Egyptian Nationalism • 187with westernizing reform: those of the Egyptians, the Turks in the Ottoman
Empire, and the Persians under the Qajar shahs. Arab nationalism and
Zionism are covered in later chapters. Nationalism among such Christian
peoples of the Ottoman Empire as the Greeks and Armenians is discussed
only insofar as these groups spurred the rise of Turkish nationalism.
EGYPTIAN NATIONALISMWestern writers used to call Egypt "the land of paradox." Almost all its inhab¬
itants were crowded into the valley and delta of the great River Nile, without
which Egypt would have been only a desert supporting a few bedouin no¬
mads. To European tourists of a century ago, Egypt was filled with ancient
relics—temples, obelisks, pyramids, sphinxes, and buried treasures—and
haunted by pharaohs whose tombs had been violated by bedouin robbers or
Western archaeologists. To most Muslims, however, Egypt was the very heart
and soul of Islam, with its mosque-university of al-Azhar, its festive obser¬
vance of Muslim holy days and saints' birthdays, and its annual procession
bearing a new cloth that would be sent to cover the Ka'ba in Mecca. Egypt
meant Cairo, with its hundreds of mosques and madrasas, ornate villas, and
bazaars—survivors of a time when the Mamluks really ruled and the city
stood out as an economic and intellectual center. To a contemporary student
who has just been exposed to Mehmet Ali's reforms and the building of the
Suez Canal, Egypt was the most westernized country in the nineteenth-
century Middle East.
Imagine one of the newer quarters of Cairo or Alexandria in 1875, or the
new towns of Port Said and Ismailia, their wide, straight avenues lined with
European-style houses, hotels, banks, shops, schools, and churches. Horse-
drawn carriages whiz past the donkeys and camels of a more leisurely age.
Restaurants serve coq au vin or veal scallopini instead of kufta (ground
meat) or kebab; their customers smoke cigars instead of water pipes. The
signs are in French, not Arabic. The passersby converse in Italian, Greek,
Armenian, Turkish, Yiddish, Ladino (a language derived from Spanish and
spoken by Mizrachi Jews), or one of several dialects of Arabic. Top hats
have replaced turbans, and frock coats have supplanted the caftans of yore.
Each of these images fits a part of Egypt 130 years ago—but not all of it.
Khedive Ismail
The ruler of this land of paradox was Mehmet Ali's grandson, Isma'il
(r. 1863-1879), a complex and controversial figure. Was he a man of vision,