What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us. Muhammad al-Muwaylihi
and his father Ibrahim began publishing the weekly Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq (“Light of the East”), the Egyptian press was thriving. Seventy years had passed since the appearance of the Middle-East’s first official gazette, Al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah (Egyptian Events, Bulaq Press) announcing affairs of state in Turkish and Arabic. Newspapers had proliferated following the 1882 bombardment of Alexandria and subsequent occupation by the British, many with the intent of fueling nationalist sentiment, others the natural outcome of several decades of break-neck development. The wealth Egypt accumulated by exporting cotton when America was mired in the Civil War, was wisely directed towards infrastructure improvements like railways, the telegraph, telephone, and entire new cities built around the country’s first modern mega-project, the Suez Canal, all of which attracted immigrants from Europe and elsewhere. By the 1890s, newsstands in Cairo and Alexandria overflowed with dailies and periodicals, including cultural, scientific and religious journals in Arabic, Greek, French, Italian, and English, a number of them produced by and for women and circulated throughout the Arab world.
Despite its diversity, readership of the Egyptian press was small, elite and largely foreign; an 1897 census (when Egypt’s population was about eight million) estimated male literacy at 20 percent in Cairo and Alexandria and in the countryside it was certainly far less. In those pre-radio days however, pubic readings in cafes and at other gatherings made the printed news available to the unlettered. One wonders if Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī thought to reach this larger audience as he wrote the articles collected here. By loading traditional story-telling forms (descriptive dialogues, nested narratives and pithy poetic asides) with details of familiar places and personages, he delivered not only the news but a call for awareness of history and for the questioning of authority, ethics and self. However “classic” the presentation, al-Muwayliḥī’s acerbic, insider observations rendered the writing fresh, entertaining and daring.
Shy and perceptive, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī was a natural-born scholar thrust into the world by family and politics. His people were wealthy, his education superb, his father a confidante to royalty, and just fifteen years old when Muḥammad was born. Ibrahim, who was deeply involved in anti-colonialist political and religious movements, treated his son as a trusted collaborator, at one point making him his emissary to the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul. Beginning in his teens, Muḥammad partnered with his erudite and outspoken father in publishing endeavors that espoused nationalist agendas and consequently placed them in harm’s way. At age 22, Muḥammad was arrested for distributing an anti-British pamphlet his father had authored, taken before a judge, tried and sentenced to death. Thanks to the intervention of a high-ranking family friend he was exiled (temporarily) instead. But being subjected to such harsh and expedient justice is an alarming experience for anyone, however well connected, and it surely colored the scathing accounts of the Egyptian judiciary he later wrote for the Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq.
Muḥammad was forty when he composed this series, a seasoned writer, editor and publisher who had travelled widely, met with heads of state, and was largely unimpressed. He generally preferred books to people, whose interactions he nonetheless found fascinating. As a member of the elite, Muḥammad enjoyed access to Cairo’s worlds within worlds, from aristocratic salons to dicey downtown dance halls. In the series presented here which he called, “A Period of Time,” he shares his observations and barbed social commentary via fictional conversations conducted by one ʿῙsā ibn Hishām. Named for a character lifted from the pages of classical Arabic literature, ʿῙsā is Muḥammad’s alter ego. Well-mannered, multi-lingual and exceedingly well-read, ʿῙsā presents himself by stating that “my profession is the art of writing.” The scholarly ʿῙsā meets his main interlocutor, the Pasha, in a cemetery where the elderly man was recently resurrected by some mysterious means, after having spent a half-century in the crypt.
A personification of the classist conservatism of his day, the Pasha, who lived and died in privileged proximity to the court of Muḥammad ʿAlī, barely recognizes the Cairo he finds on his unexpected return. Restyled as a “Paris on the Nile,” the heart of the capital is literally foreign to him, as are the behaviors and perspectives of the people he meets. Seen through the eyes of the disoriented Pasha, Cairo’s quotidian is rendered extraordinary. ʿῙsā is a patient and knowledgeable guide, offering explanations of things that however familiar to the readers of Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq, baffle the Pasha whose astonishment serves to pull a not-too-distant history into focus. ʿῙsā’s elucidations, alongside discussions with characters from all walks of life, illumine the workings of contemporary society while obliging readers to step back, pause and recapitulate, to assess the pace—and price—of change.
In the course of their odyssey of rediscovery, ʿῙsā and the Pasha exchange roles as student and teacher while exploring intuitions, events and attitudes. We overhear self-serving ministers discussing the expansionist war in Sudan and hypocritical sheikhs bickering in the religious courts. We learn of a recent outbreak of plague, the perfidy of lawyers, bureaucratic opacity, the perils of stock market speculation, science versus superstition, east versus west, pyramid climbing, and the unseemly greed of guests at a sumptuous wedding party buffet. ʿῙsā and the Pasha are appalled by the stench and vulgarity of the taverns in Opera Square where “belly-dancing” is performed, a topic to which some twenty pages of quivering outrage are assigned. Women make tellingly rare and disparaging appearances in these wide-ranging articles. Only feminine beauty is acknowledged, albeit as embodied by a statue at the entrance of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. ʿῙsā and the Pasha’s exploration of the exposition (in the wake of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s visit) with its modern inventions and treasures of ancient art, forms the substance of ten probing, piquant episodes that must have delighted the readers back home.
Presented here as they originally appeared in Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq (as opposed to an edited version issued in 1927 as a high-school textbook), these articles hold enduring appeal, not only for their insights into the “period of time” the author portrays but for how they reveal the author’s character. Roger Allen has negotiated the translation of this unusual work—part chronicle, part literary compendium—with studied grace; even occasionally pedantic passages read effortlessly and the author’s voice rings true throughout. Curmudgeonly and companionable, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī reserves his praise solely for greatness, which he finds in Nature and the splendor of Cairo’s gardens, in the architecture of Paris, and in classical Arabic literature, excerpts from which are strategically dispersed throughout the text, as are priceless anecdotes and turns of speech.
Perhaps the most engaging aspect of this book is what ʿῙsā ibn Hishām didn’t tell us but that readers now, as in the past, must ask themselves; notably, what is it exactly, aside from material accoutrements, that distinguishes us from our forebears? Much of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s world, in terms of human behavior, is perfectly familiar, as is his tacit yet resounding admonishment that history, if left undigested and unresolved, will always return to haunt us.
Maria Golia
Downtown Cairo
INTRODUCTION
THE AUTHOR: MUḤAMMAD AL-MUWAYLIḤĪ
Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī was born on the 30th of March, 1858, into an illustrious family that traced its origins to the town of Muwayliḥ on the coast of the Ḥijāz in the Arabian Peninsula. His father, Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī (1843–1906)—only fifteen years older than his son, had inherited the family silk business along with his brother ʿAbd al-Salām, and both brothers were closely involved in the political life of Egypt during the reign of the Khedive Ismāʿīl (r. 1863–79).
For a brief period at the age of ten, Muḥammad attended the famous school at Khurunfish in Cairo which was run by the Jesuit order and catered for the sons of the aristocracy, but from the time he was fifteen he was taught privately. As a young man he made the acquaintance of many of his father’s friends, among whom Jamāl al-dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh.1 Muḥammad later attended ʿAbduh’s lectures at al-Azhar, the same institution that he was to criticize with such vehemence in the newspaper articles that were later to be published in edited form