Egypt’s Hub of Ancient Mystery, Modern Bustle

Urban cliches cling to Cairo: teeming, sprawling, filthy, noisome, clogged, ungoverned, ungovernable. The first-time visitor must think that there can’t be anyone who loves it: The air is too dirty, the traffic too monstrous, the poverty too appalling.

But of course there are those who love it, and one of them is Max Rodenbeck, a correspondent for the Economist who first moved to Cairo at the age of two and has lived there for much of his life.

In “Cairo: The City Victorious,” Rodenbeck has concocted a rich pudding of a book, filled with morsels of ancient history and modern vignettes, medieval lore and contemporary gossip. His book is an illuminating introduction to the metropolis the Egyptians call the “Mother of the World.”

“The city seduced me,” Rodenbeck writes of his return as an adult to study Arabic and work as a reporter. “Her depth,” he continues, “seemed limitless, whether by the measure of time or the fortunes of her people or the mystery of their ways. . . . Layers overlapped effortlessly: the ancient and the new, the foreign and the native, the rich and the poor. Worlds mingled in the bookstalls along the edge of the Azbakiyya Gardens: the works of Enver Hoxha [the former Communist dictator of Albania] next to a score by Puccini beside an Armenian body-building manual on top of the ‘Thousand and One Nights.’ ”

Rodenbeck’s portrait of the city is romantic, impressionistic and, most of all, intimate. The many levels of Cairo society, he writes, “mingled in the streets, where the barefoot incense man swirled his censer from shop to shop, collecting a shillin or bar-iza [five or 10 piasters] from their keepers in exchange for a blessing.”

Rodenbeck gives the reader plenty of exotica, for Cairo is nothing if not exotic, but his purpose is serious, and he executes it well: to draw a portrait of modern Egypt’s capital city in the context of its ancient and more glorious pasts.

Ancient cities have occupied the place where Cairo now stands for at least 5,000 years, Rodenbeck writes. The early settlers were attracted by the rich earth deposited by the Nile River’s annual floods. The king of Upper Egypt conquered the Delta in about 3100 BC. There ensued 3,500 years of rule by the Pharaohs and their successors, whom Rodenbeck nimbly weaves into his tale.

Modern Cairo was born with the arrival of the Arab conquerors in the 7th century and is now, for better or worse, the undisputed urban center of the Arab Muslim world. Years of war have ravaged its only rival, Beirut.

In a chapter called “The Voice of Cairo,” Rodenbeck is especially enlightening on the language of the capital’s inhabitants.

“In an ancient country where power has always been concentrated among a small elite in the capital,” Rodenbeck says, “words have often been the only weapons in the hands of common people.” Cairene language, he says, is vivid and racy, and full of insults for the rulers. But the government monopoly of television and radio, he writes, has taken a heavy toll on the free-wheeling popular language, and the trend toward conformity is reinforced by the growing power of the “religious extremists.”

Rodenbeck believes that the intellectual vigor of Cairo has never quite recovered from Egypt’s defeat in 1967 by Israel in the Six Day War. And yet, he still loves the city. “Despite the cultural stagnation of recent decades,” he writes, “Cairo has escaped provincialism. The city remains a great mirror to the world at large, and a stark interface between tradition and modernity.

“Amid the bewildering din, the anxious public pomp and the insouciant private squalor, Cairo continues to exude that air of imperturbable permanence which only a proud and ancient city can give.” Rodenbeck’s Cairo is exasperating but fascinating.