the riots. I found a somewhat precautionary streak in observing Aristotle’s⁴³ citation that, Civil rebellions often spring from trifles but decide great issues. The remarkable Athenian philosopher taught it to Alexander the Great, four centuries before Christ. Twenty-four hundred years later, the Egyptian el-Banna⁴⁴ found it as gripping.

When Cairo was set on fire, Hassan el-Banna had already been dead for nearly three years; class differences persisted in a more clear-cut manner. Evidently, the Muslim Brotherhood’s generation of implementation had been resisting the British within the Suez Canal Zone, and they took that part in great numbers. Britain retaliated, and the Wafd cabinet, which had won the elections in mid-January 1950, fell. On that day, having ousted their local rivals, the Muslim Brotherhood and the palace emerged triumphant—hopes that lasted but a moment!

Saturday, January 26, 1952, exposed a gamut of rage that changed the face of Egypt for the foreseeable future. Twenty-six people were killed and 552 injured. More than seven hundred retail stores and offices perished in less than twelve hours. Large malls and complexes of stores and shops like Omar Effendi, Cicurel, and Salon Vert were looted and grounded. Almost half of Boulevard Fouad I was burned. Barclays Bank and some thirty big companies were destroyed. Seventy-three coffee shops and eating places, including the posh Italian restaurant Groppi were emptied and scorched. The most tragic event was at the Turf Club, where the Canadian trade commissioner and nine British subjects died. Most of them were murdered by youngsters deemed guilty of serious misbehaviors, but none were caught. This destructive hand, however, did not reach the classy streets Imad Eddine and Nubar Pasha.

I remember those bad days because there were only a few of them in Egypt. I could hear and see from the sixth floor balcony of our flat at Daher⁴⁵ the sound and light of exploding cans. The gamins of Cairo had just completed a tour of duty downtown and came to penetrate into our (Shawam) quarters. At the fringe of Hamdi Street, there was the renowned grocery shop of Monsieur Petro the Greek. Located one hundred yards from our apartment, the entire food supply was intentionally firebombed; bottles of whiskey had been used as hand grenades to the pleasure of young boys who enjoyed the ensuing clonk. Luckily, the owner was not harmed.

The hooligans reached a notch closer to Sabri Street toward the alley where my uncle Kamel⁴⁶ and his family were living. In their building, there were Jewish neighbors renting the first floor and many other shops owned by Armenians, Jews, and of course Shawam. In front of them, there was an office with a wide placard that read: Markaz el Ikhwaan⁴⁷ under the leadership of Hajj Ishmawi, a devout Muslim. Amm el-Hajj, as my uncle used to call him, did not want to see the examples of destruction being inflicted in other locations happening there. Vigilant as he was, the noble man distributed Nabbouts⁴⁸ to his followers and ordered them to guard against any assaults against the Jews and, possibly, the Christians. We must protect our neighbors, he said, with a loud voice, spreading the dictate of the man who had a lion’s heart. Thanks to his courageous stand, Sabri Street areas were saved in full as were the timid, frightened wives and kids of the Shawam and Jewish communities.

Our building at Hamdi Street was taller and housed some twenty apartments, three of which were rented by Jewish families, nine by Shawam (including us), and two by Copts married to Jews. Mustapha,⁴⁹ owner of a grocery store, single-handedly refused to let a few young turbulent street boys enter the lobby; he castigated them, readying his hands for a fight, Yalla barra! (Go away!), he said. In the meantime, Mustapha felt something ugly was brewing; as Hajj Ishmawi did, he immediately distributed knives and Nabbouts to members of his family and friends and stood guard to protect both his business and our building. I can still remember his thick mustache, his kaftans, his headdress, and in particular, his piercing eyes while he was holding two Nabbouts that looked like cannons to me. The entire Street Hamdi area was also saved with the exception of the mini-market of Monsieur Petro the Greek.

Elsewhere, it was utterly different. Protesters carried on their assaults. Thirteen hotels, including the Shepherd, were totally destroyed. The Metropolitan and Victoria were shattered to pieces. Forty cinemas, including Rivoli, Diana, Radio, Miami, and Metro, were ruined. Thirty-four clubs, weapons stores, and automobile showrooms were looted, so were the belly-dancing casinos Badia Masabny and the Kit-Kat.

Forty Cairene cinemas were burned in January 1952.

During the inferno that lasted until late in the afternoon, I could see the worried frowns of people upset about possible danger befalling the only source of income we had, the gallery, which was located at Sharif Pasha Street facing the Al-Ahram newspaper. Our folks were pacing the rooms back and forth like in a military parade, with hands folded behind their backs, wondering aloud if they had delivered the dining room to their Italian customer. My late father, Adel,⁵⁰ and his only brother, Kamel, owned a two-story gallery where works of art and furniture were exhibited. Some were quite exquisite. Through trading in furnishings, they had been able to rear two families of twelve persons, including seven young schoolchildren, and care for our grandmother, Afifa.⁵¹

I can still remember Grandmom’s anecdotes, especially the biographical ones relating to her times in Aleppo, Syria. She grew up there and immigrated to the Nile Valley (as she loved to call it) in the early 1920s, because she sought solace and tranquility from the repercussions of the slaughtered Armenians in 1915. Knowing such talk could be dangerous to a child’s mind, she always switched to more pleasant stories of the Arabian Nights; those were heart-wrenching memoirs she brought from Aleppo, the city that spanned Christian, Jewish, and Arab histories for thousands of years (not merely days). Being a perceptive old lady as she was, the events of early 1952 made her conscious mind explore the last years of the Ottoman Empire and its ensuing tragedies. Yet there was a touch of admiration in her voice when she spoke about the Ottomans’ discipline. Any street boy deemed to be guilty of serious misbehavior was flogged and deprived of food. And the punishment was administered by the gendarme; we lived through the time when the Ottomans called their own violence ‘law.’

January 26 was an agonizing day for all of Cairo’s residents. Everyone was caught off guard and wanted to see the day pass, never to return. My father reached home with difficulty. With a red face, he said, "I’ve got to bring the girls⁵² from school, pull them out. I will take a cab and push my way." That he did. Saint Vincent de-Paul school in the Helmieh suburb was run by nuns, and we all feared irrational behaviors lest the rioters broke in. They might harm the children and assault the nuns. Fortunately, nothing of that sort happened. The schools remained intact. My father said he had seen factory workers busily protecting their workshops and offices from arsonists who had reached Rue Pyramid. Street youngsters spontaneously joined the throngs behind unshaven agitators in gallabyeh⁵³ carrying their Nabbouts. They all seemed to be professional fomenters knowing exactly what they were doing. Chaos prevailed. Shops were smashed and looted, wounding some onlookers. On that day, anyone who harbored a grudge against anyone could have taken revenge to settle accounts.

Such behaviors unfortunately rested upon a notable lack of perception of the true situation that was developing. Class lines in several areas of our dear Cairo appeared to be hardening among the notables, and a feeling of despair had intensified beyond control. Cairo had slipped down to social anarchy.

It was widely rumored that Mustafa el-Nahas Pasha "was having a pedicure. Upon hearing the news, he ordered an armored military car to collect his wife⁵⁴ from the hairdresser’s salon and bring her home." As many editorials reported, Fouad Serageddin⁵⁵ was closing a land deal worth million(s) of Swiss francs.

Mustafa el-Nahas Pasha.

The Wafd’s politicians in charge of key positions kept their hearts a little softer than their heads; amongst them, there was shared hatred and competition, but ostensibly, one mutual enemy remained: Israel.

Britain? Here the Wafdists had mixed feelings. Reconciliatory moves toward the British government were in close proximity, as could be learned from Abdel Fattah Pasha, Egypt’s ambassador to Great Britain, and this was not seen as the most difficult barrier to overcome. Other obstacles could not be dealt with any more easily; at present, it was still the time to watch those runty rioters butting and bluffing their way to full lawlessness. To the Wafd leaders, in 1952, Britain was as good as anyone. They wouldn’t want to go to a court where they couldn’t shoot and trap any better than the Muslim Brothers.

Who burned Cairo? Many bizarre, grossly unconventional theories arose. The truth has yet to be established. A growing consensus of opinion emerged that the responsibility should be shared equally among three factors: the continued British occupation of Egypt, the disastrous 1948 war in Palestine, and the tug-of-war of everlasting political wrestling between the palace and the Wafd.

Was it because of secular ideologies from the Levant traveling through the Egyptian arteries?

Not only was the Levant such a geographical fact, but