Abstract
On January 25, 1952, the mass killing of fifty Egyptian policemen and the wounding of one hundred others at the hands of the British at the barracks of Isma‘iliyya near the Suez Canal set off a flurry of events in the capital. Workers’ unions in Cairo boycotted British establishments, the airport was brought to a standstill, a strike began in the barracks of Bulaq in Cairo, which eventually turned into a demonstration where three hundred men walked toward Cairo University in Giza (the starting point for a number of demonstrations in the past). There the mass of demonstrators joined a number of other groups (Wafdists, Muslim Brothers, Socialists, and Communists) who had convened a meeting in light of what was being called a “massacre” in Isma‘iliyya. The police who were sent to quell the unrest, instead of breaking up the group, joined them. They marched alongside the other demonstrators to the cabinet offices to demand the right to fight the British at the site of the canal. The group started marching by eight in the morning. In another part of town, a number of demonstrators marched from al-Azhar Square in the heart of old Cairo through the downtown toward ‘Abdin Palace. Once there, they veered toward the opera house, where they were met by more demonstrators.
Fire at the Rivoli Cinema, Fu’ad Street, January 1952 (photograph from the Dar al-Hilal Archives, Cairo, Egypt)
As the demonstrators marched and chanted, the mood shifted. By 12:30 p.m. the Badia Casino, located on Opera Square, was in flames. Sometime later, the Rivoli Cinema was torched, and after that the Metro Cinema downtown.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Gamal al-Sharqawi, Hariq al-Qahira [The Fire of Cairo] (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1976), 5–6.
As quoted in Anne-Claire Kerboeuf, “The Cairo Fire of 26 January 1952 and the Interpretation of History,” in Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Gold-schmidt, Amy Johnson, and Barack A. Salmoni (New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 201.
Jean and Simonne Lacouture, Egypt in Transition, trans. Francis Scarfe (New York: Criterion Books, 1958), 120–21.
William Granara, trans., Granada: A Novel, (Syracuse University Press, 2003).
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 183–84.
Radwa ‘Ashur, Qit’a min Urubba [A Piece of Europe] (Beirut: al-Markaz al-thaqafa al-Arabi, 2003), 8.
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Group, 1988), 9–10.
The year of the narrator’s birth also marks that of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty whereby King Faruq sought British military reinforcements to guard the Suez Canal, fearing an invasion by Italy. According to Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, this decade in particular (the 1930s) were characterized by “a widespread mood of disillusionment” because of the ineffectuality of the Wafd and its failure to reflect popular interests. In the context of this growing dissatisfaction, the Treaty of 1936 set off a wave of anti-British protests by nationalists who had expected full independence from British control following Egypt’s independence on February 22, 1922. See Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, “The Roots of Supra-Egyptian Nationalism,” in Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–78.
Elizabeth Wilson, “Looking Backward: Nostalgia and the City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), 133.
Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley: University in California Press, 1995), 33–41.
David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 98.
See James Donald on the idea of flânerie as a form of domesticating the space of the city. Donald, “This, Here, Now: Imagining the Modern City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), 194.
Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Rout-ledge, 2006), 358.
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 57.
Anne-Claire Kerboeuf, “The Cairo Fire of 26 January 1952 and the Interpretation of History,” in Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy Johnson, and Barack A. Salmoni (New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 210.
Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 204.
Farha Ghannam, Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27–28.
Saad-Eddin Ibrahim, “Cairo: A Sociological Profile,” in The Expanding Metropolis: Coping with the Urban Growth of Cairo, ed. Ahmet Evin (Singapore: Concept Media, 1985), 28.
Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 192.
Copyright information
© 2011 Mara Naaman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Naaman, M. (2011). Reconstructing a National Past. In: Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119710_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119710_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29143-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11971-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)