The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Skip the pyramids, hit the nightclubs
The Howard Carter of the demi-monde exhumes the cabaret stars of Cairo in the Roaring Twenties
MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO by Raphael Cormack
352pp, Saqi, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £14.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
After the Revolution of 1919, when Egypt gained her sovereignty, the new kingdom bristled with possibility. Egypt was now, as one American jazz musician put it, “a country where the Egyptians reign, the English rule, and everybody does as he pleases”. By 1922, when Tutankhamun’s tomb was being uncovered in the Valley of the Kings, Cairo had become, says Raphael Cormack, “one of the most exciting cities in the world for anyone to spend the night in during the 20th century”. Those who enjoyed the Arabian Nights included businessmen, spies, émigrés, and activists from Germany, Poland, Italy, Argentina, Japan, England and Greece. If the 1920s roared louder in Cairo than in any other capital, the female entertainers roared loudest of all.
No sooner had those who reigned and those who ruled sloped off to bed than the theatre district woke up. The clubs, cabarets and music halls offered belly-dancers, acrobats and singers who specialised in numbers such as Who Is My Father and Who Is My Mother? I Have No Idea, while the theawas tres staged Julius Caesar, Carmen, La Dame aux Camélias and David Copperfield in Arabic.
The actresses and singers were the first modern Egyptian celebrities; their private lives were dissected in magazines, their photos pinned up on walls. Myths in their lifetimes, their memoirs sold by the truckload. They were also, says Cormack, Egypt’s “new women”: financially, professionally and spiritually independent, the superstars of Cairo held the promise of a brave new world. “Doesn’t it feel like Egypt is at the doors of a revolution in everything?” asked a journalist in 1926. “Women are demanding an end to their seclusion and an escape from the bounds of the harem.” One actress, when asked by an interviewer whether she preferred the idea of acting, love or marriage replied “None of them! […] I’m out only for myself.”
Midnight in Cairo is about the female renaissance in the Egyptian entertainment industry. A niche subject perhaps, but for those whose mental picture of 20th-century Cairo extends no further than Lonely Planet and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, this book will come as a revelation.
The action takes place in the district of Ezbekiyya, then known as “Egypt’s Broadway”, a warren of roads which, since the late 19th century, had been teeming with bars and venues. The main artery the grand Emad al-Din Street with its domed buildings, picture palaces and tram line into the city’s suburbs.
Cormack reconstructs the counterculture of the interwar years through a cast of characters, at the head of which is Mounira alMahdiyya, the eccentric inventor of Arabic opera and leader of the first female-led theatrical troupe in Egypt. There is Mounira’s archrival, the demure recording artist Oum Kalthoum; the immortal Rose al-Youssef, who started out in vaudeville before founding the entertainment magazine she named after herself; Fatima Rushdi, the “Sarah Bernhardt of the East”; the comic actress and
cabaret artiste Badia Masabni; and the screen siren Aziza Amir, who in 1927 starred in Laila, the first Egyptian movie. The roots of the Egyptian film industry, today the highest grossing in Arab cinema, can be found on the boards of Ezbekiyya.
These are tales of rags to riches, and more often than not back to rags again, with plenty of sex, drugs, murders and mayhem in between. But Cormack is not only interested in the Arab women who found fame and fortune. We are also given a minor cast list of chorus girls who came to Cairo from Eastern Europe, Greece, Italy, Syria, Palestine and Turkey.
By the 1950s, however, the taste for review theatre and bawdy songs had been replaced by a demand for Brecht and Ionesco, as the clientele of louche aristocrats and émigrés gave way to one of Soviet attachés and Third World activists. Ezbekiyya is now a ghost town: only shells of the old venues survive, while the palaces on Emad alDin Street stand empty.
In this tremendous act of historical recovery, Cormack has unearthed the regal figures and buried treasures of Cairo’s golden age. He is the Howard Carter of the demi-monde.