Experiencing Cairo (and Every Other City)

June 19, 2007

Making Cairo Medieval is an excellent collection of essays on the social construction of what we know as "Cairo". The first six essays in particular I highly recommend. Each in its own way discusses the way Western conceptual categories made their way into common perceptions of the city. The essay by Derek Gregory ("Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the City of the Arabian Nights") is fascinating for its description of how Cairo was experienced as a slice of the Arabian Nights. Take the following quotation from a 19th century traveler:

It was a fair festal evening. The whole world was masquerading, and so well that it seemed reality.

Abon Hassan sat at the city gate, and I saw Haroun Al-Rashid quietly coming up in the disguise of a Moussoul merchant. I could not but wink at Abon, for I knew him so long ago in the Arabian Nights. [83]

That is a revealing passage, no? Here is a visitor who is literally seeing the people of Cairo as characters recollected from the Arabian Nights. This was not the oddball experience of a single imaginative tourist either.. this was a system of perception that was imposed on travelers by the canonical texts that they held in their hands: the works of Edward William Lane and guidebooks composed under his influence.

This all represents to Gregory an example of Orientalism and its misperception of the East. I agree, but I would like to ask a couple of questions:

The relationship between the Arabian Nights and Cairo is not completely arbitrary. Try as one might, a visitor would have difficulty seeing stock characters from the Arabian Nights in the cityscape of Tokyo or Moscow. The reason Cairo can be read as a story from the Arabian Nights is that there is indeed a connection between this Muslim cultural capital and the milieu of the Arabian Nights—more evident in the 19th century than now, to be sure. I would strongly agree that to walk around 19th century Cairo pretending to be in a masquerade is a reductive way to see the city.. but to see some connection is surely not crazy.

The word "Orientalism" drops a hush around any topic. I find it a frustrating hush because it tends to point up the uniqueness of a given situation.. and therefore safely disregards larger questions. The larger question in this case is: doesn't every city on the planet suffer from this kind of misperception? Visitors from all over the US travel to New York and see characters from Sex in the City or Friends running around. Visitors travel to Paris all the time and recline on the Left Bank thinking about artists and revolutionaries. So Orientalism is simply a particular case (perhaps more insidious) of a general human tendency.

The chapter by Derek Gregory is quite similar in method to my dissertation. I look at the travel narrative of Ibn Jubayr and watch the way he describes the cities he visits. When Ibn Jubayr visits Mecca for the hajj, he is clearly under the influence of the local historian al-Azraqi. When he visits Damascus he again has the works of a local historian in hand.. Ibn Athir. What we get in his first person descriptions of these places, then, is not a "personal" account, but rather a mediated and guided version of the city. Cairo too would have had various historical ways that it was to be perceived. The fun for scholars is to understand these historical perceptions. Orientalist readings of Cairo are just one more in a line of such misperceptions.